Absolutely fascinating that the powers of the feathers collecting together is making Sakura glow like that, like she's evolving or transforming. Except she's not even in there really, which is still awful.
OHO HERE WE GO.
Honestly the tension behind all this is pulled off REALLY well. They really make it LOOK like there IS enough power built up here in Sakura to pull that off. Especially when it essentially comes down to a power that relies upon the cumulative experiences of everything the readers have gone through to get to this point, which is a lot, and means that it's the reader's memories themselves that make this all the more powerful of a moment.
IT'S NEAT.
AND ALSO - ELDRITCH HORROR SAKURA? THE WINGS UNFOLDING WITH SO MUCH POWER THAT SAKURA IS A FORCE WITH ENOUGH SHEER POWER TO RIP APART THE FABRIC OF THE UNIVERSE?
PEAK.
And all in the service of wanting to bring people back to life.
Which, in hindsight, makes it really really funny that the Beetrain anime did their own plot so badly that it broke the purpose of the entire story to begin with, but oh well!
ALSO I'M HAVING A MOMENT OF SUDDEN CLARITY. In the cover for Chapitre 212 I was talking about how there were 14 little water droplets causing ripples that we could see, and how that was kind of the same number of worlds we visited. I never thought about it before but SAKURA'S WINGS ALSO HAVE 14 STRANDS IN THEM.
AND LIKE it's not about the number of physical feathers, because there were a bunch more of those, but Evil Wolverine's plan hinges on travelling to a number of Worlds specifically - and we went to 14 of them. And there are 14 parts to Sakura's wings. So it was always 14! They showed it to us all along! It was a concrete plan!
At least from a planning perspective anyway! I don't think it's a solid RULE that there were only 14 worlds they went to, since it's left pretty open for them to have visited other worlds inbetween and off screen and even some of the canonical worlds we went to were 2 worlds in one, but still! I just think it's neat! 14 clear arcs, 14 main worlds, and 14 pieces of the wings that will destroy the universe as we know it.
Once again this sort of thinking is removing a fundamental character arc that makes this story what it is. A big part of Aang's journey, especially in season 1, but tbh it does return in later seasons too, is accepting that he is the Avatar, and that he's the only one who can end this war. During the whole first season he is in complete denial about who he is and what he's supposed to do, which is why in most of this season there's no sense of urgency, and then once Aang gets faced with a very real, very close deadline he panics. This makes it even more brutal when in season 3, after accepting this responsibility, he gets faced with the reality of failure. He runs away again, this time not because he doesn't want responsibility, but because he knows how heavy his responsibility is and he doesn't want to burden anyone else with it. Removing the first aspect, aka running away and denying responsibility, it in turn also removes the heavy emotion from his later arc.
It keeps surprising me that people who claim to be such fans of the original seem to completely miss the point of most of this story? Like how could you look at Sokka learning about women's rights, Aang learning to accept responsibility, and Katara's motherly warmth which happened because how young she was when she had to step into a motherly role, and think "well we should remove that." You're taking out all of character development and going purely off of plot (which isn't gonna be nearly as good without the character development!)
Atla is probably one of the most analyzed and picked apart story, has one of the most long running loyal fanbases, people are STILL making thinkpieces about this show, and you manage to still misunderstand so much???
Chris Pratt using his normal voice as Garfield meanwhile Robert Pattinson over here using his most fucked up gremlin voice to play a bird that you wouldn't even know it was him until you saw the credits