Okay so this is so old, I don’t know how many people are even in the Ever After High fandom anymore, and those who still are they might not ship Rapple (Raven x Apple) which is unlikely, since a lot of the fandom at least likes Rapple or are aware as to why it’s so polular.
But my favorite fanfiction for them is called True Love Loophole, and I don’t know how to explain how happy it makes me. It’s also a full novel story so like, be prepared if you get into it, I couldn’t stop reading it. And it develops it’s own entire story line and like, it has an amazing ending, and even though this story has its angst, it also makes me extremely happy.
If you want real plot and yes the author did take their own liberties, they explain them clearly and everything is understandable, and more characters are explored into and other relationships are formed it’s just.... so so good. I read it years ago and I’m so happy it still exists. You can read it from this link, or even from the FanFiction.Net app.
Here’s a screenshot of the beginning of the story, because I’m generous, and if you think you know where the story is going, believe me you don’t. Okay, you don’t.
I'm not done complaining about how dirty ATLA did Hama, btw., and because I'm a sucker for rewriting and worldbuilding, I've actually started tinkering on an alternative arc for the character that has grown entirely out of proportion, so let me yap a little more. Hama is the knot that roped me back into ATLA, apparently.
The episode's setup doesn't make any sense if you think about it for more than two minutes, and I think it's one of the biggest wasted storytelling opportunities of the entire show. See, I don't buy the premise of the Hama episode, so I'm not drawing the ethical, emotional, and even logical conclusions the writing tries to push on me.
Now, for the episode to happen at all, the writers shove three conditions into the setup that work against each other. First, the episode needs Hama socially embedded enough that the children can meet her casually and have a reason to hang out with her at all; thus, she's the owner of an inn and offers boarding to the Gaang. Second, the episode needs her to appear suspicious and unworthy of trust enough that Sokka can justify investigating her; thus, the kids can find the chest where she keeps the comb as a relic from home, revealing to them that she's from the Southern Water Tribe (don't bother thinking about the implications of non-violent resistance this comb carries, btw, since she managed to keep it through years in a prison during which the guards tied her up by hands and feet before they feed her water and through the escape, or what it means that she has to keep that last remenant of home hidden in a locked chest; would it expose her if she kept it in the bathroom? Does she fear it could? Episode says, who cares? It's just a plot device to reveal her origin. Obey the episode and don't ask questions) Third, the episode needs her crimes to be recent enough that the local community has not already exposed her, but frequent enough that the kids have reason to investigate at all. Thus, how convenient that Hama messed up the schedule during the last full moon and failed to capture her latest victim before sunrise, so the Gaang has someone to tell them an invisible force pulled him toward the mountain. Now, they know where to look for the missing people. (btw, that the man lived to tell the tale makes me additionally question how evil and dangerous Hama truly is because that is a senior, too; as if she couldn't have assassinated him in the month since to make sure he doesn't talk. As if that weren't the most logical decision if she were as ruthless as the episode needs her to be to justify the cruelty it unleashes on her)
As you see, to meet the plot requirements, the script simply stacks coincidences until the villain twist can unfold, but the character and the storytelling just become aggressively incoherent.
One of the many questions I keep asking myself is, why now? Why does Hama start now to abduct civilians? If I remember, it's quite directly stated that the disappearances started recently, a few months ago. However, even if it wasn't stated, anything else creates considerable timeline issues. If Hama had been doing this for years, there should be many more victims, bodies, searches, rumors, patrols, or investigations. Keep in mind: Sokka suspects and investigates her immediately. I know he's a smart young man, but I don't see why no one else in the area would've come up with a similar idea.
For an antagonist, if you insist on making Hama one to impress and register as evil and dangerous, they have to work for their crimes. If she has been doing this for years without any friction because people are that easy to fool, I am not buying the threat. Since all context clues imply that she has been committing these abductions for a few months, the episode owes us an inciting event. What changed? What is the causal bridge between survivor and refugee Hama and kidnapper and predator Hama? The episode doesn't bother to answer this question beyond "They deserve the same." Again, I said it before; it's funny that the story actually thinks that what Hama went through as a prisoner of war and a genocide survivor is symmetrical to the kidnappings she does.
But why did Hama go through all the trouble to build a life at all? Do you, writers, know how much labor hospitality is? Do you, writers, care at all how much work it is to take care of such a big house with multiple guest rooms, apparently, alone? Have you, writers, considered for a moment how Hama managed to OWN PROPERTY and START A BUSINESS?! The paper trail? Hello? Did you not show me repeatedly how bureaucratic the Fire Nation is? What about a title deed? You need documentation for that. And, well, money. Taxes? Inspectations? Travelers? Suppliers (since Hama is stocked well enough to feed four children for several days)? An inn is pretty much the least anonymous business imaginable, and Hama has every fucking reason to stay as anonymous as possible.
Let me remind you of the fucking background story the writers conjured for her with meticulous detail: A high-profile waterbender escapes a purpose-built detention facility by controlling guards from inside their bodies. As far as we know, Hama is the only waterbender who ever escaped, and HOW she did it should make her THE most explosive and terrifying fugitive the Fire Nation has ever seen. You cannot tell me that this happened and the Fire Nation just shrugged and called it a day. No way, people. I don't buy it. You cannot come up with this escape story and expect me to think that this is the end of it.
There is no plausible version of that event in which the Fire Nation doesn't set hell in motion to hunt Hama down. Just imagine the witness reports of the guards on this waterbender with a bending ability that bypasses walls, weapons, and will. The officials paniced, I would bet. Hama is a security nightmare and folklore material, haunting the Fire Nation. She should be, at least.
You want me to believe that Hama performs one of the most terrifying forms of bending in the franchise and the Fire Nation just forgets it? Put some respect on this woman's name when you insist on writing her that formisable! No, no, no. There was a bounty on Hama's head; in fact, there still is, I decided, but there is no data to update the picture for decades and age has changed her so much that people don't recognize her anymore.
Multiple versions of her tale are circulating through the Fire Nation because the story travels far, growing a life of its own. How would you coordinate the search if you don't pass on what happened and who's on the run? The authorities have to pass on minimal information, at least, but the event is so horrifying and incredible that details leak anyway. Therefore, the propaganda specialists spin Hama's tale as a ghost story. I headcanon that Zuko and Azula grew up with it because some servant kid told it to Lu Ten when he and his parents spent the summer in some holiday palace of the royal family.
I mean, that is the magnitude her escape story deserves. How did she not become one of the most wanted fugitives across every territory controlled by the Fire Nation? That is one of the basic mechanisms of storytelling: if you make Hama's escape and the skill she developed to achieve it that extraordinary, the consequences of her action have to match the scale and intensity.
Now, as I said, running an inn is one of the least anonymous occupations, and it doesn't really match what Hama can plausibly afford. I mentioned the paper trail that would lead every scout and bounty hunter to her sooner or later. However, the writing insists she achieved it. Granted. That makes her even more formidable.
Decades of successful concealment suggest someone capable of regulating impulses, making long-term calculations, and tolerating intimate proximity to the society that destroyed her people as Hama RUNS AN INN!!! Her field of trade is, therefore, hospitality! Are you, writers, not paying ANY attention whatsoever to the story you are writing? Do you not keep track of the creative decisions you made? She was a prisoner of war, spent years under the worst "living" conditions and then decides to to HOST guests of the Fire Nation (not exclusively, sure, Earth Kingdom travelers may pass through, but see what I mean)? What was the motivation for that? Revenge? Lure guests in and murder them? Why go through the trouble and RISK of buying (or even renting, which is even riskier if you have a landlord or landlady to answer to) and maintaining an inn? She could just move into a little appartment in a big city somewhere, scout the sewer system, bloodbend victims underground, and let them rot there. Or kill them and dispose of them in the sewer water. Get away with it for decades. Much more anonymous. That's not a story I would suggest, but if the writers wanted to make her a scary villain, that's what it would take to convince me. And, again, as elaborated in detail, we have to assume she only recently started abducting people. We know she didn't silence the one man who escaped her. So, what is her masterplan supposed to be? It doesn't compute. The setup makes Hama exceptionally bad at terrorism, actually.
Now, IF the writers insist on making her run an inn..... Here is a sneak preview of my rewrite/AU take on Hama: The White Lotus. She is a member of the White Lotus. Yes, you don't get the villain one-shot (as we established, none of the elements required to achieve the plot, arc, and conclusion of the episode make sense; neither alone nor in isolation), but Hama's story never had to go there to begin with and this decision would resolve multiple issues of Hama's post-escape story (not that the writing consideres these decades part of her character, please keep your attention on the crimes, but don't bother about the timing or an indicing event because the writers didn't either). The White Lotus would have every reason to recruit her after performing the feat of escaping the prison designed specifically to render waterbenders utterly helpless. It would explain how she evaded the Fire Nation for years: the White Lotus can hide her, shelter her, help her recover, and give her a mission and a purpose. Running an inn would still mean she's super exposed, but if the operation runs through the White Lotus, the administration issues are resolved plausibly enough. It would give Hama a meaningful way to resist because, of course, this inn would be an ideal remote operation base. Genuine travelers passing through provide an organic flow of information. Agents can blend in, leave messages, recover from injuries (it's reasonable to assume Hama is a healer), hold meetings, coordinate operations, or store and move resources.
After all, in the finale, three (!!!) of the five revealed members of the White Lotus are from the Fire Nation; I will have you remembered. Two of them were directly responsible for major military campaigns (and I think Iroh's inclusion specifically leaves us with major timeline issues: his siege on Ba Sing Se for almost two years wasn't that long ago; Zuko appears to have been around 12 or 13. If he was already a member, the White Lotus is another Imperial organ because Iroh was also crown prince and Azulon's intended successor. That looks more like infiltration, if you ask me, and maybe you could make an argument that the White Lotus recruited him specifically to get a member on the throne who can stop the war, but then it makes Iroh look like a saboteur if he left the crown to his little brother. Also, I think I remember a line where Iroh even points out that he once came as a conqueror and returns now as a liberator, which implies he took the siege campaign seriously. If Iroh became a member after losing his son and the campaign and the throne, I can see how the White Lotus would recruit an experienced soldier with close proximity to the throne for tactical reasons. Still, Iroh pretty much acts like he is the leader of the campaign to free Ba Sing Se, when Bumi is fucking there, and I don't see how that would be justified given the atrocities he committed). If you can have three (!!!) Fire Nation representatives and all the members are men, exclusively, I don't see why the sole survivor of the Southern Water Tribe benders, who liberated herself from the cruelest conditions, wouldn't be approached and recruited. As I said, it is virtually impossible that Hama's escape didn't break containment. She would've been an ideal candidate, and I think, given the background story and the fact that she is THE ONLY waterbender of the South from before the Fire Nation annihilation IN THE FRANCHISE (more sneak preview: in my rewrite, she isn't) that would've been an appropriate arc. But, no, literally crackling villain it is. Katara was actually manipulated by a predator who stains her with a forbidden technique, not reconnecting with her culture after the Fire Nation annihilated it.
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.
As I have discussed elsewhere, Azula's expressed feelings going into the final Agni Kai were something like "it's kind of fucked up I have to fight my brother to the death and I regret having to do so, but I don't see an alternative" while Zuko's expressed feelings were "I can't wait to kick my sister's ass and put her in her place, especially now that she's been weakened by her mental breakdown. No regrets, baby!"
But what about after the Agni Kai? What about after Azula was slipping tears and fire all over the place as she plunged into the abyss? What then? A lot of people claim that Zuko felt sadness or empathy or pity or unhappiness or dissatisfaction then? What did he actually feel?
Well, essentially all the series tell us is this:
Katara is clearly saddened by watching Azula breakdown. Katara feels empathy for Azula. Katara feels like Zuko must be saddened by watching his sister go through something like this and thus must need emotional support.
What about Zuko? There's a very strong visual contrast between the sorrow and empathy on Katara's face and the lack of those emotions on Zuko's face. Zuko's expression is difficult to read and quite ambiguous, but if I had to describe it I would say "satisfied," "content," "contemptuous." If there is any pity there, it is "contemptuous pity" Zuko went into the fight having no regrets about fighting his sister and now that she's been utterly destroyed, it looks like he still has no regrets about what happened.
Again, this is a hard to interpret scene, and multiple interpretations are possible. Yet it is hard for me to see anything in it which supports the notion that Zuko feels empathy for Azula here. And one reason the scene is hard to interpret is because we get no follow up. We get Zuko visiting an imprisoned Ozai, but not Zuko visiting Azula. Perhaps that's because Zuko wouldn't visit Azula, now that he's destroyed her.
To be honest, I've only just realised Zuko was even looking at Azula. Every time I've previously watched this scene, the way his hair is partially covering his eyes made me think he was just gazing into the distance like a hero who's just defeated his greatest enemy in some sort of action movie.
And Azula is definitely his enemy, but there's this weird element of dehumanisation, almost. He looks not triumphant exactly, but there's a sense of, this had to be done, there's no other way, like Azula's just this crazy person writhing around on the floor and always will be, instead of his sister — sort of satisfied, like he doesn't know her and feels no emotional connection to her.
Like, now I can see from the images that he is actually looking at her, but when I wasn't paying close attention to where his eyes were, it wasn't obvious. There's also the way Katara's head is tilted down a little but Zuko's isn't, especially in that first shot.
Maybe I just have low attention to detail. Just thought my initial impressions were interesting, because literally up until this moment this is the way I have viewed that scene.
But, yeah, Zuko is looking at Azula, but somehow it's worse, because whatever expression is on his face really does look contemptuous. Literally and metaphorically, he is looking down at her.
#atla#atla Azula#Zuko critical#challenging the fandom assumption that Zuko feels compassion for Azula at the end of the series#because I think he doesn't#especially given the comics#zuko is not a good brother to Azula#and he doesn't have to be#he has no responsibility for her#it's just frustrating when fandom acts like he's this saint who never does anything wrong after he's redeemed#being a better person doesn't happen all at once
I think those fancomics where Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes is transgender are cute and fun but I also think it's a deep misunderstanding of Calvin's character to think he would transition into a heterosexual normie who goes to her high school reunion. That girl would have neopronouns and fang implants
I know it's like 2 weeks too late to change it but I'm so mad I didn't realize that the band would obviously be called "Get Rid Of Slimy GirlS". I walk the road of shame
This show is an accurate portrayal of how artists are hopeless dumbasses and we need a producer type to bring us back to earth to get anything meaningful done and I’m here for it
They proceeded to get away with it and sweep the competition but then Ash felt bad and decided to give the prize money and title to the second place winners. They quickly ran away with no one knowing who they really were.
