Femenine Urge That

Okay, you guys were excited about this so here's how I would have written the Water Tribe characters as an Inupiaq

Note: this is entirely for fun and is based on my cultural experiences as well as my personal taste in media. There's no way I actually expect Nickelodean would let any of the darker content fly, nor am I trying to play script doctor or say any of this should have been canon. I have my own writings for that. I'm also not bothering to assign them Inupiaq names for the sake of simplicity and ease of communication.

Sokka

Sokka would be named after Bato's father who was killed in one of the Fire Nation raids. He would have dismissed the idea he was Bato's reincarnated dad whenever it was used to embarass him (usually courtesy of Katara calling him a grumpy old man) but go along with it when it was a positive thing like Bato calling him "little dad" or people saying he was brave like the one he was named after. He would probably use more Inupiat language than Katara, because he was less interested in works of fiction and poetry that were available from the rest of the world. He reads weather conditions, the process of learning that from his father was his first introduction to science, and respects the animals he hunts.

Katara

Named after her mother's uncle, who showed signs of waterbending skill but kept it hidden so he wouldn't be taken away. A bunch of her and Sokka's little cousins call her Grandpa and she later jokes to Aang they should have called him that because he's the one who's technically over 100 years old. More likely to explain cultural things than Sokka, who prefers to let them observe and figure it out, but knows more of the traditional stories. Even Sokka will admit she's a better storyteller than him. Eventually everyone who travels with them asks her for a story and she gives her best every time

Kanna

Still dumped Pakku for his suffocating ideas of a woman's place but also over some family drama he wouldn't let go of. Her grandchildren make a point that she has sworn to never drum, dance, or sing, and won't even be in the same room as it until the War ends

Bato, Kya, and Hakoda

Bato and Hakoda have labrets now. Hakoda is not just a prankster, but also a skilled dancer. Bato and Kya were both known for the beautul masks they made

Yue

I've already said she's the closest to perfect rep the series has, so all I'd add was scenes of her alone with Sokka's carving. She'd try to find ways to explain to him, holding the carving and talking to it as if it was him, that it wouldn't work out between them, as much as she'd want it too. Stuff like "You've had great adventures and that's exciting, but I don't want that for myself" and "You don't understand, I have a life here and I can't go galavanting off and leave it all behind" and ultimately deciding it would just hurt him more.

Arnook

We'd get to see more of his governing, specifically in the form of figuring out what to do with Fire Nation soldiers taken prisoner. When the Fire Nation says that a few foot soldiers aren't worth calling off the seige, Arnook gives them the choice to live among them and try to assimilate, or take their chances on the tundra. Terrified and abandoned in a strange, dangerous land, two of them agree to stay. The other one decides to take the banishment because he will not live under another nation's rule. Later, when Aang says they can't just leave Zuko behind, we see ravens picking at shreds of a Fire Nation soldier's uniform. This underlines the nature of Arnook's decision to give the soldiers options and shows that he hates senselessly throwing away people's lives.

Pakku

Still unwilling to teach Katara and firmly held to the belief that women shouldn't fight, but specifically as a result of his sister dying after defending against an animal that would have killed her and an unconscious friend. Some bitter part of him thinks the (male) friend should have died instead, even though said friend was Kanna's favorite cousin. Less smug and convinced he's always in the right, more sad and prone to anger, still as unpleasant to be around.

Hahn

His mother was a shaman, or something close to it, with a special connection to the spirit world, who asked the moon to breathe life into Yue. The youngest of three brothers, Hahn was the only one not to go missing on a hunt. Rather than believe they're dead like everyone else, he insists that he will find them someday. He's happened upon various animal spirits before and can painlessly finish off large game with his bare hands. Knowing the spirits are on his side as well as the attention his skills as a hunter have gotten him have made him arrogant. He has the dream of Yue sacrificing herself instead of Arnook, but he mistakes it for Yue sacrificing herself for Sokka, starting the animosity between them.

Hama

Taken from the Southern Water Tribe but after being kept prisoner, a man of minor Fire Nation nobility decides to keep her as a maid, mistreating her and eventually forcing her to marry him. They have a son, who ends up being the first person Hama bloodbends into the underground cave. She accuses the woman on a nearby property of bewitching her son and making him disappear, and the next full moon she bloodbends the unwanted husband into that cave. The people are convinced and the woman is driven away. More people disappear, regardless of class but nevertheless people around her. She plays up the grieving just enough that no one could ever suspect it's her. She's assumed to be cursed and lonely, and so when she leaves this house where her family was taken from her, people understand. When she weeps that the curse must have followed her after the first full moon she lived in that town, the people show her pity. A few suspect her, but they are shut down as being cold and heartless.

Damn I just realized that since the Rohirrim didn’t read or write (wise but unlearned, writing no books but singing many songs) that means Eowyn couldn’t read or write and since she marries Nerdboy McGee who loves reading and writing more than anything you can your bottom dollar one of the first thing that happens in their courtship/marriage is Faramir and Eowyn wholesome tutoring sessions in the Minas Tirith library (!) 

we all have a limit to the bad things characters can do until we're not comfortable liking them but tbh some of you are just super fucking boring

breaking news: local british magician collapses from exhaustion after carrying the entire fantasy genre’s gaslight gatekeep girlboss representation since 2004. “mr norrell is such a #icon,” our sources report. 

thinking about Jet, as I often do, and thinking about how bryke really thought not only that vilifying the only organized resistance to the Fire Nation was a good idea, but also that making that resistance a group of mostly kids and teenagers and still painting them as horrible monsters was a good idea. We really don’t talk enough about how Jet is treated like an adult in the show. And to an extent, all of the kids in ATLA are doing things that they’re too young to do, but pretty much all of them except for Jet have their emotions and backstory explored. Jet gets one line about the Fire Nation killing his family. One line. He’s shown to be this mature, autonomous figure, a leader, taking care of a bunch of other people, and the show goes out of its way to make him both unlikeable and totally responsible for his actions in a way that a character like Azula (who is exactly as old as Jet) isn’t. I was thinking about this post, which talks about the little girl and how that draws on an old racist trope that depicts people of color violently resisting oppression as child-killers and makes real the “what about the women and children?” hypothetical, and it honestly just turns my stomach that bryke used another child to paint this group of mostly children as evil. The little girl gets to be a little girl and is protected, and her protection is used as justification for vilifying Jet. Jet and the rest of the Freedom Fighters don’t get to be kids. They don’t get to be good or morally ambiguous or even just naive. They already had their innocence robbed from them when the Fire Nation took their families from them, and bryke, instead of exploring them as the children they are, makes them out to be just as bad and just as culpable, if not more culpable, than adults who actively participated in imperialism (like Jeong Jeong and Iroh.) And then Jet’s “redemption arc” is him, the only Brown Freedom Fighter, dying violently for the cause. I don’t know, man, writing this post is making me cry, but Jet deserved so much better than that. Jet deserved to be a kid, and he had that taken from him both within the narrative when the Fire Nation burned down his village, and outside the narrative by Bryan and Michael. 

So, I fell down a rabbit hole and learned two cool things in relation to the Irish language and Tolkien!

1) He seems to have tried and failed to learn Irish and thought it sounded awful XD

2) In one of his letters where he’s talking about the origin of the word nazg (Black Speech for ring), he says that he thinks it most likely came from nasc, which in modern Irish refers to a tie/bond/link and in older Irish seems to have also referred to ring-shaped jewellery (by which I mean bracelets, necklaces etc, not just finger rings). Technically, he does say that he didn’t do this consciously. He was looking up some stuff about Irish, came across the word and ‘re-learned’ it as such and thought “oop, that’s probably where that came from!” but I still think it’s cool.

Bonus! In that same letter, he describes the Irish language as “mushy” sounding and like, I get what he means? I don’t know why, but I find this description hilarious. He’s not wrong XD

You're laughing. The royal necromancer just lost their job, and you're laughing

Word Count: 1781 words

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Fandoms: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth

Characters: Elrond Peredhel, Elros Tar-Minyatur, Maglor | Makalaure, Maedhros | Maitimo

Additional Tags: One-Shot Collection, Non-Linear Narrative, Elrond-centric, Maglor-centric, Character Study, Family Feels, Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Everyone Needs a Hug, let Elrond not lose anyone 2k20

Summary: Scenes of the kidnap family through Elrond and Elros’ childhood, featuring difficult questions, buried feelings, and the fragile hope of a happy ending.

Can also be read below the cut

Keep reading

but if i don’t hyperfixate i’ll get depressed and die

Maeglin and Idril in Uzbek Gondolin

Thank you to @the-quiet-fire-of-defiance​ for helping me work out how to do this and for writing an image description

Image description: an edit with nine images. 1: a headshot of an Uzbek man. 2: A photo of some stone buildings. 3: a photo of a city from above. A large pale tower, lit up with warm lights from inside, is surrounded by smaller stone buildings including what looks like a mosque. 4: a sketch of Gondolin by FelixSotomayorArt on DeviantArt. 5: a photo of an Uzbek knife next to its beautifully detailed sheath. 6: a photo taken between two blue buildings covered in geometric designs. 7: a sunrise/sunset over a cluster of stone buildings, dotted with archways and domes. 8: an Uzbek woman in brightly coloured clothes holding a pomegranate. 9: a banner reading “Gondolin” in white text, with a moon and star symbol on either side.