it’s the quenchiest! @onceandfuturefirelord - Tumblr Blog

New piece I'm quite proud of ^^ Always love how all the characters grow and change! <3

I haven't watched the film because I think it's kind of a shame it got leaked early, but also jfc. My Zuko problem just got a whole lot worse

#zuko #atla #avatar the last airbender

theotheristhedoctor

Ok minor detail but ...

So I noticed in A:TLA, and it’s carried over in LoK, that Airbenders always seem to have an advantage in a fight. And at first, it felt like plot armour, particularly in A:TLA.

But when Aang fought Bumi, he lost most of that advantage. And I realised that this wasn’t just plot armour. Someone had sat and worked it out: nobody has had to fight Airbenders for generations.

None of the other nations have had to train to face them, or practised sparring with them, or anything. Apart from Bumi, no bender in the show has ever even met an airbender before Aang comes along. And in LoK, for the most part people still haven’t. We never see fights between those who have (for e.g. we never see Tenzin and Lin fight); when Korra and Tenzin use airbending, its a unique fighting style that people aren’t trained to manage.

It’s a really small detail, and it fundamentally works to give the heroes an advantage (and make up for Aang’s young age and lack of combat experience), but I love how it’s an advantage in combat for completely logical reasons.

The detail in these shows is amazing.

sindri42

You can see the same principle in play whenever somebody fights somebody who uses a completely unfamiliar style. Combustion benders and lavabenders aren’t straight up more powerful, but they’re pretty much always something you haven’t dealt with which presents unique challenges. That red lotus lady with no arms is just a perfectly ordinary waterbender, but using forms and styles nobody else has seen before. Jet routinely smacks around benders and soldiers, but loses hard to the first person he met who had actually studied diverse styles of swordplay. When Toph invents metalbending, nobody can deal with that, but seventy years later the counters are pretty well known among people who might have to fight the cops.

And it’s why Azula, a genius prodigy who has thought long and hard about how to counter every kind of magic and martial arts out there, keeps getting messed up by a kid with a boomerang.

ninjaotta

it’s also a detail from the second ever episode

aang straight up says to the fire nation guards on zuko’s ship “you’ve probably never fought an airbender before”, because he in-universe figures out that, if what everyone around him is saying is true, and airbenders have been extinct for a century (or at least have gone to ground enough to make people think that) then he is a totally unknown figure in anyone’s calculations

this has been brought up before but it’s also one of the reasons why hama is so thrown in her fight with katara - waterbending is about energy exchange, keeping things flowing, throwing your opponent’s power back at them and we see katara and hama do this in their fight. however, when katara is faced with a powerful blast from hama, she stands her ground and blows it apart:

[image ID: a gif of katara in the puppetmaster. she is a teenage girl with dark skin and hair and blue eyes, wearing a red outfit. she turns and throws her hand out, stopping a blast of water and turning it into a huge shield. the background is a dark forest. end image ID]

why do i bring this up?

because it’s a move - and a mindset - influenced by earthbending, which hama has never faced (she went from the south pole, to prison, to the fire nation). it’s an indication not only of katara’s skill and power, but also how she’s learned from her travels, and from toph

toughtink

one of my favorite details of atla is how the main characters’ fighting styles adapt as they take on new enemies and make new friends with other bending styles. iroh straight up tells zuko about how he developed a technique for redirecting lightning by studying waterbenders, but if you watch closely especially in the last season, there’s a lot of this sort of thing happening unspoken with the gaang, using the bending forms of other elements like katara does above. it really shows the strength in differences and diversity coming up against a fascist regime that wants everyone to conform.

biglawbear

Look at Korra metal bending here

It’s completely different than anything we’ve seen from other metal benders, who bend metal with sharp movements like the derivative of earth bending that it is

But Korra is fluid. She is bending metal like it’s water. Because she is a water bender. And she is the first person in history to be able to bend both metal and water and so she is able to combine these styles into one and move seamlessly between them. This shows so beautifully how the Avatar is the embodiment of all bending

ironbite4

Every time I think this show has shown me all it can….it gives me more.

patrickdiomedes

The fight between Tenzin and the Red Lotus reinforces this. Zaheer is pretty skilled for someone who’s only been Airbending for a few months, and he has the advantage against a lot of people because there still aren’t really enough airbenders for people to know how to fight them. But against an Airbending MASTER like Tenzin? He only wins because he has backup

leebrontide

I just wanna say that this mirrors something I got to watch in real life. I fenced as a teenager, with my wife, who continued fencing in college.

But her college had fencing equipment but no team, so she started coaching them. But she fenced lefthanded. She ended up with a team of fencers who almost ALL learned to fence lefthanded.

A small % of fencers are lefthanded, so even very good fencers are often NOT USED TO fencing lefties.

So her dinky little team of mostly newbies came in and fucked severely with teams of much more experienced fencers who couldn’t cope with fencing leftie after leftie. Her one protégé who was also very tall just laid waste to nationally rated fencers.

Whereas I, a very shitty fencer, can hold my own against my wife no problem, because I’ve fenced her from the start.

This isn’t JUST a fun plot point and a lovely way of showing social influences and planning and creativity, it’s completely based in real life. Even a shitty fighter can be a problem for a good fighter whose never encountered their style before.

zuzuthefirelord

⇒ ATLA: gifset per episode

b01e09 - The Waterbending Scroll

#pretty pretty

zuzuthefirelord

⇒ ATLA: gifset per episode

b01e15 - Bato of the Water Tribe

failingradish

Mentor & Student quality time

... 2 in 1

#wow this is stunning #awesome art

korra-of-the-watertribe

Insp.

graciegra

ATLA + Scenery (½)

yuutta

THE GAANG + CHARACTER PROFILES →insp: x, x, x, x

patronuspirit

Sokka and his Moose Lion.

minacoladas

THIS IS WONDERFUL

tadpole-art

Katara at sunset 🧡

#this is amazing!#katara #awesome art

coldresss

zuko and mai

是12.26画的一对官方cp

#pretty!#zuko #mai #awesome art

moonmeg

More illustrated textposts because why not :D

I spent my Sunday well

Based on:

drowning-in-cacophony

[ID: a short four panel comic, plus a screenshot of the textpost the comic is based off. Panel One: Zuko and Mai (shown from the chest up, in typical royal Fire Nation clothes and as adults). Zuko looks surprised; Mai exclaims, “Let’s see what you have!” /. Panel Two: Izumi, shown as a child, grins as she holds one of Mai’s knives, exclaiming, “A knife!!” /. Panel Three: Zuko and Mai again. They look proud and Zuko says, “They grow up so fast.” /. Panel Four is labelled as a bonus. It shows Zuko and Mai, still looking proud. Katara is in the background, pulling a face. She says, “Uhh... could you maybe tell your daughter to stop chasing Bumi with a knife?”. Each panel has a faint pink watercolour wash behind the character’s heads.

The text post screenshot is from user @/ axolotl-druk, and reads:

“Mai: Let’s see what you have.

Izumi: A knife!

Zuko (weeping tears): They grow up so fast.” /. End ID]

#this is amazing #awesome art