Tea in Ba Sing Se

Not Shipper , I still enjoy all of them but I have exception about someships Obessed with the Dai Li , Ba Sing Se in Atla Dai Li still are bastards but my dear bastards Love a healthy relationship❤️

[zhangg1609]

Xiao Qianglian - a Dai Li agent , male lead appearing in dai li fanfic in ao3 :

“How to tame a doll maker”

he also relates to Min Ji Shen , theyre friends

The doll he made by himself imitated the appearance of his "beloved little doll" :

Do not repost without permission

[kjscottwrites]

[X] <- psst click this

[zhangg1609]

Earth king Kuei and his unreliable and heartless Dai Li agent . Since they’ve already let themselves fall for each other, why not just keep on tormenting and destroying one another?

"But if we've already fallen into this quagmire, then let's just go to hell together "

_after a journey_

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[aisatsaa]

if only Gyatso had run away with Aang

[andi-tiucs]

Avatar Fan kid OC

I have had them for years and years but I suddenly had the itch to redesign in one afternoon, i couldn't be stopped.

if it's not obvious this is a Sukka fankid, and possibly a waterbender *shrug* but uses it sparingly

[zhangg1609]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Chapter 9 has been posted

Chapter 9: 9. Something Softer Summary: She woke not to terror, but to peace ,a slow, gentle surfacing from deep, dreamless sleep, with Baobao purring in her arms and the faint sound of Xiao whistling as he dressed for work in the predawn darkness. Still pretending to sleep, she watched him through half closed lashes , the meticulous ritual of his Dai Li uniform, the careful braiding of his hair, the breakfast tray laid out with a fresh white peony, the curtain drawn shut to protect her rest. And then the kiss pressed softly to her hair, and his whispered .

But peace is a fragile thing.

[sapphicalexaandra]

Every Kataang Hug

Hugging is a silent way of saying ‘You matter to me’.

[krekee]

Are they stupid

[manlyplumsour]

Your worst enemy is nobody else but yourself

[zhangg1609]

he came , my baby boi dai li oc version plushie

i had been waiting so long for my dai li agent plushie

he’s circle .he’s so chunky 🥳

my babi boi with his tail and ears

[zhangg1609]

Guess whose hands ?

-wip commission i order-

[zhangg1609]

bosco plushie~

[vasyandii]

A really cool thing I noticed in Tlok is that the Dai Li still opt for the half shaved queue as in their hairstyle, so the dressing conduct for new agents is to have their hair long in a traditional fashion.

[zhangg1609]

I think they’ve made some minor changes to their hairstyles, and some of them have stopped shaving the front half of their heads Some ppl have a normal hairline

[zhangg1609]

Some additional points regarding the fact that they do not shave half their heads

[vasyandii]

A really cool thing I noticed in Tlok is that the Dai Li still opt for the half shaved queue as in their hairstyle, so the dressing conduct for new agents is to have their hair long in a traditional fashion.

[zhangg1609]

I think they’ve made some minor changes to their hairstyles, and some of them have stopped shaving the front half of their heads Some ppl have a normal hairline

[avatar-legends-confessionblog]

I came up with a bunch of theories of why Iroh is a dick to Azula that are way more creative and interesting than 'Iroh is a misogynist pig!' Azula stans are so lazy fr. They are so lazy about her trauma in fact. Her trauma is too male coded for them so they fem coded it by adding misogyny and sexual abuse so they can relate to her better. They don't actually like her for her or her deeper potential, they like her because she is a strong independent girlboss with trauma they can relate to in a surface level way and say how they understand her. It's so shallow and pretentious. 'How do you know this anon?!', well for starters, many of them insist on lesbian Azula.

Now, you can ship what you like, in fact I like seeing Azula as bisexual but they plain deny any attraction she had for Chan saying its 'comphet' when it's literally her being so autistic and sheltered in terms of a normal teenage girl life she doesn't know how to act when feeling romantic and sexual feelings for a boy(which honestly is more relatable for guys than gals because or gendered socialisation which proves my point even further).

Now, they also masculinise her too, which might seem confusing as I said they feminise her. What I meant is that they make her exterior more masculine and make her all butch and dom alpha and make her hate girly stuff, but they make her interior more feminine, make her softer, more emotionally open, less cold, more girl's girl, a *feminist*. They make her more like them, more surface levelly masculine, more internally, emotionally feminine. They make her less Azula, more self insert softie butch lesbian. They make her autism more obvious(in the sense she is more awkward) and less obvious(she is less cold, more agreeable. More romantic leadish. Saved emotionally by Ty lee, saved physically and emotionally by Aang because Aang is the male exception. The one good soft male in her life. Now I can go on and on how Aang isn't the type of boy they think he is, or that's merely one part of him and Azulaang is inheritly gonna be toxic and not just from Azula's part, but that may be for a later post).

Also, they love talking about how the fandom is ableist towards Azula while they are constantly ableist towards Zuko and deny his autism coding so they can pretend he is an abusive normie male who knows better but is choosing to miss Azula's social cues and call him stupid or evil for not understanding Azula well. I understand criticising Zuko's treatment of her but they act like he must understand her perfectly or else he is actually some evil dumb misogynist who should be cucked by her(cause their Azula dates Mai along with Ty Lee). Which you know, I find pretty ironically ableist of them. But I assume it's because female autists tend to be socialised into hiding their autism and masking as normies so they are better at reading people than male autists so they are mad at Zuko for not noticing social cues they trained themselves into noticing.

Since someone just overstimulated me and ruined my analysis in real life, ruining my peace and calm, just gonna leave it at this for now. Media literacy ≠ feminist/lgbt/poc/leftist politics and that's a problem alot of you guys have, you think media literacy are those things which is why you think you are media literate for making Azula ooc and a self insert. I know the responses are gonna be disappointing(which is why I barely make stuff like this public, because it's not that I don't think this nor am I lying to just make myself look smart and it's like 'sure jan you just are afraid and stupid'(like some of you likely think), it's more like 'why try, the responses are just gonna be typical boring generic slop responses anyways that thinks being woke means they have all the media literacy and understanding of things in the world so they will call me dumb anyways because they can't think outside the framework or else they will reach conclusions they despise with all their hearts, maybe they aren't stupid like I thought previously, they are just afraid of understanding her. But they lack self awareness so they will of course deny it, unfortunately. Misogynistic Iroh is easier for them to hate and make a girlboss analysis crap out of Azula.

X

[saga-ordsmed]

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.

[moreroads]

Oh! This is an excellent rant. Additionally, I get to recommend this fic.

The Puppetmaster by tepkunset

[zhangg1609]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Chapters 8 is out

8. "Nightmares and unnecessary longing"

“Gu wakes from a nightmare so vivid it leaves her trembling and soaked in tears , not a dream, but a memory. The dark alley, the silent Dai Li agents in wide brimmed hats , the cold stone gloves clamping over her mouth and dragging her into the darkness . She wakes to a sunlit bedroom filled with his gifts: a silk robe, cosmetics, a note signed "Love you" . But all she can feel is the chill of that stone chair and the terror that one day she will be dragged back. Alone in the gilded cage, she spends the day trying to distract herself , yet finds herself missing him. When he finally returns exhausted and silently holds her, she feels relief instead of hatred, and that terrifies her more than the nightmare itself. She must escape before she no longer wants to....... That's what she expected....”