#piandao

[comradekatara]

ppl who are like “there’s no way sokka’s art skills would improve, he’s ontologically bad at art” ummmm. dude. you realize that this is the mary sue of hobbies, right? this guy could out-westley westley. he would develop an immunity to iocane powder in less than a week because he’s just that prodigious. he became a kyoshi warrior who could best their leader in a matter of hours, and this was the first time he had ever trained in his life with an actual teacher and opponent. he mastered the sword in one day, if we’re to take piandao’s word for it (and considering his name is literally sword, he is clearly an expert). sokka looked at the rough schematics for hot air balloons after the eminent inventor in the world had spent who knows how long not able to get his idea to actually work like “uhhh…. this may sound obvious, but have you tried a lid???” he has borderline supernatural aim with a boomerang. he was dropped into a haiku battle knowing nothing about the form, and not only beat the leader of ba sing se’s premier haiku club, but also chose, completely unnecessarily, to make each verse rhyme. if he actually sat down and practiced drawing, maybe with some instruction from a trained artist, or easier beginner’s materials than ink and a brush (you’ve all seen my art, and I still cannot paint with ink and a brush), I think sokka would easily be able to produce a work on par with (if not superior to) the mona lisa by the following morning.

#sokka #suki #piandao #the mechanist #synthesis #(bc princess bride reference) #(he is sooo westley coded tho. and not just because he’s an annoying smug asshole. but that is part of it) #‘sokka cant draw’ factoid actually statistical error. sokka can do everything in the world except bend and love himself

[narrativelysignificantturtleduck]

zuko has a daddy-issues desire to impress piandao and prove his skills so whenever he's at piandao's and he loses spars to sokka (since WHEN was sokka so distractingly handsome???) he feels terrible. piandao must be so disappointed in him! little does he know that it's actually making piandao like him more. he's watching zuko stumble over himself like awww i've been there :) i love my awkward gay son

#nina's personal log #zukka #piandao

[ironinkpen]

my favorite piece of avatar lore i’ve ever learned is that piandao apparently also deserted the Fire Nation military, but instead of going on the run he just. went back the Fire Nation. built a fucking mansion about it. and then when the army sent 100 guys to arrest him, he kicked the shit out of them so hard they just fucked off forever.

jeong jeong is out there in a hut in the woods living his most bitter life meanwhile piandao is sitting in his palatial estate sipping tea, fully daring the fire lord to fuck around and find out. bad bitch behavior

#a:tla #atla #piandao #he RADIATED bde every time he was on screen so this makes total sense #but also makes jeong jeong SO much funnier as a character lmao

[jasminedragonart]

#Atla #tarot #avatar jet #atla ty lee #sokka avatar #avatar zuko #piandao #avatar suki

[adriancatrin]

was about to fall sleep and then this came to me

#now i’m wide awake #sokka #zukka #piandao #idfk

[ranilla-bean]

culture tips for writing asian settings: calligraphy (pt ii)

in my last post i talked about calligraphy more generally, but here i want to talk about the calligraphy from atla. all of the calligraphy from the show is written by dr siu-leung lee and i'll be using the artbook as my reference.

if you're a writer or artist approaching written chinese, you can think about how script and handwriting might tell us something about a character. dr lee certainly did, and he even tailored writing styles to who he thought might've been writing that text: "If it were a highly cultured royal attendant, he would use a refined, elegant style, but if it were a low-level clerk, he would use a more pedestrian handwriting style."

first thing: modern standard chinese coming out of mainland china uses simplified chinese. this system was developed in the mid-20th century, so it's pretty anachronistic to use this for atla. instead, you should be using traditional chinese as dr lee does (which is still used in hong kong, taiwan, and many diasporic communities). i usually use google translate to switch between the systems.

note the use of simplified 门 (door) instead of the traditional 門 from the aang's unfreezing day comic.

next i'm going to take aang's wanted poster as an example of three different chinese scripts we see in the show. the "title" is in clerical script, the body of the text is in regular script, and the seal is in seal script.

regular script is the standard way you'd learn how to write chinese nowadays. you can see (as i mentioned in part i) how the text is meant to be read up -> down, then right -> left.

clerical script is characterised by fairly compact shapes and a kind of "roundness", and was developed in the late warring states period. this is the script used for the chinese title of the show! in the context of atla, it implies to me that the writer has more specialised calligraphic training than the average person (who, if they can write, would be using regular script). you can compare the difference in styles for the same words between clerical (L) and regular (R):

seal script is the most archaic form of chinese on display; this one wouldn't have been written by the calligrapher, but carved into a seal by a craftsperson and then stamped onto the page.

what's also really interesting is dr lee implies a difference in script between the nations. some of the characters used to write water tribe-related concepts:

this is an adapted form of oracle bone script, the one of the earliest forms of chinese writing. this fascinated me because this script was—as the name suggests—written on bone, and perhaps reflects something about the material of what the water tribes were using to write. (you can input modern characters into this website to see examples of their older forms.)

finally, some cool differences in handwriting! this is from the fire day festival poster:

this uses regular script, but in contrast to the excerpt we saw before, the formation of the characters is more haphazard (excitable?). it's also written left -> right! this suggests to us the writer is a commoner, as opposed to a royal scribe.

these are some things you can keep in mind when you're writing or drawing in this universe—while you're probably writing in english, the characters would be steeped in the writing systems we've been talking about. if a character's sending a letter, what might the recipient notice about the handwriting? what does it tell them about their social status or education? could the shape of the letters signal something about where they come from, i.e. water tribe characters write a more curvy script?

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#atla #atla culture #atla meta #avatar the last airbender #piandao #asian culture tips #chinese culture

[sockfus]

currently thinking abt when sokka and piandao hug before sozins comet...

#I LOVE THEM SO MUCH. this is such an unexplored bond but its honestly so sweet #i am crying.... babies... #sokka #piandao #atla #sophia.txt #avatar the last airbender

[dyingroses]

Avatar: The Last Airbender + text posts

#princess azula #Azula #tyzula #ty lee x azula #ty lee avatar #ty lee #atla #atlaedit #avataredit #avatar #avatar: tla #avatar the last airbender #avatar: the last airbender #sokka atla #sokka #piandao #uncle iroh #prince zuko #Zuko #zutara #katara #katara avatar #katara atla #toph beiphong #toph #toph beifong #book 1 water #book 1: water #book 2 earth #book 2: earth

[mugentakeda]

piandao comm for @@queendollophead-ao3 <333

#the most handsome of all time..... #piandao #atla #avatar the last airbender #alicias art

[sifu-kisu]

OK;

So I gave the Netflix, avatar the last Airbender a second try. I took off my judgment goggles and looked at it as a brand new work of fiction. Now mind you my opinion means nothing, but I do have a certain level of emotional attachment to this intellectual property.

The live action show is very pretty, I love the costumes and I actually enjoy some of the characters. Keep in mind I’m only 20 minutes into the second episode. I’m a little busy these days. But I plan to make some time. I took down my original post where I called the show trash so that I could collect more data for my opinion.

Some grumbles;

The special effects are kind of wonky in places. I don’t care for Appa‘s hair. 😁

Some of the fight scenes actually have good kung fu in them. Hats off to the choreographer. However the connected CGI animations of the characters performing bending imho lack the basic essences of bending. The Airbender staff fighting had no “bending” at all.

The work we did on the original show came from a certain type of process, and none of those processes seem to exist in this current offering from Netflix…

I think if Bryan and Mike had stuck around on the project you may have seen some differences, but we will never know will we?

I may write more about this after I’ve seen the entire affair. I’m still a little upset about what NF did to cowboy bebop. Both of these shows had a certain “soul“ in the original animations, but that is one more element missing in these current efforts.Heck I know people that worked on NFATLAB that won’t even watch it.

In closing someone brought to my attention that some clown on Reddit called me an asshole.

Meh, I may very well be.

But your opinions are just like assholes, everybody’s got one 😜

(((i’ve had a Reddit account since 2008))

🙃

#sifu kisu #lok #atlab #northern shaolim #northern shaolin #atlab lok #jian #kung fu #piandao #baguazhang

[comradekatara]

My friend revealed that she ships Hakoda and Piandao because they’re both dilfs and both extremely important to Sokka. I think Piandao would beat Hakoda with the pommel of his least favorite sword for giving Sokka a complex. Thoughts?

omg okay the thought of them interacting is actually so juicy. i bet piandao thinks hakoda is an evil asshole who was incredibly cruel to sokka if not straight up abusive. meanwhile hakoda is like “who tf is this bougie colonizer who thinks he knows my son better than i do…” like piandao doesn’t yell, he just kind of condescendingly berates in an infuriatingly calm tone, but when he meets hakoda he is immediately like “your son is a genius and a prodigy and he’s the greatest swordsman i’ve ever known and he has the soul of an artist and the heart of a lionturtle and the mind of a visionary and he’s perfect actually” and hakoda is just like “oh. wow. yeah. okay. glad we agree!” and piandao is just like “UMMMMM. WHAT.” and he’d be sooo fucking confused because everything hakoda says about sokka is so loving and proud and kind and all he does is praise him effusively to the point that piandao is like “does he know he also has another child…?” but piandao KNOWS that this man gave him a complex (because !!! he did!!!) so he’s just like “how is any of this possible….” all because he doesn’t understand the psychopathology of the colonized subject. smh

#catgirl-behavioral-therapy #asks #piandao #hakoda #sokka #piandao&sokka #hakoda&sokka #</3

[narrativelysignificantturtleduck]

i'll defend "sokka's master" from the filler allegations because i think episodes that give us deeper insight into characters without moving the plot along are actually essential to making a show good and the constant tightening of tv show seasons means that we're losing those episodes and getting worse stories as a result

also stopping the plot in its tracks so a beautiful dilf can tell the viewers that sokka is the coolest person ever is the most valid creative choice you could possibly make

#nina's personal log #sokka #piandao

[bestepisode]

Vote for the second half of the season here!

Propaganda is encouraged!

Voting has closed on this round. Vote on the next poll here!

#atla #avatar the last airbender #aang #katara #sokka #zuko #hakoda #piandao #atla mai #ty lee #princess azula #azula #polls #poll tournament #atla hama #toph beifong

[jasminedragonart]

redoing the tarot series with 1 colour palette so it looks cohesive.

enjoy Piandao as the king of swords

#Tarot #Atla #piandao

[3cosmicfrogs]

The episode Sokka's Master is unrealistic because if I, a fellow bisexual, was face-to-face with Piandaddy like Sokka was I would not be able to string together two coherent words let alone study the blade

#sokka's master #atla #piandao #more like #piandilf

[ranilla-bean]

culture tips for writing asian settings: calligraphy (pt i)

i love chinese calligraphy, to me it is just so gorgeous and i've dedicated a few scenes of my own fics to it, so here are just a few quick 'n' dirty calligraphy tips:

the calligraphy scene in sokka's master (illustrated by korean animators!) is a pretty good depiction tbh. you write using a brush (the brushes can be hung up on a stand too)—it can be jarring to see fics mention quills or parchment. one excellent detail from the show is that sokka, who seems left-handed, has to write with his right hand—the left hand holds the sleeve out of the way. the ink is not liquid/bottled, but is in a solid stick form and has to be ground on an inkstone mixed with water

traditionally, chinese text is written downwards, and goes from right to left across the page.

as with any other form of calligraphy, chinese calligraphy emphasises beauty of form over legibility—in the same way you wouldn't really consider times new roman font 'calligraphy'. there are different types of script in chinese, and for someone like piandao to master them is a reflection of his education and gentility. the semi-cursive below i see quite commonly in calligraphy:

then you might have something like the cursive below is quite technical but seriously hard to read

contrast that with something like this seal script, harking back to an older era of chinese script:

any calligrapher worth their salt will be putting their stamp on the work, quite literally! name seals, also called "chops", are carved out of stone; ink it up with cinnabar paste and stamp it onto your artwork to get that iconic red signature. (i got one made a couple of years ago and there's a trick to stamping: breathe on the stamp surface after dipping in the paste to warm up the pigment, and when stamping put some circular pressure on the stone to get the print to come out evenly)

i'm going to do a second part focusing a bit more on scripts from the atla world, so keep your eyes peeled...

check out:

some more calligraphy examples from singapore's national gallery

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#atla #atla culture #atla meta #avatar the last airbender #piandao #sokka #asian culture tips #some of the most beautiful calligraphy i saw at singapore's national art gallery #a really cool contemporary twist on the form #i took photos but my old lens was soooo bad so i don't have the specific ones i really liked but do check the link out <3