whenever i look into a historical monarch who doesn’t get talked about much and is just kind of a blank spot in my understanding of the historical narrative, 95% of the time what i find is pure white hot blistering capability. a pencil pusher for the ages. a 39 year reign with no more than three hours of sleep a night. there aren’t any good stories from his reign because he systematically caught and stopped all catastrophic good stories before they could start. you shrimply must respect it
Assume the worst of everyone you encounter in every interaction. Every bad thought of possible intentions and outcomes from others is real because you’re thinking about it.
Absorb as much negativity as possible as soon as you wake up. Take in only bad news when you open your eyes. This will ensure you won’t get any thing else negative for the first of the day probably, nor will you search for any more negativity.
Be extremely abrasive to strangers. In accordance to rule 1, assuming the worst of everyone, you should assume the stranger you met is an asshole and treat them as such.
You’re already perfect and know everything you need to know. Anyone trying to suggest otherwise you should rule 1: assume the worst of them and then rule 3: act like they asked to you eat glass.
Normal groceries like milk or bread or whatever running out is whatever. Just anotha day. But when stuff like salt or cooking oil or rice runs out it feels like You’re supposed to be here for me and you’re leaving. You’re just like everyone else
there's a family of local sandhill cranes that adopted an abandoned goose last summer and they're STILL together today even after migration.... i love them + they're local celebrities + nature is beautiful
Another thing about ATLA that never ceases to work me up is how dirty the show did Hama. She appears in a single episode and confronts us with one of the most politically and humanly devastating histories in the series. She gives the only (!!!) testimony of the Fire Nation's state campaign to eliminate Southern waterbending and emerges as one of the richest arcs in the series, at least in potential, but it remains unrealized: cultural annihilation, abduction, torture and incarceration, ingenuity under absolute deprivation, escape, and survivorship in enemy territory as a diaspora of one. However, at the end of the day, she is a crackling victim who passes on bloodbending like a curse. The episode concludes with Fire Nation citizens dragging her away in chains, emphasizing that they'll lock her away indefinitely, basically never seeing day or moonlight again, reproducing the very trauma that forced the conditions on her under which Hama developed bloodbending.
The episode doesn't really ask us to understand bloodbending as an invention born from torture and genocidal violence, but primarily as a horror "Come to the Dark Side, Katara"-test because the reveal is directly linked to the abducted Fire Nation villagers. We don't even bother about Hama's motivation beyond "They deserve the same" (as if what Hama did was in any way symmetrical or proportionate. As if they want me to believe this old woman who can only bloodbend during the full moon could reproduce the carceral torture environment specifically designed to exterminate her bending lineage. This is not a reasonable "both sides are bad" situation.)
The Fire Nation removes water, community, bodily autonomy, hope, and any ordinary means of escape. Hama still feels the charge of the full moon every month, studies and experiments for years to find power in the one remaining source available to her: the water inside living bodies. She invents a technique in a place optimized against waterbenders and perfects it to the point where she can control the fine motor skills in another one's hand to open the cage that holds her. As far as we know, she doesn't even kill the guards when she walks out. Bloodbending is horrifying, but it is also an astonishing act of ingenuity. The Fire Nation reduces her to helpless flesh, and she weaponizes flesh itself against her torturers and murderers of her people.
We don't spend any time on what bloodbending meant for Hama because the succession of events structures the reveal entirely through the judgment of the Fire Nation citizens and Katara's guilt. I think Hama deserved more ambiguity (compare it with how much grace and depth the story gives Iroh, who cracked jokes about burning Ba Sing Se to the ground, laid seige on the capital for almost two years straight, which certainly starved the poorest people of the population first, and is still allowed to return as liberator, leading the charge and is the one burning the Fire Nation banner) and Katara deserved to feel more conflicted about bloodbending: both disturbed and mesmerized. Bloodbending is born from the Fire Nation's machinery of extermination, which makes it unquestionably a technology of resistance, power, and dignity.
The narrative never asks what the Fire Nation made, what justice could look like for someone like Hama, or what Katara owes to a survivor from her destroyed tradition. It asks whether Katara can defeat the scary old woman and agonize over learning that skill. When it comes to metalbending or lightningbending, it mostly gets framed as extraordinary achievement. Bloodbending is terrifying and intrusive, yes, but so was what its creator had to endure. The technique is inseparable from the brutality of the Fire Nation's annihilation of the Southern waterbenders. The show should've sat with the immense political and ethical weight it created itself, instead of making it evil and resolving the episode with the abhorrent picture of the elderly prisoner of war being dragged away by the people who destroyed her culture with false moral high ground and pseudo-vindication.
Edit: Here's a follow-up if you liked this post so far.
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