#The Storm

[enchantedbook]

'The Storm' by Ida Rentoul Outhwaite

[389]

Yves Tanguy, American (born France), 1900 - 1955 The Storm (Black Landscape)

[reality-detective]

I have been saying for years that it is going to get ugly before it gets better. We are nearing that time so I hope you are all prepared for what is coming and it will NOT just be in the state of Texas either.

Do you remember when Trump was with a bunch of military generals for a photo op and he said this is the calm before the storm. The press asked; "What storm Mr. President?" He said you'll find out!!! Well, this is it! 🤔

[sokkastyles]

Thinking about Zuko objecting to the 41st division of new recruits being put on the front lines and the earthbender in "Zuko Alone" saying that the Fire Nation puts captured soldiers on the front lines without weapons as cannon fodder. Not only is this unbelievably cruel but it also shows that this is a tactic the FN uses repeatedly and that they'll use their own men in the same way. The connection between the fire nation nobles discarding the lives of their own men and the earthbender soldiers in the town in "Zuko Alone" bragging about the same thing happening to Li's brother because they could, because it was a show of power over someone they thought they were better than. That Zuko calls out both abuses of power in both episodes regardless of what "side" the soldiers being abused are on. Those are the kinds of things that will make Zuko a good leader, that make him the one to end the war, to end the needless and cruel deaths of young soldiers on either side.

It connects back to the story of Lu Ten and Iroh's song, the leaves from the vine who are felled because of the decisions of people abusing their power.

[bestepisode]

The Storm

Sokka accepts a job from a local fisherman to make money and the man accuses Aang of abandoning the world. In the large, ensuing storm, Aang recounts to Katara the events of his dark past. After being told he was the Avatar, Aang was ordered to be separated from his mentor, Monk Gyatso. Upset, Aang ran away from his home where he encountered a deadly storm, causing him to fall into the water, activating the Avatar State, trapping him within an iceberg. Meanwhile, Iroh tells the ship's crew Zuko's story. After speaking out of turn at a war meeting, Zuko was punished by being forced to fight an Agni Kai against his own father. His refusal resulted in him getting his scar and being banished for perceived cowardice. Meanwhile, Aang learns that Sokka and the fisherman are trapped in the storm; he rescues them, earning him the fisherman's respect. Zuko spots them, but lets them go, instead opting to escape the storm.

Zuko Alone

After deciding he would be better off on his own and leaving his uncle, Zuko continues his journey alone and ends up in an Earth Kingdom town, where a young boy named Lee brings him home for dinner and subsequently bonds with the banished prince. Zuko helps defend the family from rogue Earth Kingdom soldiers who terrorize the town and has flashbacks of his youth when his mother was still around. Zuko's identity as the banished Fire Nation Prince is revealed when he firebends, and the boy and his family reject him because of it.

Vote on more episodes here!

[awkward-sultana]

(Almost) Every Costume Per Episode + Elizabeth Woodville's yellow and blue printed gown in 1x01,2,3,5,7

[terrible-ghost]

Scavengers Reign - The Storm

[starlight-bread-blog]

If Aang had accepted his role as the Avatar, he might not have had to leave Gyatso.

But he didn't. He ran away. And when he woke up, he saw the exact consequences of that. He won't do it again. It was hard, really, really hard, but when it came down to it, he had accepted his duty to kill the Fire Lord.

And then he didn't have to. Funny how things worked out, isn't it? He just has to keep moving forward.

[madcat-world]

The Storm - Richard Wright

[spockvarietyhour]

Scavengers Reign

[oneatlatime]

More Zuko Alone Thoughts

Last season our expository Zuko episode was The Storm, an episode which I loved. It was both a well-written and well-animated piece of media, and enthralling to watch. I don't want to say enjoyable because of the subject matter discussed, but it was certainly good.

This season's expository Zuko episode was Zuko Alone, and I didn't like it. Although it was animated fantastically, I found the characterisation of Zuko in the present day sections to be completely off. I found it embarrassing, awkward, and frustrating to watch. Now, I've seen the rating this episode has on IMDb, so I know this is just my opinion, and a fairly unpopular one at that. I'm also aware that I'm biased because Zuko is not my favourite character. But I want to explore why, in my opinion, The Storm stuck the landing while Zuko Alone flubbed it.

Here's what I think is the main reason: The Storm is Aang's story about his past, juxtaposed with Iroh's story about Zuko's past. Aang and Iroh are our storytellers; Aang and Zuko are the stories being told.

Zuko Alone is Zuko's story of the present, being experienced through Zuko's perspective, juxtaposed with Zuko's story in the past, being experienced through Zuko's memories. It's too much Zuko, and unlike the characters in The Storm, Zuko has no idea what's going on.

Despite his flightiness and inability to take things seriously, Aang is perceptive, socially and emotionally intelligent (as much as a 12 year old can be), and able to be subtle when the situation calls for it. Look at The Great Divide: as soon as he had the appropriate backstory info, he saw right to the heart of the conflict, he saw that it was stupid as Hell, and he saw and successfully executed a way to fix it that relied entirely on an accurate assessment of all involved parties' stances. And it worked.

Iroh has easily the highest perception stat in the whole show, when he isn't being deliberately obtuse. His wisdom is off the charts, if his one liners are anything to go by.

So despite some very (very) notable differences, Aang and Iroh have similarities in their personalities and their perspectives, and importantly for this post, in their self-knowledge.

Then we get Zuko, who has the perceptiveness and subtlety of a mud brick to the teeth, all the wisdom of a bandaid wrapper, and the social and emotional intelligence of something that starts to grow in your sink when it's been too long since you did the dishes.

Aand and Iroh can see the themes, lessons, mistakes, and places for improvement in the stories they're telling, about themselves and others. Zuko is stumbling through both his past and his present. The Storm is compelling because the audience gets to simultaneously learn expository detail and watch Aang and Iroh go through a process of self-analysis, recrimination, and commitment to doing better. It's an info dump with a hefty dose of character building on the side.

Zuko in Zuko Alone is a dumbass blindly stumbling into the same mistakes we've already seen him make, learning nothing in the process (that I could detect - maybe he'll run into the family's older brother in a few episodes and work up the courage to save him based on what he learned during his time with that family, who knows). Zuko has been trained to be a fighter, not a person, so of course he's going to fail at the 'soft skills' parts of being human. So Zuko needs someone with him to do/model that soft skills work until he learns how to do it for himself. But Zuko is alone in Zuko Alone, so the character development that could have happened doesn't.

I don't need morals and themes explicitly spelled out in the narrative; I'm fine with subtext. But Zuko in Zuko Alone so thoroughly misses what's going on in the episode that it's annoying to watch. And there's no indication at the end of the episode that he's learned anything from having missed those things. There's no indication that he's aware that there was anything to miss.

In The Storm, Aang has Katara to bounce off of and help talk him through his story. Iroh's wise enough not to need a foil, but he does have the ship's crew, both as a reason to tell the story and as an audience to play off of. Heck, in Bato of the Water Tribe, Sokka has Bato giving the speech about the lonely wolf to help him understand the point Sokka's dad was trying to make in the flashback, and avoid the wrong course of action (leaving Aang behind). Aang moves on from self-recrimination and Iroh has won back Zuko's crew's loyalty at the end of The Storm; Sokka has finally understood 'being a man means being where you're needed the most' by the end of Bato of the Water Tribe. But Zuko is alone by choice in Zuko Alone, so he finishes the episode exactly where he started, his mother's last words entirely misinterpreted. No wiser, probably unable to even articulate where he went wrong beyond fire = bad in this context.

There seems to be a theme in this show of the necessity of friends and family networks and support. Aang (with Katara's help), Iroh (with the crew as audience and motivator), Sokka (with Bato's help), all come to better understandings of their responsibilities and/or their mistakes by working things out with the help of at least one other person. Zuko ditches Iroh to play at being a lone wolf and fails in a way that's frankly embarrassing to watch.

So the reason I don't like Zuko Alone is that he's doomed to fail from the start. Zuko is (trying to) go about his character development in a way this show has already showed us is opposite to how it should be done. I'm not fond of 'doomed from the start' narratives as a general rule, mostly because to me they feel like a bad investment. If you know it's all going to end badly (because it started wrong), then why bother committing the time and effort the narrative asks of you? (She says, having read The Silmarillion twice).

So if I became Queen of the world tomorrow and decreed that Zuko Alone needed to be changed to fit my personal tastes, how would I do it? The obvious answer is to shove Iroh in there, but it probably wouldn't work anyway, because Zuko is not showing any signs of being ready to listen - REALLY LISTEN - to those wiser than him. I'm not sure if he's even ready to admit yet that there are people who ARE wiser than him. He's already admitted that there are people with more martial prowess than him, like his sister, but I don't think Zuko actually values wisdom enough to see its worth. So it's probably not even on his radar. If Iroh's presence wouldn't work, what about having a removed narrator, like Iroh did for Zuko's story in The Storm? A narrator who is not as thoroughly blind to what's going on in the past and the present as Zuko. Maybe a single episode character, who tells the story of that time a stranger came to town? That might work. It would fit with the genre this episode is paying homage to. Or you could have an interesting juxtaposition, where the narrator character is not omniscient, narrating the present only, and Zuko is completely alone during the flashback bits. That would probably lead to Zuko making the same mistakes anyway, since it's really his past that he needs to work through.

Or maybe I'm reading way too much into this and I just don't like Zuko enough as a character to like a Zuko-centric story, no matter how it's told. Or maybe 24 minutes of second-hand embarrassment is 24 too many for me. At least he's keeping Song's horse bird fed.

[mafiosaseries]

🔥Rhea Ripley, Becky Lynch, Bianca Belair & Jade Cargill 🔥

[adeerling]

The Storm

(one of my favorites)

[reality-detective]

The Time Has Come... We The People ARE The Storm 🤔

[derangedrhythms]

[...] his heart swamped by the seas

Ted Hughes, Collected Poems: Uncollected (1960-67); from ‘The Storm’

[ltwilliammowett]

La tempête / The Storm, by Jean Antoine Théodore Gudin (1802-1880)