After Dark

4 year old me: why must we do this

Fantastic old woman in the leopard print coat: "Why yes, my tooth IS real silver! Nobody ever asks me that. Do you like cats?"

At the 1985 Labour party meet, the motion to support LGBT rights as a party was passed due to a block vote from mining unions.

@stiffyck had me Pondering about Eridian formal wear/jewelry for Grace and now here we are.

Bonus:

And artist notes under the cut:

I want that for us. I so want that for us. I want to be the generation that has seen fucking everything and is like a MRSA bug and unfazed and when that Cheeto finally dies, I want us to. Plant the gardens and clean the seas because we can and we want to and we remember some joy, some time of trust even when it got broken and we can say to the 20 somethings "let us show you what we can build, how it can feel."

So we tried to make sure someone called her every day, so she would have some kind of interaction, and one time my spouse asked how she was doing, and her attitude was basically, “Yeah, this happens sometimes.”

Because that was her life. She did live through the depression, she did lose three siblings to the last pandemic. She did live through WWII, and sent a son off to Vietnam, and made a family and a household and a career while knowing one slip of a button might wipe out all life on earth. And she lived through it; she survived.

And so 2020 wasn’t the end of the world, for her. It was just another thing. Because life is made up of sunshine and rainbows and puppy dogs, AND ALSO fascists and violence and rancid millionaires living high while people starve. And when you are in the middle of the shit times, you acknowledge that they’re shit, and also that they are not exclusively shit, because they still include spring days and new flowers and people taking care of each other.

Can we talk about young Monk Gyatso for a second? Because honestly, he is one of the best characters in the entire franchise. He’s essentially a chaotic mix of Sokka’s goofy energy and Toph’s absolute gremlin energy. He was constantly making up jokes and pranks, driving Roku completely insane.

The Chronicles of the Avatar books confirmed that this iconic phrase never existed in the Fire Nation. Gyatso literally made it up on the spot just to mess with a teenage Roku.

Look at their actual dialogue from the book

The Dedication of a Master Troll

Gyatso’s dedication was indeed unmatched. He didn't just forget about the joke; he casually brainwashed a young Aang into believing this was how actual cool people in the Fire Nation spoke.

And Aang, being the sweet, trusting kid he was, fully believed his master. When he met Kuzon, he probably threw a confident "my good hotman!" at him. Kuzon was undoubtedly baffled, but because he didn't protest, this only solidified Aang's rock-solid faith that this was the ultimate Fire Nation greeting.

The Generational Curse

The absolute beauty of this realization: Gyatso created a ridiculous greeting just to annoy Roku. A century later, that exact same trolling phrase comes back around to deeply irritate Roku’s own great-grandson, Zuko.

So this "hotman" prank literally passed through generations just to end up annoying Roku's descendant. Never underestimate Monk Gyatso’s dedication to a bit.

anyway i wanted a memento of my first pride, you know, and this one vendor was selling keyrings, and i liked it, so i bought one. do you remember those italian charm bracelets that were all the rage like 10-15 years ago? it was a keychain like that, and it had a rainbow rooster, a rainbow cat, and then just a rainbow, and so I bought it.

i run into my mom a couple of vendors over and she goes oh you bought something? what’d you get? so i showed her, and i was like, “I’m not sure why it’s a rooster and a cat. Seems kind of random. But I liked the rainbows.”

and my mom, who was some form of minister’s wife for most of my childhood and teenagerhood, stares at me like she thinks i’m joking.

“What?” i say.

…relic…