ciarra? like nevada?

because here’s the thing. i’ve harped before on how fucking dumb it is to take the character whose central line in the og show was “no matter how things may seem to change, never forget who you are” and have them immediately afterwards 1. actually somehow just not leave the country they were banished from, and 2. deliberately and knowingly choose to have their own memories wiped. like ???????!!?

and yeah, that then leaves the question, when it’s revealed in late s3 that she was banished and is possibly still alive: why didn’t she ever come back for her kids? why didn’t she at least seek out zuko, who was also banished and therefore at least theoretically accessible to her? why didn’t she try to intervene when she presumably learned about the agni kai and her son’s disfigurement? and if she never learned of it, how could that be without her either deliberately forgetting she had kids or choosing to actively ignore any opportunity to get information about them?

and my friends, this is where the silliest part of the whole kerfuffle is. because there was ALREADY a built-in, solid, well-explored piece of worldbuilding that could very easily have answered all of those questions in a way that wouldn’t fundamentally violate the basic foundations of her character’s nature. that piece of worldbuilding? the city of ba sing se.

As a writer, this solves so many of your problems. If Ursa ends up in ba sing se (which there’s decent reason for her to do, given that it’s entirely reasonable that she’d be worried about ozai changing his mind and deciding he needs to tie up loose ends, and that the city just repelled iroh, making it about the most secure location she could get) then once she makes it inside the walls she discovers there is no war in ba sing se. suddenly, trying to get information about anything to do with the fire nation, let alone the royal family, becomes extremely difficult and dangerous. she has a plausible reason not to know, or have very little and extremely delayed awareness of what’s happening to her children.

also, the city is fucking massive and packed to the brim with refugees. even with zuko and iroh getting all about the lower and upper ring, it’s completely plausible for her to have even still been there without amnesia and just. never happened to cross paths. big cities are like that. you could see a million people in a day that you’ll never see again and they’ll only be a tiny fraction of all the people there that you’ll never catch a glimpse of. plus, once you’re lucky enough to get in as a refugee, it’s probably not so easy to leave again, especially if you want to have a chance of being able to come back.

if you really want the amnesia plot, the dai li/joo dee worldbuilding is already set up there too! all you have to do is have ursa keep trying to find out about her kids, maybe even discover zuko’s banishment and try to either reach out or leave the city in response, and have the dai li catch her in a sting to crack down on citizens promoting awareness of the war.

badabing, badaboom, ursa gets joo dee’d and now you have an amnesia plotline without ursa deliberately abandoning even the memory of her kids.

She isn’t found out to be the lost princess until

A) she goes into the kingdom to bail out one of regulars

I was today years old. That is disgusting.

No Child Left Behind is one of the worst things to ever be incentivized in schools. It was signed into law when I was 14. Reading Rainbow was my show as a kid. LeVar Burton played a big part in why I became an avid reader to date. The joy of it. It's an adventure around the globe and through different time periods without stepping on a plane or time machine.

Children parrot behavior. In grade school, I always wanted to read the same amount of books as my teachers (50 books) and managed to double that each year. Before No Child Left Behind, book fairs and Scholastic catalogs were a serious matter like your grandma's Fingerhut catalogs. Libraries were (and still are) a wonderland.

and he paused for a second and then said, “when you’ve been taught from a young age that crying is weak and you should train yourself never to cry for any reason, you assume that everyone else has trained themselves too, so anyone who cries has to be doing it on purpose. it took me a long time to realize that wasn’t true.”

Which starred Nathan Lane as a drag queen just two years after he had voice Pumba in "The Lion King":

And we ESPECIALLY need to remember Victor Victoria from 1982 (during the REAGAN administration) which is SET IN THE 1930S and stars everyone's favorite curtain-sewing nanny as a struggling soprano who decides to pretend to be a boy doing drag (DOUBLE THE DRAG FOR YOUR MONEY). I mean look at this photo:

Count Victor Grazinski isn't putting up with your transphobia (or you being a dick to Robert Preston).

Some Like It Hot (1959), it got in trouble with censors and still went ahead, but it featured a lot of Gender and a character getting really into this whole “being a girl for real” thing, as well as the implication of a a gay engagement being on the table

but like? It has Marilyn Monroe in it and banger music and it’s a classic! I only know from my mother bringing it up and also a tiny bit of exposure to russian tv channels, but I think it was also popular in the Soviet Union? So she’d seen it as a child and loved it so much she watched it with me when I was also just a child.

2005 movie adaptation of 1996 Pulitzer Prize-winning musical! Lesbian couple! Kind-of-gay-kind-of-het-with-a-side-of-trans-it-was-the-90s-the-definitions-are-squishy couple! Every single couple in it is interracial!

1999 teen comedy satire about being a lesbian! Ridiculously fucking funny!

YOUR MOM'S CHICK FLICK COMEDY-DRAMA!! 1991!! The woman on the top left was in love with the woman on the top right! It's implied that the woman on the bottom right is the elderly woman on the top left! In the book the two women on top are explicitly lovers! It won two Oscars and three Golden Globes! This movie passes the Bechdel test basically every thirty seconds!

YOUR MOM'S ROMANTIC FANTASY-DRAMA! 1992! A young bride switches souls with an old man and she and her newlywed husband have to figure out how to connect! Those are two of the biggest stars of the era on that cover!! You will notice the word "joke" appeared nowhere in this description!

1994! The only "it's a man in a dress" humor comes from a male bus driver developing a crush on the titular character! There's nothing dark or deviant about the fact it's Robin Williams in drag even if the plot wouldn't pass muster today! The comedy comes from a very cishet American dude trying to navigate life both as himself and a "cishet British nanny who's a widow" at the same time!

1982 comedy! Christmas release! Similar plot to the abovementioned Victor/Victoria! Main character actually learns and grows due to his experiences as a woman!

Legal drama! 1993! You probably STILL know the names on this poster! That's Tom Hanks playing a gay man with AIDS who's suing his former employer for sexual discrimination! That's a Black man playing his lawyer!

1973! If you're wondering what the fuck a Jesus movie is doing here, it portrays Judas as being in love with Jesus! Judas is Black! He's also a sympathetic character who's doomed by the narrative! My mom remembered seeing it in theatres and told me there were massive protests, not because of Judas, but because Jesus is shown being royally pissed off! And by the way...

THEY DID IT FUCKING TWICE!! The remake is from 2000 and it kinda sucks but it also garnered basically no outrage (except from musical theater fans pissed about the weak casting) in spite of the fact it's significantly more explicit than the original and suggests that whole "in love" thing was reciprocal!

Now let me tell you what ties all of these movies together, except for the second Jesus Christ Superstar and also But I'm A Cheerleader because my mom was deeply biased against teen comedies:

THEY WERE ALL ON MY SHELF WHEN I WAS GROWING UP. A VERY AVERAGE MIDWESTERN FAMILY OWNED ALL OF THESE.

And you'll notice I didn't mention Angels in America, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Brokeback Mountain, Jennifer's Body, Saved!, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Flawless, or Torch Song Trilogy. I only provided movies my family owned.

Also the Reagan years. And you can lean into the fact that the guy is in a relationship he has to hide because people wouldn't understand it, but the real standout is the character of Hollywood Montrose.

adding Different For Girls (1996) - lovely understated british film about a trans woman (yes played by a cis man, it was the 90s) and a cis guy who was friends with her at school, who meets her again years later after she transitioned, and they fall in love