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[wayofcloudbrain]

Selected Correspondence of Fire Lord Zuko

As preserved by the Royal Archives

1.

My good hotman Zuko,

It's Aang! Sokka let me borrow Hawky. Please feed him before sending him back.

I'm writing to ask if it's okay for me to drop by. Except I'll probably be there by the time you get this, because Appa flies faster than Hawky. Still, it's polite to ask!

Write back (or don't.)

Hot regards

Your friend Aang

-

Revered Avatar Aang

Hawky arrived two hours after you left. Never send me "hot regards" again. Like I keep telling you, language has changed in the past 100 years. It doesn't mean what you think. Future historians will think we were having an affair.

It's always okay to drop by. Hawky has been fed.

May your inner fire warm you (write that down somewhere)

Fire Lord Zuko

2.

Hi

need 3 fire benders (zappy) + few construction workers + a lot of copper

Delivr to harbor

sokka

-

Honorable tribesman Sokka of the Southern Water Tribe, son of Chief Hakoda, Hero of the 100 Year War

No.

May your inner fire warm you

Fire Lord Zuko

-

Dear Jerk Lord of the Jerk Nation, Master Jerkbender and All-Around Jerk

quit being stingy and send me what i need. seriously. the fate of your nation is at stake. LOOK:

[drawing of two pickles, a stick figure and waves]

Hot regards

Sokka

-

Sokka

Your drawing makes no sense. I'm writing a law which bans you from owning a messenger hawk.

I found you three volunteer firebenders who can lightningbend. They'll be there in a week with four carts of copper. If you need construction workers, beg Toph, don't bother me.

Feed Hawky better. He's malnourished, he keeps begging me for more food.

And don't do that.

Fire Lord Zuko

3.

Dear Honorless Usurper

My, how the time flies. It seems as if it was only yesterday that I was supposed to be crowned Fire Lord, and here we are, celebrating the first full year of your doomed reign. I salute you.

Know this: you won't know peace for long. I have entered into an alliance with Admiral Noboru. He is a true patriot and has kindly offered me three ships and 2000 men to retake the throne. He has also generously offered to serve as my consort, "despite my mental deficiency."

I am writing as a courtesy, as it is obvious that the throne will soon be mine. I might even let you live.

May Agni's light shine on you*

Azula

Fire Lord-in-exile

[* common benediction for the dead during Fire Lord Zuko's reign]

-

Dear Sister

Thank you for writing. I spoke with Noboru. I told him that I was allowing an Agni Kai and that you were on your way.

Noboru has fled the country. He gifted you his whole estate, see the enclosed list. He said to tell you he's sorry and not to come after him.

Please come visit any time. I hope your healing is going well.

May your inner fire warm you

Your brother Zuko

[enclosed: A list of assets including a home in the 5th Province, a vacation home on Ember Island, 20 acres of farmland, a substantial amount of gold and silver and assorted property]

4.

Zuko

this is the worst copper i've ever seen??? i want a refund. you're the worst copper merchant ever.

sokka

-

Sokka

You didn't even pay for the copper. I'm not giving you a refund. And I'm not a copper merchant. I didn't even buy it, somebody else did. What's wrong with it?

I can send you more if you need?

Fire Lord Zuko

-

Sokka

I sent you two more carts of copper. This is the best copper we have, so if it's not good enough, you can get your own and stop mooching off of me.

Fire Lord Zuko

5.

[on a thin sheet of metal]

Sparky! Earth Rumble 8 is two weeks from now. I'm coming to pick you up in the morning two days before.

Check it out: I can write now. Katara helped me with the characters but I've got it now. Hawky isn't strong enough to carry these, but Katara's dad is letting me borrow Seabreeze.

It's TOPH.

-

Dear Lady Beifong

You can't just come pick me up! I'm the Fire Lord. Two weeks isn't enough time for me to arrange days off.

I'd like to come watch you knock some heads, but I can't. Sorry.

Feed Seabreeze. Seriously. What's wrong with you people? Every bird you send me is starving.

May your inner fire warm you

Fire Lord Zuko

-

[on a thin sheet of metal]

Sparky. Thanks for sending me a sheet of paper but my privy is stocked. I can guess what it says though: "I can't go I'm so busy and I'm too much of a wimp to clear my schedule"

I'm coming to pick you up. Tell your guards they can either get out of my way or get CRUSHED. It's gonna be fun.

It's TOPH.

-

A painting of Fire Lord Zuko, Lady Beifong, Master Katara, Avatar Aang, Suki of Kyoshi Island and Sokka of the Southern Water Tribe. Lady Beifong is sitting on the Fire Lord's shoulders, holding up a decorative belt and smiling widely.

[wayofcloudbrain]

I wish Americans fucked with more foreign music. You don’t have to know the language to appreciate a good record. Folks in other countries listen to our music and don’t speak a lick of english. Music needs no translator

[wayofcloudbrain]

[wayofcloudbrain]

I firmly believe that Jin Guangyao and Jiang Cheng have no beef with each other for the majority of the timeskip. They both have traits that the other values in allies, if not necessarily in friends:

Jin Guangyao is extremely appropriate, considerate, hardworking, and never makes social situations worse than they have to be. I don't think Jiang Cheng would care that he has schemes or a fake smile because that's just everyone in the political world; it's not as if he has any delusions that the other high-ranking gentry are being fully honest and sincere with him either. On the contrary, he would pretty much respect the work ethic and understand that sometimes you have to do shit to get your dad to like you even when you know it won't work. In short, Jin Guangyao is unlikely to do anything to piss Jiang Cheng off, and at least is very kind to Jin Ling.

On the other side, Jiang Cheng is a man who is just not very dangerous if you understand him. You can say he's a man with a predictable temper, or you can call him easy to manipulate; either way, this works in Jin Guangyao's favour. Jiang Cheng is aware of Jin Guangyao's various social disadvantages, but is too pragmatic to try and exploit them, and is too single-issue to be a significant political opponent. While he does come from privilege, his personal life is so tragic that I don't think Jin Guangyao would feel moved to envy or resent him for his social standing, and at the same time he's a sect leader who actually does work instead of foisting it off on his servants or onto Jin Guangyao himself. In short, Jiang Cheng does not pose a threat to Jin Guangyao, and at least is very kind to Jin Ling.

Does this make them besties? That depends on how deep I am in the Chengyao sauce on any given day, but for sure they are not enemies up until the shit has hit the fan post-timeskip. They are essentially each other's least hated coworker

[wayofcloudbrain]

[wayofcloudbrain]

an important note on wwx's characterization that i think is important and sometimes people will get wrong, is that wwx doesn't have low self-esteem ("i'm stupid, i'm ugly, i'm annoying, i'm bothersome, nobody likes me") nor does he have low confidence ("i can't do this" "i don't know this" "i can't do anything right"). in fact, both of these are extremeeeely high in his personality as a teen and young adult

what wei wuxian does have, however, is low self-worth, specifically when it comes to his own needs and well-being compared to other people. couple that with his high confidence and urge to pay off debts of gratitude, and you get his extremely self-destructive behavior ("it's fine if i lose my core as long as jc has it for the good of the sect, i can survive without one", "it's fine that i'm being forcefully kissed by a stranger because she's nervous and i don't want to embarrass her", "it's fine, it's all fine, as long as it's me, because i can take it")

[wayofcloudbrain]

little sky bison

[wayofcloudbrain]

@Aoino_Kuroino

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[wayofcloudbrain]

[wayofcloudbrain]

Shel Silverstein predicting ChatGPT in 1981

[wayofcloudbrain]

It is so weird and unique. I wonder if it works because the pushable button is the thing you bond about, or at least rather prevalent among the things you usually know about your online friends.

lol this is so true. and also really cool in a way i could never explain to anyone who isn't Like This

[wayofcloudbrain]

i actually need to know people's thoughts on this because at least in my experience the answer to this has drastically changed since i was on tumblr in the 2010s and its driving me fucking insane

*im talking about fandom takes specifically. not someone being horribly evil about a real-life issue or or blatantly factually incorrect. literally just harmless fandom disagreements or differing interpretations of a text/character/etc.

[wayofcloudbrain]

did jin guangyao kill jin rusong? a discussion of several different possibilities

(reproducing the stuff i wrote here because i still think it's interesting)

jiggy antis typically claim that it is confirmed as canon that jin guangyao killed jin rusong....and then are content to leave the conversation at that. this seems like both a prematurely decisive claim and a waste of interesting discussion material. thus, i've decided to discuss several different possibilities/explanations as to what exactly happened regarding jin guangyao and jin rusong.

the below includes 4 diffeent scenarios/explanations in which jin guangyao did kill jin rusong, and 3 different scenarios/explanations in which jin guangyao did not kill jin rusong. all scenarios have been written to comply with what is strictly written in canon to the best of my ability.

yes, he did do it

yes: it happened exactly as sect leader yao said: self-explanatory. as sect leader yao said, jin guangyao killed rusong purely to cover up the fact that qin su was actually his half-sister. (this is the version of events preferred by jiggy antis.)

yes: he mercy-killed rusong: maybe rusong was already showing signs of a life-altering disorder as a result of the incest. or maybe jin guangyao just felt that, if the incest information ever came out, rusong would be doomed to a life of suffering in a heavily prejudiced society. jin guangyao himself had spent his entire life suffering and getting kicked around due to his own proximity to society's pariahs/taboos, so perhaps he felt that he could not subject his son to the same miserable existence. thus, jin guangyao gave rusong a more peaceful end, before (in jin guangyao's mind) society could force rusong to suffer.

yes: he allowed rusong to die through inaction: this is really only a "kill" under a utilitarian moral framework. by this explanation, maybe jiggy found out in advance that someone was planning to kill rusong; however, for any of the other reasons listed here, jiggy decided to do nothing and allow the assassination to happen. thus jiggy would consider himself guilty of allowing rusong's death to happen through inaction.

yes: he did it to justify eliminating an opponent of the watchtowers: maybe the advancement of the watchtower project, which jin guangyao knew would make society a safer place, had hit a deadlock because of a particularly stubborn opponent. so jin guangyao killed rusong and framed the opponent in order to engineer a situation in which his annihilation of the opponent would be entirely socially sanctioned.

and here is where the utilitarian arguments come in. perhaps jin guangyao knew that the watchtower project would improve the lives of millions of people and would make society as a whole safer. and he saw that one political opponent as the final major barrier. and jin guangyao could think of no other way to get rid of this guy. so jin guangyao weighed the lives of those millions of people against his one son, and concluded those millions of strangers were weightier; his son became his iphigenia.

of course, this is still a rather unhinged plan to just come up with on your own, so perhaps a better explanation of events is this reasoning paired with the "he allowed rusong to die through inaction" series of events.

no, he did not do it

no: rusong was killed by political opponents and jin guangyao blamed himself: now we reach the "he didn't do it" section of the potential explanations. jin guangyao has a habit of claiming kills he didn't strictly perform himself; so long as the chain of cause and effect can somehow be traced to somewhere near him eventually, jin guangyao will claim credit for someone's death. this is how jin guangyao takes credit for the death of jin zixuan: even though [novel canon] no one forced wei wuxian to lose control of wen ning and no one forced wen ning to attack jin zixuan, jin guangyao still acts as if he can call himself jin zixuan's killer, simply because he sent jin zixuan to wei wuxian's location.

jin guangyao, in pursuing the watchtower project, aroused a lot of public anger. jin guangyao made himself, and by extension his wife and his child, the political enemies of many, and thus political targets as well. thus, if an enemy targets the life of jin rusong because they are jin guangyao's enemy, jin guangyao is entirely justified in feeling as if rusong's death is his fault. after all, if he hadn't pursued the watchtower project, then maybe rusong would still be alive.

no: jin guangyuao said "he had to die" as a Cope: losing your son sucks. perhaps jin guangyao, in the despair following his son's death, tried to cope with the new reality by telling himself that rusong would have had to die anyways, because he was an incest baby. if rusong was always slated to die, then the fact that rusong is now dead can now be survived. thus, "rusong had to die" becomes an emotional coping mechanism for jin guangyao.

no, jin guangyao himself is uncertain if he allowed rusong to die through inaction: this one is a a bit fanciful but bear with me here. on one hand, jin guangyao loves his wife and son. on the other hand, jin guangyao is horrified by his marriage with his wife and by the existence of his son, because his wife is also his sister and his son is the product of incest. jin guangyao lives with not only this horror but also the constant fear of exposure, because if this information ever got out, the lives of himself, his wife, and his son would all be over.

rusong's growth thus becomes a source of dread, not hope: every day lived brings the possibility of rusong developing some disorder or condition that eventually proves the incest. is it not possible that jin guangyao, living every day under such fear, might come to believe that things would be better if rusong stopped growing older? if rusong died--then gone too would be the evidence of the incest, would it not?

now along comes the political opponent who assassinates rusong. jin guangyao does not see it coming and is thus unable to stop it. but afterwards, upon beholding the corpse of his son, what does jin guangyao feel? rage? despair? no--relief! he feels relief! though he also grieves, the constant fear shrouding his entire life has, for once, lifted!

but if jin guangyao is relieved by the death of his son, what does this imply? can jin guangyao truly say, with full confidence, that he did not see the assassination coming? can he really say, with heaven and earth as his witnesses, that his failure to stop the assassination was not to some degree a choice? is there truly no small part of him that did in fact see the assassination coming--yet, knowing it would be so relieving for him, simply chose to do nothing?

but if jin guangyao did not see the assassination coming at all--if rusong's death truly cannot be pinned on jin guangyao at all--then what does that say about jin guangyao's power? about jin guangyao's safety? jin guangyao being innocent of killing through inaction means that jinlintai really is somewhere assassins can penetrate into. then jin guangyao son really was killed by a force he had no way of stopping. then, in this situation, jin guangyao really was powerless.

you can remove the ambiguity and argue the case either way: jin guangyao knew about the assassination and let it happen, jin guangyao legitimately knew nothing and could not have stopped the assassination. but the ambiguity makes this scenario more interesting to me. jin guangyao lives for the rest of his days uncertain if he chose to allow his son to die through inaction, or if he really was just weak enough to fail to protect his son. maybe jin guangyao's memories of the incident even manage to start distorting after a while, implying either one or the other depending on jin guangyao's own mental situation.

thus, when jin guangyao says "rusong had to die," he himself uncertain if he's justifying his actions or delusionally coping with a reality he had no hand in making. when jin guangyao says "i killed my son," even he himself is uncertain if he's even telling the truth or not.

[wayofcloudbrain]

we need more pathetic female characters written by authors who don't hate women

[wayofcloudbrain]

lxc: ahahahha isn't it so funny mingjue-xiong if you'd been a girl we would have been betrothed to one another ahhahahahahaa hahahaha hahahahaa *starts crying*

nmj:

(nmj's silence is not because he doesn't agree or like this concept but more because if he thinks about it for two seconds he'll have to envision living for more than two more years and that will make him die of yearning anyways)