not all tears are evil

galadriel's been around since the beginning, like, for pretty much all of middle-earth's history you understand, she has Seen it all and despite what you may have been led to believe is at all times this close to snapping. also the reason lothlorien is so chill is she has this magic ring that makes it so the whole place exists slightly outside normal time

i can't emphasize enough how much of a post-apocalyptic horror story thranduil lives in. homeland destroyed and half his people massacred. has fucken sauron in his backyard and the spawn of the primordial beast that eats light puttering about on his lawn. a dragon lives next door. does NOT have a magic ring and is therefore obliged to rule over his murderforest in normal time

just so we're all on the same page here, legolas' day job before joining the fellowship was to hunt the spawn of the primordial beast that eats light and it's not like, a big deal or anything. he just has to do it. he's used to it.

Ba sing se trio as kids🌱🔥🌻

I already designed jets parents way back and because I never read jins book (tbh I don’t like reading books period so I won’t ever) I also designed jins parents from scratch.

Azula and ozai isnt present cause I kinda wanna show how this is them in their happiest moments with the people they feel safe and love, which Ofc those two aren’t rlly with zuko.

"It's unrealistic for a Holocaust survivor to still be alive."

That's not to say I think Magneto's origin should be changed, or that he should be permanently killed off. Far from it. This is comics; all kinds of timeline bullshit happens all the time. As someone pointed out above, Wolverine is most of the way into his second century of life.

What I'd do--and what I'm shocked Marvel writers don't seem to have done yet--is wave the mutant bullshit wand and make Magneto functionally immortal. Secondary mutation, maybe. Something something magnetic fields. The mechanics don't matter any more than "Wolverine is functionally immortal because healing factor" does. What matters is this:

At some point, Magneto will be the last living Holocaust survivor. And he will not let the world forget.

There was a story I read as a kid where Magneto took a handful of soil from the camp where his family died and spread it on the surface of the moon, where he was building a mutant haven of some kind. The image of him on his knees with soil running through his fingers and an agonized look on his face has haunted me ever since. To some part of him, it's always 1945. Never again is quite literally now.

I want to see Magneto as the furious conscience of the Marvel universe. I want him to rip a hole in the UN General Assembly building and stride in with his full regalia on--except for one sleeve, stripped to the forearm to show his tattooed number--and read the UN the riot act in all his nigh-unkillable glory. I want him to storm into summits between warring planets, atomize the ferrous metal in everyone's weapons, and lay down the galactic law that is There Will Be No More Genocides On My Watch, And My Watch Is Eternal. And I want future writers to use his story, and his enduring popularity as a character, to make sure that audiences don't forget either.

"After completing that backlog of over 17 million pieces of mail in 90 days, our performance impressed leadership so much, they sent us on to Rouen, France, where we cleared another backlog in record time. It was a lot of work, a lot of sadness. No one thanked us for our service or included us in the ticket-tape parade. Our hard work and selfless service was not recognized. We were treated better in Europe than we were when we returned back to the United States. That is, until now. People are starting to recognize us and what we did. We were even given the Congressional Gold Medal for our service. Isn't that something?"

We go together.

Caduceus for the longest time was my favorite character of the nein, he and yasha still alternate between the top two spot. Everything from his quest to find his family, growth as a person, and the positive impact he had on the nein is just irreplaceable to me.

Yes it's tragic that Molly's life was so short, but Taliesin's unrelenting decision to let Molly rest leads to such a beautiful story about grief, loss, moving on, and change. Their passing was sudden but it never stopped mattering. I think if Molly lived the yeah it could've been interesting, but they would not be the nein we know anymore. They'd be vastly different people.

A Syrian refugee or something.

Hastings can be his tall English self or whatever, but yeah, Syrian refugee Poirot.

Your tags are telling the reason why I got the idea in the first place, because if he was Belgian today, he'd have no reason to be in Britain for safety, but the Middle East got bombed to smithereens. And sure, the British (as any north/western European country) today are still xenophobic towards foreigners, I mean, we all saw this Brexit thing go down. But still. I just think it'd be really interesting.

Ok this is the funniest thing ever because if poirot is still seasick it would be so ironic for hastings to be a pilot or sailor

Poirot, as a Belgian refugee, is an example of the kind of immigrant that allows England to feel good about itself. Gallant Little Belgium™ resists The Hun™ in vain, which allows the British Empire to clasp them to its vast bosom. The first novel (1920) sees Poirot dependent not just on the charity of England, but on the individual charity of a particular member of the gentry who is dedicated to philanthropy, and he is keenly aware of this. Before he becomes a celebrity, he becomes a gimmick, his sleuthing reported on in the newspapers as something of a fad. And Poirot's instantly legible foreignness is usually read, pejoratively, as French. After all, the French may have Escoffier, and they may have sexy novels, but they are the nation of the non-glorious revolution, and that of Bonaparte (boo hiss), linked with Scotland in the Auld Alliance: in short, an ancient and untrustworthy rival. The internal contradictions and hypocrisies of England's xenophobia and nationalism are always, I would argue, inescapable in the books. And a lot of the drama of Poirot's famous final denunciation/deduction scenes is linked to the ways in which he is exposing respectable, complacent middle-class English society as... if not entirely rotten at its core, certainly hiding all sorts of secrets from itself.

Random Guard:...Link people die if they take those to the chest.

Link: I mean you should be angling yourself, i'm not saying to just let your sternum take a whole blow, to just take it square, that's a terrible idea

Random Guard: It explodes rocks.

Link: You have armor for a reason my guy.

Random Guard: ...

Link: If it helps, drinking some fire resist potions has proven to be moderately effective for me.

Random Guard: The Ones you apply to your skin?

Link: What

There is no universe in which Azula was winning that fight with Zuko (or Katara, for that matter).

Azula spent so much of Book 2 being built up as this deadly terrifying force against whom the heroes are badly outmatched that it can be difficult to catch exactly how quickly Zuko is advancing.

Back up a bit to Book One. For the fearsome exiled crown prince of the Fire Nation, Zuko's not that impressive a firebender. He's not bad by any stretch, and he's able to lay the untrained Sokka and Katara flat pretty easily. Then he gets in the ring with Aang, who is an airbending master, and the difference between a regular bender and a master becomes apparent when Aang literally puts his ass to bed:

People have attributed this to the fact that no one's fought an airbender in 100 years, but I think it's also worth noting that Aang (a 12 year old from a pacifist nation) has probably never fought anyone before. Like, ever. And yet the second Aang thinks "okay, I'll attack back", the fight's over.

Zuko's got the same genetic predisposition for firebending talent that Azula does, yet it never seems to manifest because of his mental blocks. At the beginning of the series, he's already so beat down that all he really has is conviction, pride, and anger, so even with training from Iroh (the firebending master, thank you very much), he struggles. Yet throughout Book 2, when he has no time to train because he's on the run, he actually seems to advance faster. The fact that his bending is literally tied to his character arc (as his morals become tangled and he has to fight off aforementioned mental blocks) is pretty brilliant. Like, by the time of the Crossroads of Destiny, Zuko getting his ass handed to him by Aang is a pretty consistent feature of the show--he just can't match wits with him.

Hell, at the beginning of the series, he and Iroh (again: the actual firebending master) launch a combined power surface-to-air attack...which Aang casually swats away into a nearby ice wall. Come the Crossroads of Destiny, however, and Zuko by himself launches this bigass fireball that blows through Aang's defenses.

Zuko advances so quickly that it's scary. That prodigious talent is in him even if it doesn't come through as cleanly as with Azula. Who, by the way, was busy about to get flattened by Katara some few dozen feet away, until Zuko took over and then effectively stalemated her himself.

All of this in retrospect makes it abundantly clear why Zuko's firebending seemed to skyrocket so much when he learned true firebending from the Sun Warriors: it was really the only thing left. He's hard a hard road learning how to fight waterbenders, earthbenders, and airbenders, and even if unconsciously, he's applying the philosophy Iroh taught him about augmenting his bending style with aspects of other styles (see also, the waterbending-like fire whips he uses in the above gif). Once he actually understands fire and how it works, he's got it mastered. Hence why any gap between him and Azula effectively disappears as soon as their next fight--before her friends have betrayed her and her stability goes out the window. There's no real sense of urgency to their fight at the Boiling Rock prison. True, Sokka's presence with the sword helps, but Zuko doesn't look remotely worried and he counters Azula's every attack perfectly.

All her life, Azula only ever learned fire. She was taught by the best people the fire nation can employ, so she knows all the cool tricks, but she's still poisoned by the corrupted firebending practiced in the modern ATLA timeline. Unlike Zuko, who managed to get the basics if nothing else from Iroh (fire comes from the breath, and can be used to survive as much as to kill), Azula has always used fire as a weapon and a means to hurt others. She has no true knowledge of the craft, meaning she's got the same weaknesses as Zhao, she's just better disciplined to the point she can make up for it.

Zuko's victory was a given considering Azula's complete loss of control by the time of Sozin's comet, but even had she been in a perfect mental state, she'd have lost, because in many ways Zuko is simply the better firebender.