Chapters: 4/4 Fandom: Avatar: Legend Of Korra Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings

There’s something deeply distressing to me about how there’s been this steady push over the past twenty years to transform all forms of media from things you can physically buy and use as you see fit into things you essentially rent in perpetuity from publishers and hosting services. It’s like there’s this assumption that we can rent these things forever and never have to worry about the Internet ever going down or one of these digital landlords deciding to take them away from us whenever they want. Movies and PC games are my beat, but I've certainly had to stockpile a number of hard copies over the years due to rights issues or lack of interest keeping them out of the digital marketplace.

On the Existential Fear of Losing Your Online Persona

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“Digital is about access, it’s about sharing,” Schwartz said. “But once you digitize something, suddenly the object is not human-readable anymore—not readable like a stack of letters in your attic. With digital you have to preserve the letter, and you have to preserve the software, and the machine that can read it.”

That means that as technology evolves, the types of data it can read evolves as well. Think about the floppy discs you almost definitely have in a box somewhere—or DVDs, to pick a more recent example. My current laptop doesn’t have a CD/DVD drive at all. I couldn’t watch my Mona Lisa Smile DVD if I wanted to. So you can see how delicate that media is.

Thinking a lot about this since Apple announced the demise of iTunes. One great thing about iTunes was the convenience of digital while still owning a physical library. I spent a good chunk of the 90s building a music collection. It defined me, which was the things worked then. It’s no coincidence that the transition from aesthetic to moral signal occurred alongside the transition from owning a physical to a virtual library. If the things we own can’t define us, then what does? When I was twelve or thirteen, I would have killed for something like Spotify where all the music I could ever dream of was at my fingertips, but there’s no hunt, no sense of personal value.

Picard: “...well, fuck me, I guess.”

“He reminds me of that delightful FBI agent with the future-glasses from that old David Cage game.”

These aliens have names like Garvin, Skorin, and Talur. And this kid comes up with Jayden. The hell, writers?

“Order.

Kuvira is driven by a fierce desire to protect and guide the citizens of the Earth Kingdom and persistent on achieving national unity through the use of military force. She displays mastery in the use of metalbending, and also demonstrates considerable physical strength.” Art by KDEJ.

My own theory is that a majority of the new Air Nation is made up of former Earth Kingdom subjects for two main reasons. First of all, the simple fact that the Earth Kingdom is the most populous nation in the world means that, if the number of people developing airbending was equally distributed, the lion’s share of new airbenders would appear in the Earth Kingdom. Secondly, it seems like Tenzin got the majority of his “recruits” from Ba Sing Se, where they were refugees fleeing conscription and had no choice but to leave the EK, while others presumably came to Republic City as civil war broke out falling the Earth Queen’s assassination. By contrast, the Korra-era Fire Nation and the two Water Tribes were relatively stable and humane places, so the new airbenders probably had less of an impetus to emigrate. I imagine some did, but it wasn’t a matter of life or death for them. As for the airbenders who stayed behind in the Earth Kingdom, I had a dark idea about that. A few years ago, I was playing with story ideas for a potential Kuvira fic, and I hit upon this idea of a bunch of pro-Kuvira EK airbenders joining her army and being put into a special unit. With a training regiment crudely based off of whatever old books about airbending were floating around the EK, these airbenders would learn to control and manipulate poison gas as an offensive weapon against opposing armies and in fortification-clearing operations. While they would seem rather graceless and clumsy compared to someone like Tenzin, the fact that these “gasbenders” would be wielding clouds of the Avatarverse’s equivalents of mustard gas, phosgene, and chlorine would make them terrifying in their own right, and they would be one of the many things that turned the world against Kuvira. Sadly I never came up with an actual story to put this idea in, but I still have the gasbenders in my back pocket for a rainy day.

Were there no new Air benders in the Fire Nation of Water Tribes? We saw the Air benders pop up in Republic City (EK colony) and Lin had reports of Air benders in the Earth Kingdom.

Does this mean Air benders come from “the people of the earth element” or that the other two nations just kept quiet about it?  It certainly would have been interesting to see how the modern Fire Nation deals Air benders in their midst. 

Where did the Air benders come from in the pre- fire- conquest days? Where they all born within the nomadic- monk society? That seems very unlikely. Where they born elsewhere and joined the order as a “higher calling”? Where they Air benders from all nations or just the Earth kingdom? and if so, why? 

While Tenzin & Krew pressured the new Air benders to join it was a voluntary choice in the end. Was it always that way?  what I’m getting at is … there may be people with Air bending abilities that are not part of the Air bending culture/ society. Are they self taught? are they lying dormant? What are the stories of the non joiners?

“Now tell me which is better: three...or four? Three...or four.” “Three...or four.”

Do you see your little red house?

Kuvira thinking about crushing you like a bug

Daily Kuvira #16 - Autumn

Taking time to get away from the city.

And perhaps visiting a friend….

@nick-nocturn, isn’t this basically what Keratin Garden was?

a beauty guru that is haunted by a demonic entity