memery inbound

1) Figured this out.

Before his son died, Iroh was a pretty bad dude. He had redeeming qualities, like sparing the last dragons and loving his family. But he was still a general leading a campaign of conquest.

His redemption started after his son died. He clearly had a lot of self reflection as well as a spiritual awakening in the following years.

But he was still conflicted, trying to remain loyal to his nation and family while also practicing the principles he learned from his travels. But those things were incompatible.

Even after he had to actively fight against the Fire Nation when Zhao threatened the moon spirit, he still thought he could return to living in the Fire Nation.

It's only after Azula tried to imprison him and Zuko and forced them on the run that he gave up on the idea.

I think it's sometime around their time staying in Ba Sing Se that he finally decided to oppose the Fire Nation. At the price of his own freedom, eventually.

Until Grace slips out a sentence along the lines of "could you give me a little grace here" and Rocky immediately points out he used a word wrong so Grace has to explain that yeah, grace means elegance but it can also mean mercy sometimes too.

She should be at the club

Baby mouse had earplugs in the sketch and I straight up forgot to ink them pretend they're deep in there

Meanwhile not at the club:

I was driving through Vermont with a friend, and we pulled over at a tiny shop offering Maple Items. We were on the state highway, not the interstate, so "pulling over" meant "squeezing my tiny car into a parking bay the size of a broad highway shoulder."

As we got out of the car, an older woman emerged from behind the building where she had been pruning her roses. She introduced herself as Tammy.

Her shop offered the promised variety of Maple, but also a number of small antiques and a plethora of dog figurines, plaques, and clearly-hand-stitched garden flags.

A huge purple ribbon hung on the wall behind the register, along with many pictures of small dogs. This was no county fair ribbon. It was the size of my torso. The material had the soft sheen of actual silk.

As I placed my purchases on the counter, I asked, "Do you... Breed dogs?"

Yes. She does. She has bred Yorkies for the last 40 years. Her mother bred Yorkies before her. The purple ribbon was from her national championship winning Yorkie.

You may be expecting that the infodump was going to be about Yorkies.

It was not.

It was about 40 years of drama in the Yorkie breeding community. Where – you must understand – the judging at shows is often about who you're in with, not about the dogs. This is especially true when Tammy's opponents win anything.

And Tammy's mother! Well. Phyllis has been on the Yorkie scene since Yorkies were invented. Because of this, many women of equally venerable age hold deep grudges against Phyllis. The sort of grudges that result in episodes of Midsommar Murders.

This led to deep injustices against Phyllis on the part of judges and prevented her dogs from winning so often she retired from the scene. Judging is all about who you're friends with, after all.

After 20 years in hiding, Phyllis – the One True Queen of Yorkie Breeding – hatched a plot. She may have been out of the show circuit, but she was still breeding dogs. She entered an absolutely perfect bitch in the national competition, but sent her with a handler rather than go in person.

None of the usurpers knew who this dog belonged to, and in dog-breeding circles this Does Not Happen. This could have resulted in further injustices, but Phyllis was crafty. She knew this tournament was being judged by a man from the UK, who knew naught of the drama in the US Yorkie Empire.

With these advantages – and being the best dog there – Phyllis's bitch won the highest honor at the show.

Incensed by this insult to their ill-gotten supremacy, the other owners descended on the handler after the show, demanding to know for whom he was working.

"Phyllis," said he.

The name of the overthrown queen evoked horror in the usurpers.

"PHYLLIS!? She's still ALIVE!???"

Yes, Phyllis yet lived, and this bitch – the dog, not the woman – went on to mother Tammy's current dogs. One of whom, Lucy-Fur, is the reincarnation of Tammy's sister (also Lucy). This is certain for two reasons.

Firstly, Sister Lucy absolutely went straight to Hell upon her death, and Lucy-Fur the dog is positively as evil as Sister Lucy was.

And no matter how gently this is pointed out, the newbie will often initially feel instinctively defensive towards what they perceive as scolding. Which means that when another community member comes along and says "Don't worry about the language police 🙄, many of us think AGAB language is fine, it's a useful way to refer to the kind of formative experiences you had as a child," the newbie will latch on to them like a life raft.

And yes, we live in a transphobic society, a lot of people coming into the trans community will have uninterrogated transphobic views, but that just makes them more vulnerable when there is always someone in the community willing to tell them "no, your transphobic views are fine actually, and in fact here are some more you might not have thought of!"

It means a sizeable chunk of newly-out NBs are swiftly radicalised into increasingly extreme transphobia and transmisogyny simply as a defense mechanism against having their own comments criticised. One day they're just happy to join a community where people supposedly don't judge you on your birth sex, and the next they're talking about the importance of "AGAB socialisation".