powerpoint night with the gaang

everyone in my replies rn like “uhhhhhhm well actually 🤓☝️ toph couldn’t make a powerpoint ☝️ because she’s blind 🤓☝️🤓☝️” first of all, shut the fuck up. second of all, you know nothing

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found the time to dust off and colour some sokkas! at least some concept to make sure our boy is well-dressed and protected through the episodes in season one. (i am not entierly sold on all though... hm...

you may also like: zuko, sokka, ty lee, suki,

old atla fanart from 2020 hihi

Zuko having a connection to the spirit world but instead of it being something deep and profound, it’s just because he spent three years pre-finding the avatar running towards the first weird magical shit he saw.

Aang and Zuko journey to the Spirit World.

The Spirits: Oh look, the avatar.

The Spirits when they see Zuko: AND HE BROUGHT ZUKO WITH HIM! GUYS ZUKO’S BACK!!! EVERYONE HE’S HERE!!! ZUKO YOU BASTARD HOW ARE YOU?!

iroh’s connection to the spirit world is one of sober mutual respect

zuko is the spirits’ equivalent of that one racoon who just hangs out inside a gas station on top of the slurpee machine so persistently that he’s given a namebadge and an employee cubby in the break room

atla heritage post

Ozai is so pathetic, like that “take his bending away haha he’s harmless now” trick would never have worked on Zuko, if you took his bending away he’d just grab his swords and come at you twice as hard, Azula doesn’t have swords or anything but she’s pretty good at hand to hand and amazing at talking her way out of problems, Iroh bust himself out of prison with no bending at all, meanwhile Ozai? Gets his bending taken away and then just collapses, doesn’t even try anymore, then just sits in prison and tries to get into Zuko’s head some more, he could have trained up and tried to break out too! But no! Bet he can’t break steel bars with his bare hands. Bet he can’t kick a steel lever in two. Bet he can’t even do a flip.

Also we never really see him do any really impressive firebending apart from when he has magic comet power, I guesss he shoots some lightning at Zuko, but that’s it and Azula is still better at the lightning thing. Azula has blue flames. Zuko can do firebreakdancing and bend with his swords. Does Ozai, who is not 14 years old, have blue flames? No he doesn’t.

He didn’t even do his coup himself, Ursa had to kill Azulon for him! Could have just challenged Iroh to an Agni Kai for the throne but he didn’t bc he knew he’d lose.

And then he only ruled for like 6 years! He lost a war that had been going on for 100 years bc of a bunch of kids.

Loserlord indeed

Do you think prince Zuko slurps noodles really loudly

And his crew never tells him because they don't wanna get yelled at

But then later Toph makes fun of it constantly and he had no idea and he gets all embarrassed

Okay but

REAL WORLD TRIVIA TIME!

Whether slurping is considered rude is cultural

In Japan, it can be rude not to slurp, because slurping shows how much you're enjoying the food

So this could be:

Zuko on his ship: *slurps*

The Cook: *quietly pleased that even Prince Brat likes his cooking*

But this could also be:

Zuko at the Western Air Temple: *sllluuuurps at everything the Gaang serves*

Katara: *eye twitch* His mouth is full of water I could do it, I could murder him right now

Sokka: Not until he teaches Aang please

Toph and Aang: *pause a moment, then start SLLLUUUURPPING*

@lizardlicks added these very important tags:

So I present to you:

Zuko on the ferry: *slurps now that he has decent ill-gotten food*

Jet: *playing 4D chess against himself on "peasant manners" v "Fire Nation manners"*

I love how whenever ATLA recognizes Sokka is smart enough to solve a problem but it’d be too fast they just stick him in some kind of situation. Like he COULD’VE stopped jet from drowning a town so they tied him up and dumped him in a forest. He COULD’VE figured out what that spirits deal was so they lost him in the spirit world for 24 hours.

”#normally the situation is just ‘the gaang refuses to listen to him’, #so many episodes are just. sokka says not to do something -> they do it -> it goes badly -> they beg sokka to fix it for them -> he fixes it, #cactus juice and boiling rock eps are the obvious outliers here ofc, #the desert bc his attempt to provide for them backfired in a spectacularly unprecedented way, #and boiling rock bc he was simply too suicidal to be rational, #which is like. we’ve all been 16 it’s okay king you’re allowed a mental health day, #his life WILL be full of anguish and suffering#most of it self inflicted#and we LOVE that for him!!!!, #my special little freak<3333”

preperations for the long journey ahead, friend

Ok minor detail but ...

So I noticed in A:TLA, and it’s carried over in LoK, that Airbenders always seem to have an advantage in a fight. And at first, it felt like plot armour, particularly in A:TLA.

But when Aang fought Bumi, he lost most of that advantage. And I realised that this wasn’t just plot armour. Someone had sat and worked it out: nobody has had to fight Airbenders for generations. 

None of the other nations have had to train to face them, or practised sparring with them, or anything. Apart from Bumi, no bender in the show has ever even met an airbender before Aang comes along. And in LoK, for the most part people still haven’t. We never see fights between those who have (for e.g. we never see Tenzin and Lin fight); when Korra and Tenzin use airbending, its a unique fighting style that people aren’t trained to manage.

It’s a really small detail, and it fundamentally works to give the heroes an advantage (and make up for Aang’s young age and lack of combat experience), but I love how it’s an advantage in combat for completely logical reasons.

The detail in these shows is amazing. 

You can see the same principle in play whenever somebody fights somebody who uses a completely unfamiliar style. Combustion benders and lavabenders aren’t straight up more powerful, but they’re pretty much always something you haven’t dealt with which presents unique challenges. That red lotus lady with no arms is just a perfectly ordinary waterbender, but using forms and styles nobody else has seen before. Jet routinely smacks around benders and soldiers, but loses hard to the first person he met who had actually studied diverse styles of swordplay. When Toph invents metalbending, nobody can deal with that, but seventy years later the counters are pretty well known among people who might have to fight the cops.

And it’s why Azula, a genius prodigy who has thought long and hard about how to counter every kind of magic and martial arts out there, keeps getting messed up by a kid with a boomerang.

it’s also a detail from the second ever episode

aang straight up says to the fire nation guards on zuko’s ship “you’ve probably never fought an airbender before”, because he in-universe figures out that, if what everyone around him is saying is true, and airbenders have been extinct for a century (or at least have gone to ground enough to make people think that) then he is a totally unknown figure in anyone’s calculations

this has been brought up before but it’s also one of the reasons why hama is so thrown in her fight with katara - waterbending is about energy exchange, keeping things flowing, throwing your opponent’s power back at them and we see katara and hama do this in their fight. however, when katara is faced with a powerful blast from hama, she stands her ground and blows it apart:

[image ID: a gif of katara in the puppetmaster. she is a teenage girl with dark skin and hair and blue eyes, wearing a red outfit. she turns and throws her hand out, stopping a blast of water and turning it into a huge shield. the background is a dark forest. end image ID]

why do i bring this up?

because it’s a move - and a mindset - influenced by earthbending, which hama has never faced (she went from the south pole, to prison, to the fire nation). it’s an indication not only of katara’s skill and power, but also how she’s learned from her travels, and from toph

one of my favorite details of atla is how the main characters’ fighting styles adapt as they take on new enemies and make new friends with other bending styles. iroh straight up tells zuko about how he developed a technique for redirecting lightning by studying waterbenders, but if you watch closely especially in the last season, there’s a lot of this sort of thing happening unspoken with the gaang, using the bending forms of other elements like katara does above. it really shows the strength in differences and diversity coming up against a fascist regime that wants everyone to conform.

Look at Korra metal bending here

It’s completely different than anything we’ve seen from other metal benders, who bend metal with sharp movements like the derivative of earth bending that it is

But Korra is fluid. She is bending metal like it’s water. Because she is a water bender. And she is the first person in history to be able to bend both metal and water and so she is able to combine these styles into one and move seamlessly between them. This shows so beautifully how the Avatar is the embodiment of all bending

Every time I think this show has shown me all it can….it gives me more.

The fight between Tenzin and the Red Lotus reinforces this. Zaheer is pretty skilled for someone who’s only been Airbending for a few months, and he has the advantage against a lot of people because there still aren’t really enough airbenders for people to know how to fight them. But against an Airbending MASTER like Tenzin? He only wins because he has backup

I just wanna say that this mirrors something I got to watch in real life. I fenced as a teenager, with my wife, who continued fencing in college.

But her college had fencing equipment but no team, so she started coaching them. But she fenced lefthanded. She ended up with a team of fencers who almost ALL learned to fence lefthanded.

A small % of fencers are lefthanded, so even very good fencers are often NOT USED TO fencing lefties.

So her dinky little team of mostly newbies came in and fucked severely with teams of much more experienced fencers who couldn’t cope with fencing leftie after leftie. Her one protégé who was also very tall just laid waste to nationally rated fencers.

Whereas I, a very shitty fencer, can hold my own against my wife no problem, because I’ve fenced her from the start.

This isn’t JUST a fun plot point and a lovely way of showing social influences and planning and creativity, it’s completely based in real life. Even a shitty fighter can be a problem for a good fighter whose never encountered their style before.

Arsonist's Lullaby

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some of these were conzepts i drew for @ranilla-bean fic the iconoclast. others are just me doodeling zuko in SEA inspired clothing (khemer or siam style/ so cambodia or thailand)

really? you’re STILL hung up on me trying to kill you? it was only on like twenty separate occasions. Grow up

AU where Zuko and Iroh join up with the gang in Book 2 while they're fugitives in the Earth Kingdom. Except when they get to Ba Sing Se, Azula doesn't realise this and still offers to take Zuko make to the Fire Palace

Zuko says yes and spends all of Book 3 acting as a spy in the Fire Palace

He requisitions Suki from the Boiling Rock to "question her" and just never sends her back.

Suki spends the entire arc up to the Day of Black Sun deeply, deeply disbelieving that Zuko is actually on their side but playing along until she can escape. She thinks he's playing some kind of 4D chess when really all those questions about the Gaang are because he's afraid they won't actually want him as a friend after all this, well obviously they're friends, or they were, but what if they change their minds, especially when they see his dad, oh Agni do they know that he looks exactly like his dad? Except for the dad-hand scar?--

Suki is straight up ready to club him in the back of the head and escape when she sees that sky bison coming down.

Sokka: Oh great, you and Zuko are already friends!

Suki: *quietly aborts murder attempt, and redirects it to Ozai*

Katara 🌊🩵

Zuko: There’s something off about her. I can’t explain it but she’s slipping. 

 Azula:

Yangchen, Kyoshi and Korra

Past Avatars

Saw this frame on a different reblog by @thatssroughbuddy but why does it look like Iroh is using his phone to take a photo of his nephew at a landmark

"Uncle, make sure you get that glowy light in the picture and send it to my dad to let him know I'm about to capture the Avatar!"

This was so cute I had to draw it

and of course Iroh is doing what-

!!!!!!

Iroh posts it on social media with some caption like "look at my beautiful nephew" and Zhao comments like "is that the Avatar in the background?"

And Iroh responds, "no, it's the northern lights."

This is insanely funny to me and now: