Yet Improving

It’s been A Bit since I’d really thought about actually writing things out in fic form, so I’m willing to say: Simmons tried to redirect a lightning shot meant for Grif. He did block it, but it backfired on himself

(hello inspiration, it’s been a while) york york york york

at some point I developed a headcanon for York as having grown up an orphan or on the street, and that he got his locksmith status as a thief/conman. something similar translates here, and that’s how he didn’t grow up in an airbender temple. 

Even when he became a known criminal (Robin Hood) entity, he flew under the radar as an airbender for a long time. He moves like a new-form earthbender (more like Bolin than Bumi or Toph) and in combat specializes in using his own bending to deflect and manipulate others’ bending. At first glance, he’s a terrible earth/fire/water bender. He doesn’t get caught until someone (3 guesses who) figures out that he’s crazy crafty airbender. He figured out how to use a lighter to turn himself into a human blow-torch, and loves sparring with Carolina to practice manipulating firebending (and for her top-notch company, of course). 

to say that he or Wash is proficient in using any glider would be... a stretch 

Man I wish I had more for the OC one, but I can say, for the RvB one: 

YES. FINALLY 

Red Team is a group of idiots who have been sent out to get them out of everyone else’s hair to track down the avatar and bring them back to the White Lotus!

Raised in the desert, got his laundry mixed with Simmons’, discovered personal expression. I think the thing with his face/eye in this is that he still got into some sort of altercation with Tex, but she’s a spirit in this so it did physical damage to his face and weird things to his eye. He had some spiritual proclivity already, but I think the blue eye can see spirits and spiritual energy more clearly than a normal human eye. 

(Back in RvB classic, I draw Donut has having lost that eye to the grenade, but then gets a new one when Chrovos resurrects him and the new one is all glowy. And then I kinda wanna just draw him having a blue eye after s17, even with the paradox fixed. They still know Huggins, so, hey why not.) 

Grif has a mixed-bending heritage, so Kai is a (hardly-practicing) firebender and they both have clothes that are a kind of color-style mash up of fire nation and earth kingdom clothes. He wears what’s comfortable. 

Master of neutral jing. Is a clever bender, but once combat has lasted more than a few turns at taking swings, he gets sloppy. He’s more interested in using his bending for other things, like kicking off a novelty pizza chain that runs on the gimmick of cooking your pizza over lava. mostly so he can eat the pizza and other people can pay for it. There’s a depressing lack of lavabenders to really pull this off, however, and even fewer who are interested in cooking pizza with it. That is to say, there is only one. And his name is Grif. 

A fortune teller once told Simmons that his primary rival for the positive attention of his preferred father figure would be the Avatar. He has not known proper rest since. He’s a firebender, but he’s mostly scared of his own powers. He’d much rather use practical, scientifically tested, engineered tools and weapons to achieve his goals. Simmons does, however, have a history with Going Feral and consequently wrecking shop. Fire extinguishers are a required part of his travel kit. Whether he has any secondary bending abilities (like lightning or energy sensing) is anyone’s guess. He’s confident he’d have no use for them, anyway. 

Rather than robot parts, Simmons has a massive lichtenberg scar that branches out from his left shoulder. He doesn’t remember getting it and doesn’t know how he got it. I know how. Sarge and Donut know how. 

Next time, hopefully: Sarge, Church, Doc

Honestly I can’t really say that I’ll end up writing anything. It’s kinda in the same state as the Danny Phantom AU, where it’s a space I’d love to keep playing in but don’t know that I could schedule myself to it. But I’d love to keep answering any questions I can and and building out the world more through asks!

The thing with Wash and Epsilon is that I’d like to try and parallel PFL again but with an avatar flavor. Where basically this project is trying to bond people to spirits to create, at the very least, more powerful benders, or maybe even entirely new powers (to be manipulate for war, of course). I don’t have all of the Alpha/Epsilon/fragments logistics sorted yet, but I know that when they try and bond Wash and Epsilon, something goes wrong. They’re both warped to the spirit world, where they get stuck for like 2 years before they escape and Tucker and Caboose find them. I don’t think they remember most of that time, still in an uncomfortable half-bonded state. But they’re both a bit different than before by the end of it. 

As I mention this bonding idea, it’s inspired by the nature of the avatar, but they never pull of anything comparable to it. 

I can’t remember what details I’ve already talked about for Tucker, but I think the forms he takes to the best are for firebending. I might take a crack some day at a super sketchy animation for what that might look like, but it’s pretty cool in my head. And I’m falling in love with this idea of people connecting to their elements in different/non-traditional ways. Details in canon avatar stuff for what forms of martial arts specific unique characters are styled after is my candy. like toph has a specific style she uses, and Bolin looks like boxing, but they’re all earth benders. Like how Iroh borrowed from air and water techniques in his own bending, and passed those on to Zuko. I want to see this story where someone has been unable to engage with this thing that is supposed to come naturally to them, because nothing his teachers are saying is making sense. He takes up swordsmaship (from perhaps an international practitioner) because he still wants to be a warrior and something about this at least feels right to him. 

and now I’m storying this out a bit

like he sees the way Carolina moves and is like “woah” and maybe tries to do those moves on his own and she catches him and shes like “you’re a bender?” and he’s like “...yes.” completely leaving out that he’s not a firebender. but Wash knows he’s a waterbender and if he catches Carolina giving Tucker form tips while tucker is loudly saying “YEAH THIS IS SUPER COOL FIREBENDING” he might be able to say “y’know the white lotus is about sharing forms and unity and stuff, right? like you can just do that?” and Tucker’s just “:OOOOOOOO”

anyway I’m a sucker for one day getting an actual fight scene with Tucker fighting alongside Carolina and the image of them doing the same forms in a fight with different elemental reactions has got me, as my people would once say, shooketh

Hopefully after my last final is over my brain will spare me more gears to figure out how exactly I want to do this, but you’re super duper right. Avatar has HUGE war themes and it’d be an absolute waste to let that go. 

For now, most of what I’ve got on the freelancers is just that they’re a branch of the White Lotus (this is a post-Korra-ish timeline) that was created during a war time. The White Lotus is a neutral body, but... well. I don’t think anything every really stays clean in war

Bending and origins, though!

Tex -- is a spirit (yet undetermined origin or nature. perhaps an aggravated nature spirit)  Carolina -- fire/lightning (raised in the White Lotus) York -- air (was raised outside of air nomad culture. parents either non-benders or new airbenders who didn’t join the temple) Wyoming -- non-bender/marksman (New Republic heritage) North -- water/healer (mixed parentage) Maine -- earth (no one’s really sure where he came from, but Carolina’s seen him around most of her life) Wash -- air/spirit (raised with the nomads and earned his arrows, but he’s a bit of a Jedi Master Skywalker, if you catch my drift) South -- fire (mixed parentage) CT -- non-bender/inventor/short-swords (fire nation heritage) Florida -- water (heritage unknown; lots of swamp rumors)

I agree emphatically 

I don’t see why not? it just probably wasn’t a grenade 

I’m still brainstorming for Tex that doesn’t involve anything zombie-adjacent but I’m sure she’s involved. and he gets retribution. 

I did think about Donut as just being an airbender. but the thing about Donut is that while he can often just be long for the ride, he’s also the guy who killed Tex for revenge, is indestructible to the point it’s a running joke, and basically told an ageless and near-infinitely powerful being which could only be contained by the proper flow of time to Suck It. So 9 times out of 10 he prefers to be bending sand because it’s flowy and sparkles in the sun, but do not assume lightly of him because his aim with a boulder is unmatched. (He probably moves a lot more like Bolin; like a boxer) 

I don’t think I’d ever consider Doc an earthbender? He’s always being tossed around by everyone else. I know I don’t want him as a waterbender, as part of that “guy who wants to heal can’t heal” thing. Him being an earthbender could maybe play into an arc about embracing his own talents (kinda like his arc with O’Malley) but considering that actually makes me think moving him to a firebender would fit him even better. 

We may be coming from different angles, where your style is to choose bending based on personality type, and my style leans heavily on trying to figure out how I can get the most out of each one. I’ll admit that some of the characters I make decisions for based on where other characters are. Like I could see Wash as a firebender or an earthbender, but those had kinda been claimed as Red Team elements, so I wanted to try something different. (I also wanted something to set him further apart from Carolina, who is Peak Firebender) He doesn’t feel like a waterbender to me, so that left air. And from here I’ve found that I really like considering how traditional air nomad culture clashes with Wash’s more… blunt tendencies, and how it could really highlight Wash’s dark period. Also I feel like airbending has the potential to be not so flashy, but still ruthlessly effective, which is Wash’s strong suit compared to the other freelancers. 

homework motivators is the purest form of fandom content 

and Oh man that’s a super good point!

I haven’t gone too deep into thinking about Donut designs myself (yet), but I was thinking about the sandbender outfits we see in TLA, which seem pretty ragged with a lot of wrappings, and thinking about that that might clash so badly with Donut’s Style. (ad the very least he’d need to own it. baffle his parents by dying it fancy colors or embroider patterns that won’t last long on thin wrappings) It was probably a result of their rough living conditions at the time and I can’t remember seeing sandbenders in LoK to compare, but there also seemed to be a lot of places for sand to get stuck in while flinging it around.

but airbender fashion elements can be loose and flowy while also being tied off. I mean, if he’s a sand-bender it’s not like he can’t just pull the sand back out of his clothes, but hey it’s not like water-benders want to be wet all the time. and anyone who’s been to a beach knows its not fun having sand all up in places where it does not belong. 

I’d love to see how Donut’s style might evolve from Home to Just Left Home to Been Out a While to Just Met an Airbender (this isn’t me intending to ask or pressure, just pondering Donut best Red)

--HEY I JUST GOT YOUR DRAWING AN AAAAAAAAA

((First first , I have to thank you because when your words first graced my eyeballs I was fighting with my toddler brain which was screaming “DONT WANNA” at my drawing homework. and then this got me in the PodCast zone and I was able to transition from this to that and do my homework and it actually looks pretty good bless you hallelujah amen))

regular first: HEY YOU SHOULD DRAW AVATAR!VERSE OUTFIT DESIGNS. NO MATTER WHO ELSE DRAWS THEM ALSO. THIS EARTH HAS A SHORTAGE AND THAT SHORTAGE IS AVATAR!VERSE OUTFIT DESIGNS 

second: I’m so happy cause doing avatar aus is so much fun but I hadn’t actually gotten myself to any drawing stages yet. the avatar outfit aesthetics are to hecking die for (if only searching for good groups of official reference material wasn’t an actual nightmare) and it’s fun to make them sO BLUE TEAM

or at least the 3 that I drew as warm-ups before i ran out of space on the canvas I was using. (I’m not super great at drawing people w/o posing them dramatically which makes outfit-concept drawings Real Hard so Yay Lil Thumbnail Dudes) 

I feel like I should ramble for a bit here but all I really have to say is that I draw Tucker prettier than he deserves and I’m gonna make 2020 the year I give Caboose his dimples back 

also I guess maybe it’s worth talking about the state they find Wash in, having escaped the spirit world after being stuck for an amount of time which this author has not yet decided on. Also I think maybe he was raised under Air Nomad tradition but felt a personal moral conviction to not stand by and let a war happen and joined on the pretense that he would fight only for the sake of peace but perhaps lost his way in it all and has to work through the shame of having done something (hurt people) for the sake of revenge? or maybe I’ll mix it up, I’m already playing so fast and loose with canon plot parallels. maybe we can get wild. maybe i need to eat something more substantial than that cup of jello just now

anyway IF YOU DRAW MORE YOU GOTTA TAG ME I BEG YOU I WANNNA SEEEEEEEEEEE

((and again I’m dead serious I cannot thank you enough, your timing on this was a freaking God send)) 

*is a pansy, does not tell anyone. Caboose knows cause he gets hurt all the time and it’s easier to fix it than listen to him be sad. Wash finds out cause Tucker saves his life when they first meet. Tucker didn’t think he remembered that until Wash almost brings it up to a sentient human stranger and Tucker about has a stroke

**kinda like Jinora in LoK, but he’s honestly not super good at it. not about to astral project himself anytime soon. this is part of what makes Wash’s encounter with Epsilon go truly bananas 

***but think of it like Knife Simmons. Technically Simmons is always Knife Simmons. They’re the same person. But also 9 times out of 10 Simmons is just Simmons. Fire is not exactly clean or organized 

 ****uses this power to reheat food and never have a cold bed

*****is artistic af about it; moves like an airbender. is also hella intimidating cause he figured out how to use earth bending to just grind rocks into dust to make more sand. it’s more sparkly. 

******this is a lot like Caboose being the avatar; no one’s super paying attention to him and most of the time he sounds like he’s reading your horoscope, not talking to the spirit that’s right over your shoulder that you can’t see and is drooling on you

(^7)maybe??? could be fun??? OMalley explanation??? will require more thought

Church is still kinda up in the air atm, but Caboose and Tucker both grew up Northern Water Tribe. Probably not besties or anything, but in the same water-bending class. I think they've been traveling for a while when they stumble onto Wash. 

there's a... slight chance? That Tucker knew about Caboose? Or maybe just suspected? and he kept his mouth shut. certainly for something along the lines of "this guy????? the avatar?????? please, I've been doing the world a favor." 

Tucker also has a lot of his own stuff going on (being terrible at the classic water-bending combat, learning sword-play instead "because it's just way more me yknow? and waterbenders are everywhere around here, yknow what chicks love? swords." but then traveling with Wash (and eventually Carolina) who was raised in the White Lotus and learning about cross-bending techniques that suit him better. And also the healing powers that he keeps a secret because "yeah girls can kick ass now but that doesn't mean guys gotta step back". we'll slap that out of him by almost killing his friends) 

that was a long side-track but you question also brought me to Animal Guides for which I need to figure out what Freckles is but, on a related note, Shelia is something massive like a sky bison or a badger mole. 

Anon you galaxy-brain, you. It would be super cool to see Caboose use his bending for all the impossible mechanical feats he does. It's the kinda thing that gets brushed off cause "oh that's just Caboose being a mystery" but actually wait there's an answer this time

lmao and then Sarge tries to explain this to someone and they're (Grif is) like "stop trying to make excuses for those Blue guys being better than you" 

(the dynamics of Red and Blue teams are still a little fuzzy but it's likely that the Reds are this AUs rendition of "the group of suckers sent out on the impossible task of finding the avatar". And then Sarge's excuse for never leaving them alone is because he knows the avatar is right there  but no one believes him. Maybe he even starts to doubt himself. Starts coming up with other reasons to stick to them when he realizes he just... kinda likes Caboose as a kid and maybe wants to make sure he grows up big and strong. (Grif: "He can not possibly be getting any bigger") )