#excellent mouth wheat boy characterization

[ultranos]

jet for character ask game please!! I need some good takes on mouth wheat boy

Your timing is hilarious because I’ve been hammering out Jet’s arc in Book 2 of salt & ashes for the past week.

Why I like them

I admit I was pretty neutral on him when I first watched the show back in the day. Now, after learning a lot, I see him as this hugely tragic character. He’s a teenage boy who’s hurt and yet he still fights for other people. He has every reason to just throw his hands up and live only for himself, but instead he watches out for others like him and younger than him.

He’s flawed. He’s a teenage boy with PTSD. And yet he still has found a way to care so much.

Why I don’t

I dislike the entire plan of “let’s flood the town that’s got a lot of Fire Nation people living in it”. I can understand how he got there, and I can understand his logic. And violent resistance to an occupying force does make sense.

So I think I hate that the universe made him think he had to make those choices and made him have to sell off bits of his soul. I wish he’d had a different target, so he wasn’t so easily villified. As I said, sometimes violent resistance is the answer. I just wish he could have had a better choice of targets to show that.

Favorite episode (scene if movie)

I like his Ba Sing Se arc, before getting Dai LI’ed.

Favorite season/movie

s2 Jet, the one who’s a little more tired of fighting, a little wiser, and has a lot more to lose is more interesting.

Favorite line

I have totally blanked on excellent Jet lines.

Favorite outfit

I actually like how his default outfit is a mishmash of cultures. It speaks to how he has to live, scavenging off of scraps. And it also fits in with the head canon I have, which I’ll explain in a sec.

OTP

Jet/an actual happy ending. Or at least Jet/a better ending.

Brotp

Him and the rest of the Freedom Fighters are just excellent all around.

Head Canon

So, I started reading Jet as part of a non-mainstream Earth Kingdom culture, but of one that has been colonized and subjugated over and over for more than a thousand years. Basically, if the Earth Kingdom is (Song) China, Jet is non-Han Vietnamese, as Vietnam has had a long history of being colonized and its indigenous population shoved to the side.

This also has the interesting side effect of dropping a parallel between Jet’s home village and the villages firebombed by the US during the Vietnam War.

So Jet is an amalgamation of cultures to start with, and has the generational trauma of fighting to see his own culture survive wave after wave of settlers. He’s a patchwork of cultures and he’s clinging to whatever scraps he can.

Unpopular opinion

I hate seeing Jet treated as a villain in fandom and treated as someone on the same level as Ozai or Zhao in fics. Like...stop with the “abusive” Jet characterization. It’s an annoyingly bad take.

(I admit a lot of my change in feelings about Jet has been due to learning more history of colonized areas and by listening to friends who have gotten highly involved in activist work. It’s after internalizing these lessons that the above take has become downright offensive.)

A wish

I just wish he’d gotten a better narrative arc in canon. So I guess I have to go fix that in salt & ashes.

An oh-god-please-dont-ever-happen

Unfortunately, the answer here would have been “what happened in canon”: dying alone and basically forgotten by history, having not actually made much of a difference.

5 words to best describe them

traumatized justice-seeking rabble-rousing activist boy

My nickname for them

“wheat boy” is pretty good.

#nos answers things #mariehuanna