#toph can see

[arillustrated]

fuck it. avatar as calico critters

zuko, iroh and toph

[ash-and-starlight]

The world needs more Yue and Zuko friendship, I squeal just thinking abt the parallels. They deserve a life changing field trip together and if u have abt ideas I’m all ears 👀

Hiii anon this ask fermented in my inbox and in my brain for so long,, so take this??? Post canon yue lives/no war au arts?? Anyway aside from the Parallels and their political position & their duty before hoes grindset I think they could learn a lot from each other. With zuko learning the gift of patience & diplomacy from yue & Yue learning that allowing yourself to feel anger and speaking up can actually be Good.

anyway hypothetical life changing trip outcome: zuko takes an intro gender studies class and yue says fuck

(oh and also must not forget the crush on sokka)

[navajja]

My first attempt at drawing alta characters

[muffinlance]

Do you get the impression the live action is treating us like utter morons?? Like I thought that making it aimed at an older audience would open the doors for more subtle story telling, but no, they're just using monologues to tell us eveything! Like in the second episode Katara's like 'oh his power isn't that he's the avatar, it's that he ~connects~ to people'. Girl we're not idiots we can see that!! And the first episode with Aang's goddawful 'I don't want this responsibility' monologue

THIS, YES. The word that keeps coming to mind is definitely "subtlety". The show for literal children? Had it. The remake for adults? Not so much.

[aangarchy]

I saw someone made an AU where Aang was actually 16 when he was told he was the Avatar like he was supposed to, and froze at that age as well, and now I can't stop thinking about it.

[justaz]

realistic zukka: zuko is swamped with being firelord and righting everything wrong w the fire nation that he has No Time for visitors or personal letters, sokka is busy as chief of the swt and building all his little inventions to speed the rebuilding efforts along. zukka doesn’t speak for weeks bc they simply don’t have the time or mental space to think about that.

that is, until zuko wakes up in the middle of the night to a face over his, grinning like a madman. zuko’s instinct is to fight bc there has been five assassins this week and it’s only monday. sokka is screeching like a banshee bc if zuko breaks his invention-

the guards burst in and light up the room to find chief sokka of the swt desperately scratching at the ground to get away from a half awake firelord zuko who is currently beating him with the first thing he could get his hands on: sokka’s invention.

they don’t speak for weeks bc sokka is Upset

[that-weird-girl-in-the-back]

Sokka:It's so unfair that you, Aang, and Toph have all gotten wanted posters, and I haven't

Zuko: I technically got 2, but why are you bothering over it now? We're no longer enemies of the fire nation

Sokka: It's the principle of it, and plus, I feel underappreciated. Wait what do you mean you had 2?

Zuko: That's unimportant, *thinks to himself for a moment*, what if I made one for you now, I'll even give you a bigger bounty than Aang with a cool nickname added on to it for you. Would that make you happy?

Sokka *tearing up*: You truly do care about me

Zuko: Great, when you leave the fire nation, I'll release it and have it circulate for a few weeks, then call it back so that you're not constantly being hounded and chased by bounty hunters.

[janadoesstuffwrong]

Thinking abt the air nomads:

What if, after the war, once the dust has settled a little, Aang goes back to travelling, hoping that maybe he can find at least some trace of surviving airbenders. As an added bonus, he gets to do more of the exploring and wandering that he had to put on hold.

Toph goes with him ofc. She only just got a taste of real freedom and it was overshadowed by ever-present impending doom. While she's on speaking terms with her parents, she isnt quite ready to be back under their roof on a permanent basis. The rest of the gaang have their individual homes and responsibilities that they get back to, though they join for the odd field trip or adventure when they can.

So anyway, they're touring all over the world and over the years they notice just how displaced so many people have become. EK citizens who barely escaped the blaze but lost everything; FN military now decommissioned with no idea how to carry on; people looking for a new start in the hard-won peace. Maybe it starts with Toph heading back to Earth Rumble, where a group of young runaways scrounge for cheap fights to make a little money.

At each turn they find more and more people with no homes to return to and no family to protect them; runaways escaping the roles the war forced them into. Gradually, Aang and Toph start to see that they aren't so different from themselves. They just want a new start.

So they decide to give them one. They clean up the temples and set up villages in the surrounding areas (helps to be master earthbenders), where people can arrive and stay as long as they need. Travellers and refugees pass through in droves, sometimes choosing to stay and rebuild their lives there, sometimes continuing in their wandering with a guarantee that they'll always have a place to return to should they have the need.

Over time, the lemurs grow in number and even some flying bison calfs (hybrids with a relative species maybe?), can be seen in the skies. Whenever the founders visit, it isn't the same but Aang feels a little more at home.

The first time someone asks Aang to teach him his philosophies, and expresses his desire to become a monk, how can he refuse? Maybe it's a former soldier, somebody who's done terrible things, looking for a path to redemption. So Aang teaches him, and then he teaches others. And though they may not be airbenders, they are as earnest and faithful as any nun or monk Aang knew before. The temples become filled with new faces: Firebenders, Earthbenders, Waterbenders and non-benders all wearing Air nomad orange and yellow.

Aang always feared that it would be his responsibility to have airbender children, and the idea of forcing that on someone he loved terrified him. Maybe that's why he waited so long before acting on his feelings for his best friend, his travelling companion, his fellow-village builder and temple-restorer. How could they have a truly happy relationship with this pressure hanging over them? He wishes he could be content with the new way of things that he and his friends have created. But he knows that he can't be the last airbender forever...

Nobody knows why some children can bend the elements and others can't. Is it blood? Is it blessing? Is it the land in which you're born? Or is it the simple allocation of fates decided by the values and norms you're raised believing in? Is it enough to be surrounded by the culture and beliefs of the Air Nomads? Nobody knows...

All they know is that nobody sees it coming when the six-year-old daughter of two non-bender villagers from the Earth Kingdom and Northern Water Tribe sends herself flying twelve feet into the air with a sneeze.

[pumpkinrootbeer]

i do think it is legitimately very funny whenever someone tries to make the claim that lavabending is inherently a very slow subbending and therefore not good in a fight. specifically when using that argument against Bolin's skill as a bender.

Sure, I feel like in very specific instances with Ghazan that could be a fair argument to make. It takes him a moment to destabilize the Ba Sing Se wall and for him to kick up enough lava to destroy the airbending temple. (to the point I would argue that if Bolin had been versed in lavabending like he was in s4 he would have swept the ground with Ghazan), but in moments where he's actually in a fight his lava is incredibly quick.

Just the lava frisbee on its own is an incredibly quick move

But making that argument with Bolin in particular is absolutely batshit when outside of lavabending he is an incredibly quick fighter. I would say it is one of, if not the, most defining things about his fighting style. He moves very, very quickly and uncharacteristically agile for a earthbender. This is a known thing. Like

I am not the first person to say this but no other earthbender does backflips like he does. And THEN with lavabending he is just as quick if not more so

Bolin since season 1 has had an uncanny knack for bending incredibly fast, and his lavabending is no exception to that rule. It's honestly something that haunts my brain all the time because how quick he is with it low-key breaks the balancing? a little?? Like earthbending was always shown to be very strong but in turn it was slower than other types of bending, but with Bolin that doesn't really seem to be a hangup he has.

[honeyxmonkey]

Gets mildly back into the ATLA fandom

Scrolls the tags

Sees shipping discourse

Sincerely I thought I'd managed to escape Zutara vs Kataang because I didn't actually join the fandom until well after the series came out (because I was like seven)

Some of the posts I've seen are... concerning

Like, even if you don't like a ship, the words aimed at specific characters and other REAL PEOPLE is uh... well, I've spent too long embroiled in fandom drama to address it seriously. Especially since I just got here

But

Uh

Yeah

Good luck I guess??? Gonna be over here in my Zukka corner and contemplate an extremely complicated ToA crossover???

[trashfactorysstuff]

Ovotor

[babieshowclown]

Doodles I drew having fun and feeling free

[sillyfudgemonkeys]

LoK Edit animated: Rangi finds Kyoshi's spirit in the Spirit World

(Based on my Immortal!Rangi AU, I know I said "make it a gif" but y'all are getting the vid instead.....I'll upload a gif later >w>)

[muffinlance]

Wait, what’s going on with Embers???? That fic has been on my read later list since 2021, what’s happened with it???

Brief overview, then I'm likely never touching this topic again, because this is not a Drama Blog:

Context: Embers is a super old AtLA fic that was written during the early fandom days, read widely at the time, and was the origin of the widely-used fanon name of "Wani" for Zuko's ship (kind of by default that it was one of the first popular fics to give his ship a name, I think?), even though most fic writers don't seem to realize it's from there anymore.

"What's Going On": I used to include a link in all my stories to it, because I believe in crediting other writers for borrowed elements, and I was using "Wani" in all my fics. But BOY did I not want to be sending readers that way anymore, so I've adopted a new name for Zuko's ship, and removed all Embers links.

None of the criticisms about Embers itself are new; I'm assuming they date back to when the fic was being written, because this isn't an "it aged badly" thing, this is an "actually yeah this gets worse the longer you think about it and I shouldn't have ignored my bad feelings just because some of the worldbuilding was interesting" thing.

An Incomplete List of Why I Made the Change:

I don't actually like the story that much anymore, and don't want to rec it

I tried to re-read it recently to see if some things were as bad as I remembered and it turns out they were So Much Worse Oh Yikes. More specifically, the treatment of Katara and Aang and their respective cultures has... rather a lot going on. One example: The Fire Nation and Air Nomads are both given multiple backstory elements in an attempt to make the average Fire Nation soldier's participation in the genocide/war in large part the fault of the Avatar and the Air Nomads themselves, and also fully justified from the Fire Nation perspective. And I do mean fully. One of its core tenants is "People from the Fire Nation (and only people from the Fire Nation) who don't follow orders Literally Die, therefore murdering pacifists and babies and continuing the war (and their regularly scheduled war crimes) is the only thing it is physically possible for them to do". I cannot emphasize enough how literal that is.

Also the name "Wani" means "Alligator" and is... objectively a pretty lame name for Zuko's ship? Where's the personality, where's the deeper meaning, where's the resonance with Zuko's themes? @tuktukpodfics initially thought I was calling the ship "Wanyi", and that's what I've switched to, because it is Objectively So Much Better. In their words: “Wànyī (萬一): Literally ‘one in ten thousand,’ ‘perchance.’ Used grammatically in Chinese to mean ‘what if’ or ‘just in case.’ I think a ship called ‘The Perchance’ is perfect for a boy clinging to false hope.”

TL:DR; I don't rec Embers anymore, because I don't actually like the story anymore, and there are things about it that get worse the more I think on them. I've removed links to it and renamed Zuko's ship to "Wanyi" ("The Perchance") because our boy deserves a ship name that reflects his character arc.

[winterstaryu]

Idk if I'd ever want ryanball to be explicitly canon in any way bc whatever fucked up thing they have going on now is INFINITELY funnier to me

[motherhenna]

Even though my gaming laptop is dead and I can't replay Oblivion rn, I've decided to design a new Hero of Kvatch anyway that fits into the same universe as my other heroes. And since my Nerevarine and Dragonborn are both women, I figured I should buck the pattern and throw a guy in there lol. His whole vibe was equally inspired by both ancient greek / roman busts and Moses from Dreamwork's Prince of Egypt.

I've always liked the trope of blind characters with the ability of precognition, which is what I decided to explore with Aurelius--likely the result of an ill-advised bargain with Clavicus Vile on his father's part. The man wanted himself and members of his family to be "noticed and recognized by those in power", though failed to foresee that this would apply to more than just kings and nobles. In fact, turns out that drawing the curious eyes of several Daedric princes isn't ideal for the wellbeing of your unborn child, and Azura's boon of prophecy doesn't exactly play nice with bouts of madness and delusion...party favors from Sheogorath and Vaermina.

Haven't fleshed him or the story out much, yet, but y'all know how I am: always happy to add another softboy to my roster lmao I promise I know how to draw / write men who aren't in some way soft but can't say I'm interested in doing that