in spite we exist @nullnihilist - Tumblr Blog

Someone figured out how to make a mask that responds to eye movement! Another amazing start to a cosplay!

Props to Lenses Factory HK

Do you have any recommendations of sources for researching the cultures the water tribe is based off of?

Okay, so. Dirty secret time: I am a fantastic BSer. I am just, pulling cultural world building out my posterior, for the most part. With Avatar being a fantasy world where each culture is an amalgamation of real world cultures, I have more wiggle room than if it was set in the RW, or the cultures only derived from one source.

But! To be slightly more helpful! How I started idea-gathering was this:

Picked which amalgam of cultures, in specific, I wanted to use. For the Water Tribe, I'm mashing together Inuit, Sámi, and Kazakh cultures. Why those? Inuit because they're clearly coded in the show as being a similar culture, Sámi because I have done research into them in the past for other characters (this is Panuk's honey-reindeer herding tribe!), and Kazakh because I just think the eagle hunting thing is cool, okay?

Once you've picked some RW things, go to Wikipedia. Read the culture, history, language, and religion/mythology pages. They're good summaries, and generally have links to additional sources.

Once you're done with the basic summary reading, look for things written by actual people from that culture. In the internet age, many peoples even have their own "how not to screw my culture up" guides. When I read these, I'm looking for interesting details that make things feel authentic (like daily chores on a wooden ship, and communal eating, etc.)

Further dirty secret: you only need a handful of specific details to make the whole story feel reasonably authentic. Then you can start sprinkling in your own things (like the hair bead significance), and people will totally be willing to roll with it.

Mind you, again, that this is for non-RW cultures that you're just looking for a place to start with. If you wanted to specifically code the Water Tribe as a single ethnicity, or write a RW character from a culture to which you don't belong, you'd need to do hella more research. (Especially into tropes said culture is sick of seeing applied to them by outsiders.)

Good luck! <3

soozencreates-deactivated202110

Hi! I am as white as they come, but I thought I would add this, because this post literally came across my dash:

(courtesy of @mostly-mundane-atla )

mostly-mundane-atla

So you guys might remember a game called "Never Alone" it made a lot of headlines for being based in Inupiaq storytelling and actually narrated in Inupiatun and having done extensive research, not of the Inupiat in tha traditional sense, but actually with them, talking to them. Part of the game was unlocking these little interview bits called "cultural insights" and they're a great way to start learning about us.

Translation dictionaries also exist and can be helpful for getting a "feel" of the cultures. If you find a link to the University of Alaska Fairbanks site when googling that, you should be able to find some pdf files for free. The Inupiat and the Yup'ik were especially influential in the Water Tribe's aesthetic design, but someone pointed out that one of the waterbending characters was actually given a name from an Athabaskan language, so they might be worth looking into for cultural inspiration as well.

Also, you can literally just politely ask us? The traditional cultures and ways of life aren't ancient history for us, we have grandparents who lived in animal skin clothes and hunted for subsistance. My girlfriend was supposed to be trained as a shaman. We're in our twenties. That's how close it still is to some of us. And I can promise you, we can give you things way more accurately than wikipedia. I say so from personal experience.

muffinlance

[id: Screenshot of post by @mostly-mundane-atla

Text: I am literally begging non native fans to respectfully ask Inuit, Inupiaq, and Yup'ik fans if there are any cultural things they would have added to the Water Tribe or just the Avatar franchise in general because I know I'm full of good ideas and I'd imagine others have them too.

Even the little things are fun. For example, Sokka calling Appa "pops" or "gramps" because his name is pronounced like "aapa" which means father or grandfather (depending on the context) in Inupiatun.

End id.]