Music rules my mind

@notsolaris @sylvere @junesugars

@sleep-gummies @not-really-a-conjunction

Lol

@xaeorian , @ianyourattic (hope it’s okay to tag you…) Go my Ians!

Robert: hm? How so?

Coupé: he also sniffs his food before eating it.

pet peeve that happens more often than you would both think and want

hey do you guys like my new outfit

To me, it’s more about how her character was written in general. It’s about how white men specifically wrote a native woman who experienced trauma and torture at the hands of her oppressors and then ended her story with her being captured again. We need to consider how that looks when native women have a history of being abused -- and that what the Fire Nation did to the Water Tribe reflects too strongly with real life.

They gave her trauma and they made her hellbent on revenge to the point where she would not be redeemable. And it feels wrong that they would also push the line to make sure she can only be seen as a villain because, at her core, she wants retribution for the things that were done to her and her people. 

It’s not wrong for her to want retribution. It’s not wrong that she used whatever means she could to get out of the Fire Nation’s hands. The Fire Nation had already taken everything from her -- she doesn’t owe them patience or compassion. 

And yes, the way she handled things was wrong but you also have to consider that this is just how they written her to be? They framed the entire fact of her developing blood bending as a horrible act that made her unhinged and crazy. The focus isn’t on her pain or what she and her people suffered, it was on how she went crazy and lashed out at people.

Maybe it’s just me but I was sad at the fact that we missed out on Katara being able to connect with someone from her tribe and for them to relate to each other’s pain. It would have been nice to have Hama, jaded and paranoid from being forced to live as a recluse in the Fire Nation, to begin to open up more when first meeting with Katara and the gang and realize she could heal from her pain and become more -- she could pass on her skills and become a mentor. Grow her family and tribe.

They do this most obviously, of course, with Zuko’s entire plotline, starting him out as the major antagonist and repeatedly and continuously peeling back layer after layer until he’s been entirely turned around, narratively, from the ‘big bad’ of the first episode, to a fundamental ally by the end. But they do it all over the place at different levels. Zuko is an individual who undergoes a redemtion, who changes from one state to the other. Then there’s the contrast of people Like Jeong Jeong and General Fong, Iroh and Long Feng, as ways to show that even if a culture is ‘evil’ or ‘good', individuals in that culture can be different, can even poison parts of that culture with enough power, or begin the healing process for more than themselves, with enough power.

Then they do something I’ve never seen any other children’s cartoon even attempt, which is they do it on a cultural level, too. They take Aang to the Fire Nation and show him that even the Fire Nation, as a culture, isn’t all bad. There are fishing villages and schools and acting troupes doing what fisherpeople and students and actors do. Cultures are made up of people, and the people aren’t wholly good or bad.

And the thing with Hama, what they were trying to do, was add a layer of this nuance to bending. They established, waaay back in season 1, that water is the ‘good’ element. Water heals, Fire destroys.

And the message of Hama’s episode was supposed to be ‘Water can destroy, too.’ (Later to be hammered home with the Sun Warrior episode with ‘Fire is life, too.’) But they kind of lost it because... because they lost their own message in trying to cram that revelation into one episode and a throw-away episodic character.

It kind of erased Hama’s nuance. In bringing the focus of that episode to how water-bending can be just as destructive in it’s own way as fire-bending, the nuance of Hama’s story, her suffering, gets lost in the cackling villain stereotype. The nuance is there, in her story as an abused woman who fought back against her abusers the only way she could, but in their effort to drive home ‘look, water-bending can be awful too’ they completely erased the power (and empowerment) behind it’s creation.

They included all the pieces for a true nuanced reading of Hama’s story, where she is neither wholly victim or villain, but a melting pot of both, because that’s far more realistic than either extreme. But they lost it, they missed the mark because our emotional conclusion to that episode was Katara’s horror, her swearing off of this path (which, I will admit I love that she didn’t manage to hold for it for more than like half a season), her disownment of Hama. Her complete and utter rejection of Hama, which feels like a victory in the face of the truly awful things Hama did, and thus completely eclipses the pity we ought to feel for Hama. Which is then reinforced as Hama cackles as she’s led away like it’s some kind of victory for her.

An abused-abuser is given into the care of people who are alligned with her old abusers, and she's more focused on ‘lol I corrupted you to, I win'??? They’re so focused on Katara’s arc here, the ‘add nuance to bending’ theme, that they completely miss the moment that proper characterisation and representation of the complexities of abuse could have made the episode a true masterpiece.

What if Hama doesn’t laugh? What if she screams? What if she’s furious, and terrified, and thrashing as she’s dragged away? What if she begs Katara to save her, avenge her, continue her work, kill them all, please, you’re just like me, you have to STOP THEM!

After that, I don’t think it truly matters what Katara does. What’s the right answer here? To violate the people who are just trying to protect their own in order to free a serial killer? To leave an abused woman in the hands of people alligned with her abusers?

They both have benefits and problems. If she freed Hama, what then? They're children already burdened with stopping a whole goddamned war, they don’t have the resources to take care of, rehabilitate, or even relocate Hama, and if they leave her where she is, what’s to stop her from just starting up again once they’re gone? If she didn’t, what then? Can she really just leave a member of her tribe in the hands of her enemies? What does ‘I will never turn my back on people who need me’ mean when both sides of the war need her, and picking a side means she has to turn her back on one of them.

Have the guard take Hama away or have Katara save her, it doesn’t matter. Afterwards, have Katara break down. She collapses to her knees in the dirt with her arms around herself like she’s trying to hold all the pieces of herself together and sobs ‘I didn’t know what to do, I couldn’t save everyone, what was I supposed to do?’ And she looks to her big brother, who’s only a year older than her, because there’s no one else to look to, because this war has taken everyone from her in one way or another. It took her mother when it killed her, it took her father when he went to fight, it took Gran-Gran when it called Katara to fight, and now it’s even taken Hama, a woman who should have been another Grandmother to her, by turning her into a monster.

signed,

bypass paywall

bwah :3

As a lot of people aren’t familiar with plot creatures, I thought I’d shed some light on the members of the mental menagerie…

The Plot Bunny - Story ideas that come bounding in and start multiplying.

The Plot Chicken - They squawk, flap around, and shit everywhere, but when you actually need to do something with them, they scatter.

The Plot Sloth - Takes its sweet goddamned time turning into something useful.

The Plot Mule - When you mash two plots together and get something cool, but you can’t get a sequel out of it to save your life.

The Plot Cat - Lazy little bastards who take up your headspace, scare away all the other plot bunnies, but won’t actually do anything except lay there.

The Plottweiler - Barks loudly and viciously so you can’t ignore it, distracts you from everything else you want to write, but leaves you too paralyzed with fear to actually put words down.

The Plot Squirrel - Cute, distracting, full of nuts, and just TRY to keep up with that train of thought.

The Plot Bedbug - Shows up during the night, chews on you so you can’t sleep, and disappears in the daylight.

The Plot Tick - Burrows in, bleeds you dry, and leaves you with the creepy-crawlies. Mostly preys on horror writers.

The Plotroach - Totally unappealing, but so tenacious they’ll survive anything until you finally give up and write them.

The Plot Fin Whale - It’s a longfic, but a surprisingly fast-moving one that just flows right out of you.

The Plot Dragon - A gigantic pile of your most treasured tropes that probably don’t go that well when mixed together haphazardly like that but so shiny

The Plot Gryphon - A crossover.

The Plot Chimera - An especially ambitious crossover.

The Plot Hydra - WHERE ARE ALL THESE SUBPLOTS COMING FROM

The Plot Salmon - A love story that ends tragically.

The Plot Peryton - That deathfic you don’t want to write because you like that character and don’t want them to die but its shadow will be cast upon you until you give up and write it.