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Is anyone still here? It’s been 3 years. I’m having a crisis

If someone wants a really good example of the importance of justice in fiction, then Avatar: The Last Airbender did it really well.

See, audiences are obsessed with justice and fairness in stories. They want the characters they like (the protagonists, usually) to win and for the villain to get their comeuppance. Stories get more complicated and really interesting when they question what justice actually is and what it means for characters to get what they deserve. Should the characters get what they want? Or what they need? If the characters haven’t “earned” it, should they get anything at all? If, at the end of a story, a character has gotten neither what they wanted or what they needed, why not?

A:TLA covers justice a lot, in many different ways. There’s Hei Bai’s forest, Jet and the Freedom Fighters, Monk Gyatso’s skeleton, Avatar Kyoshi and Conqueror Chin, the Ocean Spirit’s revenge on Zhao, what happened to Katara and Sokka’s mother, Hama of the Southern Water Tribe, Iroh’s past as the Dragon of the West, Zuko’s suffering versus his sins, Iroh and Zuko’s rejection of the Fire Nation’s war and their efforts towards peace, and so on.

A:TLA’s finale is especially well done because traditional story justice expects Aang to kill Ozai for everything the Fire Nation has done. The characters in the story expect Aang to kill Ozai. It would be long-awaited justice for the world. Ozai is responsible for the deaths and suffering of thousands of people in his time as Fire Lord; it can’t be argued that he doesn’t have a lot coming for him.

But Aang doesn’t kill Ozai.

And it still works, because at that point in the story, it’s not about what Ozai deserves, it’s about what Aang deserves. Aang is a 12-year-old boy who has the fate of the world on his shoulders, the last member of a pacifist culture that’s been essentially wiped from the face of the planet, and he doesn’t want to kill anyone. It’s justice for Aang, the last airbender, not to have to kill Ozai.

Whether or not the audience believes Ozai deserves to die, whether or not the audience believes Ozai’s death was the “right” course of action, they can still at least be somewhat satisfied that Aang is satisfied with this end.

ancient-rome-au

I know we’re all tired of the “man proudly holding fish he caught” genre of profile picture on dating apps & sites, but I think we’re just going to have to accept that fishbros aren’t going to stop because they’ve been doing it for millennia

candiceirae

Yes, but whatever happened to the ‘holding fish he just caught, while heroically nude? You’d think that dating sites would be all about heroic nudity, but noooooo….

morkaischosen

I feel like there’s an argument that shirtless pics are the modern version of heroic nudity, adjusted for our stronger nudity taboo.

ancient-rome-au

finally, some good discourse on this post

expiredcheese

saintbleeding

hot take but “im being normal about this” is just the funniest fucking phrase

no i categorically am not

ᓚᘏᗢ

Getting into an argument with my partner because I said they should eat my body if I die before them in a survival situation and they refuse to entertain the notion. "I'm not saying you should kill me, I'm saying if you outlive me you should eat me," I say. "NO," they respond.

parkchanwoohoo

vergak

shadow-posession-jutsu

for those interested in cowboy hat pet pics

suazu

thememedaddy

me_irl

artyphex

I love that in the time since Twilight was big we've learned that Kristen Stewart is actually a fantastic actress and super cool human being and all the hate against her was unwarranted and rooted in misogyny while also discovering Robert Pattinson is yes a good actor but also one of the weirdest people alive

hyah-through-hyrule

Obsessed with this

hyah-through-hyrule

detectivehole

emperor kuzco was clearly gay

detectivehole

hes 19, with unlimited power, and he ain’t got a gf. the only time we see him interact with any women his own age is when he’s rejecting like 7 of them rapid fire. he pretends to date pacha in a gag that lasts like 10 solid minutes. listen to me god damnit

qqueenofhades

Okay, but just in case anyone is coming to tumblr dot com for my hot takes on 20+ year old kids' movies: Kuzco super WAS gay (or at least coded as such) and of course, I didn't get it until I watched it as a gay grownup.

He is played obviously camp and dramatic, for a start, and there is the aforementioned "hate your hair/not likely/yikes yikes yikes/let me guess you have a great personality" summary dismissal of all his potential brides. Then he spends dinner asking Yzma about Kronk ("so he seems nice? He's what, in his late twenties?") and otherwise being slightly obsessed with him.

Then there is the whole Adventure of Doom with Pacha, him being ever huffy about the Kiss of Life, and then the restaurant gag where Kuzco takes to playing Pacha's fake wife and dressing up in ladies' clothing with great gusto (reinforced by the waitress' "bless you for coming out in public" remark when Pacha says they're on their honeymoon). Then when he is finally de-llamafied, we don't see him paired off with the obligatory girl from the lineup earlier, as might otherwise be expected in a Disney movie. Instead he is still single, but goes to found family it up with Pacha, Chica, Kronk, etc, which dare we remark is a very queer trope.

In short, I have no idea how a Disney movie with no white people (all the characters are Indigenous/people of color), a gay king, cross-dressing jokes, and the most offbeat plot of all time actually ever got made (can you imagine the Family Friendly Mouse doing that today? Let us also talk about Kronk because he is a brilliant deconstruction of both toxic masculinity and the musclebound henchman stereotype.) Other than that this was the Chaos Hour of animated movies in the late 90s/early 2000s, and yes.

So yes. There you have it. I will not be taking criticism at this time.

flavinbagel

In response to the question “How did a movie like this get made at all much less by fucking Disney?” there was a recent Vulture article that outlines the whole shit show of a history behind this film according to everyone (writers, directors, VAs, Stings) involved. The gist of the story is that they fucked up making a whole, true-to-form Disney musical that never came to see the light of day SO BADLY that Disney switched directors, locked the writer’s room, and didn’t review a single script until weeks after the film was in theaters.

Please, read this article if you have some time. This story is wild, and involves directors being pitted against each other Bake-Off style and a shockingly intimate documentary created by the wife of Sting who, himself was heartbroken by the decimation of the songs he wrote for the film including cutting a fantastic Yzma villain song sung by Eartha Kitt that is SO DAMN GOOD but would not ever have fit the more nailed-down Yzma we would eventually come to know and love. It’s so catchy though, I’m doubling up on calls to action but please listen now: