on my way

Art Prints by RebekahEvansArt

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I’ve censored names because I don’t want anyone to be sent hate, but this post and the amount of likes it got enraged me so much that I had to say something about it. This truly might be the worst take I’ve ever seen about both Katara and Aang.

Let’s address how this is harmful to Katara first. The original poster seems to want Katara to keep her scars for the aesthetic™, which is already a really gross concept, but I cannot stress enough how disgusting it is to want a female character to bear permanent, painful markings in order to give a male character ‘more development.’

We are shown routinely throughout ATLA that scars are not just physical indications of trauma but emotional ones as well. 

The only person we see who has scars for “cool” character design reasons is Jeong Jeong, but even then we can assume he received them while he was fighting in the war or because he became a deserter. 

All of these characters have these scars to serve as a constant reminder of the Fire Nation’s brutality and ruthlessness. Katara doesn’t need a physical reminder of this. She already deals with the tremendous, traumatizing loss of her mother on a daily basis. How could you possibly think that it would be good to scar Katara just to ‘punish’ Aang while completely disregarding how it will affect her emotionally?

Katara should not have to bear the emotional and physical weight of Aang’s mistakes in order to teach him a lesson. 

It also completely undermines her moment when she learns she’s a healer. She gets this incredible gift that is so special to her because it means she is able to be both a fighter and a healer. These two sides of her are crucial in her fight for justice and compassion, and the healing aspect is a beautiful addition to a character who is so ‘down in the trenches’ in her approach to achieve these things.

This revelation is not only important to Katara as a character but also integral to so many pieces of the plot. If she hadn’t realized she could heal scars, she wouldn’t have offered to try healing Zuko’s in The Crossroads of Destiny. The chess pieces are constantly being set up in Book 1 in strategic and deliberate ways. I’m all for headcanons and fan concepts, but not when they dismantle the plot and characters for, frankly, sexist reasons.

Onto Aang. 

There is absolutely zero indication that Aang did not suffer the consequences from burning Katara. He is immediately remorseful. He is so incredibly guilty that he swears off firebending for good. He is attacked by Sokka, and is probably reeling over the idea that his best friends and the only people he has in this world might never forgive him for his mistake.

But Katara does forgive him, way faster than he forgives himself, as we see him struggle with memory of hurting her well into Book 3. 

Zuko burns Toph accidentally, but absolutely no one chastises him for this or holds him to the standards they hold Aang. And sure, you could argue Zuko makes his mistake as an act of self-defense while Aang is just goofing around, but Aang is literally twelve when this happened. Don’t tell me that you never unintentionally hurt yourself or others when you were messing around as a preteen. Sokka lists an array of injuries he’s sustained at the end of The Deserter, and while I’m sure most of them were self-inflicted, I can’t imagine that Katara wasn’t involved in any of those instances. They’re kids - all of them, and Aang is the youngest of the bunch, so of course he still has lessons to learn. That doesn’t mean he should have to suffer the ramifications of his adolescent mistakes forever.

His impatience to learn firebending also stems from the fact that he only has until summer’s end to do so. It’s not an excuse for him not taking Jeong Jeong’s warnings seriously, but it is an explanation. And he learns from it. The way we see him handle fire and the responsibility of bending fire in The Firebending Masters proves that he’s matured. 

Aang, Book 1: Jeong Jeong tried to tell me that I wasn’t ready. I wouldn’t listen.

Aang, Book 3:  All this time, I thought firebending was destruction. Since I hurt Katara, I’ve been too afraid and hesitant. But now I know what it really is … it’s energy, and life.

The audacity, the gall, the absolute nerve that it takes to say that Aang, a survivor of genocide who lost all of his family and friends and entire culture, “gets let off easy too much” is appalling to me. I’m not sure how many times I have to say that Aang honoring his culture and people and going against the tide - fighting back against the notion that he can’t preserve the traditions and beliefs of his people while being the Avatar at the same time - is not, by any stretch of the imagination, easy.

I don’t know how many times have to say that a child does not deserve to live with the trauma of killing someone, but I’m going to say it again. A CHILD DOES NOT DESERVE TO LIVE WITH THE TRAUMA OF KILLING SOMEONE.

If you truly still believe that the lion turtle/energybending is an easy fix, just read this meta because they explain perfectly why it is not.

The Hunger Games, Actual Teen style!

On the left, 15-year-old Josh Hutcherson.

On the right, 16-year-old Jennifer Lawrence.

-Haymitch Abernathy was 16 when he won the Hunger Games, and the Capitol attempted to force him into prostitution as they did with Finnick and many other popular victors. He refused, and in retaliation, they gradually killed off everyone he loved one by one—his friends from home, his family, his girlfriend. He began drinking heavily at a young age to deal with the trauma of the Games, the loss of everyone he’d ever cared about, and subsequently having to continually relive the trauma of the Games in mentoring roughly 50 children, two each year, whom he’d then have to send to their deaths in the Arena. 

-The Capitol also attempted to force Joanna Mason into prostitution. She, too, refused, and like with Haymitch, the Capitol retaliated by killing off everyone she loved one by one. She alludes to this in both the book and the movie version of Catching Fire, not flinching when she enters the Jabberjay area of the arena because there’s “no one left” that she loves. The movies don’t really explore this, though, while the books do more exploration both with everything the Capitol has taken from her and the lingering effects of her PTSD from her imprisonment by the Capitol. 

-The only reason Peeta and Katniss weren’t forced into prostitution was because the Capitol was too invested in the “Star-Crossed Lovers from District 12″ narrative. 

-Also, Katniss spent the latter half of her first Hunger Games deaf in one ear and had to have her middle and inner ear reconstructed after the Games—the explosion at the Cornucopia permanently fucked up her hearing in that ear. She’s able to hear again after the surgeries but never quite the same. 

-And Peeta had a prosthetic leg! He was severely injured while fleeing the “Mutts” at the end of the Games and was bleeding out from his leg by the time he and Katniss reached the Cornucopia. Katniss gave him a tourniquet using one of her last two arrows to tighten it. Doing so saved his life, but by the time the Capitol doctors took them out of the arena, the leg was beyond saving and had to be amputated. Katniss finds this out in their “post-Games” interview with Cesar Flickerman. 

-Just generally the movies glossed over or completely cut a lot of characters whose experiences in the games left them physically disabled (Katniss’s partial deafness and Peeta’s lost leg being cut entirely, Beetee’s spinal damage from the forcefield leaving him wheelchair-bound being largely kinda glossed over) or with PTSD (Katniss and Peeta’s PTSD isn’t really explored that much, Joanna’s PTSD is pretty much skipped over entirely, Annie’s barely in the movies at all, Haymitch’s entire backstory is cut, the fact that Finnick is basically just constantly putting on a show and barely holding it together under the surface isn’t ever really explored, pretty much all of the addiction subplots including Haymitch attempting to quit drinking and Katniss starting to drink at one point and everything related to morphling are cut…). 

-Basically as “rough” as the movies are they sanitized the FUCK out of the Hunger Games and the world surrounding them, and that’s…not a good thing.

The only reason Katniss and Peeta were saved from prostitution was timing. After their own Games, the rumblings of rebellion had really started to gain traction. All victors have to do a celebratory circuit of all the Districts, but Peeta and Katniss’s celebration circuit was being used by Snow as a “everything’s fine, please don’t rebel, we’re just a pair of teenagers in live” prop tool for Snow to try and supress the rebellion. Peeta and Katniss were much more useful to him as teens in love than they were as prostitutes. Then we went straight from there to the 75th Games, in which Peeta and Katniss were fighters. Between being used to quell a revolution and having the Quarter Quell go the way it did, there was no time for Snow to loan them out to people. But had the timing been different – had there been no rebellion or had Peeta and Katniss not been central to it or had it all been delayed long enough for the post-games celebrations to die out, then yeah, they would have been sold to the highest bidder just like Finnick was.

Cinna puts Katniss in a dress that is consciously designed to make her look much younger than she actually is, so as to play up the ‘teens in love’ angle they’re trying to sell the Capitol.

But the dress also has padding, so as to make her breasts and hips seem larger than they are, since she’s been literally on the verge of starvation for weeks, and wasn’t eating that much before that, and as a result she isn’t that curvy. Katniss is shocked by this, but Cinna explains that the dress was actually a compromise, because the original Capitol plan had been to give her plastic surgery.

Katniss then realises that none of the male tributes grew facial hair in the arena, even though several of them were old enough (note: she doesn’t say that all of them were old enough. Though Rue was the youngest, this suggests that there were other tributes who were young teenagers) and that something must have been done to them to prevent that from happening.

Also, it’s worth considering that Katniss and Peeta probably looked even younger than your typical sixteen year olds.

Katniss makes a big deal about how much they both get to eat at home, but if you read between the lines, Peeta lives off stale bread from the bakery and the odd bit of meat, and Katniss is essentially living the hunter gatherer lifestyle, supplemented by what they can buy from the baker and what they can get from Prim’s goat.

They’re much more well-nourished than the bulk of District Twelve, but Katniss can still easily spot the Career Tributes, because they’re the ones who have always had enough to eat. She’s one of the older (and therefore almost certainly heavier) tributes, but she still gets to hide in trees to get away from the Careers, because she’s significantly lighter than all of them.

Malnutrition tends to push back puberty. Katniss would probably be less well-developed than a modern teenager of the same age.

Notably, we don’t hear about her getting her period— or even wondering about that like she does with the facial hair— in the arena. Which, yeah, could be because of our culture’s habit of viewing menstruation as less kid-friendly than graphic child murder and mentions of prostitution, but it’s worth considering that in real life she might well have not started it yet.

While wearing the final interview dress, even with the padding to give her bigger breasts and wider hips, she says she looks about “fourteen at most”, which even accounting for Cinna’s borderline magical design skills, suggests that she probably tends to look like a younger teen even without it.

Map Being Used

This one from the Avatar Wiki

Determining the Structure/Function of the World

1) Round World

According to Avatar Wiki the map “is also heavily distorted, much like a Mercator projection, a type of cylindrical map that makes a round surface appear flat while still preserving loxodromes.”

2) Magma

There are numerous volcanoes, meaning there is magma beneath the surface

3) Geomagentism

There are compasses that are used for navigation, meaning that the world is generating a magnetic field.

4) Plate Tectonics

We can assume that various mountain ranges we see form as a result of plate tectonics.  For instance, there should be a hot spot approximately under the Fire Nation, creating the arpeggio the way island chains like Hawaii and Polynesia form.  This means the plate is moving to the East, subducting beneath the Earth Kingdom.

So we’re going to assume the non-bending related geologic processes in atla function the same as ours

5) Pangea

Again from the Avatar Wiki “the above map excludes an entire hemisphere of Earth, most of which is oceanic.”

So the world is in a state similar to Pangea, with the land masses collected together.

In fact, given the mountain ranges surrounding the edges of the Earth Kingdom, it is probable that the plates are converging, on the cusp of reforming one large land mass.

Impact of Bending

Even if it’s been hundreds of thousands of years, bending has not existed for a large scale of geologic time.  However, there are cases of very powerful bending that permanently alter the course of geologic history.  So while there are cases where the impact of bending is negligible, it cannot be ignored.

1) Lava Bending

Sometimes benders do stupid shit like fight volcanoes.  In Roku’s case, it involved plugging up the vent and stopping the eruption.  Aang redirected the lava around the town.  Roku has made it so the pressure will continue to build, and that some of the magma will be redirected to make sweet phaneritic textures.  Aang has given any geologist who wants to study that eruption in the future a headache as they try to figure out where the trench came from and how the region that should have been devastated by the eruption was impacted.

2) Seismic Sense

No thoughts, only how much easier it could be to study small earthquakes if you could train yourself to sense them instead of hoping for the best with the seismographs you have available.  Although there would be a degree of subjectivity to the research.

3) Sedimentary Rock Record

When the formation of the rock is largely dependent upon factors in the environment you know bending is going to change things.  Sedimentary rocks form mainly as a result of alluvial (water) or aeolian (wind) related processes.  This means that bending could have some sort of impact on their formation.  However, unless the change is something more long term, such as the rerouting of a river, it is unlikely to have a significant impact.

4) Weathering and Erosion

The same is true for weathering and erosion.  Bending could either speed up or slow down the processes that are already occurring.  It would have to be considered as a possible contributing factor to any unexpected changes in the natural process, but should not have a large impact on the rock record.

5) Stratigraphy

Earthbenders like to destroy millions of years worth of stratigraphy to launch a rock at an enemy or make a point.  They can absolutely mess with the layered sequence of rock.

It’s important to note that these are already issues that need to be addressed when studying paleology, archaeology, etc..  There are natural processes that can destroy or invert stratigraphy, like landslides.  While the loss destroys primary context and can make interpretations more difficult, particularly in fields like archaeology, it is still possible.

There are two main methods of dating.  Relative and absolute.  Relative dating is using surrounding clues to determine age, such as using the layers of a sediment and different objects found within them.  You get an age, relative to other items, i.e., Pot A is older than Pot B but younger than Pot C.  Absolute dating is using methods like dendrochronology or radioactive decay to determine a number age for an object, i.e., Pot A is 25000 years old.  Even if bending can impact relative dating, absolute dating is still an option.  There is also a possibility for Sequence Dating, using a known sequence of evolution for something such as pottery to date a new find.

So while the destruction of stratigraphy does mean a loss in valuable context, there are much more interesting things, in my opinion at least, to be considered.

6) Radiometric Dating Techniques

Radiometric dating involves measuring the decay of radioactive isotopes to determine an age of crystallization or cooling for a rock.  It tells you how long it’s been since a rock was at a certain temperature.  A mineral with a cooling temperature of 300 degrees and age of 60 million years means the rock cooled past 300 degrees approximately 60 million years ago and has not gotten that hot since.

Zircon is a common mineral used for radiometric dating because it has a high cooling temperature, around 900 degrees Celsius.  Enter firebenders.  Specifically Azula and her blue flames, which reach a temperature of approximately 1500 degrees Celsius.  This means that under sustained heat from a fire like Azula’s, the age of the sample would be ‘reset’ and appear to be brand new, even if it’s been millions or billions of years.

7) Plate Tectonics

This is it.  The big, permanent, physics-defying crazy stuff.  The bending that would absolutely fascinate and horrify the geologists.

Remember that time Kysoshi used her bending to split Kyoshi Island off from the mainland.  That means she used her bending to CREATE A MID-OCEAN RIFT

Which, when compared to the proposed original trajectory of the plate, means she either…

Changed the direction of the plate

Or completely changed the plate’s trajectory

8) Bonus - Modelling

With bending, it could be possible to make non-computer generated models to test various hypotheses.  It would take a high level of control, but you could use bending to make a model of the world for observation and testing.

In Conclusion

The methods of analysis and study would be fundamentally different because there would be new methods (e.g., seismic sense) and new challenges.  While a lot of the effects of bending would be similar to those caused by natural processes, such as landslides destroying stratigraphy,

Trying to study geology in atla would be brutal.  Millions of years of stratigraphy can be destroyed in an instant.  The reformation of the supercontinent could be prevented because Kyoshi decided to form an island.