devoted

the dead want a fire lord on his knees

For a time, Europeans regarded the tomato with deep suspicion. Arriving from the Americas in the 16th century, the tomato’s resemblance to other members of the nightshade family ensured it was met with botanical paranoia rather than culinary enthusiasm, and for a while it was admired chiefly as ornament. And so the tomato spent its first European years being looked at rather than eaten: a fate it bore with the equanimity common to objects that are right, and surrounded by people who are not yet.

The tragedy of Zuko is that he spent years rehearsing for a trial and accidentally wandered into a redemption arc.

It also occasionally turns on whether someone landed in shit.

The Flagellants were bands of religious penitents who travelled from town to town during the Black Death, publicly scourging themselves with whips. They believed the plague was divine punishment and that sufficient repentance might persuade God to lift it. An invisible disease is a difficult enemy to confront. One's own back, by contrast, is considerably easier to reach.

Furta Sacra, or Holy Theft, was the medieval practice of stealing a saint, or rather his leftover bones, from one church to enrich another. Thieves weren't troubled by the commandment against stealing, because they had devised a tidy loophole: if the theft succeeded, the saint had clearly wished to be taken. The dead, conveniently, do not object. It's remarkable how easily a crime becomes a blessing once the victim is in no condition to disagree.

It's bleak as hell, but it's also why his arc is peak, because he doesn't get better at deflecting but he does dismantle the beliefs that made him agree with it in the first place.