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Haven’t drawn ole’ Seaweed Brain in a while 🫶

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idc idc Annabeth being petty and mean to Rachel in battle of the labyrinth is everything to me

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I didn’t expect to come away from a book about Haymitch even more convinced of Peeta Mellark’s crucial role in the rebellion, but I did. Because the book showed that Katniss was not uniquely rebellious. It reminded us that Snow’s worldview hinges on one fact: he is the victor. There is no room in his world for the vulnerability that Lucy Gray caused him. Haymitch recognizes it: Snow will not allow him to die. There must be a singular, selfish victor. Because every lone victor sends the same message to Panem: your will to power must come before any loyalties, any sense of justice. The people around you cannot be trusted. They are your enemies, when the chips are down. It is a a brutal slap in the face of any organized resistance. The idea of two victors is completely and utterly antithetical to Snow’s personal demons, and to his system. He rationalizes his betrayal of Lucy Gray this way. He drives the point home to Haymitch when he kills Ma, Sid, and Lenore Dove: any attempt to sidestep your fate will be met with awful retribution. It probably gave him some personal satisfaction to kill a Covey-girl, but it didn’t matter. She was a dead woman regardless. And Katniss? Okay, she sings some songs. She buries a child in flowers. Beautiful. But if she wins fair and square, she’s less of a threat even than Haymitch, and more of a victory for Snow. Not even Covey-blood are above his rules.

Then Peeta throws a wrench in the whole thing. Because he loves her. And he wears it proudly. But even then, Snow is not worried. This is nothing new. Star-crossed lovers mean nothing. No alliance can last. One of them must kill the other, in the end. That is how this story goes.

And then it doesn’t. Because they refuse. There will be no singular victor. Either there will be none, or there will be two. He says Seneca should have killed them on the spot, and maybe that would have bought him some time, but as soon as Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark determined that life or death at each other’s side was more important than anything else, it was all over. The system really was brought down by a handful of berries.

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I have a 32 page inpatient case report due in two days and you know what. I feel like this is a perfectly reasonable time to reread akatsuki no yona from scratch again

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“everyone interprets characters differently” unfortunately so true! thankfully I was blessed with an intense preternatural insight into their core beings (watched and paid attention) and I don’t have to worry

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why does my mother suddenly fail kindergarten whenever she tries to do anything on the computer

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you know how kids tend to subconsciously adopt the mannerisms of their parents? i wonder how far back that stretches.

do i laugh like my great grandfather, because that's the way my grandma laughed, and my mom copied her?

does the way my dad make comedic sounds when he's driving actually originate with a distant uncle two hundred year ago, who made funny noises in the horse-drawn cart because it made his niece laugh?

i wonder which of my little mannerisms came from ancestors long passed, and i wonder which of mine will echo in family descendants long after i'm gone.

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They bonded while waiting for kagome

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You know I'm gonna be honest. I don't think all these apps really need access to my precise location

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one of my favorite subtle implications in the series is that it seems the Titan Army was fully banking on Percy being the host of Kronos. Why else would they make their main base a cruise ship if their primary enemy is a son of Poseidon? Named after Andromeda, the wife of Perseus? Why would they work on Oceanus specifically being free so much? Side notably with other children of Poseidon? Why plant Zeus and Hades' items of power on Percy when Luke already had them? Why only Zeus and Hades' items, not Poseidon's? Well because they really need Percy as Kronos' host, that's why. (and Poseidon siding with them because of that would be a bonus as well)

I like to imagine Luke's cabin on the Princess Andromeda is fully decked out with like "WELCOME PERCY" and sea-themed sheets and everything and he hates it so much cause it's a constant reminder he failed and he was Kronos' second choice. Also then he gets his super special pegasus not even exactly stolen by Percy, but the pegasus willingly defects to be Percy's personal steed instead, which must just be insult to injury. Luke has immense one-sided beef with Percy and Percy has no idea.

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I think about Azula shooters often and their common refrain of "if Azula hadn't had a mental breakdown, she would've won" and I'm here to tell you that no, she wouldn't have.

There is no universe in which Azula was winning that fight with Zuko (or Katara, for that matter).

Azula spent so much of Book 2 being built up as this deadly terrifying force against whom the heroes are badly outmatched that it can be difficult to catch exactly how quickly Zuko is advancing.

Back up a bit to Book One. For the fearsome exiled crown prince of the Fire Nation, Zuko's not that impressive a firebender. He's not bad by any stretch, and he's able to lay the untrained Sokka and Katara flat pretty easily. Then he gets in the ring with Aang, who is an airbending master, and the difference between a regular bender and a master becomes apparent when Aang literally puts his ass to bed:

People have attributed this to the fact that no one's fought an airbender in 100 years, but I think it's also worth noting that Aang (a 12 year old from a pacifist nation) has probably never fought anyone before. Like, ever. And yet the second Aang thinks "okay, I'll attack back", the fight's over.

Zuko's got the same genetic predisposition for firebending talent that Azula does, yet it never seems to manifest because of his mental blocks. At the beginning of the series, he's already so beat down that all he really has is conviction, pride, and anger, so even with training from Iroh (the firebending master, thank you very much), he struggles. Yet throughout Book 2, when he has no time to train because he's on the run, he actually seems to advance faster. The fact that his bending is literally tied to his character arc (as his morals become tangled and he has to fight off aforementioned mental blocks) is pretty brilliant. Like, by the time of the Crossroads of Destiny, Zuko getting his ass handed to him by Aang is a pretty consistent feature of the show--he just can't match wits with him.

Hell, at the beginning of the series, he and Iroh (again: the actual firebending master) launch a combined power surface-to-air attack...which Aang casually swats away into a nearby ice wall. Come the Crossroads of Destiny, however, and Zuko by himself launches this bigass fireball that blows through Aang's defenses.

Zuko advances so quickly that it's scary. That prodigious talent is in him even if it doesn't come through as cleanly as with Azula. Who, by the way, was busy about to get flattened by Katara some few dozen feet away, until Zuko took over and then effectively stalemated her himself.

All of this in retrospect makes it abundantly clear why Zuko's firebending seemed to skyrocket so much when he learned true firebending from the Sun Warriors: it was really the only thing left. He's hard a hard road learning how to fight waterbenders, earthbenders, and airbenders, and even if unconsciously, he's applying the philosophy Iroh taught him about augmenting his bending style with aspects of other styles (see also, the waterbending-like fire whips he uses in the above gif). Once he actually understands fire and how it works, he's got it mastered. Hence why any gap between him and Azula effectively disappears as soon as their next fight--before her friends have betrayed her and her stability goes out the window. There's no real sense of urgency to their fight at the Boiling Rock prison. True, Sokka's presence with the sword helps, but Zuko doesn't look remotely worried and he counters Azula's every attack perfectly.

All her life, Azula only ever learned fire. She was taught by the best people the fire nation can employ, so she knows all the cool tricks, but she's still poisoned by the corrupted firebending practiced in the modern ATLA timeline. Unlike Zuko, who managed to get the basics if nothing else from Iroh (fire comes from the breath, and can be used to survive as much as to kill), Azula has always used fire as a weapon and a means to hurt others. She has no true knowledge of the craft, meaning she's got the same weaknesses as Zhao, she's just better disciplined to the point she can make up for it.

Zuko's victory was a given considering Azula's complete loss of control by the time of Sozin's comet, but even had she been in a perfect mental state, she'd have lost, because in many ways Zuko is simply the better firebender.

And that's the truth of it.

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Yona and Hak in Akatsuki No Yona: Illustrations - 20th Anniversary Edition (2023) by Kusanagi Mizuho

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Kagome and Tessaiga

(I couldn't choose a pose)

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Audre Lorde, from "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism" (1981)

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do you see this shit my liege

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my most toxic trait is i fucking love work gossip. i play neutral not to be the bigger person or take the high road but to hear slander and hearsay from every side. two coworkers complained about each other to me in the same afternoon and i nearly blacked out from the rush

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