2 spooky 4 this

do you think any of the patrons looked at zukos scarred face - obviously done by a firebender - and immediately think jet was an asshole? like

jet: hes a firebender!!!!

patrons, thinking about the backstory they concocted for zuko and iroh where their home was invaded by firebenders and they barely survived with their lifes so they could come and have a peaceful life selling tea in a city the war doesnt touch:

remember everyone...

thursday watch: the conditions for thursday are here, but a thursday incident has not yet been confirmed

while realism means--exactly that, adherence to the specific logics of actual reality and its physics, logistics, etc.

There's a particular recurring discussion of "realism" in media that goes something like this: "okay, but realistically the heroes would always win because they'd just shoot the villain while they're monologuing" – while refusing to acknowledge the obvious follow-up question: "wait, but if monologuing reliably gets you shot, where do all the monologuing villains come from?"

i.e., what we're really discussing is not a milieu which has adhered to some notional model of "realism" ab initio, but one which was apparently governed by the conventional tropes of its genre right up until the moment the character the person framing the scenario wants to win walks into the room, whereupon "realism" asserts itself.

Heck, there were folks doing this song and dance in the notes of the post this one is following up on, trotting out hypotheticals like "in a realistic fantasy setting the twelve-year-old chosen one would always lose because experience trumps skill and the power of friendship isn't real", implicitly taking it as given that in a milieu where this is true, people would still be handing out magic swords to twelve-year-olds.

This is, in some ways, where groundedness and realism intersect--once the story has established that, for a certain thing, the internal logic of the world aligns with the logic of reality, readers will (reasonably) expect that to continue to be true.

One of the sort of notorious examples of this is horses in fantasy worlds--you can have horses that don't work like Earth horses, but once you establish in universe that they do work like real Earth horses, readers (or at least readers who know horses) will want a realistic portrayal of horses.

Sir Ditto. Based on Tudor portraits.

Stitches wanted to showcase his favorite outfit

Stitches wanted to showcase his favorite outfit

cunt dracula: