#why are their awful awful eyes LIKE THAT | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

spiderlandry · 8 months

Text

stay — jake sully

Description: Jake reflects on a love from his past life.

Pairing: Past Human!Jake Sully x F!Reader, Jake Sully x Neytiri

Warnings/Tags: angst, kind of fluff, death mention (tom sully), i dont know anymore it’s just kinda bittersweet

Word Count: 1.3k

Author’s Note: it’s jake’s birthday today (august 24) !!! so im posting two jake fics :] the other one is fluff i promise

PRESENT

Guilt has to be some type of chronic pain, Jake thinks. It sits in his ribcage beside his heart like a heavy stone, only alleviated by the reminder that he has a life now and the past is long gone. But the problem is that it would always haunt him. He’s a sinner, he has to pay.

Being with Neytiri makes him feel alive, it really does. He loves her. But there’s a place in his heart only occupied by one person right next to Neytiri’s place—you.

You, who was the first to ever see him. The first to ever give him a taste of what it was like to love and be loved. When he was learning the words oel ngati kameie, his point of reference was you. Your heart that he so diligently worked to earn, something you shared that he didn’t deserve. Don’t get him wrong, he’s sure you’re still on your feet. Hell, you probably found someone better. He hopes you have and that you’ve also realized that one’s heart can belong to two, just like his.

He wonders sometimes if you know his heart still belongs to you.

2146

“Pretty lady,” Jake greeted you as he wheeled himself into the pub. This wasn’t his usual place, but he’d come here more regularly all because of one person: you. “How’s business tonight?”

“Better now that you’re here, Sully.” You flashed him a cheshire grin from behind the bar, pouring him the usual.

You were the pretty bartender that caught his eye, months ago. It wasn’t a rare occurrence for him to observe beautiful women from afar, but you were different. Though you were attractive, it was one particular conversation that drew him completely to you, where you spoke of your own dreams as a scientist even in the quickly deteriorating shithole that was the city you’d both considered home. It gave him something. It gave him hope. Just a sliver.

He watched you from the corner of the room while you did your job.

He waited for you until the end of your shift, careful not to drink too much so he can remember the next morning. To remember how you grinned at him when you opened the door to your apartment, and to spend the next few hours kissing him stupid.

PRESENT

There’s nothing like the date nights with Neytiri. It’s freedom injected into his veins. They fly together, circling the floating mountains and laughing as they chased each other. The world glitters and glows around them, and the world falls away.

By the end of the night, he cages her inside his arms, protection enough for the both of them—he protects himself by shielding her.

And there’s a flash—just a second—of his past life.

It happens. Rarely, but it happens. Sometimes Neytiri would run her fingers through his hair just right, or she would shove him playfully with such a precise force that it matches a memory buried deep under the grounds of the graveyard inside his mind where he mourned his other life, and along with it, you. For one moment, he’s back in a human body, with your soul still there with him, somehow.

He only falters for a single frame, but it’s enough for her to notice. She doesn’t pry in the hopes he’ll tell her someday. He’s got a type—Neytiri is beautiful and patient, just like you.

2148

His apartment gathered dust while he spent all of his time at your place. He’d never dare utter the word out loud, but it was becoming home for him. When you had opening shift at the bar, he awoke to gentle lips on his forehead and a promise to come home later.

Promise. Jake didn’t have much of it in his life. But once again, you reignited a sense of belonging that he once had.

There was no other place for him to be.

At least until those two agents showed up at the door and demanded he go with them. He was shown his twin’s dead body, and it was then he saw the other side of the coin. That could have been him. It should have been him, technically. Tom was always the better one.

Jake was proposed with a choice.

It was nighttime when he got to you, and you were already there waiting for him with a worried expression. There was no grieving, but there was guilt.

You held him for hours in silence after he told you what happened.

In the morning, he further explained to you what those agents told him, and you listened patiently—intently—without interruption. Afterward, you smiled solemnly. Perhaps you’d already known his choice even before he did.

For a long time, you knew that Jake felt lost. No sense of purpose, he told you. And while you were a pillar of stability for him, his heart sought for an objective. You had your studies, your aspirations. He didn’t have any goal to work toward. You, being you, recognized his craving for something more.

“If you go, I won’t hold it against you.” You said, preparing breakfast at the crack of dawn. There was only sleeplessness for both of you.

“But?” He asked.

“But what, Jake?” You glanced at him, unable to make eye contact for longer. “What do you want me to say?”

“If you tell me to stay, I will.”

“We both know I’m not doing that,” You sighed. That was the thing, you knew him too well. “Do you want me to tell you to stay?”

His silence said it all.

“Look,” despite your nerves, you finally faced him. Courage he saw in your eyes. “I love you. There’s nothing that’ll change that. I don’t want you to go, but I’ll never tell you to stay.”

“That’s nonsense.”

And despite the edge in his voice, you smiled. “This would be good for you,” you caressed his jaw. “You’ll come back. It’s not forever.”

He rested his head against your middle as you ran your fingers through his hair soothingly, scratching at the scalp.

“I’ll come back, I promise.” He whispered.

“I don’t doubt that, Jake.”

He intended to keep that promise.

PRESENT

He would never stop thanking you for not telling him to stay. If you didn’t, he wouldn’t have his family. But he promised to come back, and that’s where the guilt grows tenfold.

The guilt doesn’t end. He doesn’t really expect it to.

With a strong heart, he prepares himself to tell Neytiri about you.

In the back of her mind, she likely knew there was already someone before her. By making the bond, they share everything, and with a haze, she felt Jake’s love being shared with another. She sensed his hesitance to get close to her during training.

He tells her about finding purpose, about how he fought for you, that everything he did—even as Toruk Makto—was all so he can make you proud.

He exhausts himself telling endless stories of your adventures together on Earth, and regardless of her distaste with sky people, there is no greater joy for her than hearing him share this part of his life. It means the secret would no longer plague him.

Don’t get him wrong, he moved on long ago. Found happiness without you. But that does not mean he stopped loving you; it’s a part of him as much as his bond with Neytiri.

Someday, he hopes to pass onto his children the kind of bravery he gained from being with you. To be unapologetically courageous—to fight for want you want. When they’re older, there may be a circumstance where he can give advice from a lesson he learned from you. One of which being that there’s more love in one’s heart than they think.

He lounges with Neytiri in a secluded part of the mountains, holding her, when he spots a new light in the sky. A light that, unbeknownst to him, contains you.

#idk why i ended it like that lol #i feel like theres potential for this to be a series #like maybe reader signed on as a scientist to keep an eye on jake #after humans lose the war she ends up signing with the rda to go to pandora #then i would turn it into a tsu’tey fic where she finds love after jake aw #jake sully x reader #jake sully #avatar #avatar twow #avatar the way of water #avatar the way of water x reader #atwow #atwow x reader #jake sully angst

175 notes · View notes

kaladinkholins · 3 months

Text

i know I've mentioned my interpretation of mizu's gender a million times on here but i don't think i ever fully elaborated on it.

so on that note i just wanna ramble about that for a bit. basically, it's my reading of the show that mizu is nonbinary, so let me dig into that.

putting the rest under the cut because it ended being pretty long lol. also here have a cute mizu pic of her being happy and most at ease with herself, symbolised by her letting her hair down. <3 ok let's proceed.

okay note that nonbinary is an umbrella term, and applies to a vast range of gender identities, but it's my personal preference to use it as is, simply because i'm not a fan of microlabels. more power to you if you are though, but anyway.

essentially when i refer to mizu as nonbinary it means that i interpret mizu as a woman, but not ONLY a woman. not strictly a woman. she is also a man. she is also neither of these things, she is something in between, while at the same time she is none of these at all. i've said as much many times, but i just don't want people to think that by nonbinary it inherently means a "third androgynous gender" that essentially turns the gender binary into a gender trinary. not only is that going against what the term nonbinary was crafted for (to go against rigid boxes and categorisation of gender identities), but also, not all nonbinary people fall under that category or definition, and that's definitely not the way i interpret mizu.

also, before anyone fights me on this, let me clarify further that gender means something different to everyone. it's not your biological sex or physical characteristics. but at the same time, gender is not mere presentation. you can be a trans woman and still present masculine—either because you're closeted and forced to, or because you just want to—and either way, that doesn't take away from your identity as a woman. same goes for trans men. if you're a trans man but you wear skirts and don't bind or don't get top surgery, that doesn't make you any less of a man. because gender non-conformity exists, and does not only apply to cis people! some lesbians are nonbinary and prefer using he/him pronouns while dressing masculinely, but that doesn't mean they're a man, or that they're any less of a lesbian. neither does this mean that they're a cis woman.

the thing about queer identities in general is that, like i said, they mean something different to everyone, because how you identify—regardless of your biological attributes and fashion or pronouns—is an extremely personal experience. so a nonbinary person and a gnc cis woman's experiences might have plenty of overlap, but what distinguishes between the two is up to the individual. there's no set requirements to distinguish you as one or the other, but it's up to you to decide what you identify as, based on what you feel. either way, by simply identifying yourself as anything under the LGBTQ+ umbrella, you are already communicating to the world that you are not what a conservative, cisheteronormative society wants you to be.

which is why i find all this queer infighting on labels to be so ridiculous. because we're all fighting the same fight; the common enemy is a societal structure that divides us into set roles and expectations purely based on our biological parts. that's why biological essentialism in the queer community is a fucking disease. because by arguing that women are inherently weak and fragile and soft and gentle and must be protected from evil ugly men, while men are inherently strong and angry and violent and exploitative of women, these people are advocating for the same fucked up system that marginalises and abuses women as well as effeminate and/or gay men.

anyway. i'm going on a tangent. this was meant to be a blue eye samurai post. so yeah back to that— the point i'm trying to make is that there's no one way to identify as anything, and everyone views gender in a specific way.

so with that being said, yes you can definitely interpret mizu as a gnc cis woman and that's a totally valid reading. however, interpreting her as nonbinary or transmasc also doesn't take away from her experiences with misogyny and female oppression, because nonbinary and transmasc folks also experience these things.

me, personally, i view her as nonbinary but not necessarily or always transmasc because i still believe femininity and womanhood is an inherent part of who mizu is. for example, from what we've seen, she does not like binding. it does not give her gender euphoria, but is instead very uncomfortable for her both physically and mentally, and represents her suppressing her true self. which is why when she "invites the whole" of herself, she stands completely bare in front of the fire, breasts unbound and hair untied. when she is on the ship heading to a new land in the ending scene, she is no longer hiding her neck and the lack of an adam's apple. we can thus infer that mizu does not have body dysmorphia. she is, in fact, comfortable in her body, and relies on it extremely, because her body is a weapon. instead, what mizu hates about herself is her face—her blue eyes. she hates herself for her hybridised identity, hates herself for being a racial Other. hates that she has no home in her homeland. these are not queer or feminist themes, but postcolonial ones.*

* and as a tiny aside on this subject, i really do wish more of the fandom discussion would talk about this more. it's just such an essential part to reading her character. like someone who's read homi k bhabha's location of culture and has watched this show, PLEASE talk to me so we can ramble all about how the show is all about home and alienation from community. please. okay anyway—

nevertheless, queer and feminist themes (which are not mutually exclusive by the way!) are still prevalent in her story, though they are not the main issue that she is struggling with. but she does struggle with it to some extent, and we see this especially during her marriage with mikio, where we see her struggle in women's domestic spaces.

on the other hand, though, she finds no trouble or discomfort in being a man or being around other men—even naked ones—and does not seem stifled by living as one, does not seem all that bothered or uncomfortable navigating through men's spaces. contrast this to something like disney's mulan (1998), where we do see mulan struggle in navigating through men's spaces, as she feels uncomfortable being around so many men, always feeling like she doesn't belong and that she's inherently different from them. mizu has no such experiences like this, as her very personality and approach to life is what can be categorised as typically "masculine". she is straightforward and blunt. her first meeting with mikio, she tells him straight to his face that he's old while frowning and raising a brow at him. she approaches problems with her muscles and fists (or swords), rather than with her words or mind. compare this with mulan, who, while well-trained by the end of the movie, still uses her sharp wits rather than brute strength. this is a typically "feminine" approach. it's also the approach akemi relies on throughout the show—through her intelligence and persuasive tongue, she navigates the brothel with ease. mizu, in contrast to someone like mulan and akemi, struggles with womanhood and femininity, and feels detached from it.

thus, in my opinion, mizu is not simply a man, nor is she simply a woman. she is both. man and woman. masculine and feminine. she has to accept both, rather than suppress one or the other. her name means water. fluid.

as a side note, while i do believe mizu is nonbinary, i also primarily use she/her pronouns but this is a personal preference. i find it's easier, plus it's what the creators use, and because, in general, being nonbinary simply doesn't necessitate the use of they/them pronouns. nonbinary is not just a third gender. it's about breaking the binary, in any which way, and that's exactly what mizu does.

also, i'd also like to mention that one of show's head of story even referred to her with the term "nonbinary", rather than simply "androgynous" (see pic below). and it's possible this could be a slip up on his part, in which he believes the terms are interchangeable (they're not btw), but regardless i find it a very interesting word choice, and one that supports my stance.

so anyway yeah that's my incredibly long rambling post.

TL;DR nonbinary mizu rights 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻 congrats if you reached the end of this btw. also ily. unless you're a TERF in which case fuck off. ok i'm done.

#mizu blue eye samurai #mizu bes #blue eye samurai #blue eye samurai meta #sorry if this is redundant btw i just cant stop thinking thoughts :3 #btw i am a mixed* southeast asian who is also nonbinary. just in case that's important context #by mixed* i mean i'm asian+asian but diff ethnicities lol. i dont have a white bone in my body god bless<3 #my whiteness is purely learned thru cultural osmosis + bcs my parents taught me english as a first language (boooo 🍅🍅🍅)#also i live in the global south so i think EYE know a thing or two about being gnc in a society of rigid awful gender roles‼️#so likeee i think its ridiculous that its an either-or thing #mizu can be nonbinary while still being a woman of colour ¯\_(ツ)_/¯#also ummm as much as i love queer themes and gay people i wish people would talk more about the racial otherness / community aspect #as mentioned in the post above #you don't need to read bhabha's whole book btw but just take a look at some of his ideas and you'll get what im talking about #like the fact that the fandom mostly ignores those themes in the story makes me feel like :( :/#cuz to me THATS the thing that spoke to me most and its a shame that its just not talked about enough #i mean i know why thats likely the case. but still.#whoops im rambling again 🤪#fandom.rtf #shut up haydar #meta dissertations.pdf

60 notes · View notes