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deactivatesamwhich · 1 year

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Spider/ GN!Reader

Chapter 2: High Camp

Rated PG. Spider has a dangerous secret that is weighing on his mind, and you try to find where you fit in amongst the scientists and eco-warriors. Tbh, Norm appears in this almost as much as spider. #slowburn, angst, hurt/comfort? hand holding. 🤮

It was only after boarding the resistance's aircraft(an SA-2 Samson 16 rotorwing general utility aircraft, which had been painted in Na'bi war paint) that you realized you had forgotten your shoes on the beach. That was littering right? Great impression you must be making on Eywah.

This Norm Spellman sure was a character. You'd expected from a name like that that he'd be a human, not the dorkiest looking Na'vi you'd ever seen. Well, technically he was. One of the few remaining Avatar drivers, Norm literally wore the dual identity like a badge of honour. Cargo shorts and vest, combined with Na'vi-style jewelry.

"You were on board the Sea Dragon, right? What was it that you did on there?"Norm asked. His big avatar body had been squished up into the co-pilot's seat with the addition of you and spider on board. It appeared the back seats had been taken out and the space filled most of the way up with supply crates.

"Not much, to be honest. I was in an apprenticeship to be a mechanic, but really I'm only on Pandora because my dad insisted I stay with him."

This admission got spider to look away from the window for the first time since the flight began. He gave a look of startled recognition, you could almost imagine his ears perking up if he'd been Na'vi.

Norm didn't seem to notice Spider's interest, and asked his follow up question. "Is mechanics something you would be interest in continuing to utilize for OUR side? High Camp has no shortage of stuff breaking down all the time."

"I'll do whatever you ask me to, honestly, even scrubbing the toilets. I'm so grateful you're even giving a stranger like me a chance." You effused.

"Spider's a great judge of character, isn't that right?" Max piped up from the pilots seat.

"Huh, yeah? If you say so." He didn't even turn his head away from the window.

"He seems out of it." You commented to no one in particular.

"The kid doesn't want to leave his friends. He's always been like that, thinks he's too cool to hang out with us nerds." Norm said. "You'll see them again buddy."

"Some of them at least." The scientist muttered, almost inaudible over the engines hum.

"We're almost there." Max said. "Feast your eyes on that scenery, Y/N."

The hallelujah mountains were truly astounding. Defying gravity, enormous, green topped and rugged. They were like something out of a fantasy movie. Two ikrans and their riders banked up close on either side and slightly below the aircraft. You waved.

"Scouts." Norm explained unprompted. "We're clear to land. We're wanted men, you know. Bridgehead's enemy numero uno." He sounded kinda excited about it.

(Author's note: Look at this cool diagram I found on the Avatar Wiki. Let it distract you from the abrupt scene transition.)

High Camp was located in a cave in one of the larger mountains in the Hallelujah range. One half of the massive cavern was the Omatikaya camp, the other half human structures. It was an experiment in cohabitation, born out of necessity.

"Who's hungry?" Norn asked while the lab airlock repressurized.

"Oh me!" You said. "I'm literally starving." It had been 2 days since you'd last ate, and you'd barely had anything to drink even. Sea salt crystalized on your blue jeans. Your party of four stepped inside the atmosphere of the lab. You eagerly took off your exopack.

The bio-lab at highcamp was crowded and felt lived in. Every surface was covered in science paraphernalia, strange plants, dirty cups, books and trinkets. The structure itself was exposed support beams and inflatable exoskeleton. A half inch thick layer of latex between the lab and the air outside. What was meant to be a temporary structure had been left up past its intended lifespan. And the smell was unlike anything you'd ever experienced. It wasn't a bad smell, just that you couldn't smell with an exopack on, so your senses were barraged with the scent of wilted vegetation, cleaning chemicals, and old electronics.

Spider made himself at home sitting backwards on a swivel chair and Norm came back into the main area holding three trays, passing them to the three humans. The meal was a step down from a tv dinner, but you'd had worse during your year on boats. Meat-like cubes, canned fruit, runny mashed potato. You ate like a ravenous beast.

"I hope you aren't big on privacy because you won't find much here. Our sleeping quarters are filled to double capacity, but we'll find a place to hang a hammock for you." Norm said.

"Jake told me to keep an eye on them, I think there's room near my bunk." Spider spoke up. He'd already finished his meal.

"Alright, that's settled then. I'm sure you two have had a long day, I won't ask anymore from you today, Y/N, but do start thinking about how you'd like to contribute." Norm got down on your level to look you on the eye like it was a serious matter. Then he slapped his thigh with a sigh "Welp, I guess it's time to unlink and stretch my human legs, c'mon Max, help me out." The two scientists walked to the far end of the lab, leaving you and Spider on your own.

"What do you do here?" You asked him.

"Get in the way mostly. I'm not smart like them, also I'm only 16. I'm kinda a special case. One of a kind." He said. "Hey y/n, wanna see the omatikaya camp? That's where the cool people are." Spider had the most genuine smile you'd seen since you met him, it was almost mischievous.

"Are you sure that's Ok?" You were wary, after how the reef people had treated you.

"Yeah, they're used to me hanging around. I'll vouch for you."

You two put your masks back on and you followed him to the Na'vi side of camp.

"Hey pest! We'd thought you'd died! It's been months." A young adult Na'vi shouted. In english even.

"Ha, you wish you could get rid of me that easily."

"I see you've brought a new sky demon with you. You know we can't let just anyone in here. I should go tell Mo'at." The young warrior crowded you personal space, grinning, but he held a knife to your throat. "Who is this, your little mate?"

"Mate?" Said spider. "Ew, no. That's Y/N. They're joining the science team I think. Jake Sully approves, and Norm brought us back. So back off." He pulled on the warrior's arm. The Na'vi stepped away scowling.

You were starting to realize just how much respect even just the names of those two held.

"I have my eyes on you two, and I'm still telling Mo'at."

"Do you really think I'm Ew?" You asked. "You shouldn't have brought me here. I'm going back to the lab."

"No, I don't know why I said that. You're not gross. C'mon, ignore that skawng." Spider said apologetically.

You looked back up at the cluster of Marui tents, campfire and the bustling crowd of clan members."

"Alright quickly. If you get me murdered, I'll haunt you for eternity.

Spider walked you through the maze of Marui and work stations.pointing things out. You were trying to pay attention to his explanations, but you were prone to lingering over the shoulders of craftsmen for too long. You knew what you wanted to do now, and it wasn't mechanics. There were Na'vi making spears and musical instruments, weaving cloth and making beads. You were good with your hands, blessed with patience, learning best by doing, so with the RDA, the obvious and only option had been mechanics. What if... You could be a crafter? Would anyone be willing to teach an outsider?

After an evening of tense introduction and a lot of gawking and snooping both on your end and the Na'vi towards you, you and Spider went back to the humans sleeping area, utterly exhausted.

A hammock had been hastily strung up near his bunk, near everyone's hammocks and bunks and bedrolls really. It was a crowded space with at least 40 people sleeping.

You were just starting to drift of to sleep, lulled by the gentle swing of the hammock and the dozens of snores and whispers around you, when to your right, you heard distressed wimpering and groaning. You looked over to see Spider roll over in his sleep, shaking slightly. Your heart went out to the boy. Quietly, you got out of your hammock and tiptoed the short space over to him. What kinda nightmare was he having?

"No, I don't know anything." He mumbled. "No, It hurts." He should his head. You put a hand on his cheek and stroked, moving up to pet his hair. "Shh, s'okay. We're safe now." The boy took a slow breath and his face relaxed a little. A hand came up to grab your wrist, and Spider opened his eyes. "What are you doing?"

You blushed, caught with your hand still deep in his mass of dreadlocks. "You were crying. What was your nightmare about?" You tried to pull you hand away, but he pulled it down to his chest, holding on like it was a lifeline. "I don't even know how to start. It's a long story. You wouldn't care to know."

"I do care though, and I want to know." You insisted.

He sighed. 'It's the middle of the night. People are sleeping. The summary is, You wouldn't believe the horrors the RDA put me through when I was first captured. Actual torture. And then Quaritch...did you know he's my Dad? Well kinda anyway. Fuck it. Can I tell you a secret outside? I did something really bad."

Another cliff hanger! Don't worry. You'll get your heart to heart next time.

#avatar 2 fanfiction #Spider x y/n #atwow fanfic #my writing

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stonesparrow · 3 years

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For the dr.stone x atla crossover I feel that even if Hyoga is or was a soldier in the fire army he wouldn’t have liked the idea of a nations worth of centuries of knowledge pasted down through generations being wiped of the face of the earth.

I just had a thought Hyoga could be a soldier in the fire army but he could also be a master instructor at his own dojo he inherited from his master kinda like master Piandao. He’s still a fire bender though.

Also I think I would be a cute and funny plot twist if he has a daughter who is still young but old enough to help fight and strong enough to thanks her dad training her. I think he’d be the same tough and cold character he is but he’s surprisingly tender, caring, gental, and kind to her in his own way that would just make the characters in the dr.stone universe jaws hit the floor lol.

Ah, you do have a point with Hyoga likely being disappointed that the knowledge of airbending was lost to genocide - all those ancient techniques would probably be really fascinating to him as a martial artist. Though I can also see him buying into the Fire Nation’s imperialist message of “we are the strongest nation, so we should rule over all the weaker nations.”

I like your idea that Hyoga is a fighting instructor, with his values he’d probably be something like Zuko in skillset - he puts a lot of effort into firebending, but also into spearfighting since he deeply respects the nonbender master who taught it to him. At the same time he has no time for people who either don’t take it seriously or are too weak to make a difference.

(More under the cut because this got long)

Him having a kid is an interesting plot twist and while it’s more twisty than I’d expect, I’m kind of intrigued by the potential it has. Though that also brings up the question of who the kid’s mom is, and when the kid was born (I estimate Hyoga’s age in DCST to be around 20-22). Homura maybe? Like...perhaps Hyoga and Homura were both fairly high class and had an arranged marriage, but while Homura fell in love with him as they grew up together Hyoga only respected her as a friend and fellow fighter.

And then if they had a daughter (maybe pressured by both their parents to produce an heir of some sort) it could make them both more complex characters. If the kid was really strong though I’d lean more towards an Ozai-Azula like dynamic with Hyoga impressing his values of “only the strong and skilled deserve to live,” onto her. Plus if we’re keeping relative canon ages then I’d estimate Homura to be 20, Hyoga to be 22, and their daughter to be 2 by the time Team Avatar shows up in the Fire Nation to do their thing.

However...I can see some potential with the kid turning out physically weak, and that throwing Hyoga’s values into wack.

Let’s say the toddler was born healthy and strong and an assessment by some Fire Sages said that she’d become an extremely powerful bender - this pleases Hyoga, since he can’t imagine having fathered a weak child with him and Homura’s combined firebending ability. And indeed, by the time the kid is two she shows signs of firebending power well beyond her age group, with Hyoga planning to train her into an extraordinarily strong warrior.

Except with such a strong fire at such a young age, the little girl suddenly falls terribly ill, having raging fevers and struggling to breathe. Hyoga’s ideals would tell him that such an ill child will die, and that’s that, the weak and ill perish while the strong survive. But he finds himself insisting that the kid will survive, because she’s strong, she has to survive. She’ll recover and become the strongest firebender this side of the Nation, not die a weakling.

Some time later, the Gaang shows up to Hyoga’s town to resupply. Pre-Zuko joining but maybe somewhere between meeting Piandao and encountering Combustion Man? Aang decides to visit the local firebending dojo (rip Sokka’s nerves) because hey, he wants to see some firebending techniques from actual benders, and he can tooooootally handle staying low key this time, honest! He encounters Hyoga and gets a fair bit intimidated by him, though Hyoga seems to approve of “Kuzon’s” highly adaptive martial arts style.

At some point, a messenger comes and Hyoga slips away. Being nosy, Aang follows them and catches enough of the conversation to determine that there’s a sick kid living in that fancy mansion, and relays his concerns to the Gaang. Katara immediately wants to investigate further - Sokka is again very stressed but understands that he can’t stop his sister once she’s made a decision (plus this is post Painted Lady and Katara is even more determined not to let children suffer if she can do anything about it). But when she tries the front entrance, the guards won’t let her in, even when she says she’s a healer. In fact, they deny that there’s a sick child at all, while Aang insists he didn’t hear wrong.

So Aang and Katara, ever the problem solvers, break into the mansion (airbending is super useful!) and find the kid’s bedroom. Katara assesses the patient - she determines that even with her waterbending, the kid will likely suffer from complications her whole life due to the damage she’s already sustained. Hyoga suddenly appears, asking them how they got into his house (he’s actually very curious, since they seemed to enter silently and without alerting anyone). When Katara excuses herself and says she’s a healer from the colonies (Aang’s explanation for how Katara has “special healing techniques unlike any other”) and just wanted to help, Hyoga says that he doesn’t need a healer, and that the girl will recover soon. Katara starts to argue and Hyoga starts insinuating that he could easily beat her in combat, when Homura shows up, pleading with Katara to save her daughter.

Hyoga and Homura start arguing, with Homura saying this may be their last chance and Hyoga saying that a true daughter of his would be able to fight off the sickness alone. Homura eventually asks if he’d rather have a dead daughter than a weak one, which makes him go quiet (Aang and Katara are standing there awkwardly watching all of this). Hyoga then calmly says that since they seem to be at a standstill, the reasonable course of action is an Agni Kai (Aang goes pale at this, while Katara doesn’t actually know what that is).

In the courtyard the Gaang watches anxiously as Hyoga and Homura begin their duel, which results in quite a few impressive displays of firebending. Homura however seems to be holding back slightly, more on the run than attacking. At one point Homura gets thrown on her back and nearly burnt, but Katara calls out to her, saying she has to win for the kid. She gets back up and starts attacking Hyoga with renewed resolve, and even Hyoga is surprised.

Hyoga realizes that as loyal as Homura is to him, she really is doing her best to win, even coming at him with direct shots of flame now. And since this is still Hyoga, he respects that deeply - she’s doing things “properly,” even though she doesn’t want to. He even respects that Katara was so dedicated to her role as a healer that she broke into his house just on the mere mention that there was a sick child there.

And in the very bottom of his heart, despite all the talk of strength and weakness and who deserves to live, he has a hard time realizing that he doesn’t want his daughter to die, even if it means she’ll be weak and reliant on others her whole life. This might be a little OOC for canon Hyoga, but hey, it’s an au and maybe if canon Hyoga did have something small and weak to protect, he’d be less of an ass to Senku and company.

So at a key moment in the battle, Hyoga pauses for a split second instead of dodging a blast from Homura and allows himself to be grazed on the chin, reminiscent of his revival scars in canon. It’s not a bad burn, and those watching closely realize that he let her win. Hyoga turns to leave, only saying that Katara will be compensated for her healing services and that they truly did things “properly.”

Katara heals the girl, saying that the fever is gone but her lungs are damaged and she’ll have breathing problems from now on. She’s paid a small sack of gold by a servant that she initially refuses, but takes in the end since it’d probably be good to have extra Fire Nation currency on hand. The Gaang leaves the mansion feeling...a little conflicted about the experience, honestly.

Meanwhile as Homura sits by the girl’s bedside Hyoga appears in the doorway, having treated his burn from the duel. An awkwardly long silence passes before Hyoga says he’s been thinking about the skills that "Kuzon” and “Sapphire” displayed, and that he’s considering buying a home in the colonies so he can learn about those types of skills (since Aang claimed they were from the colonies). He turns to leave, but not before offhandedly saying that the seaside air in the colonies he’s looked at might be good for their daughter’s lungs.

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mystery-salad · 3 years

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The Vuisce Plot

Just want to get down my basic thoughts on their overall plot, since they went way off the rails! Despite how much their story diverges from canon, major spoiler warnings under the cut still!

Vuisce started out as a simple Pact engineer who came in through the Durmand Priory during the normal story, an irrelevant person handled the basic story as Commander up through lws2. As such, plot went normally there. They simply followed orders, though they did continue to push their Priory research which focused on the eternal alchemy and how that magic flows through Tyria and its creatures.

Zhaitan’s death shook them in a way they hadn’t expected. The explosion was different, the shockwave that shouldn’t have come from a dragon dying unless...perhaps all that magic they consumed had a reason for it. After all the world kept spinning despite the dragons gorging on magic. And now a huge mass was suddenly back in the world.

They continued to research, and Scarlet’s ability to wake another dragon via a leyline magic path really confirmed how dangerous killing these giant beasts could be. They argued against the initial attack trying to talk anyone into an alternate path, but one priory engineer can do little against an entire three organizations aiming for the death of the dragons.

———————

But then the crash happened. And the Pact fell apart. And what else can you do than pick up the pieces and any survivors you can find, and take the chance to try and do things your way? Their team isn’t the canon one, after all they never directly worked with any of what would’ve ended up being the canonical team.

Vuisce zooms through HoT with a ragtag team to Mordremoth, Caithe handling most of the egg arc herself. Once there, Trahearne is not nearly as far gone as he is in the normal slower story progression. And he’s able to hear Vuisce out and try to help through his connection to Mordremoth.

Using some various *hand wavy* methods and a lot of experimental magic based on theoretical equations, the team manages to lure Mordremoth into a smaller body. One of her strongest Mordrem. And from there, they cut Mordremoth’s mind off from her own body. The forest goes dormant, the sylvari and mordrem are free from control, and Mordremoth can be handled alive without unleashing all her magic into the world.

Trahearne is saved, with Mordremoth cut off from his mind. Vuisce beelined so quickly to the dragon that everyone from the og dragon team (Eir, Zojja, etc...) didn’t die or suffer too horribly from prolonged time in the blighting pods. And once Mordremoth was trapped and incapacitated, the crew went to see Caithe and the egg since it called to Vuisce. Though the call was quieter, calmer without the sudden influx of magic from another dead dragon.

———————

Time passes, Mordremoth eventually calms down in her new body. She knows she can’t on her own reconnect to her old body and magic and...while she can’t control much here, she can think clearer without so much power buzzing through her mind. And perhaps life is better, with a team protecting you rather than a threat constantly facing your domain. She joins Vuisce’s group officially and aims to help keep the world stable. Perhaps if it’s stable enough she and her siblings may return to their bodies and slumber once more.

———————

Mordremoth senses the bloodstone and white mantle before the others can, leading the team to the disturbance to try and halt the explosion before it overflows. They can’t of course, bloodstone is innately parasitic and reasonless. And has so many bodies and so much magic to feed off of. The explosion still builds until it’s too late. But in the aftermath there is a worse threat. The pact can be left to handle the fallout here, they have better resources and Vuisce trusts they won’t kill the wrong things. But that Mursaat is not what he seems. The team must prepare to fight a god.

———————

Aurene is born in relative safety. The golden city is stronger for the magic still flowing through the dragon laying beneath, and Balthazar knows better than to pull his ruse in front of the elder dragons directly when he seeks to kill them. She’s smaller, more delicate as the only magic her egg has absorbed is that of Zhaitan and her own mother. She’s bonier and scrawnier, but tough and energetic as ever. And she learns fast. And grows faster under the tutelage of her elders.

———————

The team chases Balthazar through HoT but any ambush he may set is far outmatched. Vuisce never travels alone after all and how do you take down a team who’s faced and ready to challenge death already?

———————

Aurene grows more, having gained Balthazar’s magic. Joko follows soon after. There are some enemies you simply can not reason with after all, some are not drunk on the consumption of the magic of Tyria, but the power they think it could bring.

———————

Kralkatorrik is a more challenging target, flying high rather than bursting from the ground. And the Pact is closing in much to Vuisce’s chagrin, with a plan they hope their little team can move faster than. But they can’t, and Aurene is saved by luck of consuming Joko. Vuisce accepts how dangerous the Pact is to their plans on keeping the world stable, they won’t let it cut this close again. But in the mists with Aurene they finally catch up to Kralkatorrik, forcing their way into his mind with the help of his sister already on their side.

They trap another and lay low again, waiting for Kralkatorrik to calm down and listen in his new form.

———————

And then we hit icebrood saga which I’m still working out deets on

As for the standard team, none of them are involved in the plot. They saved the world with the commander once and have moved on to calmer lives they’ve each chosen, with the reputation of a victory under their belts.

Braham learned well from Eir over the years once she returned from the Jungle. It was a rocky road, figuring out what they each needed as a mother and son. But even more they found how they could be friends, as Eir taught Braham what she learned from her own great battles and victories, and Braham prepared properly to become a legend himself under guidance and support from the family he has left.

Taimi started up her own lab in Maguuma thanks to the uncovered Rata Novus hub, and runs a krew dedicated to discovering and learning from other old asuran cities. She hopes to dig all the way back to the years her people had spent subterraneously. There’s much to learn of how things had changed, knowledge lost from the displacement. It’s a flourishing prestigious krew that many look to join.

Jory and Kas open the detective agency back up. Jory’s know-how and Kas’ connections are an effective combination, there’s not been a case they couldn’t solve once brought to their attention!

Rox freed herself from Rytlock’s shadow, his denial of her success purely by trying to help her friends being the last straw. And it was still a success by many means, she draws her own group of admirers and an eventual warband. One that respects and admires her skills. She truly is enough. And when the Olmakhan reconnect through the threat on their own lands, she discovers the place she can truly call home.

Caithe runs the crystal bloom, ever the shining emissary of Aurene and the head of a group that’s much smaller but doing their part to remind the world that the dragons are necessities, not the enemies here. The world is wary at best of this team of dragons on the loose, surely they’d be better off of the pact got what it wanted and killed them instead? But perhaps not...Caithe hopes to push this point with her own faction as they try to aid the Pact in repairing damaged zones.

And Aurene herself grows, a slower growth but a magnificent one nonetheless. She’s shimmering, as one could expect from a child of Glint, and resplendently graceful. But darker as well, smoldering and shambling in her own way as magic from Balthazar and Zhaitan and Joko runs through her, less diluted by the plant and crystal magic of her elders. She’s a force to be reckoned with and no one can deny that.

Zhaitan is eventually revived in turn with the help of its siblings, able to pull back a fair amount of its magic into the body before being encased in a smaller avatar in turn. This is the turning point for many watching Vuisce’s team from afar. They’re surely a threat if they’re even reviving old kills. How long before this all backfires? They can’t possibly hope to control the dragons can they???

But of course, control was never the intention, just as defeat was never a possibility. And the world will keep turning, as Vuisce hopes it will.

#gw2 #guild wars 2 #Vuisce

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ice-emperor-zane · 3 years

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ninjago atla au update: Fire Lord Garmadon, Azula!Harumi, and Misako’s evil plan™️, and then more about Zane and Cole from the picrews:

Okay so, we start off with Misako’s role in Garmadon and Harumi’s plan (cuz in this au we’re not going to pretend shes a nice person). You know how in ninjago, up until season 2, she was doing research on ninjago’s history and that island the overlord lived on? Well here, she’s been researching on the history of the avatars all her life, and has learnt of how Avatar Aang was able to spiritbend Fire Lord Ozai’s Firebending away, and how Avatar Korra nearly had her bending taken away by the bloodbender known as Amon, how in the days of avatar Won, bending was given/taken away from people constantly. Misako wanted to utilise the power of giving/taking bending away to the fullest, to have spiritbender/bloodbender governments and law enforcements who could take away the bending of those who step out of line and to give bending to those who are loyal.

In the age of the Avatar prior to Lloyd (Avatar Zavier) Misako befriended Zavier and convinced him to learn spiritbending so he could give Misako waterbending and give Misako’s daughter, the Fire Lord’s child, Harumi, firebending. Misako’s excuse was that they were both born non-benders and it wasn’t really acceptable in the royal family for them to be anything other than benders, especially the heir, and the public weren’t aware Harumi wasn’t born a bender, Zavier made them both benders. He died an early death not long after this, so he never learnt of Misako’s plan to make bending a privilege and to use it as a rewards/punishment system. Avatar Lloyd was born shortly after, though of course, he was far too young to understand what was going on. Fire Lord Garmadon was of course 200% supportive of Misako’s ideas, and he no doubt planned to use the spiritbending/bloodbending method of giving/taking away bending for evil reasons™️ like removing the bending from entire other nations unless they pledge allegiance to him.

Harumi didn’t take too much convincing to think that it was a great idea, not only was she like 9 at the time, but because she had been gotten her firebending abilities later than everyone else, training-wise she was behind all the other kids her age, she could never be as perfect as she should be and she hated that more than anything else. Her hatred for her lack of natural skill and her want to wipe the smiles off all the other kid’s faces made her an extreme perfectionist who never ever stopped practicing. She became a firebending master at age 14, with the blue flames Azula had in atla (caused by extremely strong hatred for something or someone).

Now we get onto some more info about Zane and Cole based on the picrews.

You know the avatar before Lloyd? Avatar Zavier? That was Dr Julien’s son, Zane was created as a replacement to help Dr Julien cope with his grief, and also in the hopes that Zane could acomplish what Zavier always wanted to as an avatar but couldn’t (to protect those who cannot protect themselves). Zane, Jay, and Cole grew up together, but to Zane, it always felt as though Cole and Jay were best friends and he was a third wheel, so he jumped at the chance to go go the northern water tribe after discovering he was a waterbender. He’s spent the past 3 years or so of his life mastering waterbending, and honestly, he’s been a lot happier there than he ever was in Zaofu. He’s found that waterbending came naturally to him and he’s already one of the best in the tribe, hes best friends with the princess of the northern water tribe, Princess Pixl. Things are going great for him. But he can’t help but feel as though he’s not doing what he’s meant to be doing, because he’s meant to be protecting people, thats his purpose, and he’s finding it really difficult to accept that he deserves happiness too.

And now, Cole. Growing up, Zaofu had been hell, its the city made of metal and he cant metalbend, it made him feel so useless. Combine that with his airbender father, who despised that his son couldn’t airbend because it made Cole a far worse dancer (Lou is still part of the royal blacksmiths, they’re a group of Airbenders who use their bending and the extra agility/gracefulness it gives them to do dancemoves that would be impossible to a non-airbender). Of course, Cole, an earthbender, is Lou’s complete opposite, but that didnt stop Lou from forcing Cole to try to learn to dance. The standards were just so high and he hated it. Albeit Cole became quite a good dancer, but the amount of extra training he’d been forced to take, the amount of ridicule he got from others for not being able to do what they could, the extent at which it made him hate himself and how he’d been born, it wasn’t worth it. He didn’t fit in with anyone arround him, except Jay, Zane, and his mom. He doesn’t know how he would’ve survived without those guys. This all comes off in his fighting style, most earthbenders use a strong wise stance and face things head-on, Cole is more prone to airbending techniques, he only actually uses earthbending to create last-minute walls/shields, he usually uses evasive manoeuvres until the opponent tires themself out. This makes him exceptionally powerful, and I don’t think anyone at Zaofu ever took notice of that (even Jay and Zane thought he was kinda weak, fighting-wise, considering he couldn’t metalbend nor was he as agile as his father hoped), but as Bumi said, earthbending is based on neutral-jing, and Cole’s techniques feel a lot more neutral than just punching stuff. And Iroh said to draw strength from many places, and considering that earthbending and airbending are opposites, it seems like a good place to look. When Cole left Zaofu to go to republic city, he was looking for people who appreciate him more, and, I’d like to think he found that in the Smith Siblings.

Oki heres some more picrews, here we have Avatar Zavier, Harumi, and Pixl (you’re gonna hear a lot more about Pixl)

#before yall say in the comments its Xavier not Zavier yeah buddy i know. it was an intentional choice ok #Zavier has more Zane energy. gotta get those zzzs #lego #ninjago #lego ninjago #harumi garmadon #harumi ninjago #lord garmadon #garmadon ninjago #misako montgomery garmadon #misako ninjago #zane julien #zane ninjago #cole brookstone #cole ninjago #atla!ninjago #atla au

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bongaboi · 4 years

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Bayern Munich: 2019-20 UEFA Champions League Winners

In that moment of elation, the cameras hunted for despair. They found it in the slight, forlorn shape of Neymar, sitting on Paris St.-Germain’s bench, a perfect picture of heartbreak. Neymar, with tears in his eyes. Neymar, staring into the middle distance. Neymar, with his head in his hands.

Here, in tight focus, was the shot, the story. No player fits so neatly as an avatar for their team as Neymar. He is the most expensive player in the world, and his club is the richest project soccer has ever seen. His career has been shaped by money, and the club’s ambitions are fueled by it. He is the star concerned only with his own light. He is the princeling who yearned to be king. He is the modern P.S.G. made flesh.

In those lingering camera shots, in the silence, Neymar not only illustrated how that felt, but exposed the limitations that had led him, and his team, here. It is always easier to tell an individual story than a collective one. There is no one image — not Joshua Kimmich’s artful cross, not Kingsley Coman’s precise header, not Manuel Neuer’s trophy lift — that encapsulates the source of Bayern’s success.

Nor is there a single, pithy explanation. Bayern was, by a shade, the better team in a final that produced a dish quite distinct from any of its ingredients. Two teams front-loaded with attacking talent combined in Lisbon to create a game — a compelling, absorbing game — that was more slow-burn drama than quick-fire entertainment.

Both defended with grit and steel and thought. Neither was quite as assured as normal. Robert Lewandowski was a touch short of his ruthless best leading the Bayern line; Kylian Mbappé was not quite as explosive as he could be for P.S.G. Neymar did not want for work ethic, but his invention was just a little lacking.

Both teams were in pursuit of a domestic and European treble — league, cup and Champions league silverware — and yet neither was quite itself. Bayern won because it came closer than P.S.G., because its self-perception is better defined, because it draws its strength and its wonder from its system, not from the lavish talent of its individuals.

Hansi Flick, Bayern’s coach, had the courage not to change tack out of respect for — or fear of — P.S.G.’s fearsome front line. Bayern played the high defensive line which, common consensus had it, Mbappé in particular would relish. He trusted his players not to blink. The margins were fine, and P.S.G. hardly played badly, but the reward justified the risk.

That will be of scant solace to Neymar and his teammates, of course. The identity of the player that proved their undoing will add a little sting for P.S.G., too. Coman was born and raised in Paris; he joined P.S.G.’s youth academy as a child. He was a teammate of Presnel Kimpembe, the French champion’s central defender, until both were 18.

Coman made his first appearance for P.S.G.’s senior team at 16, the youngest player ever to do so. Like so many others, he is a product of Paris and its banlieues, the suburbs and satellite towns that are, perhaps, the most fertile breeding ground for soccer players in the world. Only São Paulo, Buenos Aires and South London even come close to rivaling it.

And yet Coman, like Paul Pogba and Ngolo Kanté and even Mbappé, until he was brought home at vast cost, got away. Coman left for Juventus in 2014, having grown frustrated at the lack of opportunities he was offered by his hometown team. The scale of investment from P.S.G.’s Qatari backers had by then made the club fallow ground for young prospects. Coman went to Italy, and from there to Munich. Now he has returned to haunt the club that made him, to vanquish it when it was in sight of its goal.

But one picture does not tell a story. Coman’s career has been remarkable. He is only 24, and yet he has already won 20 major trophies. Every season that he has been a professional — he made his debut in 2013 — he has ended as a league champion: twice with P.S.G., once with Juventus, five times with Bayern.

Coman is, in other words, the ultimate player for European soccer’s superclub era. He is the embodiment of the game’s stratification, for how different the world of the elite is from that of those mere mortals who might not win a championship every single season of their career. In these circumstances, it feels almost inevitable that at some point he was going to score the winning goal in a Champions League final. He is proof that, at a certain height, it is almost impossible to fall.

For all Neymar’s tears, he and the team he represents — in more ways than one — are precisely the same. Sunday’s final had been dressed up as a meeting between two visions of soccer: the old power and the new money, the establishment and the insurgent, the immovable object of European soccer’s self-appointed aristocracy and the unstoppable force of a sports team co-opted as the marketing tool of a nation state.

In Bayern Munich’s victory, it is possible to draw the conclusion that there is, for now, at least, some sort of winner. Paris St.-Germain has obsessed over the Champions League for a decade. It has spent billions in pursuit of it. It has inveigled its way into the corridors of power and it has broken the rules, both in letter and in spirit, and it has done its best to shift the landscape to its own ends. It wants nothing more than that one trophy, that ultimate vindication of its plan.

And though it came closer than it ever had before this summer, it has failed again. Chalk up a victory not necessarily for the good guys — Bayern Munich, for all its folksy customs, is not what any outsider would call lovable — but for the way things have always been. The old certainties hold. The new order has not been established, and Neymar is sitting on the bench in tears.

But a single picture does not tell a whole story. P.S.G. has not failed, not really, not in the long term. Its presence here was success. A decade since its Gulf money arrived, it can breathe the same rarefied air as the old elite. That, in the context of what Qatar wants from its investment, is almost the same as the Champions League trophy. Almost.

So, too, all of the associations that come with it. To have Neymar — the most expensive player on the planet, an icon, a social media phenomenon — as the avatar of this P.S.G. team is to demonstrate all of the things that are valuable to the club’s backers about this project. It speaks of power and wealth and glamour and relevance and affection, in some quarters, if not universally.

Neymar’s despair might have been the final image of the night, but that is the closing of a chapter, not the culmination of the book. Just as the European soccer season lasts nine months and, at the end of it, Coman gets a medal or three, the same is true of P.S.G. There will be another chance, and another chance after that, and on and on into the future.

Young money soon morphs into old power, and the insurgents become the ruling class. Neymar will be back here again; P.S.G. will be back here again. That is the way the game is built. That is the way the game works. At a certain height, the tears never last for long.

His quest is his club’s quest: to win hearts and minds, to prove their greatness and their worth and, in doing so, to gain recognition and acceptance. Both see the Champions League as the only stage on which that can be achieved. Both had failed at the last step on Sunday: a single goal had been enough to give Bayern Munich a 1-0 victory and a sixth European crown, and prolong the agony of P.S.G.

#2020 #paris saint-germain #bayern munich #uefa champions league

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joyful-soul-collector · 4 years

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About Me

I was tagged by @theswordofpens! I started a new post for this cuz the other one was getting hella long with reblogs lol. Anyway, let’s get on to the questions!

How tall are you?

5′7 or 170.18cm

What color and style is your hair?

That is a debated topic actually. My hair is dyed bright blue, but the natural parts of it people can never decide if it’s black or dark brown. In the summer sun, it’s dark brown, but it’s not always summer and I’m inside 90% of the time, so it looks black very often. So really depends on the lighting of the situation. Though people tend to focus more on the fact that my hair is blue rather than what color the natural parts are lol. My hair is a pretty basic short haircut, short on the sides, little longer on top, a bit of bangs that get in my eyes sometimes.

What color are your eyes?

Again, debated topic, and for the same reason as my hair. Sometimes dark brown, sometimes black, depends on the light.

Do you wear glasses?

Yep! They’re red on the inside and black on the outside.

Do you wear braces?

Yeah, my family was finally able to get me braces a while ago! I guess most kids get them when they’re younger, before their teeth have the chance to get worse, and they only have to have them on for a year or so? But we were only able to get them when I entered sophomore year of high school, so I have to have them for three years since my teeth had gotten so bad. They’re a lot better now, and hopefully I’ll be able to get them off before I go to community college 😅

What’s your fashion sense?

Does fandom nerd count as a category of fashion? I wear a lot of shirts with references to tv shows. All of my shirts have some sort of graphic on it, and I also have a couple zip-up hoodies that are tv show references. I also wear bright red sneakers every day, big bright red headphones that I wear every day, and a wallet chain that I wear every day. So all of that, combined with bright blue hair, seems to make for a... noticeable person haha.

What is your full name?

Marko Polo

(Nice try, I’m not saying personal stuff on here haha)

Where were you born?

Not gonna say exactly where, but in the more southern part of California.

Where are you from and where do you live now?

Alright, so technically I’m from a few different places. I was born in southern CA and lived there til I was 8, then we moved to super north-western WA where I lived until I was almost 13, and then we moved to central PA, where we celebrated my 13th birthday like a week after arriving. I’ve lived here in PA ever since, so that’s five years here in a couple months.

What school do you go to?

A High School

What kind of student are you?

I’m an alright student? I struggle with school, especially with all the moving I’ve had to do. Different schools have different expectations and vary in a lot of ways. I also have ADHD (more inattentive, less hyperactive) and Anxiety, which has not exactly been a help haha. I’ve always needed tutors and extensions and my 504 Plan, but if I have those I can often get good grades!

Do you like school?

School is meh. It’s stressful and exhausting, which is frustrating because I have other stuff I want do outside school, but I can’t do half of it because I have hw and chores and any other random things that need to get done. But my school is very high quality compared to most public schools! We have so many resources and amazing classes, and I love attending there, but unfortunately the people are not my favorite. Most of them are rich kids who have never attended anything other than really fancy schools, so they often take what they have for granted. I’ve heard kids say “our school is trash” while sitting in our Forensic Science class, in front of a school issued computer that we get to take home every day. It bothers me to NO END how some of these people act, but oh well.

Favorite subject?

English! English has always been my favorite subject, I love stories.

Favorite TV shows?

Ohhhhhhh man here we go (in no particular order): Firefly, Dollhouse, Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Demon Slayer, Legend of Korra, My Hero Academia, Sense8, Sherlock, Death Note, Lovesick, One Punch Man, Series of Unfortunate Events, The Good Place, Galavant, Parks and Rec, The Office, iZombie, Kill la Kill, Community, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, The Umbrella Academy, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Naruto, Batman The Animated Series, Travelers, Sex Education, Cells at Work, Death Parade, The Promised Neverland, RWBY

Tbh there might be more but those are the ones I could find haha. If you haven’t seen these, watch em, pretend this is a rec list, and then come and yell at me about how good they are.

Favorite movies?

Again, here we go (in no particular order): The Iron Giant, 10 Cloverfield Lane, Cabin in the Woods, any and all MCU movies (but especially Spider-Man), Into The Spider-Verse, Scott Pilgrim vs The World, anything Bo Burnham, anything John Mulaney, James Acaster: Repertoire, The Prestige, The Usual Suspects, Planet of the Apes, Lars and the Real Girl, Her, Newsies, Baby Driver, Serenity, Liar Liar, Crazy Stupid Love, Bandersnatch, ARQ, Cloverfield, A Silent Voice, Klaus, How To Train Your Dragon, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

There are definitely more, I just couldn’t think of them haha. Again, watch these, and then come and freak out with me about how they’re amazing.

Favorite books?

Let’s do this one last time (in no particular order, of course): Ready Player One, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Harry Potter, the Gone series, Saga, Sweet Tooth, Chew, Nimona, The Tea Dragon Society, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Lumberjanes, Invincible, Runaways, Calvin and Hobbes, Prince and the Dressmaker, Here, Plutona, Sculptor, Invincible, The Sword, Ultimate Spider-Man, Holes, Saving CeeCee Honeycutt, The Giver

There are definitely, 100% more books that I haven’t listed, again, I can’t think of them rn. Also, if you don’t recognize half of these titles, you probably don’t read comics/graphic novels. You should be reading those. Read them and then come and rant about how good they are so I get to tell you I told you so.

Favorite past time?

Writing! Watching tv! Reading! Spacing out so much people have to say my name ten times before I come hurtling back to earth! Talking to friends!

Do you have any regrets?

Yeah, I wish I’d stood up for myself when I was younger. I was bullied for a really long time, and even though it’s been a couple years since the last I was bullied, it’s still really hard for me to tell people what I want and and don’t want. I think I’m a little better than I used to be though, which is good!

What’s your dream job?

Author definitely, but I doubt I’ll be able to do that for a real job. Tbh I just want a job that I can do in my sleep. Repetitive, pays well, not too exhausting, that way I have energy and time to do my writing and all the things I want to do at home.

Would you like to be married?

I think so. I want to have a person I can live my life with, who I want to care for and who wants to care for me. If I’m not married I’d like an S.O. or even just a really good friend to live with. I think I’d get sad living by myself haha.

Do you want kids?

I want to be a foster parent! I’ve loved helping people my whole life, and I think this is one of the best ways that I can help someone going through a rough time. I don’t want biological kids though tbh, not really for any one reason, just for a bunch of little ones.

How many?

Dunno man. I wanna help as many kids as I can.

Do you like shopping?

I do! However I don’t do it often because I have no money. I do like walking around stores and looking a cool stuff though, especially nerdy stores like Hot Topic or Boxed Lunch or any book/comic shop.

What countries have you visited?

Canada, usually to visit family, once to see Niagara Falls! Never been anywhere else though, but I have a whole list of places I wanna see

Scariest nightmare you’ve ever had?

TW: SELF HARM/DEATH

Oof, see my dreams are always nightmares, and my nightmares are always hella terrifying. Often they’re of my worst fears: family telling me they hate me, finding the body of someone in my family, old bullies coming back, but in my worst one I found my little sister cutting herself in an old warehouse. I don’t actually remember much of what happened after I woke up, it was so bad I disassociated for the whole day. But luckily, I don’t dream often.

Do you have any enemies?

No? Maybe? I have people I hate, my old bullies mainly, but I’m not around them anymore so it’s not like I spend time hating them.

Do you have any self doubts?

Yeah I have this hilariously fun thing where I think everyone is just pretending to like me because they can’t pick up the courage to stop hanging out with me. Or that if I talk about what’s making me sad/stressed out then I’m being a burden on other people or being dramatic. Slowly working over that but it’s still hard.

Do you have any significant others?

Nope

Do you believe in miracles?

Depends. I don’t believe in fate or the idea that something higher up is pulling strings. But I think crazy cool stuff can happen. But that’s just luck and coincidence. For me, miracles are the positive ends of luck and coincidence.

How are you?

Meeeeehhhhh. School sucks, my sisters stress me out, and my parents are breathing down my neck about fifty different things. But I have a couple good friends and my writing and good stories to read and watch, so it’s not all bad :]

Tag ten tumblrs (tag last ten people in my notifications): @tracle0 @humblesavant @holystudenthologramy @federluftmask @phahbiyah @topazastral @dragon-s-bane @cassius-mortemer @saiko-tsuki @writing-another-star

#tag game #about me

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blossom765 · 5 years

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I Don’t really like My Hero Acadamia

I can already hear the angry screaming. Let me just put this out there. I’m not attacking anyone who likes the show. I’m just stating my opinion because well that’s one of the functions of social media. Notice how i said i don’t like my hero acadmia. I’m not saying you shouldn’t like it, i’m just saying why i don’t like it. With that said, if you like the show and don’t want to get angry feel free to move along but, if you’re like me and don’t like the show feel free to stay. Now I've only seen season 1 and 2 and a little of 3. I’m not going to see the rest on the slight chance that i might like it. So with all that out of the way, let’s get into why i hate my hero academia.

My hero academia follows the story of Deku who became the world's greatest hero ( kind of a spoiler since he says that literally at the start of each episode). He was one of the minority who didn't have a quirk (superpower) in a world where most of the population has a power (useful or not). He's given a power by his hero All Might due mostly to luck (and a little to the creator either being to lazy or cowardly to think of something a little more interesting). Being a hero is also an occupation. And the show goes on to introduce it's characters and follows how they learn to be heroes in school UA and fight bad guys.Now, let's get into why My hero academia is a boring generic show that is been for some reason over hyped

---Opening

I don't know why but, many people think that spoiling the show's ending of Deku becoming the world's greatest hero is somehow an interesting way to start a series. It might be different but that doesn't mean it's good. I'm sure the audience will obviously assume that the heroes will win but, spoiling the ending is not how you're going to make the viewer feel engaged. Let's take avatar the last airbender for example ( I don't usually like to compare shows but I just want to show how one show did showing their protagonist's destiny correctly and how the other didn't. In atla, Katara tells us about Aang and how he's the avatar and, the main thing, how she believes he can save the world even though he has a lot to learn. This tells us that he has flaws, how he has to work hard and the main thing how they believe he can win. They don't tell you the story of how he saved the world. You follow him on his journey to do it. A biography show often fails because you don't get the same vibe as being in the journey, interacting with the world, and being with the characters and seeing them as more like actual people instead of characters. You sacrifice that when you take the route of a story that just tells someone autobiography. By doing that, the viewer just feels like their just watching a story instead of engaging in it. A story's main function is to put the audience into a different world instead of showing a world. There's a difference. A good story can either force to engage in the story or it can fall flat on it's face and my hero academia has leaned towards the latter.WORLD-- So, the majority of the global population has quirks (which is probably just a way to make the something sound different without taking too much of a risk) and has shown, only through Deku though, that the minority, people who don't have powers are looked down upon. Most heroes are greedy and don't actually care much about saving lives and are just there for Fame and money. I don't have much to say about this other than predictable and lazy. It feels like the creator didn't spend longer than a few minutes creating this world. This is what I mean by generic. It's like the creator went people like superheros and magic and high school stories so I'll combine those. These might have been good ideas if the creator had brainstormed a little longer but he didn't so what we end up with is the epitome of generic.Speaking of ideas that could have been useful.

Being quirkless--

Deku is introduced as an underdog. He's bullied and treated like dirt because he has no powers but, if you thought he was going to be an inspiration to people who are born at a disadvantage in life you get to feel a slap of disappointment. He's ambushed by some glob villain and is rescued by his idol All Might which leads to him inheriting All Might's power. This effectively destroys a narrative that could have been different and inspiring. Instead of being a bad ass hero who has claimed the ladder and even surpassed people who were were already lucky with a quirk maybe a version of batman ( this show is already just a copy of shows and tropes so why couldn't they have actually copied something to make the show interesting) we are stuck with a protagonist who's success could only start if he's like everyone else. What makes this that much more stupid is that Deku is sub textually a disabled person. Someone who's at a disadvantage in life and born different from others and is bullied because of this difference. People with disabilities irl relate to this as they have had to go through life differently than people who weren't disabled. And it's not like no disabled character in a show has succeeded before. Take Toph for example. She's blind but is still talented and a respected bender also using her disability to her advantage by using seismic sense. Instead of doing something something that smart and creative, the creator decided to just make Deku not disabled, as if that's something possible for millions of people. It's not just disability, he can also be seen at a disadvantage because of his race. Obviously being quirkless isn't seen as a race but take the U.S. when African Americans were still seen as second class citizens. They were treated horribly for being black and people in power either treated them like that or they looked the other way when that happened ( Deku is bullied and treated like dirt because he was born quirkless and none of his idiot teachers seem to give a damn about his whole class bullying him). African Americans were always at a disadvantage, from living in poverty to segregation (Deku was at a complete disadvantage especially in the hero industry and wasn't even treated like a human being). So could African Americans suddenly change their race to White to get better lives? No. They had to protest and fight back against injustice to improve their lives. Deku doesn't get something this close to fighting against injustice and as someone who's aiming to be a hero, that's not a good sign. So, the only way that you can succeed is by changing your biology. Great my hero academia, great job.

All Might--

yeah yeah he's the greatest hero in the world and his powers are just boiled down to really strong punches. He's introduced as a symbol of hope, peace, and justice probably because heroes and authority figures were incompetent before and after he showed. But, he's got a secret, he used to be quirkless but then he got a quick and he's actually got a very shrimpy body and he thinks if that gets out then people will lose faith in him being the thing that solves their problems. But that doesn’t even make any sense.. Like I guess it's a problem that his powers are depleting but did nobody think that this guy just can't go on forever? Are the heroes that unreliable to them? I just don't get it.

Hero industry--

Nearly all the heroes are greedy assholes who don't understand how important their job is. They are obsessed with fame and fortune and this gets to the point where todoroki's father abuses his wife and children because he's obsessed with one of them surpassing All Might. Like I get that some of them are assholes but the majority? Seriously? That few people put their lives at risk just to save other lives. They even put their loved ones at risk by not masking their identities like All Might’s master who had to send her son away because being with her was too dangerous. This might have been a point where more heroes should have realized the magnitude of their job the dangers they the people they know in and maybe secret identities are useful because they keep the people they care about out of harm's way. I find it very unlikely that all might master was the only one who had this problem but, since the Creator is the lazy kind of creator, no hero in the world goes through this problem and the majority of heroes are insufferable assholes.

Characters--

Deku- I haven't mentioned what a bland character he is. I'm all for perseverance and kindness but those aren't the only things that make a character. It's also their personality. Deku is just a good goody, no nuance, just that. You might be thinking that a nuance might come out of no where except it's actually weird that he isn't more of a grey area. He was bullied since he was young and given no hope of success. And the people who bullied him were all people who had quirks. That past should have an impact on him. A good example of a relatable and believable protagonist is Judy from Zootopia. Deku and her have lot in common. They're both hard working and perseverant and they reached their dreams despite their obstacles ( except Judy actually had to work through the obstacles instead of somehow changing the fact that she's a rabbit). But, one of the biggest differences is that Judy's incident with Gidean the fox wasn't forgotten or treated as a joke. She carried that into her adult life and when she met Nick she was suspicious but she worked through that. Deku is not given a journey that important. His past of being horribly bullied is written as a joke and doesn't have as serious of an impact as it should have. All we get is a protagonist that is only capable of doing good for everyone and that is just boring and unrealistic.

Bakugou- Now the biggest thing I don't understand is why we're rooting for the guy? Why is he working as a hero? Why is he not an antogonist? Even a secondary antagonist? Even as a child Bakugou was already an asshole that should have been arrested. He beats up another kid and Deku and it looked like he used more than punches: fucking explosions. Now they probably weren't that big but, they're still explosions and extremely dangerous and likely left severe marks and burns on the kids and nobody has arrested this crazy child yet. Going into middle school now. He's still a scum bag who is so egocentric, so crazy that he threatens Deku if he signs up for UA. He literally uses his explosion power right on his desk inches near Deku (and his idiot teacher does nothing) and threatens to blow his arm off when he puts his hand on his shoulder while it’s smoking. And tells him to jump off the roof and hope he gets born with a quirk in his next life and that is treated as a gag. I wish I was joking but apparently bullying is just that funny. You might think that it's just Deku trying to use humor to deal with this but show treats this like a joke too. With that suicide remark ending with a joke to Deku actually still friends with this asshole. I don't care if they're childhood friends he is fucking nuts and Deku has no reason to want to stay friends with him because all he has done is make his life miserable. I’ve been picked on before and it hurt so i can promise you that Bakugou not being made to suffer severe consequences and Deku wanting to be friends with him is just ridiculous unless Deku has a case of Stockholm Syndrome. Maybe actually treat him as what he is: a bully. Have him go through consequences or have Deku prove him wrong that he can become a hero even if he’s quirkless, like Judy did with Gidean. I forgave Gidean because Judy proved him wrong and he also grew up and knew that what he did was wrong but, we don’t get anything that smart or realistic, we get a bully who supposed to be treated as a good guy by the narrative. And this guy is going to be a hero. Yeah, Bakugou. The guy that wanted to beat the shit out of two kids when he was a kid, that told his childhood friend to go kill himself, that brutally attacked Deku in the first exercise that all might planned for them not because he was playing the role of villain but because he has a gigantic ego and he was angry. Who in God's name would ever trust the job of protecting life to him? He's not even doing it to protect people. He's just the younger version of todoroki's dad who just wants fame. He's an asshole. And when an asshole like him isn't made to suffer through the consequences, your whole pack of characters fail because they're just that: characters. You failed in the task of making them feel like people.

Uraraka-- The hetero normative love interest. Now i’m not saying this as a shipper or anything. I don’t ship anyone in this show. I’m saying this as a viewer who is just so bored of the cute nice girl x nice guy protagonist trope. Only reason Deku has a crush on her is because she’s cute and she’s the only girl that didn’t treat him like dirt and the only reason Uraraka likes him is because he nice and... inspiring, i guess. She’s teased that she likes him by Aoyama because apparently a boy and girl can’t just be good friends that admire (not romantic) each other as impressive people, they have to be in love. This causes her to get extremely flustered because i guess she’s never been teased like that but, whatever and goes on to future episodes with her being nervous around Deku. Soooooo, another cliché. I can’t realy say much about this because i don’t really expect much from shonen (and even shoujo) anime in terms of romance. So let’s move on to why she wants to be a hero. She wants it for the money to help her parents out with expenses. Sure she seems grounded and realistic and all that except there’s one massive flaw in that. When you work a job, especially a dangerous job, that you don’t enjoy it starts to drain the life out of you. Are heroes really the only occupation that are allowed to use powers. Like 80% of the GLOBAL population has quirks and you’re telling me they haven’t properly integrated quriks into the world. Take atla for example. In avatar, bending was a way of life, it made the world move and there were just as benders as there were non-benders. And you expect me to believe that with 80% of the population having a quirk, nobody decided that they might be useful, maybe help the economy. Anything,use your imagination. You might say that more jobs using quirks would put quirkless people at a disadvantage but, the thing is that they are already treated like dirt. And that could have lead to a whole new story, with a quirkless people demanding better treatment ( sorta like legend of korra with non-benders being oppressed by benders) maybe even taking inspiration from Deku who should have been the first hero without a quirk. Uraraka’s character is just a whole minefield. That’s all i can say.

Todoroki-- He’s the cliché cold cool guy. But, that cliché actually has some grounds. He and his mother ware abused by his father so, it makes sense that he’s like that. But, instead of maybe working towards something that makes more sense like i don’t know working in family services, fighting for laws to make heroes face consequences for their crimes, anything that would fir his character. He’s an abuse victim but, he working to become a hero and also working under his father as a sort of intern. Yeah... wait what? He wants to become his father’s occupation, which i’m not that mad at because he still has dreams, i guess, but he’s working with his abusive father and the childhood abuse is to be forgotten. He could have one of my favorites if they had taken his past remotely seriously and not just assumed that it’s okay to forget about abuse,work with the abuser, as long as the abuse victim is still a little angry. Like seriously creator, that is all kinds of fucked up. On a side note about Todoroki’s mom, who exactly sold her to todoroki’s dad. She calls her mom to tell her what she’s going through but, how would that make sense if her parents agreed to sell her. Did only relatives have a say in this and the parents consent doesn’t fucking matter? Like how does that make sense?

Mineta-- He’s a pervert who wants to be a hero to be popular with girls. All i can say is..WHY IS THIS PIG A GOOD GUY? If anything he’s just going to be a rapist not a hero. His sexual harassment is right up your face and you’re supposed to root for this guy. I’ve never liked fanservice because it’s insulting to so many different people on so many different levels (women are sex objects, gay people are bait, men are all disgusting and no body will care) but there comes a time when it gets ridiculous and wondering “where are the police?” and “where are the laws against rape and sexual harassment?”.For God’s sake, he tried to peep in the girls’ bath in front of everyone, nobody doing much to stop him, and the teacher suspected this, and what does he do?, he posts a kid as guard instead of expelling the pig. When your teacher, who’s also a hero, does not get obviously sexually harassing pig, you should already be asking yourself a lot of questions.

Asui-- She’s apparently a cinnamon role.You can sum up her character to that. I’m sorry but, i don’t understand everyone’s obsession with her. Sure, she’s cute and all that and she got some screen time in the internship episode but, being a cinnamon role is just that. It’s not important enough. If she had some more qualities, maybe a backstory, and if we know more about her resolve and dreams, maybe why she wants to be a hero then i guess her cuteness might have been icing on the cake but, it just falls flat because there’s just not much to talk about.

The rest of the characters are just pretty boring and i can’t really find much to say about them but i think you get my point on how i feel about them.

Narrative---

I’ve already said that the story follows how these kids become heroes. And now i’m going to say how boring that is. The story can be summed up to learning their future occupation and fighting some bad guys. I have no problem with the narrative itself, it’s just maybe they should have put more story into it other than learning how to become heroes. How about we see more stories about the characters, anything that doesn’t have to do studying to be a hero. Take atla for example. We know aang is working to learn the elements and defeat the fire lord but, how that differs from my hero is that the story often deviates from the plot allowing even more stories in, stories that some people will enjoy and other stories that other people will enjoy. We know the world is at war and we know aang is the avatar and what he’s working towards but, the show doesn’t dwell on that too much. It’s the right mix of new stories and interesting ideas while also having the main goal in mind. It might not be a good idea to compare my hero to atla but, i just want to show how one show showed it’s goal correctly and a how one didn’t. My hero falls towards the latter. The show can be summed up to studying to be a hero which doesn’t open the opportunities for more people to enjoy different stories.

I’m going to end with this. This show does not have anything to differentiate it from other superhero shows or give it depth. There a fuck ton of superhero shows out there and Tiger and Bunny was one of them that was different and did well. It gave it’s characters depth, put more stories in that weren’t summed up to just fighting bad guys, and it did something different by putting ads on heroes. My hero academia isn’t different. It’s genericand does nothing to sepereate itself from other shows. All I can say is that it’s cliché after cliché after cliché..

The End-

#my hero academia #my hero academia review #unpopular opinion

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seyaryminamoto · 7 years

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This is the first time I have come across Sokka and Azula being shipped seriously. This interests me, so would you care to explain why you ship them? =)

Well, I have explained a few times before… or a lot of times xD but alas, if something can get me rambling, it’s a question like this.

Alright, soooooo… why Sokka and Azula? Why not any other combination of characters? Why did I have to choose these two despite their canon interactions are so few and far apart that sometimes it made me, a hardcore shipper, lose my mind, desperate for more?

Everything really sums up to one word: potential.

People have all sorts of reasons to ship anything they like. The most common one you see out there, in fandoms, is history: the childhood friends trope is very loved, for instance, and even I can’t help but love certain ships built on the basis of long-term, strong relationships that could endure absolutely any obstacles. When shows take ten thousand years to get that big fan couple together, people will start gushing about all the history the pairing has, and alas, it’s a great reason to love a pairing!

But as you will notice, there’s no such canonical history between Sokka and Azula. What is the root of this ship, if not shared history? What makes me say they have potential, when they seldom interact?

The potential we shippers see comes from something else entirely. It comes not from history, but from the contrast between their characters, the parallels, the similarities and the differences between them. All this brought together can give birth to a unique relationship that, to this day, I can’t realistically picture brewing between any other characters in this show aside from Sokka and Azula.

Alright, to start off:

1. The parallels and circumstances: Sokka and Azula were born to the family of leaders in their respective nations. The situations aren’t 100% the same, but their fathers are the leaders of their communities and their mothers had a closer relationship with their other sibling. In regards of their relationships with said siblings, Sokka and Azula are the rational, even cold-blooded siblings at times, in contrast with their emotional and hot-headed siblings, Zuko and Katara.

Curiously, with the upbringing they have, Sokka and Azula both turn out to be the siblings who tease the others, the ones with the sense of humor (I will never let anyone forget Azula’s absurd puns), They’re the ones who grew up with a tight bond with their fathers, looking up to them and wanting to follow on their footsteps - not that Zuko didn’t try to do it too, but the difference here lies in how the fathers reacted to it: Ozai embraces Azula’s attempts to imitate him and rejects Zuko’s, while Hakoda tries to teach Sokka how to be a leader and a warrior, much like he is. So, Azula and Sokka have similar relationships with their fathers.

And just so, they’re the ones who are more military/strategy oriented of their pair of siblings. Azula was, hands down, a strategist and intellectual, shown as she can recite perfectly what Ozai requests from her as a child in Zuko Alone, and shown again when Zuko asks her about Sozin’s history, uncertain of his own knowledge but assuming Azula would know better. Sokka, likewise, is the “plan guy” in Team Avatar, and the one who was ecstatic and determined to go to a Library. Sokka loves learning new things, and from the looks of it, Azula may be intellectually inclined as well.

Also, they’re the most awkward flirts you’ve ever seen. Combine “Maybe we could do an activity together?” with “That’s a sharp outfit...” and you find yourself with the most hilarious attempt of courtship ever seen.

Considering all this, we also have the issue that comes with their insecurities. The complicated relationships with their mothers, the sense of inadequacy... they’ve both canonically felt the despair of not being good enough, Sokka struggled with it silently for a long time, begrudging his sister for her special skills. Azula felt it too, while watching as her friends picked to side with her brother over her. Sokka felt it as well when his father left him behind in the Water Tribe as he took off to the war... and Azula did it in the same circumstances, years later, as her father leaves her behind, too. Even in these regards, they’re similar.

In conclusion, their upbringing may have just had a hand in grooming them into being this similar to one another, no matter that they were as different as they were. These experiences are the kind of thing that could easily bring two people together, realistically speaking. There’s a lot of potential bonding that could happen because of this.

2. The differences: these two are also vastly different, and of course, the opposites attract notion has been repeated to no end with this ship and many others. But what’s going on with Sokkla isn’t that simple, I believe. People can ship something on the premise of “opposites attract”, but I personally can’t do it unless there’s more substance to it than just that (ergo why I like the parallels I listed above more than I like the differences).

So, let’s list the obvious differences, shall we? Princess and peasant (despite there’s a lot of people who like to think otherwise, but upbringing-wise, Sokka lived far more humbly than Azula did and that’s really what this is about), water and fire, bender and non-bender, moral and amoral, sociable and loner, healthy family and unhealthy family.

Amongst the not-so-obvious differences, I said they’re great at strategy, but as it turns out, they’re great at different kinds of strategies: Sokka loves long-scale plans, but they fail for him more often than not. He’s better at improvising, at thinking of solutions on his feet. Meanwhile, Azula is the opposite: she regroups when a plan fails, then builds new plans steadily, but with perfect precision so that everything falls into place when it has to.

The differences abound, by the tons, but as you may see, they’re not the worst kind of differences. While it sounds cliché as heck, even the example of the way their strategies work is ideal to prove why these differences aren’t quite as problematic as they can seem. If they work together, those differences become complementary. Take your time to imagine what a strategy concocted by Sokka and Azula would look like: who on earth would be able to stop these two if they joined forces? I tell you, no one on ATLA’s cast would stand a chance xD

The differences between them are pivotal for the third point, I’ll say. And that’s where things really kick in.

3. What they could become together: Sokka and Azula are of course not without flaw, they’re both pragmatists to the point of cold-bloodedness, he can be really goofy sometimes, she can be extremely amoral often, so as much as I adore them in every sense, I know there’s a lot of room for character growth in both of them, even now (yes, I sing praises for Sokka’s development, but I’ll be damned as a fan if I didn’t realize he can grow even more than he already did!).

The one who clearly needs to grow more is Azula, nobody will question that. Her downfall is very heartbreaking and everyone wants her to heal. I am not going to claim Sokka and Sokka alone can patch her up, that’s absurd. But I do believe Azula needs support from someone who’s as emotionally strong as Sokka proved to be throughout the show, someone who will stand by her even in her darkest moments, someone who doesn’t give up on those he loves. Sokka fits the requirement just right.

3A. But why Sokka, and not anyone else? Because Sokka, who’s one of the characters with the best moral compasses in this show, is also not a preacher. If Azula chooses to take an aggressive stance on something, or a threatening one, Sokka might talk her down from that by showing that approaching the problem from a different angle will be more efficient. Sokka isn’t above murder, that’s something that cannot be forgotten: he knows sometimes you can’t find peaceful solutions for problems, as it was in canon when they killed Combustion Man. But Sokka would seek any other solution before reaching the point of killing someone. Spending time with someone who has a good moral compass, but who isn’t high-and-mighty about it, is the kind of thing that I think Azula would benefit from. With him, she can learn to let go of her father’s teachings of using fear as the means to control anyone: Sokka would show her why that’s pointless, really.

And speaking of which… it’s canon that Sokka isn’t inherently terrified of her. Azula could intimidate Ty Lee into submission, even send Mai away with a mere suggestion (and sure, Mai glared at her but still left as she was asked), she can terrify her brother and uncle enough to make them think the Earth Kingdom killing them isn’t as bad as being handed over to Azula… and yet, when she goads Sokka during in the Eclipse, he doesn’t hold back. He doesn’t back down. He gets up in her face and yells, demands for the truth. He will not let her walk over him, and even when she regains her bending afterwards, he makes a move as if to go after her before he realizes it’s futile. But he isn’t scared. He’s courageous enough that in the Chase he swings his club at her as she’s running off, tosses his boomerang faster than the elements the others sent at her. His sword threatened her far more than Zuko’s bending in the Boiling Rock when the two of them took her on. Sokka kept her in check, never hurt her, but it SHOWS that Sokka isn’t going to back down on her just because she’s threatening. Heck, even the comics prove this! He took her on, one-on-one, in the Search. And heck, he survived despite the roof collapsed :’D wouldn’t you consider that quite a feat?

Point being, Sokka will NEVER let Azula walk over him. And this is something that makes me believe he’d gain her respect rather quickly. He’s not a minion, he’s not a vassal: he’s a leader in his own right, and I believe Azula would acknowledge it.

Why would she? Because she ditched an entire firebending procession in favor of traveling with two non-benders. Because she took a legion of earthbenders under her command, no matter that they weren’t Fire Nation: contrary to the popular belief, Azula’s sense of superiority doesn’t blind her to other people’s skills, regardless of who they are or where they come from. She’s willing to find allies anywhere, and the show proves it clearly. Why would she scoff at Sokka for being a non-bender when she didn’t do this to Mai and Ty Lee? Why would she scoff at him for not being Fire Nation when she didn’t do that with the Dai Li? Well, my answer is that she wouldn’t scoff at all. Not if they met under better circumstances than they tend to meet in canon, or if they amend their relationship somewhat.

Sokka has a lot to offer Azula, but the first thing that hooked me on this pairing was the realization that he might actually make her laugh to the point of tears. Sokka’s jokes, silly as they can be, are the sort of thing that definitely could fly with the girl responsible for “the Avatar’s fangirls”, and nobody’s ever going to convince me otherwise. The real thing that hooked me is that this goofy boy, with his witty comments, his sarcasm, his often poorly-disguised enthusiasm for all things new, could really bring happiness to someone like Azula. The little history between them is bad, yes, they were at opposite sides of a war, but as enemies they could respect each other. As friends? I think they would find they suit each other really well, their senses of humor match, their countless list of things in common do, too. Even if someone doesn’t want them to become romantic, the potential between their interactions is so great it fascinates me even after all this time. They have it in them to be amazing partners, whatever the nature of their relationship.

The bad blood between them isn’t the kind of bad blood I see between Azula and any of her Fire Nation friends. She never expected anything good from the members of Team Avatar, but she did from the Fire Nation gang. She had helped her brother out but that went to waste in her eyes, and their relationship only ever got worse to the point of them damn near fighting to the death in the finale. She was definitely not the greatest friend to Mai and Ty Lee, but she believed they were friends for real: they betrayed her. The amount of backstabbing Azula has received is kind of overwhelming. People can think she had it coming, whatever, but those wounds are a lot more likely to open again when dealing with the people who inflicted them in the first place. Team Avatar was always just the enemy for her. She doesn’t need to bounce back from being double-crossed with them, so honestly, I find that establishing bonds with them could be smoother for her than trying her luck with everyone who turned their backs on her before. She should have new friends that she knows aren’t lying to her face, or shooting glares at her when she’s not paying attention.

And that brings up another reason why Sokka is so good for her, in my opinion: he is terribly, ABSURDLY, blunt and honest. Sokka’s attempts to lie his way out of anything are laughable, and for someone like Azula, it’ll always be obvious that he’s lying. But he’d never lie about serious things, too, which is where his great principles are a wonderful thing for this relationship. He’s not going to be dishonest to her, and she’ll know it. She’s a people person xD she can tell when someone’s absolutely honest, and she’ll find that Sokka is practically incapable of dishonesty. So whenever she’s doing something he disapproves of, he’ll say it. He speaks his mind, always, no matter the cost. He doesn’t even know how to hold his tongue.

Finally… the honesty part ties in with something essential for me in a stable, healthy relationship for Azula. This girl has gone her whole life telling herself she’s a monster: when someone as honest as Sokka gets to know her, and lets her know she’s not one? No doubt her life would end up upside down because of it, but she’d know he’s not lying. She’d know he’s saying it because he truly believes it. Sure, it’s a huge source of drama for their relationship anyways xD but if Sokka loves her, her fears of not being deserving of love could start to be dismissed. If her enemy from the times of the war could possibly grow to have feelings for her… well, first off she’d think he’s crazy xD but once it kicks in, so much of what she feared and dreaded about herself would be disproved. I know many people expect this problem of Azula’s to be fixed through her family, but as I said above, the bad blood there is so damn bad that I don’t see why someone else can’t do it instead. Maybe it’s not the ideal way, but I believe it would work.

So, that’s quite a bit on why Sokka suits Azula as well as he does. But you might be wondering by now if it’s a two-way street: can someone like Azula be good for someone else? Well… you might be surprised.

3B. But why Azula, and not anyone else? Sokka has a ton of love interests in-canon, and a ton more ships outside of canon. So why would I dare claim Sokkla is the best ship for him?

Something funny I like to bring up is that what people love in Sokka’s most popular ships gets gathered into one with Sokkla.

The main reason why people ship Yuekka: impossible love, princess and peasant, he did everything he could for her, didn’t stand a chance and fell head over heels for a girl who loved him but loved her nation too. So… Azula and Yue are obviously characters who differ in A LOT of aspects, in fact, in most of them. But they share two things: they’re princesses, and they would do ANYTHING for their nation. Azula’s goal when striving to become Fire Lord is to be a great leader for her nation, remember? Curious coincidence, right? So… if Sokka falls for Azula, you get these same elements that you had with Yuekka. Funny.

Top billed reason why people ship Sukka: “I’m a warrior but I’m a girl too”. That quote sold a lot of people on this ship, and frankly it’s the main reason why Sokka and Suki are together at all: both are warriors but her feminine side appeals to him anyways. Do I even need to say who’s a girl and a warrior, AND A STRATEGIST JUST LIKE HIM…? Yeah. I don’t. You already know :’D

Top billed reason why people ship Tokka: Toph and Sokka were hilarious together, right? Got along really well, they even bonded over Katara being annoying and all that. They were the nickname ones, the jokesters, offered a lot of comic relief in the show. But alas… I am not a fan of the comics, yet Sokka and Azula provided comic relief just fine too. As I pointed out above, Sokka and Azula grew up with very similar siblings: they could just as easily bond over that, too.

Point being, Sokkla can pull everything off. At the same time. It really can. You could say that Sukka’s famous line applies to Tokka too, but it doesn’t work with Yuekka. You can’t say the appeal of Yuekka can also be found in Tokka because Toph actually doesn’t care for worldly affairs the way Yue did (she doesn’t join Team Avatar out of wanting to help people, she does it to be free and to have a chance to be herself, completely personal reasons). The comic relief thing about Toph and Sokka having similar senses of humor can’t apply to either Sukka or Yuekka. And Yuekka’s circumstances simply don’t apply for Sukka either.

So Sokkla has the potential that every one of these ships has, and more. It even gathers factors that the other ships didn’t have (as I mentioned, relationships with family, interest in strategy and intellectual pursuits), and adds several that I find pivotal for why Azula can help Sokka grow lots:

Azula is a challenge. What does canon show us regarding Sokka and challenges? He absolutely THRIVES in them. Sokka can claim he wants to have a peaceful and easy life, but the minute something extraordinary happens, he’s all over it and doing his best to be part of it. Sokka was set free from burdens and allowed to grow into the young man he became because of the challenge of stopping the Fire Nation. It was a fight they could have lost, but he did his damnedest to help his friends succeed.

Yue was a challenge of sorts for him, too. She was out of his reach, and he tried to love her without being with her, which showed an amazing nobility from him and proved how much he can care about the people he falls in love with. It ended too fast for anyone to say if that relationship could have gotten anywhere, but it was promising, if anything.

As for Suki… I really don’t love the ship. And one of the reasons I don’t is because while they care about each other, I feel that Sokka doesn’t need to try at all. Being comfortable is fine, but as I said earlier, Sokka thrives in challenges. He loves proving himself, and he did to Suki early on, but he doesn’t need to prove anything anymore. Thus, their relationship isn’t the kind I think would suit Sokka best. It’s not a relationship that compels him to do better, to try harder, to give it his everything.

A relationship with Azula would be the absolute opposite of that. Sokka would know Azula doesn’t settle for mediocrity in anything and he will not be a man who doesn’t deserve her. He would constantly strive to better himself, and she would help him reach his potential as a fighter and even as a leader, because that’s the kind of stuff she knows, and it’s the kind of stuff he’s interested in. So he can learn more about these things with her! In any case, he’s not going to have a single second of boredom with Azula. Not a chance. And I really think that’s something Sokka would love to enjoy in his life: a relationship that never ever feels complacent.

And another thing that always gets to me is Sokka’s acute awareness of how ordinary he seems in comparison to all his friends. It’s a nonsensical thing if you ask me, HE’S WONDERFUL! XD but he has these insecurities, and those insecurities can gnaw at him a lot. Wouldn’t it be great for him to be with someone, a partner who would make him realize how amazing he is? And I don’t mean that Azula would spend all day coddling him and telling him he’s remarkable: I mean that she would make him feel remarkable, because nobody can hold a relationship with Azula the way Sokka can, no matter how hard they may try. In a fully stabilized relationship, where they’ve both worked together to reach their full potential individually and together, these two really would develop a bond like no other. A relationship this incredible would be so strong it could reduce Sokka’s insecurities a huge lot. And I’d say that’s yet another point in favor for this ship.

4. The potential: with everything I said, I think it should be clear now why I talk so much about this ship being one based on potential. Nothing is set in stone, you can really do whatever you want in fanfiction with this pairing. You don’t have nearly enough canon interaction that you can take as shippy, no landmarks, nothing you absolutely need to feature… you really can do anything.

There’s Sokkla fics about them being partners in some organization, be it the White Lotus or anything else, there’s Sokkla fics where they’re a happily married pair, there’s fics where Azula captures Sokka that can start dark and go light, or even stay dark all along. There’s modern AUs, there’s crossovers of all kinds… there’s SO MUCH you can do with Sokkla. So much. These two really aren’t limited by anything, as far as I can see. People can portray their relationship as the healthiest in the Avatarverse, but some enjoy drama or angst, and they can take the relationship towards a toxic angle if it suits them. Someone can write them in the fluffiest of fluff, simply being happy together, and instants later they can give them the wildest smut you’ve ever imagined. And if done right? Everything will work. EVERYTHING.

Canon didn’t give us the ship, but it gave us the possibility. As I am, I don’t even worry about it becoming canon or not anymore: the richness of stories I’ve seen with these two is so vast I am constantly in awe over it. There’s been some serious fanfiction masterpieces for Sokkla that anyone should read (but if you want those, there’s another ask for fic recommendations waiting for me, so hold on and I’ll get to it eventually xD). The worlds that can be created for these two are amazing, truly.

And well… maybe you know this, but I’ll say it in case you don’t. I’ve spent almost five years of my life writing a fic about Sokka and Azula in the most compulsive manner EVER. Five years WITHOUT writer’s block. Five years of constant work in an AU that has already spanned over 1.6M words. What can I tell you of this experience? That I could have never made it this far, and created something this vast, with another leading pairing. I can’t replace their characters with others, I can’t write a version of Gladiator with, say, Toph and Zuko instead. It wouldn’t work. I can’t do it with Azula and Aang. It would never work the way it does if the main characters weren’t Sokka and Azula, and if their relationship wasn’t the main line that moves the plot forward (or slows it down, sometimes). I’ve rewritten ATLA as a whole, and gone further than I ever imagined I would with a story.

And it’s all because of them. Because that’s how much potential they have. Whatever criticism Gladiator deserves for my decisions, the fact remains that the story wouldn’t even be even a pale shadow of what it is if it weren’t about Sokka and Azula.

Lastly… doesn’t hurt that they make a beautiful pair, does it? :D

(Sokka and Azula by Drakyx)

Nope. Certainly doesn’t hurt one bit.

So, I hope if you got through this absurdly long ask, you would take two things with you: first, this wonderful ship has a ton of potential and it just takes a willing eye to see it. They’re a remarkable match in every way, seriously. Sometimes I get so lost in it I forget there’s next to no canon material about them, because of how real the connection between these two characters feels to me xD

The second thing I want you to take with you is…

… I talk a lot. I have too many feels about Sokkla. If you ask me to talk about them, I will ramble for hours, as I just did :’D hope you enjoyed reading my crazy gushing, and if your curiosity is still stirred, stick around and I’ll recommend Sokkla fics very soon! Thanks for the excuse to squee about them!

#anon #sokkla #sokka #azula #and I rambled again #how many times will I ramble today I do not know but I sure am happy about this last session of rambling xD #this is the kind of stuff I wanna talk all day about yes

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godsickk · 6 years

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((Worldbuilding questions, you say? I might have a couple! Uhhhhhh tell me more about religion in Nina's world because she's referenced gods in several posts thus far so I'd assume it's polytheistic? What's the relationship between gods and spirits? Are gods really just powerful spirits that everybody worships? Is there any difference at all between spirits and gods? And how about all those cults that worship Nina? What are they like? How weird is it for that sort of thing to happen?))

unb0und. OH BOY LET’S GO

Religion in Nina’s world/polytheism vs. monotheism/etc.

During early civilization in Nina’s world, the most powerful spirit partner among a given population was seen as that group’s local god. How their human partner was seen varied from group to group; some were seen as the god’s mouthpiece, some as its keeper, some as an earthly extension of the god, some as an avatar of the god itself. Most or all of the blood sacrifice performed by each group was dedicated to their god.

The idea of a single, all-powerful god never really took hold in Nina’s world. People had always known that spirits existed throughout the entire world, which made it easier for them to accept that other groups would have gods of their own. The best way to describe it would be as a huge spread of monotheistic local religions. When visiting another group, visitors were expected to acknowledge and show respect to that group’s god – though they wouldn’t be made to worship it, since they already followed a different god.

This is why people swear by gods instead of god – speaking as if one’s god were the only god was considered a sign of disrespect to the gods of others. One would say “oh gods” instead of “oh my gods” because only one of those gods actually was THEIR god. Not worshiping another god = fine and normal. Refusing to acknowledge the existence of other gods = extremely rude.

In Nina’s world, gods never had absolute power over their people. Humanity’s first connection to spirits came through spirit-human partnerships, and though the human partners had much longer lifespans than most, in the end, they always died and took their partner with them. Gods were never seen as all-powerful or eternal, which made people more comfortable with defying them and challenging their authority. If the person partnered to a “god” began to abuse their power, they could be cast down or killed by the others. A god generally functioned as a guiding light, a pillar of community support, a point around which a society could gather itself, a source of wisdom or otherworldly knowledge, etc.

As people grew to understand more and more of spirits and the spirit world, the view of them as gods gradually died out and was replaced with the current view that puts them somewhere between natural (albeit still deeply mystical) forces and alien beings. For the most part, religion in Nina’s world has gone extinct; it’s almost entirely a thing of the past. In its place, people raised up ancestry and blood, balance with nature, executions, social division and hierarchy. “Gods” and all its variants are secular expressions now.

Relationship between gods and spirits/difference(s) between spirits and gods

On the most practical level, there was never any difference between spirits and gods, since all spirits are made from the same substance – just gathered and formed into different shapes, sizes, concentrations. The difference was always in how people saw and related to spirits.

People partnered to spirits viewed as gods would often exaggerate their partner’s power to other people in order to enhance their social/religious/political/etc. power. Sometimes they were found out and subsequently cast down; sometimes they passed without notice; and sometimes they played that exaggeration so well that the members of their community began to do their work for them, and the god and god-partnered crystallized into figures of myth or legend after their deaths.

When travel increased and societies started connecting and merging with each other, it meant hundreds of gods gathering in one place. This oversaturation of gods, combined with how humanity’s view of spirits was gradually evolving, is what really initiated the worldwide decline of religion. With so many “gods” in one place, it was hard to keep seeing them as any more deserving of one’s devotion compared to the rest of spirit- and humankind. People began looking more and more to those who wielded social, political, and economic power, and gods – even the idea of them – were deemed things of the past, relegated to myth and history.

Nina’s cults/what they’re like/how they’re seen in her setting

Nina’s status among her cults is different from that of most gods throughout history. With the direct way that she uses Zero’s power – something without historical precedent, unless you count certain mythological figures – and their abnormally high level of physical connection, combined with Nina’s force of personality and the nature of her celebrity persona, most people see HER as the god, not Zero. Zero is seen as both the source of her power and the price she pays for wielding it.

In the beginning, most people (except for a few REALLY big fans) don’t see Nina as a god, or even as a particularly religious figure; she’s a chance for justice, a figurehead and focal point for rebellion. The meetings about her aren’t initially for worship; they start out as gatherings where underground political groups discuss which issues to bring to her attention and how to do so, which duels they want to try and get her to fight, how much they can trust her (IF they can trust her), and so on. Nina is a source of hope for them, but she’s also a political asset – a means for these people to achieve their goals, and one that needs to be carefully managed and strategically deployed for maximum effect.

Nina almost definitely would never have had cults if it weren’t for Vene. His efforts to destroy Nina’s world force her to reveal her true power again and again; as Nina repeatedly defeats his attempts, her displays of power and her continued protection of humanity dovetail with her reputation as a source of hope and justice in such a way that many people start to see her as a savior figure, a view which gains more and more traction as Nina continues to defeat Vene. Nina is Vene’s daughter and, in many ways, his polar opposite; she launched her career with a monologue about being the cure to counter Vene’s plague; the two of them are the only ones who can rival each other in terms of power. In a culture that believes strongly in fate and destiny, people waste zero time in forming a narrative around these two and how Nina was born to kill Vene and cure the plague of his existence once and for all.

The development of Nina’s cults is an extremely unusual one within the context of her society, but it only happens due to extremely unusual circumstances. If it hadn’t been for Vene, she’d have gone down as a modern legend (with a few fringe fanatics). Then again, if it weren’t for Vene, Nina probably would have fallen into monstrous godhood herself for lack of an adversary. She might end up with cults then, too, but they’d be JUST A LITTLE DIFFERENT IN NATURE

Most of Nina’s cults gather to talk about her, build up her narrative in each other’s eyes, talk about their hopes and fears together, plan acts of resistance, and so on – they’re still strongly political, but now have more of a narrative focus on Nina herself. Sometimes there’s meditation or silent prayer, or an offering of burnt aromatics (it makes some of them feel better, and they figure it can’t hurt).

One group carried out meetings that imitated Nina’s executions. Nina found out. That group doesn’t exist anymore.

At the end of the chase, Vene arrives in their home world before Nina and makes one last, prolonged attempt to destroy it. This is when the cults lose their political side and become wholly, overtly religious, as the population tries to survive the beginning of the end of the world.

#thank u this is a good one #worldbuilding.#facts.#ANSWERED.#bxrningbrxght #long post

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warholiana · 4 years

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‘Warhol’ Review: Nothing Like the Real Thing

‘I want to be as famous as the Queen of England,’ Andy Warhol once said.

By Dominic Green April 17, 2020 11:16 am

WARHOL By Blake Gopnik Ecco, 961 pages, $45

‘As genuine as a fingerprint,” said the caption to Andy Warhol’s photo in his high school yearbook. The style of a Warhol screen print is as unique as a fingerprint, but a genuine Warhol was so easily faked that Warhol had assistants do the work for him. Mass production and media smarts made Warhol the most famous of all American artists—not bad going for an artist who, as Blake Gopnik admits in his detailed, enthusiastic and absorbing biography, “never had the innate talent for realistic drawing that even many minor artists have.”

Fame is the right measure of his achievement, but fame was not his only spur. There was money, too, and plenty of drugs, not forgetting elaborate choreographies of gay sex that Warhol, with factory-like efficiency, combined with his photographic hobbies. Today Warhol stands proud in the public’s estimation. The art world revels in its elitism, but a Warhol, as the English put it, does exactly what it says on the tin. Campbell’s Soup, Elizabeth Taylor, Chairman Mao and Marilyn Monroe all look genuinely like themselves, and the fingerprint of Andy Warhol seems, somehow, to be on them all.

“I like to watch,” says Chance the Gardener in the film “Being There,” Hal Ashby’s meditation on the credulity of the rich and powerful. Warhol played the fool as only an intelligent observer can. His early 1960s transformation from intellectual graphic designer to gum-chewing Pop star was the most successful case of dumbing up since Marcel Duchamp’s realization of the secondary value of bathroom fittings.

Warhol’s triumph was a belated commercial victory for the pre-1939 European avant-garde: Critics called early American Pop Art “neo-Dada.” We live in Andy Warhol’s world of endless lurid images, each framed in irony. This is Jeff Koons’s good fortune, if not always ours.

He was born Andrew Warhola in 1928 in what Mr. Gopnik calls a “grim little flat” in Pittsburgh’s Soho neighborhood. His parents Andrej, a laborer, and Julia, a cleaner, had immigrated from what was then called Ruthenia and is now eastern Slovakia; Uniates, Slavic Catholics following the Greek rite, they were a minority within Pittsburgh’s “Slav” minority. Andrej was absent for long periods and died from complications of tuberculosis when Warhol was 13. Julia cooked Ruthenian food—in the 1930s, tinned soup was still a luxury—and encouraged Andy and his two older brothers to draw by copying from magazine illustrations.

How did the artist whose “notable achievements,” according to Mr. Gopnik, include rejecting a “signature touch” acquire his monumental blankness? Mr. Gopnik, an art critic (formerly for the Washington Post), wonders if Warhol’s Ruthenian background made his family “hyphenated Americans” with “nothing to put before their hyphen.” Did the Warholian recipe of low emotional affect and highcamp impact emerge as his shield and sword against a homophobic society? Or was it a childhood bout of Sydenham’s chorea, the disease then known as St. Vitus’s Dance? The illness’ immediate effect was that the 11-year-old Warhol watched Disney shorts over and over on a projector in a sickroom whose walls were adorned with shots of movie stars. Longer-term effects included blotchy skin, shaky hands and, Mr. Gopnik suggests, the repetitions of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Mr. Gopnik expertly traces Warhol’s technical and intellectual roots to his studies in painting and illustration at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute of Technology: the paintings of Stuart Davis, whose deceptively bland depiction of consumer products made him Warhol’s “one true avatar” in American art; the “hot new art of silk-screen printing”; and the Bauhaus notion that the studio should be a factory and art an “indictment of materialistic forces.”

The beatnik “André” made a virtue of his “comically awkward” sketching technique by turning his lack of traditional “hand” into an impersonal “efficiency,” as adaptable to commercial design as to the avant-garde gallery. In 1949 he took an overnight Greyhound to New York City and launched his “secret weapon,” the “blotted line” lifted from his hero Ben Shahn. A hardworking “bashful elf” with a “cold, calculating heart,” Warhol quickly built a reputation as “a cheaper Ben Shahn,” without Shahn’s “taint of far-left politics.” He drew for Condé Nast’s Glamour magazine and the Girl Scouts’ American Girl, and produced covers for highbrow LPs and books published by the literary imprint New Directions.

By 1960 Warhol had gotten ahead in advertising. He owned a house on the Upper East Side, and his mother was living in the garden apartment. He had repaired his appearance with skin creams, a nose job and a wig. He had worked and networked, and befriended Truman Capote. He had exhibited in small galleries too, but, Mr. Gopnik writes, his work remained known only to “the tiniest circle of uptown gays” and his income as a designer was declining as magazines turned to color photographs. His projects at the time included designing a bookplate for Audrey Hepburn and drawing the feet of minor celebrities.

The Abstract Expressionists had shown there was money in avant-garde art. Contemporaries like Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg were already reworking American icons. Warhol had an adman’s eye for the empty vessels of commercial imagery. “I want to be as famous as the Queen of England,” he told the uptown photographer and socialite Frederick Eberstadt. For the second act of his life, Warhol exchanged Brooks Brothers suits and season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera for jeans and pop radio. He experimented with urinating on his canvases, but inspiration lay closer at hand, in the designer’s world of mass-produced images.

“You’ve got to find something that’s recognizable to almost everybody,” the dealer and decorator Muriel Latow advised. “Something like a can of Campbell’s Soup.” Warhol described the soup-can sequence of 1961 as a “synthesis of nothingness,” but the power of his early images derives from their synthesis of depths and shallows. Isolated and enlarged, their colors inflamed, the commonplaces of commerce assume the scale and resonance of cult icons.

Warhol’s tins, Brillo Boxes and famous faces were, Mr. Gopnik suggests, not just a camp “Dada reply” to the machismo and existential angst of the Abstract Expressionists. Warhol fed the directness of commercial photography through the techniques of tradition, “meticulously hand-painting” his cans. He pretended to “cut all ties to craft and tradition,” but was the latest in the “craft obsessed” line of trompe l’oeil painters, curators of uncanny American reality like John Haberle.

By 1965 his Soup Cans, Marilyns, dollar bills and Jackie Kennedys had won Warhol an entry in Who’s Who—he claimed to descend from the von Warhols of Cleveland—and the keys to the Silver Factory on 47th Street, where he produced art, films and the early shows of Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground. Warhol, who fantasized that he was the “keeper of a male brothel,” ran a dark kingdom of “heavy drug use, sexual madness and violence.” Applying the theory of the “found object” to the “found person,” he collected “oddballs and freaks,” dubbed them “superstars,” exploited them in tediously obscene films, then ditched them into addiction and early death. In 1968 a thwarted hanger-on, Valerie Solanas, shot him. His life was saved by a doctor who opened his chest and manually massaged his heart.

The reborn Warhol dumped his old accomplices and devoted himself to “Business Art.” In the 1970s, instead of observing and reflecting the surfaces of consumption and celebrity as an outsider, he came to resemble his earlier image of Elizabeth Taylor, the famous person as “perfectly fungible commodity.” His last two decades are a catalog of vacuous screen-printing and joyless corruption, with Warhol proliferating inferior copies of his now-haggard trademarks: Interview magazine, which he founded and which foundered amid celebrity back-rubs; portraits of Chairman Mao and Mick Jagger; groveling to Imelda Marcos and the Shah of Iran; changing his style for “people portraits” of the merely rich; and daubing bodily fluids onto the canvas in a succession of ever-sillier wigs.

“You’re a killer of art, you’re a killer of beauty, and you’re even a killer of laughter,” Willem de Kooning raged at Warhol at a party in the 1960s. Warhol did make several killings. Mr. Gopnik calls them “true, important achievements,” but they now look more important than true. In the early ’60s, Warhol briefly balanced commerce and the avant-garde, photography and paint. Fame turned him into the real thing, a genuine fake. Business Art “reduced all of Warhol’s works to their lowest common denominator as merchandise,” Mr. Gopnik admits. Warhol descended with them, as the court pornographer of celebrity culture. In 1987 he died rich and lonely, at 58, from a heart attack after gall bladder surgery.

Mr. Gopnik compares Warhol’s hunt for lucrative “pet portraits in Kuwait” to Goya’s pursuit of commissions from Bourbon aristocrats, and likens Warhol to Gainsborough, who complained of “the People with their damn’d Faces” and wished he could paint landscapes. But Warhol’s idea of a “landscape,” as Mr. Gopnik indicates with laudable if not impressive detail, was “crotch shots of a porn star.” Placing Warhol with Picasso on “the top peak of Parnassus, beside Michelangelo and Rembrandt and their fellow geniuses” perhaps overrates an artist who couldn’t draw. Warhol’s real peers were the movie stars he loved: larger than life in image, but better at expressing other people’s ideas than contriving their own.

—Mr. Green is the Life & Arts editor of The Spectator (U.S.).

See this review online (behind a paywall) at https://www.wsj.com/articles/warhol-review-nothing-like-the-real-thing-11587136581

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sciforce · 5 years

Text

Artificial Intelligence for Mental Health

Image credit: unsplash.com

In recent years we have been hearing a lot about the potential of digital doctors and nurses: the example of AI becoming directly in charge of our welfare. Being a logical step after AI assisting in diagnostics and treatment path evaluation, digitalization of medical professionals is something that the broad public still isn’t completely comfortable with.

But what if the technology turns to the mental health and digitalizes not physicians, but psychologists? The implications all favor to introduction of AI into the sphere: one fourth of adult population is estimated to be affected by mental disorders. According to the World Health Organization, depression alone afflicts roughly 300 million people around the globe. The sad truth is not all of them can reach out for help. The obstacles are related to the still existing stigma in the society, the lack of therapists, the price of the therapy, and — in some countries — the qualification of the specialists.

It looks like AI offers multiple opportunities to help people maintain and improve their mental health. At present, the most prospective domains for application of AI techniques are computational psychiatry and the development of specialized chatbots that could render counseling and therapeutic services

Computational psychiatry

Broadly defined, computational psychiatry encompasses two approaches: data-driven and theory-driven. Data-driven approaches apply machine-learning methods to high-dimensional data to improve classification of disease, predict treatment outcomes or improve treatment selection. Theory-driven approaches use models that instantiate prior knowledge of such mechanisms at multiple levels of analysis and abstraction. Computational psychiatry combines multiple levels and types of computation with multiple types of data to improve understanding, diagnostics, prediction and treatment of mental disorders.

Image credit: shutterstock.com

Diagnostics

It is known that mental disorders are difficult to diagnose. At present, diagnosis is based on the display of symptoms categorized into mental health disorders by professionals and collected in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM). However, in many cases, with the current lack of biomarkers, and symptoms gathered through observations, such symptoms overlap among different diagnoses. Besides, humans are prone to inaccuracy and subjectivity: what is three in one person’s scale of anxiety might be seven for another.

One possible way for AI to assist or even replace human experts, as offered by the Virginia Tech group, is to combine the neuroimaging of fMRI with a trove of data, including survey responses, functional and structural MRIs, behavioral data, speech data from interviews, and psychological assessments. Another example is s Quartet Health, which screens patient medical histories and behavioral patterns to uncover undiagnosed mental health problems. To illustrate the concept, Quartet can flag possible anxiety based on whether someone has been repeatedly tested for a non-existent cardiac problem.

AI can help researchers discover physical symptoms of mental disorders and track within the body the effectiveness of various interventions. Besides, it might find new patterns in our social behaviors, or see where and when a certain therapeutic intervention is effective, providing a template for preventative mental health treatment.

Treatment assistance

Similar to somatic diseases, AI algorithms can be used to evaluate the treatment of mental disorders, predict the course of the disease and help select the optimal treatment path. Building statistical models by mining existing clinical trial data can enable prospective identification of patients who are likely to respond to a specific medicine of line of treatment.

On example of using machine learning is application of algorithms to predict the specific antidepressant with the best chance of success. While clinicians have no empirically validated mechanisms to assess whether a patient with depression will respond to a specific antidepressant, the treatment efficacy can be improved by matching patients to interventions.

Beyond analyzing fMRI images, computational psychiatry faces, ethical, spiritual, practical, and technological issues. For instance, the huge stores of intensely personal data necessary for the algorithms, immediately raise the issue of cybersecurity. At the same time, however, it is a barrier between the individual, the personal data, and the counselor that can help overcome patients’ fear of stigmatizing and the reluctance to turn to help.

Chatbot development

The idea of creating chatbots that would provide immediate counseling services was born as a response to the lack of therapists and the embarrassment of patients. It is believed that patients, who are often reluctant to reveal problems to a therapist they’ve never met before, let down their guard with AI-powered tools. Besides, the lower cost of AI treatments versus seeing a psychiatrist or psychologist let expand the coverage to a broader circle of people who require treatment.

Image credit: shutterstock.com

Virtual Counseling

The idea to use programs to simulate conversations between a therapist and a patient dates back to the 1960s when the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory designed ELIZA — the grandparent of modern chatbots. The present-day advances in natural language processing and the popularity of smartphones have to the foreground of mental health care.

For instance, Ginger.io’s app has video and text-based therapy and coaching sessions. Through analyzing past assessments and real-time data collected using mobile devices, the Ginger.io app can help specialists track patients’ progress, identify times of crisis, and develop individualized care plans.

Another example is Woebot, a Facebook-integrated computer program that aims to replicate conversations between a patient and a therapist. The digital health technology asks about your mood and thoughts, “listens” to how you are feeling, learns about you and offers evidence-based cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) tools. The first randomized control trial with Woebot showed that after just two weeks, participants experienced a significant reduction in depression and anxiety.

The next generation of chatbots will feature avatars who would be able to detect nonverbal cues and respond accordingly. Such virtual therapist named Ellie was launched by the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) to treat veterans experiencing depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome. Ellie functions using different algorithms that determine her questions, motions, and gestures. The program observes 66 points on the patient’s face and notes the patient’s rate of speech and the length of pauses. Ellie’s actions, motions, and speech mimic those of a real therapist just to the extent it does not feel too humanlike.

Preventing Social Isolation

Another problem that can be addressed by AI-driven chatbots is the extreme social isolation and difficulties building close relationships of people suffering from mental illnesses. Combined with social networks on the Internet, such chatbots can foster a sense of belonging and encourage positive communication. The National Center of Excellence in Youth Mental Health in Melbourne, Australia has launched the Moderate Online Social Therapy (MOST) project to help young people recovering from psychosis and depression. The technology creates a therapeutic environment where young people learn and interact, as well as serves as a platform to practice therapeutic techniques.

The recent developments hint that we will soon be facing the AI revolution in mental health — promising better access and better care at a cost that won’t break the bank. However, if AI builds models for mental health disorders, are we not also building a model for normality? And if so, who gets to define what “normal” is and will it be used as a tool or a cudgel? What we should remember when applying artificial intelligence to study our brains, is that we should be careful not to reduce personality to a combination of quantifiable factors and to demystify mental disorders without finding problems in every idiosyncrasy.

#mental health #health #artificial intelligence #chatbots #future

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