If this isn’t too much trouble, what soulmate au fits Diluc best? If you don’t feel like it, have a nice day 🙃
prompt: give me a character and i'll tell you what soulmate trope suits them with diluc!
soulmate au: you can recognize your soulmate based off of laughter
a/n: read this soulmate au in another fandom long ago,,, cannot remember the fic for the life of me but the concept has stayed and its been a few years,,,
you only show up to angel's share to cry and whine. the cat's tail is usually better suited for people like you (people who much prefer the company of cats at bars than drunk knights), but the cat's tail doesn't have the person tortured to hear all of your wails: kaeya. perhaps its a bit awful that you dump it on him, but he set you up with your prior boyfriend.
it's only right that he gets to hear the fallout.
so, you sit down at the bar counter and, with teary eyes, ask the bartender for grape juice. the redheaded man is well-seasoned at the art of ignoring highly emotional customers, so he slides you a drink after you set the required mora on the table. kaeya sits down next to you as you begin to slump over with sadness. you're completely sober, weighed down only by the fact that 1. you were pathetic enough to date huffman 2. you got dumped by huffman rather than dumping him and 3. you're actually heartbroken that you are sad about huffman.
"didn't work out, huh?" kaeya says, taking a sip from his glass of wine.
you resist the urge to throttle him and instead smile sarcastically at him.
"what makes you think that?" you say.
"you really got dumped by huffman?" kaeya asks.
how humiliating, you think. "i didn't get dumped by huffman. i dumped him."
"that's a lie."
"no it's not."
you bicker back and forth with kaeya until he pauses midway to flag down the bartender, who walks over with a grimace at the sight of kaeya.
"another drink, o' lovely bartender?" kaeya asks, extending his glass to diluc, who reluctantly takes him. "diluc, i know how much you love gossip, and y/n here has some lovely news to share with you."
the bartender, whom you realize is none other than diluc ragnvindr, glances between you and kaeya. he doesn't seem like he cares about what you have to say, but kaeya looks at you with a shiteating grin on his face.
"if you tell him," kaeya interjects before you can refuse. "i'll buy you the rest of your drinks for the night."
shame flies out of the window as you turn your attention from kaeya to stare directly out of diluc. free drinks are free drinks. you'd get dumped by huffman a million times over if it meant a night of unlimited grape juice at kaeya's expense.
"hi," you quickly introduce yourself to diluc. "i got dumped by huffman."
your voice is deadpan. the news is pathetic. kaeya is looking expectantly at diluc. diluc is not responding, instead looking over at kaeya with an expression of boredom. kaeya shrugs.
"i tried," kaeya says, unbothered.
"alright! now that that's done," you say. at least you'd never have to show your face at this bar again and you'd never encounter this bartender again after revealing the most shameful thing that has ever happened to you. "i will have your most expensive drink. then you can dump it out, but charge kaeya for them anyways."
kaeya looks at you, unamused and you stick your tongue out at him teasingly. however, your oncoming bickering with kaeya is interrupted before it can even begin. from behind the counter, diluc ragnvindr does the one thing that patrons haven't heard him do in years: laugh.
you realize two things in this moment.
1. diluc ragnvindr is your soulmate.
2. you introduced yourself to your soulmate as the sorry loser who got dumped by huffman.
in your embarrassment, you laugh nervously, not realizing that it causes diluc to come to the same exact conclusion you just did.
I keep going back to thinking about airbending and Air Nomads in the Avatar: The Last Airbender, and it’s subsequent stories in the Universe. There was a post that stipulated that the absence of other airbenders and information of Air Nomads in AtLA was the sign of bad writing. Which really made me angry, because – how are you even watching if you misinterpret the show so profoundly? Little kids, the show’s main audience, understand what “the last airbender” means, but not adults.
Could some Air Nomads survive? Should they have survived in the story? What their survival would mean for the world and the story? Was Aang lazy in not looking for them? Were the authors lazy?
We confuse survival of persons with the survival of the culture. The people are people – actual human beings, young and old. The culture is comprised with the language, all the beliefs and habits and everyday things, and games and superstitions, and references and songs and jokes, and anecdotes, and spiritual practices, etc… And while a single person is easier to kill, a culture could be killed just as efficiently while there are thriving genetic descendants of the people who carried this culture. There are no statistics of dead cultures, but there are statistics of dead languages – some languages even have a marked time of death – the date of death of the last person who spoke it.
But is airbending a genetic trait, same as a color of skin and eyes or more like a language? Well, we have no confirmation, actually, that it is indeed genetic, or, it being a different world, the laws of genetic inheritance work slightly differently. We have benders born in nonbender families, we have nonbenders born in bender families… It definitely has more to do with the qualities of energy, chi – that allowed Ty Lee’s chi-blocking technique to stop bending for a short time, and energy bending to turn off it completely. And it also has to do with culture and spirituality – otherwise Katara would not be the last waterbender left in her Tribe. Fire Nation was taking away adult waterbenders, but didn’t seem to check for their descendants to assure elimination of waterbending genes, therefore they (almost) successfully killed off the waterbending culture, and while that didn’t prevent baby waterbenders from being born, it had prevented them from developing their talent – we saw it in the very first episode, with Katara. Still, the culture of South Water Tribe survived, but maybe in a couple of generations of culling off all the waterbenders, there would be no waterbenders being born, either.
I said it before, but will repeat myself here: I believe some airbenders survived the initial attack. It is really the only logical conclusion. But then, there were other attacks – since the goal was to kill the possible avatar, and everyone who might hide them. So the surviving airbenders became hunted refugees, whose only real survival tactics would be to hide that they are air nomads. And well, it is hard to keep the culture alive while hiding it from anyone. It is hard to keep your culture alive even if you are not hunted, but just living in a different dominant culture – ask any immigrant. It is much more plausible that the children of the surviving air nomads only had a vague idea about their origins, and grandchildren of the survivors had no clue they were anything but Earth Kingdom or Fire Nation nonbenders.
Could the airbender culture and airbending have survived? Yes, it could. We have many examples of cultures that survived against all odds.
Is it plausible that it didn’t survive? Yes, it is absolutely plausible. We have again many examples of cultures that didn’t survive, and we have only names and scant knowledge left of their existence. Or we have nothing left. Maybe some abandoned settlements, maybe strangely decorated bones… Maybe a couple of unusual pottery shards.
Cultures die.
And it was a deliberate choice from the creators to make it so. I mean, they called their story Avatar: the Last Airbender for a reason – and that reason was that they set out to explore the world where genocide happened and the culture died, and what it means for Aang to be the truly last one of his culture. He is the last one to remember life before the war, and what the world was with the Air Nomads in it. (ok, technically Bumi and Guru Pathik remember that, too, but they are tiny islands in the world that forgot about Air Nomads).
So yes, the information about Air Nomads is scarce, and it is not bad writing. We are meant to feel this scarcity, this loss, this abyss. That empty space created by the deliberate genocide. The pain and discomfort that the empty space causes. The dis-balance. That’s kind of the point: we are meant to feel the pain of this world that had seen so many people killed because other people decided they were too weak to live. That their culture and values were stupid and worthless. The Avatar is meant to keep the world in the balance, but how balance is even possible now? And another, maybe the scariest thought – is that the world forgot what it lost. The world is left to believe that it didn’t even need those values, anyway. So, having Air nomad survivors who are fine and who are airbending stealthily, while might be plausible is a totally different story. And it was a deliberate choice of the creators to tell the story they wanted to tell – where there is one person who can bend four elements and who is also a last person of his culture in a world torn by endless war.
Another moment – we see Aang’s memories in a couple of episodes, I think – Eastern Air Temple and the Storm, and in none of them airbenders are depicted as paragons of perfection, as shining beacons of enlightenment. The boys are mean, fearful, don’t want to play with Aang, not to mention, snotty. The elderly monks are full of self-importance, not wisdom. They are all just humans – no better and no worse than other random denizens of the Avatar world. (and Kyoshi novels build up on that very masterfully, showing in simple strokes Air Nomads as normal people, with specific set of values that could be used in good and bad ways).
I think there was a comic back in the day about how Aang got caught in a old leftover trap that the Fire Nation used to get Air Nomads who survived the initial massacres
This is my tribe. Many of us in our home countries live off selling handmade goods, especially the mochilas. Weaving is an important Wayuú tradition. Every pattern and assortment of colors tells a unique story, and it's important to our cultural identity. And right now with the crises in Venezuela and Colombia, a lot of us are struggling financially. Please always purchase directly from indigenous communities!
andulkaphoto
amandla
ellievsbear
gamechangershow
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
romaincrisis
blakekathryn
