ramblings.
when i watched atla as a kid, these characters all seemed so ... adult. i kinda knew they were children, but my little brain was like: “well, i’m only eight. twelve sounds ancient. that’s double digits!” especially with zuko and sokka, they just didn’t properly register as just teenagers to me.
and i know i’m not the first person to have this ~revelation~, but it fucks me up every time i rewatch the show.
i recently watched “The Siege of the North” again, because i needed a screenshot of the spirit oasis (netflix doesn’t let you take screenshots, which i should’ve guessed, honestly), and i just ... wanted to cry? like the whole time. i actually did cry a little, which doesn’t happen often.
because i’m twenty now (almost), and when i was twelve, i cried my heart out when we moved two villages over to live next to my grandparents. that was the worst fathomable thing to me, to leave the crappy house i grew up in and move to a village i had known my entire life.
and these kids are just straight up fighting a war, loosing their entire people, getting maimed by their parents, dealing with shit not even adults should be dealing with.
this is the case with a lot of children’s media, of course.
my favourite books included harry potter (i think that’s self-explanatory), charlie bone (emma was just hypnotized for her entire life, then woken up, had to find out, at age 11 (12? not much older), that her “parents” were in league with the bad people, and moved in with a woman she’d never met before (her aunt), and somehow was well adjusted after that. i will never be over that. also, everything to do with poor, poor billy.), and the fantasmania trilogy (which started with the boy who “writes” the books just getting fucking murdered. just a bolt from a crossbow through ... i want to say his head. football saves the world in those books, they’re the best.)
also fairy tales, of course, with the evil queen dancing herself to death in the end, or rumpelstilzchen going straight to hell when he stomps his foot, and the wolf eating a girl, her grandma and a bunch of little goats (in two seperate stories, these goats were so fucking stupid; i played one of them once, in kindergarten). the prince loses his eyesight when he falls from a tower (that’s rapunzel), the witch tries to eat the children after they’d been abandoned twice by their parents (though they did first try to eat her house, so, y’know), and the frog only turns human again when he gets thrown against a wall (that’s right, there was no kissing in the version i was read).
all of this makes me think very much of that quote i found when i had to give a presentation on fairy tales in 10th grade, which went something like: fairy tales aren’t written to teach children that there are dragons; children already know that. fairy tales are written to teach children the dragons can be defeated.
(nevermind that most fairy tales weren’t written for children, at first, but you get the gist.)
anyway, i don’t know where i’m going with this, so i’ll just stop rambling now.
