ID: Katara and sokka in swimgear. in the first image, sokka is searching for something in the water. his hair getting wet. katara leans over to him saying "don't you think, its time for a haircut?" in the second image sokka rose form the water, a dog-shark creature in hand, swinging his hair in Katara face splashing her. smugly he says "no <3". End ID
i know its winter! i know it likley snowed by now on the northern hemilsphere! but... on the southern side is summer time right???
so... its fine.... this is fine!!!
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!!! please do not use or repost this artwork without permission!!!
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how does a show released in 2024 fail harder in showcasing fully rounded female characters with flaws and strengths and rich personalities than a cartoon from the 2000s. why has television & film legitimately regressed across the years when it comes to showing women as human beings lmao
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while we’re on the topic, in the og series when Zuko snuck up on Katara and grabbed her wrists and said “I’ll save you from the pirates~” it changed my life forever as an 8 year old
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sorry not sorry but i'm actually completely fine with getting a version of katara where she wasn't parentified at eight years old (something that was lampshaded but never actually unpacked or presented as something she shouldn't have gone through, it was in fact not part of her arc to work through this in the original show and the proof of that is in the fact that she was shoved into an endgame 'romance' with someone for whom she'd expressed no romantic interest, even when prompted, and whom she spent a large portion of the show mothering). a katara who still had to deal with the trauma of her mother's death, but without having to become her own mother and her brother's mother on top of it in her place. katara whose struggle with waterbending is rooted in trauma, because her power is what her mother was killed for, her mother who died protecting her. katara who struggles to be taken seriously not because she's a silly girl with magic water but because her brother still sees her as his baby sister who needs him to be strong and she desperately wants him to lean on and trust her because that's what she needs to be able to grow.
and i like getting to see sokka actually behaving like a big brother! sokka whose responsibilities to his people and to his sister are treated seriously, rather than as fodder for jokes. sokka who is still a dork and a goofball and a pragmatist but underneath it all is that fear that he isn't actually good enough--that his family and his village don't actually need him, and who is he if his own sister is grown and doesn't need him anymore either? (sokka who is terrified of katara learning to bend not because he doesn't take her power seriously but because that's exactly what got their mother killed, and it's so, so obvious they've had that fight many times before.)
are they the exact same characters we got in the original cartoon? no, but i never expected them to be and frankly i didn't want them to be. something that every fanfic writer doing an AU or canon divergence has to grapple with is how would having these different experiences change the way this character behaves and interacts with and perceives the world. do i think the live action did it perfectly? no, but then the original show was far from perfect to begin with and i never expected perfection in this adaptation.
what i do think, though, is that i can see where certain creative decisions were made and the resulting ripple effect, i can understand the logic behind them--and i can enjoy the end result, because a lot of it is stuff i've rolled around in my brain in the past anyway. and what i really want to see is where things are headed in the future.
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Damn, the Ember Island Players were actually kind of radical, weren't they? The more I think about it, the more it feels like the only way it makes sense in-universe is if being Fire Nation propaganda wasn't the point of their play at all. Aside from a barely tacked on ending where Ozai kills Aang, the play is remarkably sympathetic to the Avatar and a bunch of enemies of the Fire Nation, even framing them as being heroes. Even at points in the story where theyre literally killing Fire Nation soldiers, the narrative still seems to be on their side; they're the underdogs, the relatable ones. Its true that the Fire Nation values strength, but still, you'd expect that in a propaganda play they would be portrayed as at least a little bit more sympathetic... And sure, to some extent the gaang's characters could be seen as defamatory caricutures (the slander on Iroh specifically was probably intentional), but that also might be due to the Players getting a lot of their information from the cabbage man, someone who actively hates the gaang and only ever really sees the worst of them. (And notably, that also means that the Players had worked with an Earth Kingdom merchant to produce the play.)
Mocking the gaang is also just clearly not the point of the play or what people are there for. Sokka's actor says that he's constantly being approached by fans; people genuinely love these characters. The gaang have built entire dedicated fanbases in the Fire Nation because of this play. Honestly, the fact that they're on a remote island is probably the only reason they're able to perform the play the way it is. I imagine it would get shut down pretty quickly on the mainland. Considering all the propaganda in the Fire Nation that we've seen so far, I wouldn't be surprised if the ending was only written that way because it's illegal to write a story where the Fire Lord doesnt win. The play reads less like propaganda and more like 'we're doing the bare minimum to get this story past the censors.'
I'm really curious about what it's like behind the scenes for the Ember Island Players. Are their shows just simple, shlocky entertainment, or could they also be deliberate political commentary? With no recording technology, a play is easier to slip under the radar than something like a book: it's impermanent, stays in one theatre, and performances can be easily tweaked if, say, Fire Nation royalty happens to come by. It's interesting to me that Ursa seemed to like them, while young Zuko had a disdain for them, saying they 'butchered' the story of Love Amongst the Dragons; in all likelihood the version of the story Zuko grew up with in the palace was heavily propaganda-filtered itself. Although, to be fair, they're arguably just not very good playwrights. When it comes to the characterization, I do think some of it only seems bad because we know what the actual characters are like, but a lot of it is just bad writing clearly meant for cheap entertainment. For example, they sexualize Katara quite a bit (and there's other, better analysis out there I've seen that examines how they fetishize her as a Water Tribe girl). And, of course, all of the characters are reduced to shallow and stereotypical comedy.
Still, I think they're worth commending for doing their research and telling a story about enemies of the state that's both sympathetic and surprisingly accurate to actual events, if not the characters' personalities, amidst the Fire Nation's rampant propaganda and misinformation. From the little amount of information about them we can extract from the show, they seem like honestly very interesting people. They're walking this tightrope line between being very close to the heart of the Fire Nation but also separate from it; between being cheap, inconsequential entertainment and being a source of actual news for Ember Island citizens; between telling the underdog story about a ragtag group of children and still trying to make it look like Fire Nation propaganda. I'm not trying to make any big argument on whether they were 'actually good people' or whatever, I just want to know more about them. I kind of wish we could see their production of Love Amongst the Dragons now...maybe I'll write something about them someday
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