Warning: Teacher within, please leave offerings of chocolate, caffeine or alcohol in the ask box.
Hello there, my name is Cate, and welcome to my blog. Expect things relating to various fandoms, feminism, politics, cute and awesome things and science!
prince zuko got you all out here thinking every dark haired antagonist boy is gonna do right in the end when zuzu was the exception not the rule
I really wish it weren’t though? I think it’s really telling that a lot of people like redemption arcs because we want to see people be good despite their pasts. The fact that there are so little redemption arcs in media is very upsetting because it just sends the message that people can’t change which we know is not true. I absolutely don’t mean this for characters like Kylo Ren though lol
Redemption arcs are hard and Zuko’s was successful for a couple of reasons:
1) Zuko wasn’t the worst character in the Fire Nation. From really early on it was shown that, compared to Zhao, Azula, and other Fire Nation leaders, Zuko was consistently more noble. He tried to be a good person and do the right thing, even when doing so led to him suffering for his actions.
2) Zuko suffered for his mistakes. He suffered when he turned away from Iroh, he suffered when he betrayed Iroh, and he suffered even after his face turn. There were consequences for his mistakes; he didn’t get off scot free because his childhood was hard. He was still held accountable by the narrative and made to take responsibility for the wrongs he did.
3) Zuko made tangible amends to the people he hurt. He rescued Hakoda, helped Katara get closure, and became Aang’s firebending master. He put in work to make up for the things he did and rebuild bridges with his new allies.
Most redemption narratives fail because the guilty party is guilty of much greater crimes than failing to capture the hero, never works to make amends, and never suffers for their mistakes. You wanted to see Zuko redeem himself because he had the capacity, wanted to do the work, and paid dearly for his mistakes.
Armageddon is one of the few DVDs I didn’t sell because Ben Affleck on the commentary track is relentless. Below is the clip of the commentary from where this tidbit of trivia came from. Please take a moment to witness the magic.
this is so fucking funny
“aim the drill at the ground and turn it on”
This is the funniest fucking shit in the world, I gotta find this DVD and listen to the whole commentary
(tr*nny is short for transmission in this context)
The male benders in ATLA: Really good. They worked hard to get where they are skill wise and while it hasn’t always been easy, they are capable and can hold their own in a fight. One of them was even the Avatar, which is pretty impressive since he mastered the elements at age twelve, rather than start learning at 16 like most Avatars.
The female benders in ATLA: Inarguably the most powerful and unmatched humans in the entire world. Prodigies, masters, and creators of subbending styles. One was compared in skill to the Fire Lord at age EIGHT and able to perform one of the rarest and most difficult forms by 14. She couldn’t be defeated by another’s (even the Avatar’s) bending alone. Only faced defeat when fighting two other master benders while on the verge of a complete mental breakdown (officially being defeated by different female bender). Another held an entire city up by a single turret while standing on unstable ground, and then went on to invent her own bending style at the age of twelve. One mastered her element in mere WEEKS, mastered bloodbending and defeated the woman who INVENTED IT the FIRST TIME SHE EVER ATTEMPTED IT, held her own against a master waterbender without ANY TRAINING, and fully healed someone from a fatal wound, making her a master at two vastly different forms of waterbending at the age of 14. A female Avatar quite literally reshaped the planet and created her own ISLAND. AND MOVED IT ACROSS THE SEA. These women shown in the show are not only the most powerful and talented females in their universe, but also in almost any known piece of television or fiction, all while being completely fleshed out and complex characters, not being defined as nothing but ‘strong’. Each has their own personality, strengths, and weaknesses.
Thylacoleo, for the uninitiated, was Australia’s equivalent of the sabre-tooth cat. It was the size of a leopard, murdered rhino-sized marsupials with sharp teeth and huge claws, and looked like this:
Its closest living relative is this:
Yes, the most vicious mammalian carnivore Australia has ever produced is most closely related to a herbivorous furry cube.
What the fuck.
It’s obvious when you check out Thylacoleo’s teeth. Most mammalian carnivores have a similar setup: incisors, canines, premolars and molars. Dogs have it, cats have it, we have it. Thylacoleo’s teeth look like this:
You’ve got pincer-like incisors in the front, giant sharp-edged molars in the back, and no canines to speak of.
That last bit’s the important part. Canines are most useful for holding meat, so herbivores tend to shrink them down to nothing. Thylacoleo’s lack of proper canines show its ancestors were originally herbivores. But because you can’t just re-evolve features once they’re gone, it had to make do with what it had. Hence those ridiculous fucking teeth, which were nevertheless perfect for grabbing and chopping meat just like every other carnivore’s teeth do.
tl;dr: at some point in time a bunch of vegans decided to weaponise their limitations to kill everything and by god did they do it
kids have no concept of anything. i walked into my kindergarten class and one kid asked me what my name was. when i said miss jones, he said “i like that name. did you know i’m in love with you”
i asked my four year old cousin how old he thought i was going to be at my next birthday and he said 8. im 23
once i told a 6 year old that i had finished school and was doing “more school” [university] and she asked “why haven’t you found anyone to marry then”
We were at a museum and I was asking for the student discount and my nine year old cousin looks up at me with his eyes wide and says “wait you’re a STUDENT??”
I used to babysit these three kids and the eldest who was around 11 at the time was talking about how adults are boring and when I told him I was an adult he said, “That’s not true, you’re my age”
our aunt teaches and she has this story about a little girl who really was always pretty quiet in class and then on the final day of kindergarten she just up and stated ‘i’m all teached now. i don’t need to be teached anymore. i’m done of being teached.’
once when i was 19, I told my little cousin that i was 19 and she looked up at me with huge eyes and went, “Does that mean you don’t have to bring an adult with you to the pool?”
My 6 year old cousin saw me driving for the first time, looked up at him mom and said “does that mean she is married now?”
I watched my dad and my niece (3 at the time) arguing over a pair of pants and whether or not they were also a dress. My neice’s argument was that they were, in fact, also a dress because they were blue.
I asked the kids in my daycare class what they thought I should be for Halloween and this little boy goes, “ooh I know! A pickle! You’d be such a good pickle”
On the first day of class with my favorite student of all time, I said, “Are you okay? You look like you have a question.” And she looked me right in the eyes and said, tremulously,
“Can a piranha eat a stapler?”
One time I was working with a kid and he looked up at me and asked “Do you have a boy?” I had no idea what he was talking about, but I told him that I did not have any boys. He looked shocked and then deeply concerned and said “Well, you better hurry up and shave your arms so you can get married; August is next month!”
I was sitting on the floor with my 3yo niece and we were playing with her younger brother’s alphabet blocks and the O had an octopus on it. So I picked it up and asked her what it was.
“Octopus,” she said, all curls and smiles.
“And what kind of animal is an octopus?” I asked. I was looking for “fish” or “sea creature” but I would have accepted almost anything–”weird,” “gross,” even “slimy.” “Underwater” or “it lives in the ocean” would have also been acceptable.
She looks me right in the eye and says, happy as a clam, “It’s a cephalopod.”
dickens would either write amazing erotica or he’d spend too much time exaggerating the characters noses and foreheads to even compare their dicks to steam trains or something. just noses and foreheads bumping about the place.
Dickens would write TERRIBLE erotica, are you kidding me? His narrative voice would get in the way:
“‘My darling, I wish,’ said Mr Scruncheon, ‘to rail you,’ and indeed, his cock had reared up fearsomely as a Punjab tiger (though not, I should think, as yellow—but Mr Scruncheon was a man deeply afflicted with that sickness which causes the skin to tinge that unwholesome colour, so it is a certainty that while not as yellow as a tiger, Mr Scruncheon’s cock was a deal more yellow than it ought to have been)”
