hello vonnie
★
⁂
cherry valley forever
blake kathryn
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
wallacepolsom
almost home
will byers stan first human second
noise dept.
shark vs the universe
No title available
No title available
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Jules of Nature
JBB: An Artblog!
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
tumblr dot com
if i look back, i am lost
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Egypt
seen from France
seen from Japan
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Argentina
seen from United States
seen from Mexico
seen from United States
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@myheadgoesaround
HC: it's not as if SQH isn't strong, it's just he doesn't apply himself. He is an immortal cultivator after all. A peak lord. From An Ding. The peak that does a lot of physical labour.
But in the end, it's still a skinny twig who was on his computer all day in a cultivators body. Hamster piloting a tiger body, he's not sure what to do with it.
Putting him in situations
Error system.
Shang Qinghua is such a mood in this drawing. This is my biggest piece I’ve made these past day. Honestly if I do color environments, there must be saturated colors or else it’s too boring for me to do it.
Sometimes I feel like my 18 y.o self. Because it’s summer and I am sad. A lot of different applications I’ve made has been rejected. And it’s hard not to feel unmotivated. Connecting with people can be hard too.
But then I remember I’m not eighteen anymore. I have a lots of ressources and my life is a lot brighter than before. So I will take my eighteen year old self’s hand and tell them
« You ´ll be okay »
Li Daikun 2021 х 2025 Word of Honor 2021 [ Scorpion King 蠍王, Xiē Wáng ] Blood River 2025 [ Mu Ciling 慕词陵 ]
does the body ALWAYS have to keep the score? maybe we could just have a friendly game this time. maybe we can just have fun without putting numbers on it
🐞 a ladybug for everyone who needs good luck
Sketch dump!
Fanart of @cherrichou 's bingqiu fanfic "(Take Me) Into Your Sweet Dreams", commissioned by @xiulric 🙏 (plus half-done sketch I made while brainstorming)
Fanart of @cherrichou 's bingqiu fanfic "(Take Me) Into Your Sweet Dreams", commissioned by @xiulric 🙏 (plus half-done sketch I made while brainstorming)
Binghe in all kinds of outfits from (Take Me) Into Your Sweet Dreams by @cherrichou
Me, whenever reading a Shen Yuan centric fic: Shen Yuan you fucking idiot
Just finished an amnesiac shen yuan fic
The sentiment is the same
That Time I Transmigrated into the Protagonist’s Gay Husband by CherriChou on ao3
seat for a king
Liu Qingge
Tumblr is the reason why I have something I call the cashier test which is, if i told this to a random cashier at the grocery store, would they think you're crazy at best or at worst would they be warranted in leaping over the counter and beating the shit out of you. Karl Marx mpreg is crazy, but not beating the shit out of you crazy. The cashier will probably talk about you to their coworkers and it might even make their day. Telling someone they're complicit in their own oppression by working a minimum wage job at a grocery store makes them warranted in leaping over the counter to beat the shit out of you.
Now in handy infographic form for Tumblr users:
The Blue Spirit putting out firebending with a bucket of water is the absolute funniest thing ever done in avatar combat. It just is.
katara: *kicks zuko’s ass without even blinking* zuko:
I literally just watched this episode, and I’m sorry, but there’s one thing funnier:
Zuko couldn’t speak during this whole fight/escape in case someone recognized his voice. Can you imagine the frustration he must have felt having to go through an entire fight without yelling? Zuko???
Especially while dealing with Aang’s shenanigans?!?!?!
One of my favorite parts of rewatching the episode is imagining everything that must have been going through Zuko’s head during that escape.
Aang: Wait! My friends need to suck on those frogs!
Zuko, trying not yell out of anger and confusion:
It gets funnier when you think that he could absolutely, no problem go through a battle without yelling once, as seen here and yet chooses to be a dramatic gay and holler at the top of his lungs at every opportunity.
That says a lot about how he firebends vs how he fights with the dao blades.
He actually can’t, at this point, fight without yelling if he’s using firebending. In The Firebending Masters, he says he’s been relying on anger and rage to fuel his bending, so yeah, in every firebending fight, he’s drawing on rage and hyping that up by yelling. Someone has pointed out that after he finds the original source of firebending, he stops yelling all the time - I haven’t checked that personally but it does seem accurate.
But he doesn’t need to draw on fury to firebend when he’s the Blue Spirit. He can fight in total silence when he’s working with a weapon he’s more in touch with, when he doesn’t need to draw on hate or anger to fuel it.
I am SO curious where he learned to fight with the swords. I can’t imagine he got much training in martial weapons as a kid – he’s ROYALTY, he’s a firebender, and the focus we see on them practicing forms from a young age (and Zuko being expected to do an Agni Kai at 13!) make me think it’s likely there would have been a lot of disdain for something as pedestrian as swords. Also– @atlaculture didn’t you do something on how the split swords are a peasant weapon?
Seems like something he must have picked up after his exile, but he’s so prideful and so obsessed with “proving himself” to Ozai, I can’t imagine he’d dare to experiment with that on his own. Maybe Iroh introduced it to him? Practicing sword forms or sparring would have been a good way for him to build back muscle after what had to be a long convalescence from the burn, but without the trauma of firebending again so soon.
(You can’t convince me Zuko didn’t have some pyrophobia after the Agni Kai, and probably a heaping dose of shame along with it, because he’s the prince of the Fire Nation, he’s a fire bender, how pathetic is it for him to be afraid of fire? And yet he has to suppress a flinch every time fire gets too close, especially near his face)
Yup! Zuko’s dual swords are for civilian use and called niuweidao, meaning “oxtail sabers”. Historically, these sword were relatively cheap to acquire, due to their thin blades typically being made of low-quality metal that was easy to mass produce:
https://www.tumblr.com/atlaculture/718240438095593472/cultural-weapons-fire-nation-swords-pt-2?source=share
The consequence of them basically being the McDonalds of swords is that they were popular with all different kinds of poor people. The most interesting ones being… theatre troupes! Because these swords were relatively affordable, they were often used for stage and street performances. (And because the tropes of theatre carry into modern cinema and TV, you also see the niuweidao overrepresented in most kung fu-inspired media as well.)
Anyways, I bring this up because Zuko is very much a theatre kid, so maybe his sword skills actually come from observing actors using the sword and imitating them? Better yet, maybe his mother secretly taught him to use the niuweidao to boost his self-esteem? After all, she is a former theatre actress, according to the comics. It would certainly explain why it’s a skill he possesses but not Azula/Ozai/Iroh.
It would also explain why Zuko thought he could get away with hanging them on his wall as decorations. It would be like decorating your room with a Phantom of the Opera mask.
I don’t read the comics, so now I’m wondering how on Earth Ozai married an actress! Someone so obsessed with lineage and legacy is not someone I would expect to marry down like that. Maybe Nobility were allowed to have hobbies like that in the Fire Nation? Although it seems like entertainers don’t have the best reputation given what we see of Ty Lee and the circus…
Without spoiling too much, Azulon forced Ursa to marry Ozai, because she’s the granddaughter of Roku and he believed she would give the royal family powerful heirs. Before that, she was just a local actress in her small town.
The comics also revealed that Zuko did in fact train with Piandao himself
When exactly he started or how long he trained is never with Piandao is never addressed. Fanon theorizes that Zuko may have started his training pretty early in, on assumption that he was a non-bender since the sages predicted he wouldn’t be a firebender, and he was presumably a late bloomer (at least when compared to the expectations of the royal family).
For anyone wondering where the “Zuko was trained by Piandao” trivia came from. This short comic, called “Swordbending”, was published in Nickelodeon Comics Club and was later compiled into “The Lost Adventures” Avatar books.
I’m on the fence over whether I take this as canon or not. For one, It wasn’t written by any of the series’ main writers. I don’t mind Piandao being Zuko’s teacher, but I really like the idea of Ursa being the one to have taught her son. It would tie back to Zuko’s ongoing duality theming. For most of the series, his firebending is fueled by anger because everything about it goes back to his feelings of inadequacy and his father’s abuse. But when he’s dual wielding, he’s incredibly cool headed. Maybe it’s because he relates it back to time spent with his mother and her positive encouragement. Plus, it would match the rest of his Blue Spirit design, which has other references to his mother.
#zuko could have two teachers tbh#stage combat and actual combat have different priorities and techniques#learning one can absolutely give you an edge for the other but they aren’t 1:1#and i can’t call to mind any evidence that ursa was an assassin or anything—imo she could defend herself but her real skill is showmanship#tbh i feel like it fits the themes of the narrative—ursa trains zuko as much as she knows how to#but it’s mostly a showy style that doesn’t hold up to more intense combat situations so he builds on it without her
@falconfate
I agree. While I think Ursa taught Zuko the basics and showed him some really flashy moves, I think his combat abilities were really refined during his banishment. Like I mentioned earlier, Zuko’s swords were historically popular among the lower levels of society, such as actors and criminals/rebels. Zuko spent three years on a ship full of sailors and probably spent a lot of time docked in seedy port cities where pirates hung out. He basically got to experience the full spectrum of what dual broadswords (niuweidao) were capable of.
Anyways, enjoy Michelle Yeoh rocking the dual broadswords (niuweidao) against Zhang Ziyi’s single straight blade (jian).
The discovery of the statue of Antinous in Delphi, Greece in 1894
Really obsessed with this one like how old cameras worked making everyone blurry against the statue and just makes you realize how long the statue has been right. There.
“We’re superheroes Eclipse, we don’t have a choice.”
