Smile, Kid, Just Like You're Supposed To

So I noticed in A:TLA, and it’s carried over in LoK, that Airbenders always seem to have an advantage in a fight. And at first, it felt like plot armour, particularly in A:TLA.

But when Aang fought Bumi, he lost most of that advantage. And I realised that this wasn’t just plot armour. Someone had sat and worked it out: nobody has had to fight Airbenders for generations. 

None of the other nations have had to train to face them, or practised sparring with them, or anything. Apart from Bumi, no bender in the show has ever even met an airbender before Aang comes along. And in LoK, for the most part people still haven’t. We never see fights between those who have (for e.g. we never see Tenzin and Lin fight); when Korra and Tenzin use airbending, its a unique fighting style that people aren’t trained to manage.

It’s a really small detail, and it fundamentally works to give the heroes an advantage (and make up for Aang’s young age and lack of combat experience), but I love how it’s an advantage in combat for completely logical reasons.

aang straight up says to the fire nation guards on zuko’s ship “you’ve probably never fought an airbender before”, because he in-universe figures out that, if what everyone around him is saying is true, and airbenders have been extinct for a century (or at least have gone to ground enough to make people think that) then he is a totally unknown figure in anyone’s calculations

this has been brought up before but it’s also one of the reasons why hama is so thrown in her fight with katara - waterbending is about energy exchange, keeping things flowing, throwing your opponent’s power back at them and we see katara and hama do this in their fight. however, when katara is faced with a powerful blast from hama, she stands her ground and blows it apart:

[image ID: a gif of katara in the puppetmaster. she is a teenage girl with dark skin and hair and blue eyes, wearing a red outfit. she turns and throws her hand out, stopping a blast of water and turning it into a huge shield. the background is a dark forest. end image ID]

why do i bring this up?

It’s completely different than anything we’ve seen from other metal benders, who bend metal with sharp movements like the derivative of earth bending that it is

two of these examples can’t be shared lines of iambic pentameter (both gertrude’s line and brutus’ are already rushed and irregular at eleven syllables, so laertes and cassius both get their full ten beats for two or three words) and one of them doesn’t have to be (macduff and malcolm’s lines add up to ten beats indicating that it’s shared but no one will call the scansion cops on you if you split it into two and divvy up the extra ten syllables between them, which imo is the more playable option)

remember that verse is symphonic and that those extra syllables are notes in the orchestration of the scene— they have to go somewhere, either into beats of rest or sound. there’s a lot of ways to score any of these moments but one possibile notation for the first is

MACD: your royal father’s murdered.

(rest/ rest/ rest/ rest/ rest/)

MAL: oh.

(rest / rest / rest/ rest/ rest/) ...

by whom?

all that silence affords the director a moment to let a lightning-fast scene (the entire cast pouring onstage in ones and twos, yelling over each other at varying levels of authenticity) come to a screeching halt, and the severity of the situation set in. for the actor it’s playable as all hell, and ultimately very human: the kind of raw shock that makes you ask stupid questions. you get the same thing with laertes. tbh i’ve always found “drowned? (rest / rest /) oh. (rest / rest / rest / rest/ rest /) .....where?” to be utterly goddamn devastating in how realistic it is, bc what else can you say to that? if someone told you with no warning that your sister drowned, what else would come out of your mouth in the moment but something stupid and mundane? oh. ..........where did it happen?

the other notable similarity in these three moments is the use of un-words: two ‘o’s and a ‘ha’ (they aren’t meant to be pronounced exactly like “Oh” or “Ha”; traditionally shakespearean un-words are performed as unarticulated sounds, sighs, groans, exhalations etc). un-words leap out to the actor because it is a character rendered speechless. i made a post a few weeks ago about how big of a deal it is when people written by william shakespeare dont have words for what they’re experiencing/when the pain is so big that even in a metanarrative universe where you are only the words you speak you are forced to admit that something is unspeakable, and every “o” or “ha” or “ah” etc is a moment of this horror, this defeat at the hands of your own medium

it’s a rich moment for actors because in classical text it’s frowned upon to act “outside” of the line (to waste vocal qualities on things that aren’t words, ie to take a pause from speaking your richly layered monologue to let out a pained exhale. “act on the line” says your director, smacking you on the knuckles with a copy of freeing shakespeare’s voice), it’s diva-y and amateurish to take more syllables than you’re given. but when you’re given the space of ten beats for “ha portia”, who will dare call you a scene hog for stretching that “ha” into five notes of agonized, wordless noise?

in the same way that lear’s “howl howl howl” is very much not just the word ‘howl’ said three times these moments demand full, shattering vulnerability from the actor, a dive into the place in the body where pain lives. maybe laertes and malcolm really do say “oh.”, quiet and childlike, or maybe that ‘o’ is a stand-in for the all-air sound that shakes out of you when you get punched in the lungs and try to talk through it, or for that deep animal groan you heard that made you think what was that before you realized it was coming out of your own throat