Meet Me at the CrossRoads

me: the entire foundation of mai and zuko’s relationship was built on how miserable they were together, and how they would just sit there and hate the world together— letting their misery fester as they enabled each other’s depression— and I think that’s really unfortunate because they would work so well as friends if they weren’t trying to make their dumpster fire of a relationship work. similarly, what makes zuko and katara’s dynamic so compelling is that they share the same flaws, only as opposed to mai’s apathy and misery, it’s katara’s rage and guilt that zuko identifies with. they both share trauma over having lost their mothers, and both in a similar way (sacrificing themselves for them) and they both cope with their grief through rage, often misplaced. in the southern raiders, they both act deeply insensitively towards sokka by acting as if his grief over his mother’s death is somehow less valid simply because he is a lot quieter in his coping mechanisms and doesn’t project his rage & guilt onto everyone else. katara and zuko have a deep & profound friendship, but if they were to be in a relationship, they would only bring out the absolute worst in each other thru enabling each other’s rage and emotion-driven decision making. conversely, when they go to the boiling rock, it is shown that sokka and zuko make an excellent team, as they balance each other perfectly. sokka thinks big picture, and plans ahead, but zuko will charge into situations, and account for the details of the plan, such as when he breaks the lever for the gondola. in that same scene, we see zuko jump off the platform and sokka catch him without any communication that either was going to do so. zuko later catches sokka from slipping off the side of the gondola. when they’re fighting azula, again they fall into wordless trust with zuko on the defense blocking azula’s fire, while sokka takes the defense, using the opening zuko creates by protecting him to charge at azula with his sword. throughout the entire episode, zuko supports all of sokka’s decisions without question, telling him that it’s his call to make when he wonders whether they should stay another night, which is the kind of trust sokka always needed to receive as the leader. when sokka is about to give up because he’s afraid of failing again, zuko inspires him and even encourages failure, a lesson that sokka still needs to learn, especially after the shame he feels after losing the invasion. throughout the episode as well you can see the steady building of their friendship, and they’re shown to trust each other unconditionally. the next episode, zuko asks sokka to recount to him one of his most traumatic memories in excruciating detail, and even though sokka could easily say fuck no, he tells zuko about the death of his mother because it is important to him that zuko and katara get along. zuko also genuinely smiles a hell of a lot more than he does pretty much any other episode, even though the situation is incredibly tense, because he enjoys sokka’s company, even when he’s in prison. zuko and sokka have a lot in common, a lot of the same experiences struggling with limitations of masculinity and feeling worthless compared to their prodigious younger sisters. and that’s not to mention that they have a lot of interests in common, such as swords, and the arts (sokka likes to paint & draw, zuko is a theatre kid etc), not to mention they share a similar dry, sarcastic, offbeat sense of humor. as opposed to zuko and mai, who are two miserable people who make each other miserable, zuko and sokka are two miserable people who make each other HAPPY 

… i’m listening…

like

if they had just hired some people to actually cultivate a good website and then asked us how we’d like the site monetized? we could have come up with something

on NPR today they were talking to The Guardian, the UK paper. Asking one of their execs how it is, exactly, in the era of dying print media, The Guardian stays afloat without charging to access their online content. 

And they explained that when it became clear that the industry was irreversibly changing, they asked thousands of their readers to come in over the course of a weekend and sat them down in groups and asked what they would like the revenue model to look like going forward, keeping in mind that the paper would still need to bring in a profit somehow. The overwhelming response was “I am willing to pay for this to be free for everyone”. So The Guardian is funded by subscribers who pay because they think it’s a worthwhile service, even though all the content is available for free. 

Which is also, incidentally, how things like NPR (and Maximum Fun podcasts) are funded. And how Wikipedia is funded. And how many people run their patreons - no exclusives. You just pay because you want to support the product. It’s how a lot of the best stuff in the internet age is funded.

Other online media (whether it’s patreon or podcasts or video games or w/e) offer tiny inconsequential but fun benefits for paying. Maybe tumblr donors get cute options for frames for their icons. Maybe they get access to extra themes. Pay more on this video game for a fun skin for your character that doesn’t change the gameplay. Pay more on tumblr and you can have animated icons. Something different could’ve been done.

I mean, for us to be willing to pay for it, they’d also need to try to build a functioning website. Something they’ve been royally fucking up for years now. Still no easy blacklist, limited search features, limited privacy features, links breaking everywhere… 

But if @staff had made a real good faith effort to create a good user experience that prevented bots and protected users and then asked us 1) what kind of site we wanted 2) what income model we’d prefer to support, I feel like we could’ve come up with something.