ANNE

Aang is best boy | 24 | ATLA blog| CA| she/her

[madeline-kahn]

Music in Film: Voicemails for Isabelle (2026) dir. Leah McKendrick Music supervision by Season Kent

[theeungodlyhour]

"I left my heart in San Francisco..." VOICEMAILS FOR ISABELLE (2026) cinematography by Julia Swain | dir. Leah McKendrick

[stayflaminhotmen]

I love how this movie feels like a love letter to SF too <3 #voicemailstoisabelle

[livelovecaliforniadreams]

#Just Things That Made Me Feel All The Feels

[stayflaminhotmen]

#voicemailstoisabelle #romcomsaresoback

[peeta-mellark]

XO KITTY 3x03 "Play List"

[share-the-damn-bed]

COUNTDOWN TO ST4 | Top Jancy Moments

1 — Bed Sharing (S1E6)

“I don’t want to be alone… Do you?” “No.”

[the-official-ceo]

I don't care if they're the highest grossing movies on planet freakin Earth, you say "Avatar" and everyone and their mom still thinks that bald little bitch and his magic cow. Soggy James can keep his millions, he'll never have the streets.

[mombinaryjew]

[spideyhexx]

this look right here is one of the things that solidifies him as alex nilsen

[spideyhexx]

some posters popping up on Netflix!!!

[firehelpmeforget]

FIRST LOOK AT THE PEOPLE WE MEET ON VACATION MOVIE!

[hauntedfictionland]

End of an era 🥺

(FOREVER Jonathan and Nancy over Steve and Nancy)

[whywontvulcanseatreplicatormeat]

Just made myself so so sad thinking about Aang's marble trick because from a physics perspective, keeping dense spherical objects afloat on an airstream is not trivial, and he's doing it in a tiny little space without moving his hands. Bending is usually very gestural. So. Everyone in the era of the show is, at best, impressed THAT it is airbending. But Aang's an incredibly young master airbender. He wouldn't be acting like this was the bestest trick ever if it didn't take at least some skill; he's a goofy kid but he's also a prodigy. I bet other airbenders were absolutely blown away (pun fully intended) at the level of precision and force and minimalism of movement on display and now there's no one who understands at all why he expects accolades.

[myinterestsvary-writes]

“CHECK THIS OUT!”

[alexstandall]

THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE (2013) dir. Francis Lawrence

[squidinktea]

i dont want 22 episode seasons back. i dont want 8 episode seasons. i dont actually want a prescriptive number of episodes per season

its the era of streaming. we dont need to fil x number of timeslots.

i want tv shows to be able to determine for themselves what their optimal number of episodes per season to tell the story they want at the pace they want. maybe thats a 3 episode season. maybe thats a 50 episode season. i dont care, i just want the decision to be made for practical and artistic reasons rather than corporate ones

[e-e-e-s-the-avatar]

The Blue Spirit putting out firebending with a bucket of water is the absolute funniest thing ever done in avatar combat. It just is.

[thequantumqueer]

katara: *kicks zuko’s ass without even blinking* zuko:

[finding-flight]

I literally just watched this episode, and I’m sorry, but there’s one thing funnier:

Zuko couldn’t speak during this whole fight/escape in case someone recognized his voice. Can you imagine the frustration he must have felt having to go through an entire fight without yelling? Zuko???

[sweetiepie08]

Especially while dealing with Aang’s shenanigans?!?!?!

One of my favorite parts of rewatching the episode is imagining everything that must have been going through Zuko’s head during that escape.

Aang: Wait! My friends need to suck on those frogs!

Zuko, trying not yell out of anger and confusion:

[art-and-writing-knox-me-down]

It gets funnier when you think that he could absolutely, no problem go through a battle without yelling once, as seen here and yet chooses to be a dramatic gay and holler at the top of his lungs at every opportunity. 

That says a lot about how he firebends vs how he fights with the dao blades.

He actually can’t, at this point, fight without yelling if he’s using firebending. In The Firebending Masters, he says he’s been relying on anger and rage to fuel his bending, so yeah, in every firebending fight, he’s drawing on rage and hyping that up by yelling. Someone has pointed out that after he finds the original source of firebending, he stops yelling all the time - I haven’t checked that personally but it does seem accurate.

But he doesn’t need to draw on fury to firebend when he’s the Blue Spirit. He can fight in total silence when he’s working with a weapon he’s more in touch with, when he doesn’t need to draw on hate or anger to fuel it.

[flameraven]

I am SO curious where he learned to fight with the swords. I can’t imagine he got much training in martial weapons as a kid – he’s ROYALTY, he’s a firebender, and the focus we see on them practicing forms from a young age (and Zuko being expected to do an Agni Kai at 13!) make me think it’s likely there would have been a lot of disdain for something as pedestrian as swords. Also– @atlaculture didn’t you do something on how the split swords are a peasant weapon?

Seems like something he must have picked up after his exile, but he’s so prideful and so obsessed with “proving himself” to Ozai, I can’t imagine he’d dare to experiment with that on his own. Maybe Iroh introduced it to him? Practicing sword forms or sparring would have been a good way for him to build back muscle after what had to be a long convalescence from the burn, but without the trauma of firebending again so soon.

(You can’t convince me Zuko didn’t have some pyrophobia after the Agni Kai, and probably a heaping dose of shame along with it, because he’s the prince of the Fire Nation, he’s a fire bender, how pathetic is it for him to be afraid of fire? And yet he has to suppress a flinch every time fire gets too close, especially near his face)

[atlaculture]

Yup! Zuko’s dual swords are for civilian use and called niuweidao, meaning “oxtail sabers”. Historically, these sword were relatively cheap to acquire, due to their thin blades typically being made of low-quality metal that was easy to mass produce:

https://www.tumblr.com/atlaculture/718240438095593472/cultural-weapons-fire-nation-swords-pt-2?source=share

The consequence of them basically being the McDonalds of swords is that they were popular with all different kinds of poor people. The most interesting ones being… theatre troupes! Because these swords were relatively affordable, they were often used for stage and street performances. (And because the tropes of theatre carry into modern cinema and TV, you also see the niuweidao overrepresented in most kung fu-inspired media as well.)

Anyways, I bring this up because Zuko is very much a theatre kid, so maybe his sword skills actually come from observing actors using the sword and imitating them? Better yet, maybe his mother secretly taught him to use the niuweidao to boost his self-esteem? After all, she is a former theatre actress, according to the comics. It would certainly explain why it’s a skill he possesses but not Azula/Ozai/Iroh.

It would also explain why Zuko thought he could get away with hanging them on his wall as decorations. It would be like decorating your room with a Phantom of the Opera mask.

[flameraven]

I don’t read the comics, so now I’m wondering how on Earth Ozai married an actress! Someone so obsessed with lineage and legacy is not someone I would expect to marry down like that. Maybe Nobility were allowed to have hobbies like that in the Fire Nation? Although it seems like entertainers don’t have the best reputation given what we see of Ty Lee and the circus…

[atlaculture]

Without spoiling too much, Azulon forced Ursa to marry Ozai, because she’s the granddaughter of Roku and he believed she would give the royal family powerful heirs. Before that, she was just a local actress in her small town.

[lizardlicks]

The comics also revealed that Zuko did in fact train with Piandao himself

When exactly he started or how long he trained is never with Piandao is never addressed. Fanon theorizes that Zuko may have started his training pretty early in, on assumption that he was a non-bender since the sages predicted he wouldn’t be a firebender, and he was presumably a late bloomer (at least when compared to the expectations of the royal family).

[atlaculture]

For anyone wondering where the “Zuko was trained by Piandao” trivia came from. This short comic, called “Swordbending”, was published in Nickelodeon Comics Club and was later compiled into “The Lost Adventures” Avatar books.

I’m on the fence over whether I take this as canon or not. For one, It wasn’t written by any of the series’ main writers. I don’t mind Piandao being Zuko’s teacher, but I really like the idea of Ursa being the one to have taught her son. It would tie back to Zuko’s ongoing duality theming. For most of the series, his firebending is fueled by anger because everything about it goes back to his feelings of inadequacy and his father’s abuse. But when he’s dual wielding, he’s incredibly cool headed. Maybe it’s because he relates it back to time spent with his mother and her positive encouragement. Plus, it would match the rest of his Blue Spirit design, which has other references to his mother.

[atlaculture]

#zuko could have two teachers tbh#stage combat and actual combat have different priorities and techniques#learning one can absolutely give you an edge for the other but they aren’t 1:1#and i can’t call to mind any evidence that ursa was an assassin or anything—imo she could defend herself but her real skill is showmanship#tbh i feel like it fits the themes of the narrative—ursa trains zuko as much as she knows how to#but it’s mostly a showy style that doesn’t hold up to more intense combat situations so he builds on it without her

@falconfate

I agree. While I think Ursa taught Zuko the basics and showed him some really flashy moves, I think his combat abilities were really refined during his banishment. Like I mentioned earlier, Zuko’s swords were historically popular among the lower levels of society, such as actors and criminals/rebels. Zuko spent three years on a ship full of sailors and probably spent a lot of time docked in seedy port cities where pirates hung out. He basically got to experience the full spectrum of what dual broadswords (niuweidao) were capable of.

Anyways, enjoy Michelle Yeoh rocking the dual broadswords (niuweidao) against Zhang Ziyi’s single straight blade (jian).

[hell-vetica]

“Sometimes people need someone to believe in them. And then they can do amazing things.”

[djospurnell]

[willnmike4l]

@stealthywing cause hell yea

prob last post before byler endgame 😩