never kill yourself you might live long enough for your favorite cartoon that ended twenty years ago to start baiting you with a ship whose fandom subsists on nothing but shoulder touches and potential
hi gang. reminder that we are some of the best sweaters in the animal kingdom (second only to equines) allowing us to stay cool and keep moving in hot weather. we have 10 times the density of sweat glands compared to other great apes.
we are ALSO insanely good at smelling rain (specifically geosmin, found in the soil and activated by rain) with the ability to smell 10 parts per trillion. this is speculated to have helped our ancestors survive!
we ALSO have absolutely batshit diets compared to most other animals. caffeine and chocolate are completely toxic to most animals but we can eat it without even feeling sick. even avocados are severely toxic to many animals to the point where it can be fatal to eat, but humans love it!!!
we are ALSO the best endurance runners ON EARTH out of ANY other species. we beat horses in endurance running. you know, the animals that gradually evolved away most of their toes in order to be the best runners?? yeahhh.
and to top it all off. our lifespan is unusually long for our species' weight/mass. typically, the bigger a species is, the longer its average lifespan (e.g. domestic mice live for 1-3 years, whales can live over 200) but we're very small for how long our average lifespan is. big cats like tigers live around 14-15 years, brown bears 25 years, yet here we are expected to live around 75-85 years. that is NUTS.
humans as a species are so extremely cool. it's not just our intellect that makes us amazing. we may not be the fastest or the strongest in the animal kingdom but we're super cool in many other ways. next time you sweat you can go wow!!! humans are so cool I'm able to keep moving because of my absolutely insane number of sweat glands! thank you evolution!
the fire nation royal academy for girls or whatever it’s called is such a funny piece of lore to me. like it’s simultaneously a posh girls’ finishing school and a brutal military academy. misogyny boot camp and also regular boot camp. and also it’s middle school. no wonder azula mai and ty lee are so tight, their friendship was forged in the (literal) flames of the hell they endured together.
The Most Underrated Line In All Of ATLA/TLOK And Its Many Worldbuilding Implications - A Ramble
In S2E7 of TLOK we get this dialogue from Wan and The Aye-Aye Spirit: "There are other Lion Turtles?" "Of course there are - dozens of them!" [timestamp 3:38 in this video]
It's such a quick line it's easy to miss, but there's one thing about it that made a LOT of things click into place for me about the Avatar universe's worldbuilding; the fact that there are (or were) dozens of Lion Turtles. NOT four, with one for each element, like you would assume. Dozens.
What does this mean in terms of the Four Nations? What connections might this have with other previously established lore? Well uhm follow me on this journey. I guess.
Pre-Unifications - A Global Warring States Era?
A warring states era on a wouldn't be nearly as compelling if there were only four Lion Turtles. If this were the case, everything would be perfectly balanced; why would there be disarray, violence, cultural disparity and struggles for power within each elemental group if the world was already perfectly divided into four solid groups? Why would a national identity be in question at all?
But the fact that there are more than one Lion Turtle per element... that means different groups of people being isolated from one another for long periods of time. This means different bodies of identity, regardless of element. Different city states, regional Kings, Queens, fiefdoms, dynastic power struggle, etc etc, before any sort of inherent loyalty the ones element as a national and cultural identity was established.
We know the Avatar world was not always divided into Four Nations. In Chapter 21 of The Rise Of Kyoshi we learn that Guru Laghima - a name you'll recognize from TLOK S3 - was from an era when the Four Nations had not yet been formed. We also know from Zaheer that he lived about 4,000 years before the events of TLOK (for context, thats about 6,000 years after Wan became the first Avatar).
There's further confirmation of this in Smoke And Shadow, where we learn about the first Firelord and the Fire Nation's unification wars.
However there's implications of this even in the original series; it's not some sloppy ret-con from the books and comics, it fits. Think Omashu:
In S2E2 of ATLA we get the story of Oma and Shu - and we learn that they come from "warring villages." Now why exactly would their villages be warring if The Earth Kingdom already existed? Why the need for a power struggle? Why is it not presented as a civil insurrection or civil war, but as a conflict between two distinct groups of people? The answer is that the "Earth Kingdom" as we conceptualize it did not exist. I'd go further and say that we can assume that after Omashu was established it became a powerful regional kingdom, and created strong sphere of cultural influence. Think about it - Bumi is King Of Omashu. King. NOT the Earth King, King Of The Earth Kingdom, but still King Of Omashu.
[Now there's some debate about where Omashu's founding sits on the timeline but to me it HAS to be post-Wan, probably very nearly immediately post-Wan. The line that calls them the "first earthbenders" and that they "learned earthbending from the badger moles" has caused some to question if they fit in with the "Lion Turtles bestowed bending" lore, but to me it fits pretty easily. The Lion Turtles may have bestowed the power but the actual technique was learned from the badger moles and dragons and blah blah blah.]
I also find this line from Jianzhu in The Rise Of Kyoshi very illuminating:
VINDICATION !! And Jianzhu's moaning over the cultural diversity within his country brings me to the second part of this post...
FC Yee And Gene Luen Yang Accidentally (?) Make Avatar's Cultural Mish Mash Make More Sense
Avatar's cultural gumbo of visuals has always been a little hard to parse. If you follow @atlaculture then you know it'd be kind of fruitless to try and apply any one single ethnicity/culture to one nation. A common, and very valid, criticism of Avatar is the pan-asian approach it takes to worldbuilding. I'm not here to defend that lol. I think people who dislike Avatar on that basis are well within their rights to do so, and I also think it's important to enjoy things critically.
HOWEVER, from a worldbuilding perspective, the mish mash becomes easier to swallow when you think of it in terms of multiple groups of people being unified into different nation states over a very long period of time and slowly intertwining their cultures into a single(ish) identity.
Take the Fire Nation for example: in FC Yee's The Shadow Of Kyoshi we learn that the government was much more decentralized and the country was controlled by different clans, like the Saowon and Keosho, who had individual spheres of influence and strong senses of identity. It makes me think about Mai and Ty Lee
They're both Fire Nation nobles and they both live in the Fire Nation capital - but their styles/clothes are completely different. Now, obviously that can be boiled down to personality-based character design but. There's a wide discrepancy between Mai's Edo Japan inspired hair and Ty Lee's Thai inspired performance outfit, and a little retroactive canon about them being part of different but powerful clans .. ? Yeah. That'd be fun, at the very least.
I could go on about this... was there a Water Lion Turtle at the north AND the south? How did the airbenders transition from relatively sedentary life on a Lion Turtle to nomadism? etc etc etc BUT in conclusion: TLOK and the comics have some very fun worldbuilding implications snuck in there !! Which makes up for a lot in my opinion. Personally I'd KILL for an Avatar series set in the warring states/unification period... I think that could be insanely cool...idk. The End. For Now.
one of my personal favorite dichotomies in atla is how iroh, once the top strategist and highest-ranking general of the fire nation, now directs all his energy and considerable tactical experience towards attempting to keep his teenage nephew from throwing himself into life-threatening situations AND IROH REGULARLY FAILS TO PREVENT HIM FROM DOING SO.
he lead a six-hundred day siege and now iroh can't keep up with a sixteen-year-old armed with two swords and a passionate deathwish. zuko's motto is "act first, think never" and he's running rings around his uncle. it's like!!! who's gonna come out on top, iroh's west point education vs. zuko's deep and abiding commitment to always choosing the stupidest possible course of action, and zuko manages to win every single time
Not to downplay just how committed to self destructive stupidity Zuko is, but Iroh still managed to keep him alive and in one piece. He lost literally every battle but he won that war.
Not to step on the knife, but also figuratively losing every fight as long as it means the child who is like a son to him is alive is the exact opposite of literally winning every battle and losing his son which is what he did when he was young so that's probably why he keeps so chill 90% of the time around the Zukoness of it all.
My little sister's new boyfriend got a tattoo for her about a month ago and he wanted matching tattoos so he decided to get uh. The tattoo on her ankle of her ex boyfriend's name that she hasn't gotten covered up yet
"if you're going to eat that rotisserie chicken please do it in an area where none of us can see" you hate me. you hate me because i have different eating habits than you and you want me to STARVE
like during zuko's Morality Coma in season 2 he has an incredibly vivid dream about two red and blue dragons, and then in season 3 he just fucking. meets the exact same dragons for real? there are slight differences in how they look but otherwise he genuinely just dreamed about ran and shaw months before actually seeing them in person? and it's never elaborated on but huh???
zuko: yeah i had some weird fever dreams. there were like these two dragons circling me, and the blue one sounded like azula and wanted me to die or whatever, and the red one sounded like you and was telling me not to do that—
iroh, the only person in this house who should know what those fucking dragons look like: hey What
zuko for sure keeps having dreams like this for YEARS without connecting the dots that it's weird spirit shenanigans. aang eventually has to point it out to him and even then he thinks it's Uncle Bullshit for several more years
anyway all that is to say that there exists a version of avatar in my mind where instead of him just running straight through Makapu with june that one time, we get to see a full 20 minute ep of aunt wu trying to convince zuko that he has The Gift, and zuko just sitting there like ugh god why are old people so weird
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