Sokka: Aang Y'know How You Took Away Ozai’s Firebending?

important confession

i lied about my HIV status and all aspects of my identity (marital status, trafficking past, family, etc.) on this blog and i truly apologize.

i have to carefully avoid thinking too hard about any time period before like the 1900s because i start thinking about all the dead babies and i fucking lose it

like!!!! i trully cannot countenance any argument that the past was better when nearly HALF of all young children died. 

- via ironshearss on TikTok

Thinking about Edward Elric as the Amestrian Military's specialest little unfireable boy

State alchemists can be fired for underperforming. We know this up front from the likes of Shou Tucker. And this makes a ton of sense from the homunculi's standpoint since the state alchemists are sacrifice candidates, and the homunculi would want to cull the weakest candidates and focus only on cultivating the strongest ones who stand the best chance of opening the portal.

........Then there's Edward. Who's already opened the portal.

There's no need to cultivate him. No gamble taken on whether he's good enough to open the portal. He passed the final test already. Graduated 4 semesters early.

And as such, has a free pass to do Absolute Fuck All.

And I'm imagining how funny this is from like an outside perspective.

Some newish state alchemist who'd only ever read up on the stories of Edward Elric, ready and excited to start their career of being paid handsomely with endless freedom to research and travel and do anything they want in the pursuit of science... surprised and confused to find themselves put on probation their first month for things like "ignoring orders." Which is, as best they had thought, a famous Edward Elric pastime.

Roy showing a slight bit of stress about his yearly state alchemist report, and Ed just snorting and rolling his eyes at Roy because every year HE just hastily does his on the train ride over (canon in the manga, a travesty it was left out of the anime) and it gets rubber stamped. Ed not realizing that other alchemists' reports get genuinely scrutinized and torn apart while Ed is free to turn in whatever absolute bullshit he thinks of 36 hours ahead of time. One year his report was about whether alchemy could be done via dance (conclusion: no it can't) and no one cared. Roy WANTS to tell Ed there's some kind of unknown favoritism around Ed making him literally bullet-proof but Roy has no way to phrase this that doesn't sound like he's just in denial and mad at how good Ed's train-reports are.

Guy from the Internal Amestrian Affairs sector who's responsible for auditing other internal military personel for any suspicious activity hitting about 1 million red flags for Edward Elric, issuing a STRONG and URGENT recommendation to suspend the alchemist pending further investigation into things like "literal bunk-buddies with two members of the Xingese royalty (enemy nation)" and "spent $10,000,000 of his stipend on a librarian to make her re-copy (what he seemed to interpret as?) military records in some extremely transparent effort to unearth state secrets (it was a recipe book but he was literally asking her about state secrets)" and "literally has never once obeyed an order, ever, not even once in his career, and is on public record having said 'I do not care about the goals and protections of the Amestrian Military. I am in fact only pursuing my own interests several of which are diametrically opposed to the safety and well-being of the governing body of Amestris'"

The issued recommendation is intercepted before it even reaches its intended desk. President Bradley himself has taken issue with it and denies it before a single set of eyes has seen it. The President's veto stamp is a terrifying hammer, used rarely, and it is now sitting on the auditor's desk.

The auditor sleeps with one eye open from then on out.

Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

Y’ever read something and have understanding that has eluded you interminably suddenly stop, curl up, and snuggle neatly into a fold in your brain because a new way way opened to it?

best part of princess bride is that inigo loudly and openly states to anybody who will listen that he's going to kill a guy for revenge and has been chasing this for a while and instead of anybody saying "but revenge wont bring ur father back are u really sure that killing this guy will make anything better arent u scared of regretting the one thing uve spent ur entire life chasing" they're all just like "yea dude sounds cool hope you find him" and then he does and inigo kills him and is just "aw cool my dads avenged now i can go ride off into the sunset with my friends" and i think thats actually really great. yea maybe revenge isnt always the answer but it sure does make you feel better

any theories/thoughts on the fairies (and maybe great fairies)? like why most games in the downfall timeline (wind waker being an exception) they seem to have human forms, but otherwise they appear as glowing balls of light with wings?

Fairies show up in various forms across the land of Hyrule—at least, that's how they look.

From the drawings we get of LoZ/AoL fairies tend to be your most basic and stereotypical; a little elf girl in a dress with sparkles.

A Link to the Past portrays them similarly, though this one has more vibrant hair and thinner wings, with a decent halo.

Wind Waker gives us a LoZ/AoL style fairy again

Which gets reused entirely for Four Swords Adventures.

But in every other game, we get these.

Interestingly enough, though, we're not actually seeing a change in biology, We're seeing the effects of magical duress.

Like you said, most fairies that show their humanoid forms occur in the Downfall Timeline. ALTTP has vibrant pink, then ALBW is more muted, until we finally get to the dull, glow-less LOZ fairies.

The glow you see at the tip of their wands is actually what little magic they can summon left, concentrated into a precise point, like a laser. As Hyrule declined, their magic faded, not letting them summon the glow they're best known for any more.

A healthy fairy doesn’t need a wand.

In Wind Waker, we also see a decline in fairy power—so much so that by Spirit Tracks, there literally aren't any left; at least, not in New Hyrule. Our big exceptions come from Phantom Hourglass.

Ciela, Leaf, and Neri all maintain their vibrancy and luminosity. But they also draw power from what's essentially a minor god in his own right, the Ocean King.

So they’re outliers, not examples.

In the child timeline, where Four Swords Adventures takes place, we also see the powered down form of a fairy. But in that era, the magic of the world has been robbed, crystalized into force gems that fairies try very hard to absorb power from.

A fairy’s glow is an indicator of its magical health. The fainter the glow, the harder the fairy has to work just to keep itself aloft, and the more stress it accumulates as it tries to use magic.

Great Fairies, however, are a much clearer indicator of the magical status of a kingdom. The larger and more humanoid the Great Fairy, the stronger the country they reside in’s magic.

Ocarina of Time is a good reference point to have. These fairies are particularly large and very human-like, and Hyrule (at least from a wildlife point of view) is thriving.

Wind Waker, however, has an unstable Great Fairy type. The magic in this land is bleeding out and spiraling away, unused and unrestrained as it depletes. These fairies rule a dead world; a sea with no fish but the fishmen, a world with scattered islands and few offerings.

A Link Between Worlds’ great fairy has enough glow for a halo, and remains humanoid, so the magic is being used and maintained. But she’s also barely bigger than a human, indicating that her power’s weakening.

And then by The Legend of Zelda, she’s indistinguishable from any other fairy out there.

But Breath of the Wild?

These Great Fairies are HUGE. They’re the healthiest Great Fairies to date, in part due to their strategic hibernation in their flowers, and they match what we see of Hyrule’s life.

Yes, Ganon has the Divine Beasts and Guardians on his side. Yes, this place has lost its king. But the country itself is alive is thriving. It’s so full of magic that you can find Koroks in literally every corner of the world.

If I had to hazard a guess, since we never encounter them, I’d say that these fairies are the closest they’ve been to Surface Great Fairies from Skyward Sword.

this made me cry so now i need everyone to see it

I think people need to understand that when someone says the situation in Israel/Palestine is complicated they are not necessarily saying that the discussion of who the oppressor vs oppressed is complicated. The Israeli government has been oppressing the Palestinians for a very long time, that is clear, and it is not complicated to understand that at least since the 80s they have had dramatically more financial and military power to keep control of the territory in the way they like.

However, it is reductive and dismissive to insist that there is no complexity in the potential ways to move forward to bring peace to the region. Despite what people on tumblr.edu like to believe, "Israel should never have been created" is not a practical solution to an incredibly heated geopolitical situation in the present day. Israel was created and it does exist. 10 million people live there. 74% of the population is native born and the country has existed for 75 years. Hand waving these fact away with the opinion that "they should move back to where they came from" may make you feel good about being a Radical Leftist, but it does not give anyone a road map for how exactly millions of people without dual citizenship are supposed to just up and evaporate. Nor does it acknowledge the reality that 21% of Israelis are Arabs, the very people you are claiming to want to give the land back to.

Insisting that there's nothing complicated about expecting an entire country's population to willingly dissappear with no consequences is not a productive way to think about this conflict. It ignores the many massive superpowers that have an interest in proping up different states in the region, the power dynamics involved in any land back movements, and the inevitably negative consequences of totally dissolving an established state without a plan. It is also completely and almost comically unrealistic, so much so that it makes it hard to believe that anyone who's opinion starts and ends with this idea really gives a shit about anyone who lives in the area as much as they care about their online leftist clout.

There's nothing complicated in understanding that the Israeli government is and has been maintaining an oppressive apartheid state for decades. It is, however, very complicated to come up with a realistic way to resolve some of the most intricately entangled land disputes on the planet without plunging the region into total chaos. Not everyone has to be deeply educated on every geopolitical situation, but it is very hard to take people seriously when they know nothing about the politics or history of a region and yet insist that there is nothing complicated about it at all.

There's a lot of people on this website who are getting dangerously smug about their own ignorance, and are starting to go down Qanon type anti-intellectual paths in the name of being sufficiently radical. Not knowing the details of a very convoluted land dispute isn't something to brag about online as you call for intentionally reductive solutions. You can support the Palestinian cause and be aware of the oppression they have faced while also holding off on calling people trying to do real analysis and de-escalation work bootlickers. We need to get control of the urge to fit every global issue into a simplistic YA novel narrative structure that appeals to Western revolutionary fantasies.