smolandweird

they/them (mostly?) neurodivergent trying not to cry 24/7

[what-even-is-thiss]

I still like the term parental unit that we used to use as a joke in middle school and high school. Did everyone else do that or was it just a my social circles thing?

Anyways telling the kids to go collect their parental units at the end of an event is a) funny b) gender neutral and c) just refers to the person currently doing your parenting

Also if you’re on joking terms with your parents “greetings, child” “greetings, parental unit” is a top tier greeting. Makes you sound like robot aliens.

[lunarelixsr]

wesper will genuinely always be so near and dear to me wtf do you mean 'safe harbour'.

wylan finding comfort and security within his dyslexia and his subsequent near-death experience as a result of jesper's acceptance of him is so important to me. instead of associating a harbour with those drowning feelings of shame and the hands around his neck, he comes to think of jesper as his harbour to happiness that brings him home.

the fact that it's on a music sheet as well is such a nice detail when you consider the fact that wylan's dyslexia almost got him murdered and now it's being harnessed beautifully to craft art that encompasses not only him, but jesper, who can very much also relate to those feelings of found security and acceptance.

wesper how i love you 💓

[stella-draws-things]

[samreich]

who did this to me

[smolandweirdwriter]

sam reich is on tumblr???

[pmamtraveller]

The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars, by Greg Mort (1999)

[victusinveritas]

God, can you imagine someone from Finland (or wherever) heading to a Midwestern state fair and eating every variety of fried thing imaginable?

[victusinveritas]

God, can you imagine someone from Finland (or wherever) heading to a Midwestern state fair and eating every variety of fried thing imaginable?

[cursecuelebre]

Lord Mars and Lady Venus by Wayriding (2021) on X. I absolutely love this artwork.

[creativepromptsforwriting]

I don't need AI to write. I can create fake scenarios in my head perfectly fine myself.

[currentlycryingaboutlancelot]

i think pretty much every character in hamlet is equally fascinating but i do kind of feel worst for horatio. imagine you go to your friend’s house to visit over like a college break and while you’re there your friend and his whole family gets murdered in front of you. horatio doesn’t even live there

[piedude]

[ghost-kings-court-jester]

Favourite part of ATLA book one is Zuko running around convinced he’s dealing with a genius who is a master of evasion, a being that is so powerful it stopped aging and possibly invented time travel to hide from the fire nation, literally he’s following a world class mastermind here and he hasn’t slept in 5 days because of it.

Then boom it cuts to Aang stopping at his favourite places to play 100 years ago in an attempt to woo Katara who is being subtly wooed and trying to act like she’s not because she’s an adult (14) and Sokka is in the back chewing his own hair off trying to organise his colour coded schedule that Aang has messed with for the 400th time.

[changeling-droneco]

Honestly learning about food and culture keeps leading to a lot of interesting revelations like of COURSE Sokka won’t shut up about meat, as someone based on the Inuit people his diet would be 99% meat and his body would be a lot worse at getting proper nutrients from vegetables and grains and the like. Like it’s also the “haha sokka likes meat joke” but he and katara are likely not getting anywhere near as much nutrients from not meat meals, especially because when they do get meat, it’s a lot leaner then they would be used to. Katara is just likely better at bottling it up then Sokka. Sure, they would be used to eating some plants, like foraged berries, but their bodies are much more adapted to heavy fatty meat based diets.

[luulapants]

My elderly father started talking about how frustrating he finds “the pronouns thing” and I was like. Oh no. He had such a good stand on this, he’s been they/them-ing his cishet siblings for god’s sake! Is he regressing?? And he was talking about how difficult it is to remember, and how onerous it feels to expect strangers to keep track of it, and I’m like oh no oh no.

Then he says, “I mean, the problem isn’t the gender thing. The problem is four words: she, her, he, and him. We got rid of stewardess and turned it into flight attendant. It doesn’t matter if the flight attendant is a man or woman, so we got rid of it. We just need to get rid of those. I don’t need to know.”

“You don’t need to know… people’s gender?”

“No. I don’t care, I don’t need to know, and I don’t want to remember it.”

So we can relax. It’s just a continuation of his crusade to they/them the world. He doesn’t want to remember anyone’s gender. He’s abolishing the genders.

[teaboot]

Your dad is so powerful

[wileycap]

ok I'm sure this has been said but Sokka striding into a fucking Fire Nation school as Wang Fire is incredible & has swagger, considering that the origin for Wang is "King" in Old Chinese. I know most of this website is usamerican, so, I'll try to put this in a slightly lopsided, mostly vibes-based, and thoroughly unserious analogy:

The year is 1968, the height of the Vietnam War. A young Vietnamese dude and his sister walk into a conservative Christian school in Texas, United States to meet the principal. Not even batting an eyelash, the guy goes "Howdy, my name's President America, this is my wife Miss America, and we're here about our son, Jimmy."

(Later, it turns out that Jimmy is Jesus, and he threw a hippie party in a cave for the school kids. He was enrolled for two days.)

[ceruleanwhore]

Katara and Sokka were BOTH parentified but the show played it for laughs

We've all talked at length about how Katara was forced to take over her mother's role in the household when she was far too young and that she was likewise forced to grow up way too fast, but the only mention I ever see of Sokka in this discussion is how he contributes to Katara's workload. I intend to argue once and for all that, just as much as Katara took over their mother's role in the household in her absence, Sokka did the same in both the household and the tribe whenever their father was off fighting in the war but we don't see it this way because Sokka's parentification is played for laughs.

From the beginning, Sokka is presented as a joke character rather than just a funny character who makes jokes, and half the joke of his character is how serious he is about things even when they are ridiculous. One prime example of this is in the first or second episode of the series when he is lecturing literal babies and toddlers about going to war and fighting to protect the tribe because they are the men of the tribe. Then, when Zuko shows up, it's a whole gag about how Sokka is so completely inept at handling a weapon that he can't even land a hit. Most of us just laugh at this because haha he's so serious about being a warrior but he fucking sucks at it.

However, if you cut out the lecture scene entirely and scrapped the physical comedy of the brief fight with Zuko, instead framing it seriously, what you have is something that's actually quite sad. This reframing instead leaves you with the impression of a young man who has no peers because many of his tribesmen were murdered by the Fire Nation, and even if he is old enough to go to war, his father needs him to stay home with the women and children because no one else is left to take care of the civilians. He takes war extremely seriously because he's watched his friends and neighbors get picked off one by one in a heinous war that's persisted for a whole century, and he takes his role as the stand-in protector of the tribe in his father's absence so seriously because he knows that that's how high the stakes are. These people murdered his mother in front of his sister and by God, he is going to do everything in his power to make sure they never take anyone else.

The problem is that the men of the tribe, who could potentially mentor him and help him train to be better at this and do a better job of literally being a stand-in chief most of the time, are never there to teach him anything, so his skills are sorely lacking. He loves his tribe and his family so much that he literally tries to be his father to keep them all alive and then, when he fails because of how his tribe has failed him, it's played off as a joke and he's the butt of it. I think this actually has a lot to do with why he clings to misogyny and traditional gender roles in the beginning of the series, because his job is so important, the stakes could not be any higher, especially since he's seen the extinction of an entire race of people before and knows it could happen again, and yet he's painfully aware that he sucks at fighting, he sucks at keeping these people alive, so he desperately needs some way to feel like he's better than someone at anything. Failure is at the core of his whole character and it's his father and the other men of the tribe who made him that way because they all failed him first.

[0bscvr1ty]

Him charging in head first when Zuko and co showed up, having no chance of winning, stood out to me. Everyone else went into hiding.

Sokka decided if he was going to go down, he'd go down fighting.

He also banished Aang from the tribe because Aang had brought trouble right to their doorstep. Understandably.

But when his sister was deadset on going after that kid, he made a decision that I wish the show explored more: Leaving his tribe.

Women and children. His grandmother. What will they have left? Would Gran-gran still be there? How tall would those kids get in the time he's away? Would they be there when he returned? If he ever returned? Could he at the very least protect Katara?

Him being overprotective (of everyone, including Toph and Suki) is played off as irrational when it's quite literally a form of trauma response. He's afraid of losing more people because he couldn't protect them.

Hhfhhfhhhsfffhhhh why do they do my favorite character so dirty.

[mrdyketator]

[windynebula]

I'm gonna say something incredibly 30-year-old and I'm going to ask you to not judge me while I'm trying to be genuine and real. Okay? Here's my truth.

A piece of lettuce can really elevate a sandwich. The fresh crunch? Unrivaled. Peak. Poetic cinema.