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Look on paper I like the idea of romantic manic pixie dream girl Ted slowly showing the cynical independent cool girl Robin to believe in love, but like, Robin sometimes acts like she has no feelings for Ted. Like, when she even showed she had feelings for him it seemed to come out of nowhere, and it seems like she's forcing herself to like him because he kept asking her and she doesn't want to reject her friend she cares about. Like, maybe it will change in the later seasons, but as of early season 2 she doesn't seem to actually have feelings for him. And ted's feelings? He's not actually in love with her. He loves the idea of her that he made up in his head. The idea was made when he first met her, and he hasn't let go of that idea. The idea of Robin and the real Robin are in conflict to Ted. On the one hand he sees his friend, on the other hand he sees the image of her he created in his mind and he goes to that because he can't let her go. I know the show won't go this route because I have a general understanding of what happens, but it would have been better writing if they realized the characters realized they were forcing their relationship and just became friends. There was literally a whole episode comparing Ted and robins relationship to ted's divorced parents. Stop beating the dead horse of Ted x robin. Its excruciating. What a good message it would send if they dropped the romance.

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theyre best buddies. anyways i have a redbubble now

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my favorite trope is when someone believes they’re hard to love and someone who loves them like it’s breathing.

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this right here is the most brutal moment in all of simpsons history. not even joking.

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I previously did an artwork where Zuko is bitting Katara’s cheeks (link) and here’s his thought process 💜

As for my zkw entries I promise I’m working on this, I just wanted to draw this to relieve me of my stress today 🥲

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I know I've said this before but like...you guys know fictional characters don't cease to exist if they're not constantly getting new canon content, right?

You know you can still love them and play with them in head canons or fic or the little stories you tell yourself as you're falling asleep at night?

It's perfectly understandable to want to see certain content in canon and to be sad when some or all canon content ends, but I just think it's important to remember that you haven't lost the characters. They haven't been taken away from you.

The beautiful thing about fiction is that you're part of it. They live through you.

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this is literally the only logical progression for their dynamic

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PERCY JACKSON AND THE OLYMPIANS | S01E05

It doesn’t have to be a thing, you know, that you hugged me.

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[ID: A digital drawing of the characters Aang and Zuko from Avatar: the Last Airbender. Zuko has his haircut from Season 1. Aang is hugging him from the side excitedly. Zuko is looking down at Aang, confused by the hug, with his arms hanging in the air as if he has no idea what to do with them. Aang is exclaiming, “We’re BFFs now, Zuko!” There’s an arrow pointing to text that clarifies that BFFs stands for, “Bald Friends Forever.” End ID] 

au that zuko doesn’t get a haircut and/or speedruns his redemption arc

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favorite outfits: bela malhotra (season 1)

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I'm very curious to hear your take on Zuko as a disabled character? All of your analyses of disability in fiction have been very interesting to read so far, thank you for sharing your thoughts/expertise.

Thank you!  Follow-on from this post about Toph.

What I mean by saying Zuko is a disabled character: the social model of disability basically states that disability is any bodily difference that gets problematized and/or treated as abnormal by society.  This definition includes facial differences, AKA any scarring, skin marking, and so on that leads to staring by nondisabled society or other forms of stigma based on the person’s appearance.  Part of the reason for this inclusion is about complicating the disabled-nondisabled dichotomy; facial difference and facial scarring are identities within that framework.  Part of the reason comes from the U.S.’s history of Ugly Laws, which literally made it illegal for people with facial differences to appear in public in some cities as late as 1974.  Part of it is the huge overlap between ableism (giving more privileges to the nondisabled) and lookism (giving more privileges to the normatively beautiful).

Avatar: The Last Airbender has some high-quality anti-ableism in showing Zuko’s story, including how other characters respond to Zuko and how Zuko’s appearance informs but does not define his characterization.

One of the ways this comes out is by turning nondisabled characters’ gaze back on them:

In “The Serpent’s Pass,” Jet says to Zuko “You know, as soon as I saw your scar, I knew exactly who you were…” and then goes on to describe his almost hilariously wrong conclusion that Zuko’s a Freedom Fighter waiting to happen because Zuko’s village was presumably also destroyed by the Fire Nation.  We get to see Zuko’s moment of terror that he actually has been recognized turn into incredulity as he then gets invited to join a guerrilla force opposing everything he (currently) stands for.  Jet looks stupid for jumping to conclusions based on appearances.

In both “Zuko Alone” and “The Cave of Two Lovers,” that same jumping-to-conclusions works in Zuko’s favor, because both Song’s mother and Li’s parents assume that anyone with a burn scar must be a veteran of the fight against the Fire Nation.  Again, the emphasis is on the fact that the people judging Zuko based on his appearance are wrong.

In “The Chase,” Azula becomes the only person we ever see mock Zuko for his appearance, when she covers her own left eye to draw out the “family resemblance” for Aang.  The moment gets a horrified reaction out of Aang — Zuko’s his enemy, but Aang also realizes that this is a nasty thing to do — and helps to establish Azula as not just a villain, but a sadistic one.

In “The Beach,” Zuko blows up at Ty Lee for commenting that stress can cause breakouts.  His response is unnecessarily mean-spirited, but it also draws attention to the relative level of privilege (the biggest skin problem she has to worry about is acne) that informed her careless comment.

In “Crossroads of Destiny,” Zuko assumes that, when Katara calls him “the face of the enemy,” it’s a way of calling him frightening to look at — and it’s Katara who looks like a jerk for implying it, even accidentally.

The other big way that this comes out is clapping back at the implied treatment of disability as demanding explanation, or the “But why are you like this?” form of ableism:

The show makes it clear that Zuko does not owe anyone — not Song, not Li, not Jet, not his crew, not his friends — an explanation for why he looks the way he does.  None of the Gaang ever ask Zuko what happened, and the few characters who do (Li, Song, Lieutenant Jee) don’t end up looking good when they do so.

“The Cave of Two Lovers” clearly underlines the show’s theme of “my body, my business” in the scene where Song tries to touch Zuko’s face.  The tone (including literal musical tones) signals that Song is being inappropriate and invasive.  It’s understandable that she wants to make a connection, but it’s also emphatically not okay to touch body parts of strangers one has not received permission to touch.

To be clear, taking people’s ostrich-horses is also not okay, Zuko, but Baby’s First Grand Theft Auto helps drive home just how thoroughly Song has let her curiosity and rudeness sour a budding connection.  It also shows that, while she’s right that she and Zuko have some things in common, she has privileges he lacks because she doesn’t have to disclose her scars if she doesn’t feel like it.  Plus, that moment contrasts to Katara and Mai both touching Zuko’s cheek — Katara just after they’ve shared a moment of vulnerability, Mai just before they start smooching — because they’re both doing so in a way that’s respectful to Zuko himself.

When he wakes up from a dream of turning into Aang, the first thing Zuko does is touch his left eye to make sure he’s still himself.  It’s part of his identity, and the only time we see adolescent Zuko without it (earlier in the dream sequence) it’s a way of showing that Zuko isn’t truly himself.

Zuko grapples with the fact that he’s always going to bear evidence of having survived abuse, and a big part of his character journey is concluding that he’s free to make whatever meaning he chooses of that scar, regardless of what Ozai might’ve intended.

There are other elements of Zuko’s story the Avatar writers do well.  He bears a superficial resemblance to the thousands of villains (especially in SF) who become villainous because they incur facial scarring, but of course his story is infinitely more humanized and nuanced than “skin bleached in a vat of acid, might as well go rob banks now.”  His appearance incurs very different reactions depending on his current wealth and political power, emphasizing the intersections of disability and imperialism.  He discusses the possibility of a cure with Katara, but also goes on to live a long and fulfilling life without one.

Maybe there’s no clearer evidence that Zuko counts as disabled in the sense of “society treats your body as a problem that needs to be solved” than the way that adaptations of AtLA treat the scar.  They tend to minimize, hide, or otherwise avoid it.

[Image description: Sepia-toned image of the Gaang from a Legend of Korra promotional that appeared on the Nickelodeon website.  Zuko has his head turned and his hair swept forward in such a way that none of the left side of his face is visible.]

[Image description: Screenshot of Zuko from the 2010 adaptation The Last Airbender.  Dev Patel has a very subtle amount of makeup meant to convey minimal scarring around his left eye.]

Like I said: facial difference counts as a disability because society treats it like one.  In the social model, that’s what counts rather than, for instance, how much peripheral vision Zuko does or doesn’t have.

I’m not linking to any of many works of fan art that depict Zuko tilted to the right, occasionally even when other characters are presented facing directly ahead.  Nor am I going to link to any of the equally-plentiful works of fan fiction that keep most other elements of canon the same but specify that Zuko’s face is unscarred.  (A similar number, it’s worth noting, also make Toph sighted.)  This isn’t a callout.  It’s an explanation of how Avatar does an effective job of showing how Zuko’s facial difference informs his identity without making that difference the sum total of his identity.

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honey, i rose up from the dead. i do it all the time.

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Twitter thread: Colonization and Zutara

This thread is in response to yet another person arguing that zutara is a colonizer x colonize ship. Said user was continuing to harass @airiustide13, and I just felt like I had to respond because this is getting ridiculous. See the full thread here.

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Can someone explain to me why Andy makes this face when he sees Oscar for the first time?

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Sokka: Aang y'know how you took away Ozai’s firebending?

Aang: I recall yes

Sokka: can I have it

Aang: …what?

Sokka: can I have his firebending. just for like ten minutes

Aang: what no

Sokka: why not I wanna prank zuko

Aang:

Aang:

Aang: okay five minutes

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