Fashionably Depressed

Zuko painted his skin red each night with the even strokes of a prayer.

This was no Blue Spirit of the Deep Waters. This was Zuko and his rage. Zuko and his shame. Zuko and the cloak he donned in honor of the legend of a woman who covered her scars in paint and turned her grief into light.

Drenched in red and covered in shadows, the Painted Ghost bends lightning and flame in search of retribution.

it is our differences which make us dearer to one another

it is never too late to start loving

the enemy is not the foreigner, but the ones who tell you to hate the foreigner

everyone should have food, shelter, and work

everything is a yin and yang metaphor if you try hard enough

It’s an interesting little case study in fandom behaviour. Essentially, that Twitter user has made a name for themselves through a pattern of antagonism towards Zutara shippers, and have gotten embroiled in several controversies as a result. Critical to this matter, is their popularity. They’ve amassed a number of followers who like to orbit around them, and this has led to more than a few instances of them implicitly sending their followers after smaller accounts.

One such incident involved them spurring on hate towards an Iranian Zutara and making fun of them, only to later learn that this shipper was living in an active war zone and was indeed a victim of a violent conflict. They backtracked and apologized, to the ends of: “I didn’t know, I didn’t know…but—“ which satisfied their followers, but confirmed what Zutara shippers already knew: that this anti flippantly and performatively used progressive rhetoric to advance their own amusement, and likely cared little for the substance of the principles they claimed to believe in.

There are other controversies, but the last straw was a very recent incident where they invoked the KKK to create some joking “slander material” tags that were a play on words of Zuko’s name with that group. Recognizing instantly that such jokes were racist and offensive given the KKK’s lasting legacy of violence in America, they were quickly called out by Zutara shippers and their followers alike, which led them to backtrack and apologize for their actions. BUT…once again, they relied on the defence of ignorance, claiming that they didn’t know very much about American politics and weren’t familiar with the mechanics of Tumblr’s tagging system.

Many of their followers condemned them and claimed that they could no longer support them, but I want to ask them: what was it that you were supporting up until this point? They were more than happy to bond through dogpiling and deride Zutara shippers for supposed fascist and colonial apologia, all while actively poking the bear and inviting more conflict through deliberate antagonism.