Silver Will, Golden Wings @xiaolianfa - Tumblr Blog

it bugs me how many lesbians have issues with trans women. like, we're supposed to love women. what's next, you gonna start hating short people too? fuck off.

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AND TRANS GUYS. "ooohhhhh they're betraying womanhood" no, they're men. jfc not everything is a personal attack some people are just guys.

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reblog this version too actually

cactusringed

I think fanfiction as a medium is different enough from mainstream literature in the tools it offers writers that it's a shame that it's not talked about more often. And it's not me saying "fanfic is better than books xD" because that sort of mindset is a symptom of people who aren't particularly well read in either medium. I'm just speaking of like... The little things you get to do with a fanfic that you genuinely can't really do in an original story.

I had a big fanfic in a previous fandom where one of the big reveals was the involvement of a kind of infamous villain, whose presence was built up to and foreshadowed through the whole fic until his reveal without ever mentioning his name, so that the name drop would be a gut punch. It worked especially well because of who the villain was and his presence in that fandom space specifically (it's very complicated) and if it was an original story this reveal wouldn't work at all the way it was written in the fic. Because if you don't have a predisposition to think about that character and his relationship to the hero in a very specific way, then just seeing their name won't do much to you; the reveal and the recontextualisation it pushes upon you hinges on your previous knowledge of the source material.

I think it's an interesting tool fanfic authors are given. One of my favorite fanfic of all time is partially a re-imagining of its source material's canon, and something it does is introduce antagonists much earlier in the story or deepen npcs' stories. It then works to evoke a tragic irony that again wouldn't work if you didn't know the source material, and it's something the author obviously has a lot of fun with.

You could call it cheap or a crutch and I mean, yeah, sure, it is a little bit: the fanfic relies on previously established emotional bonds and stakes to achieve its goal, and in some cases it saves the author from having to 'properly' build up its stakes. But I think it's INTERESTING that it has that tool at its disposal. I think it's a fun thing to play with and I think these built in expectations and emotional bonds are especially why I find story driven aus in particular to be fascinating in the amount of ways you can play with them. You know??

super-affection

only real 90s kids remember

#my sister would just disconnect our wifi so she could reboot this lol

avatarcompanion

really, when I said initially that I was worried that they'd over-emphasized Katara's "Aang color scheme" over his references to her, it's because I can already sense another decade's worth of discourse a la the "why didn't Katara get a statue, is it because her husband abused into a stay at home wife with no accomplisments???" type of discourse (and also because of course Aang should honor her appropriately, that's obvious!)

Now looking at it, Katara wears a yellow string in her belt and a small band at the tip of her braid. Meanwhile, Aang has updated his pendant with blue beads to honor Katara.

The discourse I worried about is already rolling, likely exacerbated because Aang's reference to Katara isn't visible or properly saturated in the like 2 out of 3 leaked pictures we have of his design. It is likely to be much clearer in the actual movie.

If you actually consider it, Katara's design shoots down a whole lot of nonsense discourse that her being with Aang would somehow take her own culture away from her. She is fully dressed as herself and as an adult watertribe woman - she wears blue from tip to toe, fully traditional watertribe clothes and watertribe hair including her own hair loopies. She wears a pelt, she wears her mother's necklace. There's nothing significantly "air nomad" about her design.

The two pieces of yellow bands that honor her husband are mere accessories with no deeper cultural significance, absolutely nothing that marks her as "belonging" to Aang's culture, nor are they diminishing or even interfering with any aspect of her own identity.

On the other hand, Aang's honoring of Katara, while maybe slightly less eye-catching (specifically so in the art that's been released) are actually far more significant representation of Katara as included into his culture.

That pendant is the most spiritual thing Aang wears; it represents his own growth and his attachment to his lost nation, with him as it's sole living representative. He wears it all day over his heart! The fact that Aang added Katara's colors to this item represents how she is the love of his nation reborn. Like Aang really wanted to wear something of such dignity and meaning that represents how Katara is integrated into his very identity and being.

In the film, it's likely to be very visible in most shots that include his face/body, except for close-ups. It's actually far more significant that Aang decided to include Katara into his most significant item, one that specifically represents his own culture so intimately, rather than her simply wearing a few yellow strings as somewhat superficial accessories to her own watertribe outfit.