John Howe’s cover for The Hobbit

A:TLA Book 4 rumor timeline.

1/3/16, colonel-mustang:  [[Head Writer Aaron Ehasz confirmed that there was originally a fourth season planned and that Zuko/Katara was never explored because it “would have made the six year olds cry”. Also because the development time was cut short. The relationship dynamics would have gotten more time, had season 4 existed. But when Shyamalan bought the rights, it was for a trilogy and season 4 was cancelled - so they said it was always planned to be three seasons. One of my friends/rp partners took an A:TLA & Philosophy class at her school, and he gave a talk and addressed this.]]

9/13/17, devongiehl:  Aaron (head writer of Avatar: the Last Airbender) droppin’ some knowledge on a reddit thread right now, neat stuff (link: https://www.reddit.com/user/ehasz/) reddit.com/user/ehasz/

The reddit AMA: 

I was head writer of ATLA. Azula and Zuko’s relationship was not always well understood, even by the team internally. Azula loved Zuko, more than anyone save her father. She also felt competitive with him for their parents’ attention of course, but since she had alienated herself from her mother, she focused her energy on pleasing dad… which of course meant acting in more and more intense and possibly evil ways. By the end of the series, of course, her loss of her friends shatters the part of her identity that she could somehow control affection and love through intimidation. As a result she spirals… I did however intend to leave a kernel of humanity, and had we made a season 4 Azula would have completely bottomed and we would have explored the possibility of a path to redemption. True story! -Aaron

½/17, kataraandzuko:  It’s pretty obvious what couple he is talking about with this line. Ehasz always wanted to make Zuko/Katara canon or at least develop it much more than what was shown in the actual series, but Bryke would fight with him about it. This was why the chance of Katara ending up with either Zuko or Aang was 50-50 even mid-way through the third season. Yes, this means the “Zuko was originally going to be the love interest for Katara” and “The writers and creators toyed with the idea of Zuko and Katara falling in love” Avatar Extras are completely true. The cancellation of the fourth season and Shyamalan’s complaints about how indecisive Bryke were about who Katara was going to end up with led the Nick execs to step in and push for Katara/Aang because that was what they concluded as being most suitable for young children. The resulting draft for the finale ended up with Katara/Aang and lot of people in the writing room were surprised since they believed Zuko/Katara was the better choice. Bryke wanted Katara and Aang to passionately kiss to symbolize a marriage and make them look “definite”. This is in contrast with Ehasz who just wanted a sweet scene near the end where Zuko and Katara talked about how much the world had changed to foreshadow a future between them. …  Heck, Ehasz has told numerous people the same thing and even hosted a lecture at UCB about the Avatar stuff he didn’t get a chance to write about.

1/17/18, Dragon Prince AMA with Aaron Ehasz: Regarding ATLA and season 4 speculation, I would first caution anyone that unfortunately there are some “fake interviews” with me out there that spread some false info – so it’s hard to say if those specific topics are true or not.The truth is that the creators’ (Mike and Bryan) original plan was always to do only three seasons. While we were writing the show, Nickelodeon did ask me to give thought to what a fourth season would be, and it was also something I discussed briefly with Mike. However in the end Mike and Bryan decided to end the story where we ended it, and based on the love people have for the series I would be hard-pressed to say it was a mistake!

4/1/19, Aaron Ehasz’s twitter:  

 I always intended for #Azula to have a redemption arc in the story of #AvatartheLastAirbender. 

 Yes I always believed there would be a 4th season.

Truthfully, there was a moment in time when we all thought we would do a 4th season of #AvatartheLastAirbender. Then along came M. Night…

Though to be clear, M Night wanted us to do a 4th season, but Mike and Bryan wanted to focus on the movie.

And there you have it. 

Take all this info with a MASSIVE grain of salt. As much as I like Ehasz’s work, he’s been alleged of doing some scummy things in the past, and I wouldn’t put it past him to be making half of this stuff up. I also imagine a lot of these might have just been his or other writer’s ideas that Bryke never considered and never intended on doing.

Just be skeptical and don’t jump on any bandwagons as tempting as it may be.

You’re right that we shouldn’t just believe Ehasz at face value. At the time I wrote this, there were no widely known allegations of his being a sexist and gaslighting boss (that would come seven months later), and for those who want to know more, I reblogged the accusations here. 

I also agree that Bryke likely never considered doing a lot of these ideas, but this does not contradict Ehasz’s assertion that it was the studio who asked him to give thought to a fourth season, he discussed it with Bryke, and then the movie came along and they decided against it, having themselves always wanted three seasons.

However, with respect to whether Bryke wanted to focus on the Shyamalan movie, the ones caught making stuff up have not been Ehasz, but Bryke. Before the negative audience reception which caused them to lambaste it, Bryke admitted in interviews to working closely with Shyamalan and that he was respectful of them and the project.

Bryke before the movie’s release: 

TZN: You said you have two weeks to finish off season 3. Do you know what's next for you guys?

Bryan: The one thing we weren't joking about is that we really are helping on the movie quite a bit. Night has been very collaborative from the get-go, from the first time we ever met him. Very respectful of the project and of us. So we're helping out a lot on that. Also, we're just trying ... we do have a new idea, and we're just seeing if it's going to happen or not.

Bryke after the movie’s release: 

We had nothing to do with the movie. 

We were dragged thr ... it’s a long, horrible story.

Ehasz has no skin in the game here because he was not involved in the movie. However, Bryke have a motive to protect their reputations by distancing themselves from a project that it seems they did originally invest in and support. Grains of salt all around!

the real problem is people still use apple products

somebody here is posting from the mirror dimension

I won’t chastise people for their taste in phones regardless, but something you might not know is that Apple products are generally more accessible than their counterparts, and have been known to be so for years.

Embossed braille should be standard on computer keyboards. 

It would raise braille literacy more than anything else I could imagine - among both the blind and the sighted. Currently braille is actually vanishing due to an increasing reliance on audiobooks and screen readers. 

I think that braille has a lot of potential use among non-blind groups. As an alternative to traditional writing for dyslexics. As a way to help photosensitive people type with their eyes closed. Or simply as a means to help sighted people find things without needing the lights on all the time!

This is such a great idea. Most of us have all the locations of letters on a keyboard memorized without effort, imagine if we also had the little dots on the keyboards memorized? Boom. Effortless braille skills.

Same with sign language. Imagine if signing was just something we just did whenever we talked, because we all grew up learning to do that? We’d have an automatically more inclusive society and we’d all get the extra power of being able to communicate with each other next to loud machinery, across crowded spaces, through windows, etc.

Like, this isn’t some fiction, there have been societies where sign language was a standard part of language.

This is not how Braille works. Yes, individual letters have one-to-one corresponding Braille letters, but the way to read Braille quickly and efficiently is through the use of contractions. Contractions take the place of longer words or parts of words. For instance, the word drink isn’t d-r-i-n-k, in contracted Braille it’s d-r-in-k, where one contraction takes the place of “in.”

Braille is written with six dots, meaning that some contractions are dot-number-letter contractions. As in, dot-five-F is “father.” Some words are just dot makeups: one-six is “child.” Unless keyboards will now come standard with the six keys a Braille user needs, there isn’t a way to write those words.

Learning how to read Braille is awesome, and taking the initiative to emboss Braille on your own for things like menus and signs can be a rewarding way to show your support for Braille readers; it’s even fun to have as a great pen-pal “secret code.” But please stop assuming it’s one-to-one correspondence and that we can just “put it on a keyboard” without further modifications, because that erases a lot of the complexity and the language-building Braille contains, not to mention all of the work Braille readers put in to learn it.

Exactly.

I just started on the comics. I agree with everything OP stated here. As someone from the country the Earth Kingdom took inspiration from, this opening chapter of the comics made me extremely unformtable. I think I shall stop here and only read snippets here or there. Can’t believe I was so excited about them an hour ago. Should’ve heeded the advice when people told me if I liked the show I should stay away from the comics.

Exhibit A:

Zoku, my boy, you did NOT just fucking say that.

Who’s responsible for writing this whole “but colonization brought progress!” crap?

It gets worse. 

today’s the day!

there’s this trend in the atla fandom of ppl complaining about how the fandom mischaracterizes zuko and then…….mischaracterizing zuko…..in the same breath…….and i JUST

-insert that one gif of hades here-

look. i’m sorry. i know you love your weird headcanon that zuko is just an absolute dick, an asshole for no reason and that this should somehow remain a cornerstone of his personality no matter where in his life he’s being depicted, but that’s????? not remotely accurate to his character in the show lmao

he’s not ‘a dick’, he’s a traumatized teenage boy with emotional regulation issues and unhealthy coping mechanisms. these are not cornerstones of his foundation as a person, they are the result of–you guessed it!–the trauma he suffered as a thirteen-year-old boy. and while i’m not gonna pretend that he will ever be 100% perfectly well-adjusted (he’s probably always gonna have issues with his temper, ingrained trauma responses that will become far less commonplace but still crop up, particularly if anything happens to trigger a regression), but to pretend that people who focus more on ‘awkward turtleduck Zuko’ post canon are treating him like some ‘uwu soft boi who never did anything wrong’ is weirdly reductive.

and it’s so strange to me, because we see who zuko is before the trauma that quite literally changed the entire direction of his life. he was a kind, compassionate boy, who felt badly when he realized he’d hurt that baby turtleduck and that was why the mama had attacked him, and who stood up and spoke out in a war meeting because the general was planning to just throw away the lives of an entire squad and he couldn’t understand why anyone would treat their own people that way!

he wasn’t an asshole or a dick, and his rude and abrasive responses to stimuli came as a direct result of his trauma and the following three years of desperately searching for something he, on some level, had to eventually recognize he would never be able to find.

(iroh knew from the start that ozai had sent zuko on a meaningless mission that he would never actually be able to complete. i don’t think zuko ever fully realized this, but i do think he was beginning to subconsciously, and it’s why he was getting increasingly agitated and frustrated prior to discovering that the avatar was still alive. then, everything kicked into overdrive and he was desperate to actually capture the avatar and prove himself, so he never had to fully grapple with the realization that his father wanted him to fail.)

zuko with the gaang in the back half of book 3 is already much better at managing his emotions than at any point in the series prior (except possibly that one shining moment in ba sing se, moments before Disaster), and with his friends and uncle around him as a support network after the war, he would only continue to grow and become healthier and happier. (this is part of why i reject the comics out of hand, incidentally. bc i don’t for a moment believe that everyone would literally abandon him to the point where he had no one to turn to for help but his abuser.)

allowing zuko to be happy and healthy isn’t ignoring who he is at his core, it’s giving him the time he needed to heal and expanding on that. zuko was never just ‘a dick’, he was a traumatized teenage boy who needed to learn healthy coping mechanisms and emotional responses to things, but that was never a permanent state of being for him. zuko, pre-banishment, is a much more likely template for how a happy and healthy zuko would act, imo, and i don’t understand why so many ppl insist otherwise.

I was reading this post again and I want to comment on this part in particular because this just struck me:

Because yeah, his three years of searching for Aang and acting like a brat were a response to the trauma of being burned and banished, but also, something I think is important to acknowledge is that Zuko was already traumatized way before that. Maybe Ozai wasn’t physically abusive at any other time besides that one moment and maybe Zuko has fond memories of his early childhood, but it wasn’t just that one huge trauma or the other huge trauma of losing his mother, there was no point when Zuko was a child that he wasn’t living under the threat of Ozai. And he was still kind. So many people brush this off by attributing it to his mother, but that’s still a part of his character, just as Ozai’s influence was also a part of his character. Zuko shows signs of trauma even before the two big triggering events in his life that we see in the flashbacks. We see that he has emotional regulation issues as early as the scene with Azula, Mai, and Ty Lee in “Zuko Alone,” and then again when he can’t shut up in the war meeting. And don’t even get me started on “This is how Azula feeds the turtle ducks!” But he’s still a kid who leans towards kindness and empathy. Azula leaned hard in the other direction, because she learned early that differentiating herself from Zuko was how she could avoid being a victim herself.

Recovery would be hard because prior to the series there was NO point where Zuko wasn’t living in a traumatized state, but even then he still managed to be kind and compassionate and good so the idea that he could never be those things post-series when he’s no longer living in constant fear is just…nah.

I did a post (I think) last week about Zuko’s character post-DoBS since I wasn’t the biggest fan of how fans sometimes characterize him. Zuko haters say he’s a dick and Zuko fans think he’s perfect and both charactizations bother me.

Zuko was a kind, empathetic kid once upon a time. As much as his mother looked out for him, he was still bullied by his sister and emotionally abused by his father.

Fast forward to after The Day of Black Sun and I watch and rewatch the episodes and I saw that

He’s not a dick, and he’s not some saint. He’s a guy trying his best, same as anyone else.

Well, yeah. But saying fans of the character think he’s perfect is kinda stupid, especially since what makes Zuko such an appealing character is that he started out from a very unlikeable place and had to change. Just because people don’t constantly dwell on his flaws doesn’t mean they think he’s a saint.

That’s not what I meant. I’m a fan of the character. But over the 10+ plus year of being in the AtLA fandom sometimes people glorify their favorite character.

But thank you for calling me stupid. I really appreciate that.

You literally said Zuko fans think he’s perfect, though. So if that’s not what you meant, what did you mean? I didn’t say you were stupid. I said that the claim that Zuko fans think he’s perfect is stupid, because it is. Why did you come onto a Zuko fan’s post and say Zuko fans think he’s perfect? What did you expect me to say to you? 

Your response to this post was really condescending and you seem to think that just because people like a character it means they don’t understand that he has flaws, which is especially weird for this particular character because his whole story was about learning from his mistakes. Nobody asked you to come on this post to talk about how we shouldn’t “glorify” the character.

Honestly, @sokkastyles, I think you’re purposely missing the point, and being rude while you’re at it. @/allnewalldifferentwildspider was simply pointing out the black and white viewpoints people in fandom spaces can have towards certain characters. I, personally, see it a lot, specifically concerning Zuko - he’s either an abrasive asshole or a soft uwu turtleduck lover boi. I think OP raised many valid points about Zuko’s character and I think at the heart of their argument, they say the same thing, too.

Zuko can be a dick, sure, especially in the first season. A lot of it is due to his childhood, the trauma and pain of which has been talked about ad nauseum in the fandom. And I’m sure he has moments post-war where he still is because recovery and healing aren’t linear.

But he’s also still that kind, empathetic child at heart, as well. He has moments in the show where we see it. That awkward kid who loves to feed turtleducks will never be the same, but he’s still there.

@/allnewalldifferentwildspider’s response wasn’t condescending in any way - they were adding their own two cents to a public post, an opinion which I find largely agrees with OP’s post, btw. You chose to become extremely defensive, call their opinion stupid (which is remarkably close to calling the person stupid, by the by), and then proceeded to get even more defensive when they rightly, and politely still, called you out for it and attempted to express their intent in a new way to clear up any misunderstanding.

No fictional character is worth being rude, reductive, and somewhat of a bully to a real, live person. I’m sure you’re going to hate this as well, and I’m sure I’m going to get a heated response calling me dumb while you try to claim you’re not calling me dumb either on this post or in my inbox. Go for it, I can take it. Because after being online in fandom spaces for over a decade, I can handle people disagreeing with me. I hope you reach a point in your life where you can, as well.

(Oh, and while we’re at it, nobody asked you to come onto this post and add your opinion either, but you still did it, and somehow you think you have more of a right to it than anyone else? Nah.)

Oh for the love of….

First of all, it’s not bullying to respond to someone’s response to their own post. Stop that. Don’t do that thing where you make every mildly abrasive interaction out to be some sort of abusive rant when that’s 100% not what happened.

@sokkastyles was responding to a very black and white and frankly ridiculous position posited by @allnewalldifferentwildspider–that ‘Zuko fans think he’s perfect’. This is objectively untrue, and it is in fact specifically what I was arguing against in my original post. I’m not entirely sure what purpose that response served except to argue a point I didn’t actually make? Agree with me without actually agreeing with me? Calling the statement ‘zuko fans think he’s perfect’ stupid is not calling the person who said it stupid–you can say a stupid thing without being a stupid person, fyi–and how on Earth is it ‘missing the point’ to point to an objectively untrue statement made by the person to whom she was responding?

It is, in fact, condescending to come onto a post and argue a point nobody was making and then be reductive as hell in the conclusion. Which, again, was the reason I made my post in the first place. The entire point was that Zuko isn’t perfect, that Zuko’s fans acknowledge that (far better than Aang or Azula fans do, incidentally, which I pointed out in another reply on this post), and that people act like Zuko fans preferring to focus on his healing post-series means we think he’s perfect and never did anything wrong when that is an objectively false statement.

Are there people who glorify their favorite characters, occasionally including Zuko? Yes. Is this a phenomenon unique to Zuko? Absolutely not. And Zuko fans are much, much better at admitting Zuko has flaws, discussing and accepting them, and talking about places the writing was weak or didn’t quite follow through in specific areas, than Aang fans are. And yet it’s Zuko fans enjoying the awkward turtleduck tag and headcanons who get accused so very often of ‘ignoring’ his flaws, even though that isn’t necessarily true (and, in fact, runs contrary to why a lot of us love him in the first place).

She wasn’t being rude, she was being fed up, and possibly interpreting the post in somewhat less than good faith, but I can’t really blame her since this is the sort of thing that happens so often in this fandom–and, again, it’s why I made this post in the first place. Three months ago. Good to see some things never change.

So let me start by apologizing that saying “Zuko fans think he’s perfect” wasn’t me articulating the idea the best I could. What I meant to say was that since I joined the fandom back in 2005 some fans sometimes ignore the flaws of their favorite characters because they like them so much. Zuko fans sometimes do this too. I understand the way I wrote it made it look like I was saying this about all Zuko fans when I meant to say some of them do this. Like any other group of fans. Hell, I do this.

BUT, the complexity and depth of Zuko’s character is one of the biggest draws of the characters. Simply saying that “Zuko’s a dick” or “Zuko’s a good guy” is oversimplifying the character and doing him a disservice. Zuko is the way he is as a result of all of his experiences and I understand part of the trauma because I also had an abuse father. That’s one of the reasons I related to him so much. That fact that I could watch his journey helped me through my own depression.

So imagine how I feel when something I say through text of gets me the ire of people who tell me “us Zuko fans,” “we Zuko fans” as if I was never a Zuko fan.

Like I wasn’t there on a hot afternoon in 2005 and pointed at my TV when Zuko spared Zhao and said “this guy’s a hero. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s a hero.” Or like I didn’t leap for join during The Day of Black Sun when Zuko confronted Ozai and told him that he was going to join the Avatar. Or when kataangers kept going to my blog and told me they hoped that I would get gangbanged and hoped my throat would get slit.

When did the gatekeepers throw me out of the clubhouse and why didn’t they do it back when I joined in 2005?

I’m sorry I didn’t articulate my idea correctly and I do want fans to see the character for what he is because it is a great character. One of my top five favorites ever.

But don’t throw your claws up at me. I know I’m a Zuko fan. I’ve been waving that flag a long time. Still am.

In your first response to this post, you said ‘Zuko haters say he’s a dick and Zuko fans think he’s perfect’, and you followed this up with ‘both charactizations bother me.’

The way this is phrased (and I acknowledge that you’ve said you phrased it poorly, but all we have to work with are the words you actually wrote, since none of us are mind-readers), you are the one who removed yourself from both categories. Your post reads like you do not consider yourself either since, according to you, ‘Zuko fans think he’s perfect’ and that doesn’t describe you. You did not proceed to clarify that you actually are a Zuko fan until a follow-up post, but that doesn’t change the fact that the first impression someone reading your words is left with is that you don’t consider yourself part of that group.

That said, I was not gatekeeping anyone. I’m not a gatekeeper, I’ve never tried to be, and, in fact, I never once said or insinuated that you aren’t a Zuko fan. I said ‘… Zuko isn’t perfect, [and] Zuko’s fans acknowledge that’–a category which clearly does include you, since by your own admission, you are a fan of Zuko and you don’t think he’s perfect (which, incidentally, means that you’re still proving my point). I don’t care how long you’ve been in the fandom or been a Zuko fan. I never said or implied anything about your own engagement with fandom–I was very specifically speaking in broad strokes, because I was talking about general trends in this fandom which I have been witnessing for years and which ultimately spurred me on to make the original post in this thread.

I’m not ‘throwing my claws up’. I’m not attacking you, or kicking you out of the clubhouse, or whatever other dramatic metaphor you’ve come up with. I’m simply pointing out that the claim that Zuko fans don’t admit he has flaws is objectively false. Furthermore, I pointed out that on the whole, Zuko fans are better at admitting and accepting criticism of their favorite character than many others in the fandom are, particularly Aang stans. (Again, in another post on this thread, I pointed out that trying to criticize Aang in this fandom at all, even the most mild ‘he sometimes made bad choices’ take, is just asking for people to pile into your inbox calling you a genocide apologist or accusing you of hating children or survivors or whatever else.)

And as sokkastyles mentioned in a few reblogs as well, fans don’t have to justify their love of a character with constant disclaimers that ‘I know he didn’t always make the best choices really’. We are, in fact, allowed to say ‘I love this character’ without adding ‘BUT I KNOW HE’S NOT PERFECT, GOSH’. We are allowed to talk about Zuko being an awkward turtleduck in social interactions without bringing up his behavior from before his redemption arc. We are allowed to talk about him becoming happier and healthier and being a decent human being and a genuinely good person without talking about how hard it was for him to reach that point in every single post. Sometimes, we just want to focus on the good parts, on the growth and the healing and the change, and that’s ok too. (And before I get accused of gatekeeping again, if you consider yourself a Zuko fan, then I am including you in that ‘we’.)

Focusing on Zuko’s good traits and his growth post-series does not mean we are ignoring the bad he did during the series before his redemption arc. Sometimes it just means that we want to focus on the good and happy bits. (Most of us are happy enough to delve into angst or the messiness of his mid-redemption story, too, which makes those claims all the more ridiculous. I’ve never met a Zuko fan who didn’t sometimes talk about his storyline in the show and how he did bad things sometimes.)

Yes? That is what I said, it’s a simple ‘if/then’ statement, where exactly did I lose you?

If you’re about to go on a tirade about how you’re a Zuko fan and have been for sixteen years, please, spare me. I read it the first time. My point with that sentence was to say that you are included in the we, because I’m not interested in gatekeeping anyone. I’m not sure if you understand how ‘if/then’ statements function, but it was not intended to call your Zuko Fanning into question, it was to pose a self-evident corollary that I didn’t think needed clarification, since I know you do consider yourself a Zuko fan and are therefore included in my general statements.

“Zuko fans think Zuko is perfect” is such a common mischaracterization of Zuko fans that I have an entire wall of shame post dedicated to it. Time to add a new entry!

I would actually like to invite anyone who thinks Zuko fans unfairly glorify Zuko to find me an example of this behavior. Surely, if this is such a frequent occurrence, it should be easy. 

(No one who brought up this point has ever, once, cited a specific instance of it.)

"Stop scrolling and please help me spread the word, because if I've landed on your page you're most likely either a black woman or someone who cares about black women and the simple phrase I'm about to share could help save a black woman's life.

Doctors are to black women what police officers are to black men. That may seem controversial but I believe it to be true and I speak from personal experience.

If you've seen this TikTok you know that a 2016 study showed that 50% of medical students and residents thought that black people couldn't feel pain the same as white people.

And we learned from this video that because of a 1999 study, to this day, there's a black correction factor for the creatinin levels in black people's kidneys, meaning we're less likely to recieve a kidney transplant if needed.

So if you go to a doctor, feel you aren't getting proper treatment or they refuse the treatment you've requested, say to them the following:

I will need you to document on record that you are refusing the treatment (or medicine) I've requested, and the reason you are doing so."

This works. I have used it in other situations. If medical staff have to document and take responsibility and be on the hook legally for doing shady shit they behave much differently.

If you weren’t already going to spread this advice because black women are at risk, then spread it because it’s applicable to everyone else as well, including you reading this.

But particularly women, and especially black women.

For today.

For tomorrow.