Milo Ventimiglia as Jess Mariano in Gilmore Girls | 6.08 "Let Me Hear Your Balalaikas Ringing Out" (11/?)

Going to try and do a sketch every day so I can get better at life drawing for my ultimate goal of being able to draw Dramione better 🩷

I’m an illustrator for my job- but work in children’s media. So it’s all noodle arms and squishy friends, I’d love to be able to draw more realism.

I can see in this drawing where I started with the hands, it’s all very tight- but I loosened up a bit and it came together okay. Can’t wait to keep practicing ✍️ 🤓 ✏️

Aang, you must master the Avatar State.

It's disturbing how much rage bait ONE line said by a young teenage girl in an EW cover story with so much other content can generate. Dozens and dozens and dozens of click bait articles, rage video analyses, and SO many angry meta posts with people practically ready to tear Katara's actress apart with their bare hands. All for having the audacity to say that she found some of Sokka's more brazenly sexist lines "iffy" in the OG cartoon. She implied it wouldn't translate as well in a live action and that they had toned it down, and you'd think she announced the Avatar is going to be a warmonger the way the internet's turned on her.

This week's fandom discourse has been about as low key and rational as S1 Zuko being offered some calming Jasmine tea...

So I had to stop on episode 6. Gonna continue watching tonight. I just have one thing to say so far. People think a good adaptation is the one that follows the story of the original. It’s not. It’s the characters. The characters are the ones that made the original so good. And none of them are as fleshed out here. You cannot seriously tell me the katara you see in the original is the one you see in the live action.

The writers decided to take the struggle and the growth of the characters away. I’m on episode 6. So far, Aang had everything come so easy to him, he didn’t struggle at all. Kyoshi fought for him at Kyoshi island. He enters the spirit world so easily, he finds Roku so freaking fast, he immediately knows Hei Bai is the spirit of the forest, out of nowhere. He learns absolutely nothing through those 6 episode. I could talk for hours about how that scene with Gyatso was a cop out. Why should their main character suffer right? He shouldn’t. So they just make up a scene where Aang meets Gyatso and he just outright tells him there’s nothing he could have done so he shouldn’t feel guilty.

The OG never had that scene. Because the OG knew the audience was smart enough to realize it themselves. There was nothing Aang could have done if he hadn’t run away, he would have died. But Aang needs to realize this himself, he needs to confront his feelings, learn from his mistakes, forgive himself and move on. But these days, writers don’t want their characters going through a journey, nope, the characters are just perfect, from the beginning to end.

Same said for Zuko. The writers apparently decided to make him softer, have higher morals, not as angry or determined, because that would make Zuko complex and interesting. He was good at heart in the OG show too, but he was spoiled and angry and violent. He’s none of that here, he’s gentle and respectful to everyone and just wants to capture the avatar, but not too much though. Zuko doesn’t even give everything he has to capture Aang, he doesn’t hire pirates, he doesn’t hire June himself (Iroh has to convince him to do it), he doesn’t follow Aang into the fire nation, you don’t feel his desperation, his determination, just how much he wants to go home. How could his journey feel interesting when we don’t see the dramatic shift in his character? The most interesting character in the show is not as ineteresting when he doesn’t go from a spoiled angry hurt teenager to an honorable smart and compassionate young man.

Yes, the story is fine, the visuals are nice, but it’s all very surface level. Everything is just flat.

This is an overall problem with TV formats lately. Cramming too many in too little, particularly when it comes to Netflix. They want everything that makes a memorable cult classic but they want to take shortcuts to get there. It doesn’t help that Netflix is cancelling shows left and right without giving them the opportunity to breathe first. And this sadly bled into the show. It’s all rush rush rush, without the build-up.

The show isn’t terrible, not at all. However, it needs to pace itself. Let the characters breathe. Filler episodes were there for a reason and that was to give the characters an opportunity to grow and build bonds together.

Hopefully next season they can take on some of the critique and make it better, preferably with double the episodes. Eight is not going to cut it.

zuko being pissy because aang stole his diary is the most on-brand thing in episode 2 so far omg

[src]

No one reblogs on tumblr anymore.

No one leaves comments on Ao3 anymore.

Seriously people the lack of fandom interaction these days makes me genuinely depressed, it never used to be like this, makes me wonder what's the point of coming online to do anything anymore.

Reblog a post so other people can see it.

Leave a comment so the author doesn't feel like giving up.

Fandom cannot live on Likes or Kudos alone.

first kiss

What it’s like being a writer

“Don’t be bitter. It provokes wrinkles.”