June 2026

The creeping buttercup (lat. Ranunculus repens) on the river bank🌼🌊

blaze this post like the sky was blazing on May 05, 2025

to all those sharing your skies with me, thank you

you inspired me to add some color today

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He has trouble expressing himself but tries to make thoughtful gestures and give little gifts to people he cares about to show affection.

Early on when Iroh and he are living in a cave and he's going through one of his Robbing People With Swords phases he steals a fancy tea set for Iroh in a misguided attempt at showing affection.

In another misguided attempt at affection he gives the Earth Kingdom boy his knife.

After struggling the entire night to bond with Jin because he's socially inept he does his cute little gesture of lighting the lanterns and risking outing himself as a firebender because he wants to make her happy. And then gives her a coupon for a free cup of tea when she clearly wants to kiss him, because he's clueless.

We see this style of showing affection come out with Mai as well except she sneers at it and shuts him down and hurts his feelings about it. He is the kind of sappy bastard whose first instinct on seeing something pretty is "I'm going to give this to my girlfriend :)" but it seems like this is supposed to be showing us that he and Mai aren't a good fit. He tries being sweet and vulnerable and makes little gestures, like seeing a beautiful perfectly intact conch shell and trying to give it to her, and she verbally rolls her eyes at him and hurts his feelings about it.

Later on when he's with the gaang and starting to feel safe being his true self, he's showing them affection in his typical way by making and serving everyone tea (and on a more subtextual level I think this is a way to demonstrate humility to them, since he comes from royalty he's trying to show that he sees them as equals).

He does other kind gestures to show his new affection for them in the forms of leading a prison break with Sokka and taking Katara on a trauma closure (but murder not NOT on the table if she wants) mission and waiting outside her tent all night like a wet dog on her doorstep.

I'm so happy for him when he actually gets to make tea for the gang and they happily accept his token of friendship instead of throwing it back in his face

In some later versions of the story of Heracles, storytellers added in their own little side fic to it, where Heracles is getting force-fem'd and has to live as the maidservant of this wealthy dominatrix lady and this addition to the story got so popular in retellings that it's considered its own equally valid version of the myth. Literally someone's Heracles femdom fanfic that got so popular it was accepted as a "canon" part of the story by the people of the time, most of whom probably didn't know that it wasn't in the older versions of the myth because it was the only version they'd ever heard. So now someone's dominatrix OC they created to ship with Heracles is an official part of Heracles lore and listed as one of his wives on Wikipedia (with the caveat that she's not in every version). This part of the story arose at a time when ideas about gender and sexuality were shifting somewhat, so I think we can see why people in a time period like that found this addition to the story to be intriguing and wanted to explore them through a popular myth.

"Canon" is a modern concept born from a religious concept that was designed as a tool of social and mental control. Canon should be considered like draft 1 of the contemporary myth and all fanfic and retellings are just alternative versions of the same story just like how classical mythology has multiple versions depending on who's telling it and when.

Was Iphegenia sacrificed by her father or did the goddess Artemis step in at the last moment to spare her? Both, because both versions exist and are equally valid and real because both are fictional. The one where she IS sacrificed came first (I believe) but was changed in later tellings, probably because human sacrifice was a huge no-no in Ancient Greek religion and practitioners were probably not buying the idea that a god would demand a human sacrifice when such things were strictly prohibited, and they decided that they were ignoring and rewriting that part of the "canon" because they couldn't make sense of it in the context of how they understood their religion. Kind of like how I cannot make sense of a highschool aged girl wanting to make out with a 6th grader based on my understanding of teenage girls as someone who used to be one. It was one of the first ever instances of "she would not fucking say that," so the folk fixed the error they saw in the story, and we do the same thing today with fanon and fanfiction.

They weren't buying that Artemis would ask for a human sacrifice, they decided she was acting OOC and to fix it, just like how I do not buy that Katara wanted to kiss that little boy or that Zuko would be happy with Mai, and as a result I am changing the story in the way I retell it.

So if I decide that Zuko ended up happily married to Katara and they had beautiful steambabies, then fuck it, that's what happened. Because I said so. Because that is how telling stories has worked since the dawn of humankind.

The version of ATLA where Zuko and Katara end up together is just another version of the contemporary myth. It might not be canon, but it is just as valid and just as real, because neither are real, both are imaginary, and arguing that people aren't "allowed" to disregard canon and decide for themselves what happened is basically like arguing that your imaginary friend is more real than someone else's imaginary friend. Both are imaginary. Neither are real. These are not historical events they are fictional stories and no one can stop you from deciding that something else happened because thought crime is not real and you have free will.

Deciding to disregard canon and make up your own version of fictional events is using free will to its fullest extent tbh. More people should do it when a story they like ends in an unsatisfying way. It's very fun.

Ending this rant on some Henry Jenkins wisdom.

And this one:

"'Fandom' is a vehicle of marginalized subcultural groups (women, the young, gays, etc.) to pry open space for their cultural concerns within dominant representations; it is a way of appropriating media texts and rereading them in a way that serves different interests, a way of transforming mass culture into a popular culture."

Jenkins, Henry. “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5, no. 2 (1988): 85–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295038809366691.

Thank you for listening. Zutara forever.