Love it when Preston Garvey gives me the same quest again and again like YES pookie another settlement DOES need my help, you are so right about that!

Reblogging for the Sasazuka hate. That man is INSUFFERABLE

I'm really tired of the "woman sad about her arranged marriage" trope, especially if that woman is royalty.

I am sure that many women across time were sad about their arranged marriages, but I'm sure a lot of others were excited, ambivalent, or resigned. Again, especially if you were royalty! I am sure if you were born a princess, you were trained from birth that your whole purpose in life was to marry someone important to solidify the power of the person on the throne. And honestly, it's an important job, if it wasn't, they wouldn't have tried so hard to do it.

That woman isn't just marrying another king or prince, she's going to be an ambassador of her country. She's supposed to be there promoting good relations. She isn't just a woman being sold off, she has a job! Also, if she is marrying the reigning monarch (or the heir), she may well end up running the country if the king is off at war or he dies when the heir is really young. That happened a lot throughout history! (or maybe she marries the third son and helps him find his way to the throne. Good for her)

It just feels like a modern sentiment being projected back. In Romeo and Juliet, when Juliet's mother first brings up marrying her to Paris, Juliet's basically cool with it and says she'll try to like him. She would have known this was going to happen because that is what rich women do, they marry into another family so their two families can be buddies. What else would she even be expecting?

It wouldn't bother me so much except that it's all we see! Give me a story about a woman who is like, "Cool, I shall give it my all!" Or she's like rolling up her sleeves and planning how she's going to get the court on her side and rule France, power behind the throne style (these women are mostly portrayed as villains, but who is to say the king would do a better job?). And also, have a little faith in women's fathers? You think men in the past didn't occasionally consider the happiness of their daughters? Not even a little bit?

Sokka is alone

He is his tribes last line of defence

Two years ago, his father and the men of his tribe journeyed to the Earth Kingdom to help fight against the Fire Nation.

Leaving him alone.

Here he prepares to fight and has to use his teeth to tie his wraps because this ritual is meant to be done with your tribes men.

but there is no one left to help him

He promised his father he would protect his tribe and has dedicated himself to it.

To the extent that he can apply their traditional war paint alone without a mirror.

At times this is played for laughs. Hes off playing soilder, as katara call it, trying to train small children to be wariors

But he was not much older than they are when the fire nation attacked and took his mother away.

now he's alone, the only male of age, raised in a society that says he is the only one left who can fight to protect his tribe.

He is preparing to die.

He's seen what happens, he knows what's likely to happen.

They took all of the other benders away before he was born and now they've come for his little sister.

and he is ready to have his last breath be in defence of the ones he loves. Even if it is all futial.

This is pretty much the entire reason why I hated the 1st season. Because Sokka is actually a great character and everything that’s admirable about him is constantly denigrated or treated with comedic derision.

Sokka didn’t even get much of an arc. The writers just narratively framed his already existing qualities in a better light as the show went on

(unserious joke post ahead) I'm gatekeeping guilt narratives from people who haven't committed atrocities. too many times have I encountered a story with a very promising guilt-ridden character and then we learn what they did and it was something no reasonable person could think was bad and the character just has low self worth about it or it was socially unacceptable in the setting. give me some Nuance to chew on. give me someone struggling to find the stable ground between accountability and self destruction. look me in the eye and tell me just how far your faith in the human power to grow extends. maybe shoot a man in reno just to watch him die then feel really fucked up about it and then your fiction will be better.

In Collar x Malice, Yanagi is practically incapacitated by guilt throughout his storyline and you find out that the HoRriBLe AtRoCiTy he committed is….(almost) killing a kidnapper in self-defense when he was a child. And the game’s narrative goes on to treat that as something he *should* feel insane levels of guilt over.

The whole game has a creepy level of disdain for the act of self-defense tbh.

One of the most difficult things is having to love someone how they need to be loved, and not how you want to love them.

My sacrifice for your tainted mind and your pure heart

I must not scroll. Scrolling is the task-killer. Scrolling is the little-death that brings total procrastination. I will face my tasks. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the task has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Fave companion posting

god i love fallible characters, but specifically zuko in the catacombs. choosing his sister over his uncle just to get to sleep in his childhood bed again. earning katara's kindness and empathy and stripping it all away in minutes because he ached for the familiar. fighting on the wrong side of history just to see his father smile with pride. knowing he could have done the right thing, but what is being good when you could be terrible but loved.

what zuko did at 13 was so dangerous as to result in a prince (royalty) (untouchable to everyone except his own family) being challenged to a fire duel because he sounded like a leader. and a better one than his father. an heir who's willing to fight generals for the safety of his people during a war will grow into a ruler who realises that the key to his people's safety is to stop the war, and he already had the constitution and the political standing to speak out about it where even people like iroh refused to when he was still a child

zuko's lack of regard for political decorum probably helped. there's no "that's just the way it is" with him, if a system sucks he will do everything in his power to fix it. rules are made up and he was set to inherit the power to change them and make them more just from the day he was born. the gaang's discussions of the war got so intense after zuko joined because he knew exactly what they were up against and wasn't about to let them forget it

give it a few years and if ozai didn't challenge zuko, zuko would have ended up overthrowing ozai. god help him if zuko managed to get azula on his side. refusing to fight at the first agni kai probably saved his life, since even the fire lord couldn't justify killing a child (his child, the firstborn heir to the throne, which has insane optics when you really think about it) who wasn't engaging in combat during an agni kai. it all comes down to zuko's loyalty - to his people and his father and his nation - but one of these is not like the other and doesn't deserve it. if he realised that too soon it would have killed him

zuko would have been such a problem if he was allowed to stay at home. travelling the world and seeing the perspectives of the other nations with his uncle gave him a more balanced viewpoint of the war, as well as the means to defend himself from things like his father and sister shooting lightning at him because he stood up to them about being abusive war criminals, but he was always headed there in the end

“I don’t need therapy because my comfort characters are my therapy” and it turns out the comfort characters in question are the ones who need therapy the most