#laptop was at 31% so I wasn't taking any chances

[oneatlatime]

The Chase part 2

Apologies for the technical problems. Battery power must be conserved for necessities, which unfortunately does not include Avatar. But the power's back on now, so!

Picking up from Toph treating a senior citizen like a snooker ball...

I do like how Mai's not shy about participating in Ty Lee's nonsense.

The way Zuko Jr. says "I'll follow this trail" is very menacing.

We're continuing last week's cowboy theme.

This village has the same menacing single windchime as the village in the Spirit World Part One did.

This was may more satisfying than I was expecting! It was completely unfair how easily the Fire Nation ladies defeated Sokka & Katara so getting Appa'd was a nice payoff.

No disability unmocked this episode. Also nice stance from the lizard.

This whole scene with Toph and Iroh has the most beautiful backgrounds. I sense phone wallpapers in my future.

Forget about the visuals, every line of this exchange was golden. Two towering pillars of wisdom and emotional maturity meet for tea and not a soul goes untouched. Also a nice moment of calm in an otherwise frantic episode.

Can this PLEASE be the rock bottom for Zuko. I can only take so much more second hand embarrassment.

Fully-provisioned princess of the fire nation v. sleep-deprived half trained avatar v. starving outlaw who seems to have forgotten to bring his swords, the only weapon he's good at. Place your bets, folks!

Zuko in a nutshell.

Ok so we're getting the whole gang back together.

The whole whole gang.

The whole whole whole gang.

How the hell did they mess up six on one?!?!

A princess can't surrender with honour when she doesn't have any!

That was kind of Katara to offer to help. I didn't expect that.

Final Thoughts

This episode doesn't let up once. Even the break with Toph and Iroh having tea doesn't do much to dispell the rising tension from the chase. The musical stinger that plays over the title card was a surprise bit of foreshadowing in that way.

That tank thing was neat. Shame about what it contained, but that's a really cool design.

Poor Appa was once again the MVP this episode. It was uncomfortable watching him get so exhausted.

It seems like the thin veneer of level-headedness cultivated by Katara over the last season or so is indeed quite thin. It was interesting to see how the different characters reacted to being tired. Sokka was alternatively amped up and completely chilled out, Aang got quiet (until he felt Appa was being insulted), Katara reverted to her early season one characterisation. It's hard to say with Toph, because we've only known her one episode (it feels like more) but I think she just got more Toph-like.

Please let this be the end in Zuko's experiment with independence. He's not good at it. He needs uncle. Points for trying, but he failed, so please bring uncle back.

Sokka low key wins this episode. He's the one with sense, the only one who stays clear-headed when it counts, and it turns out that clear head of his can defeat the pokey thing Ty Lee does.

I don't know how much time is supposed to have passed between picking up Toph and the start of this episode, but I can't help but feel that Toph really got the short end of the stick here. She did give up everything, even if much of what she gave up was not that great for her personally. And in return she got to travel in a way that completely blinds her and get yelled at. Meeting Iroh was a nice consolation prize.

Now I kind of want a story where Toph doesn't come back to the Gaang and instead goes around unleashing bending hell on the earth kingdom.

Was there no b plot or c plot this episode? Everything kind of collided in the final couple of scenes, which I did not see coming.

Frantic is the word I keep coming back to for this episode. Everything fit together nicely. I'll definitely rewatch it when I have the chance to do so in one sitting, without unforseen technical problems.

#the risk I took was calculated #but man am I bad at math #atla #avatar: the last airbender #avatar the last airbender #the chase #laptop was at 31% so I wasn't taking any chances #Note to self: stop putting of looking at a backup power supply #stupid utilities company is currently doing “intermittent network repairs” which apparently translates to killing the grid #every saturday and wednesday #but never the same time on those days #I'm going to clean up part 1 now

[ash-soka]

31, 38, 42 for the oc ask meme?

31. Pick one OC of yours and explain what their tumblr blog would be like (what they reblog, layout, anything really)

this question made my go and make a whole fake blog for my first ever dnd oc, Myrah (pronounced meer-uh). this is her:

(picrew by nudekay)

her blog would look like this:

she'd mostly blog about fashion, interact with her handful of friends, and advertise her youtube channel. she's an elf bard in canon, so she would put a lot of violin content on youtube, and maybe the occasional harp piece.

if you want to see the kind of posts she'd reblog/her aesthetic, you can check out her blog here!

warning though, it only looks good in desktop, and i will also probably never post to it again

38. Which one of your OCs would be the best dancer?

Oh, Orpheus by far! He's spent 10 years as a professional dancer in his canon setting, and he always still dances in any au I put him in. And that was always the plan for him, right back to his earliest design concept—

^I almost never post my art so most of you have never seen this but here's my first ever drawing of one of my favourite boys! excuse how lq it is, this is just a screenshot, the original is on my old laptop, it was that long ago. He's evolved somewhat from this original concept, but he's very much still a dancer!

Orpheus is my water genasi bard OC from @literalpotatx's dnd campaign. Ash very graciously let me make him a dancer instead of a more traditional type of bard.

Orpheus joined a dance troupe when he was around 17 or 18, and within the next year or two they were invited to perform for the royalty of his home kingdom. He spent the next 10 years, basically the entirety of his 20s, as a dancer for the royal court of Pythos, so he's pretty good. I do have some unfinished art of him when he was first invited to the palace with the other dancers:

which i also posted here!

I flip flop on what styles of dance he'd like in a modern setting, I think he'd like the control that ballet requires you to have, but i could easily see him liking other styles as well. I keep coming back to these two videos (one, two) as possible dance inspiration for him in his canon setting! i think he'd strive to master a few different styles over time. sorry this got so long— my dancer oc is one of my favourites!

42. Which one of your OCs would be the most interested in Greek gods?

okay i really love this question, i can answer it in a few different ways,

1) if taken completely literally then, it's him again, my beloved Orpheus:

(picrew by baydews, colours slightly edited by me)

so. funny coincidence. my Orpheus is not the Orpheus of greek myth, I just personally love the myth of orpheus and eurydice and thought it would make a good name for a bard, even though my bard is a dancer. I named him that, and had him ready to go as a character the next chance I got to play someone new— so when I got invited to play in a new campaign, I decided to use Orpheus, and later found out this campaign would be incorporating Greek gods.

really funny to me how that happened. and the funniest part is that it happened AGAIN, another player in the same campaign decided to recycle her oc from years ago, named atlas, the next chance she got, and had decided to play as them before finding out this was a Greek gods campaign [doofenshmirtz "two nickels but weird that it happened twice" meme]

so, if i take "which oc would be most interested in greek gods" completely literally for their canon settings, the answer is Orpheus because those are the gods in charge of the world he lives in. funnily, if you'd asked this a few weeks ago i don't know if i could have said as much dkhgbdfkhb. yes, the Greek gods are real in the world he lives in, but. Orph didn't really care about them in more than a vague sense until Thanatos did him a favour last session dkghbdk. Thanatos isn't even the first god he's met, he's met Hermes and been in the vicinity of Artemis, he just wasn't that impressed before now i guess kdhfgbdk. to be fair, idk if he fully realised hermes was a god, and he didn't properly meet artemis. He's also met some? demi-gods I guess? it's complicated to explain, but I think one of them kind of did also put the fear of the gods into him a little bit so. he does care more now because of all that's happened. and i think that counts as being "most interested" out of all my ocs in their canon settings.

2) if taken in a. kind of literal but kind of meta way? it's complicated hold on.

if I had a nickel for every time a friend told me about their idea for a modern greek gods au, and let me come up with a concept for how my personal favourite god would fit into that setting, i'd have two nickels. which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.

but anyway, my favourite of the Greek gods is Thanatos, the god of death. i just really like psychopomps, and although he's nearly always present in some way or another, he's rarely actually mentioned, which basically makes him free real estate for this kind of thing.

(was I smug that orph had a really positive interaction with my favourite god so i could let my favouritism bleed into him? yes, thank you for asking!)

and i always say the same thing for him in a modern setting as a human, he'd be the hard working employee of a funeral home that Hades owns. his twin Hypnos works there too, mostly on reception but he helps his brother out when he's not sleeping on the job instead. back in like, 2018, a friend asked what i'd do with him and this is what i came up with, and i've stuck with it. (also a good excuse to bring up any knowledge i've retained from watching askamortician over the years).

also the part of my brain that wants me to go "i liked it before it was cool" is forcing me to say: i've never played that hades game. this is just from my own interpretation

i've been thinking about it recently because a different friend asked a few weeks ago, which prompted me to actually do designs for Thanatos (left) and Hypnos (right) in this setting.

(picrew by cosmitasia)

so in a weird way i think this version of Thanatos who's basically an oc would count as "most interested in the greek gods" because basically every other character we worked into this setting that he'd be interacting with is another greek god, lmao.

3) but, if i take this the way i think the question actually intended, as in, in a modern setting, which of your OCs would be the most interested in Greek Mythology, then the answer changes again!

In that case the answer is probably my mc for the exile, Dimitra "Mimi" Vamirel, she really loves reading and I think she'd take a real interest in mythology in general in a modern setting! i'll add a picrew of her here too:

(picrew by djarn)

thank you so much for sending this!!!!! 💖💘💝💞 i appreciate the chance to talk about my brain blorbos

link to the oc questions, in case anyone else wants to send them!

i have 1, 2, 24, 33, and 44 sitting in my inbox though! i will get to them asap <3

#if this shows up in any tags i'm so SO sorry #long post #thank you so much for letting me talk about orpheus' dancing i love him so much #anonymous #ask #my ocs