Nobody Famous

Witch: And that is?

She is what interests me in either of you

Like why are you even here if not for her story bro

This leads to a triple reasoning of 1) more dynamic, 2) more “deserving”, and 3) forbidden homosexual relationship to have the two guys leave the boring unworthy hetero female lead for each other just to subvert expectations.

because here’s the thing. i’ve harped before on how fucking dumb it is to take the character whose central line in the og show was “no matter how things may seem to change, never forget who you are” and have them immediately afterwards 1. actually somehow just not leave the country they were banished from, and 2. deliberately and knowingly choose to have their own memories wiped. like ???????!!?

and yeah, that then leaves the question, when it’s revealed in late s3 that she was banished and is possibly still alive: why didn’t she ever come back for her kids? why didn’t she at least seek out zuko, who was also banished and therefore at least theoretically accessible to her? why didn’t she try to intervene when she presumably learned about the agni kai and her son’s disfigurement? and if she never learned of it, how could that be without her either deliberately forgetting she had kids or choosing to actively ignore any opportunity to get information about them?

and my friends, this is where the silliest part of the whole kerfuffle is. because there was ALREADY a built-in, solid, well-explored piece of worldbuilding that could very easily have answered all of those questions in a way that wouldn’t fundamentally violate the basic foundations of her character’s nature. that piece of worldbuilding? the city of ba sing se.

As a writer, this solves so many of your problems. If Ursa ends up in ba sing se (which there’s decent reason for her to do, given that it’s entirely reasonable that she’d be worried about ozai changing his mind and deciding he needs to tie up loose ends, and that the city just repelled iroh, making it about the most secure location she could get) then once she makes it inside the walls she discovers there is no war in ba sing se. suddenly, trying to get information about anything to do with the fire nation, let alone the royal family, becomes extremely difficult and dangerous. she has a plausible reason not to know, or have very little and extremely delayed awareness of what’s happening to her children.

also, the city is fucking massive and packed to the brim with refugees. even with zuko and iroh getting all about the lower and upper ring, it’s completely plausible for her to have even still been there without amnesia and just. never happened to cross paths. big cities are like that. you could see a million people in a day that you’ll never see again and they’ll only be a tiny fraction of all the people there that you’ll never catch a glimpse of. plus, once you’re lucky enough to get in as a refugee, it’s probably not so easy to leave again, especially if you want to have a chance of being able to come back.

if you really want the amnesia plot, the dai li/joo dee worldbuilding is already set up there too! all you have to do is have ursa keep trying to find out about her kids, maybe even discover zuko’s banishment and try to either reach out or leave the city in response, and have the dai li catch her in a sting to crack down on citizens promoting awareness of the war.

badabing, badaboom, ursa gets joo dee’d and now you have an amnesia plotline without ursa deliberately abandoning even the memory of her kids.

I also thought it was far more tragic to work off what Zuko said, that they were a happy family once, but Ozai had a bigger love for power than family.

I know as a kid he could've not realized how things actually were, but it just hits me harder to think that they were a happy once, and from Ozai's lust of power, his family fell apart, it broke, it grew weak and divided. Conflicting.

And it just added to the lesson of pursuing absolute power is a loss of love, a collapse of your house, a weakness in your foundation.

How the higher you climb, the farther you are from the roots that held you up and together, and it makes the fall far more devastating.

His want of power over family, he sent away the wife he once loved.

Turned an older brother against him to plot in secret.

Banished the son that would help lead to his defeat.

Broke his most loyal and effective daughter and soldier as he left her behind.

And all it left him was being alone and overconfident. No one to come to his aide as he faced the wrath and mercy of the Avatar.

Teenagers are basically primed to make mistakes. That's kinda the whole gig. Just old enough to do stuff on their own and still figuring out how to weave in and out of it. It’s worse when they start out as well intended mistakes. Imma be real here, i am a parent. I have a teenager. Sometimes she makes mistakes and learns something. Sometimes she just goes "maybe I didn't break the rules the right way."

So here is the thing. Marinette is 15. 15 is a special age. Later curfew, grown up feelings without grown up knowing, and the unfortunate urge to "handle it yourself".

She has also been handed the literal weight of the world. Which. No 15yo ever is ready for that, and she already had anxiety and imposter syndrome before that started. She is getting terrible advice but she is at this point someone who is suffering under lets call it "chronic trauma". Over and over over again the narrative has demanded that she and only she is responsible for everything that happens around her, to her and through her. She has once used nearly every Miraculous in very short order, and has now fused the cat and ladybug - which I have mentioned is likely incredibly dangerous.

How are people looking at her as some sort of evil villain? People lie about grief all the time. We try to make things gentler. We lie at funerals. Marinette feels both that she failed to save Gabriel and that she as good as killed him. (If she'd been a few seconds faster, he wouldn't have died. That's not rational or right. But it is what she is feeling.

She is a kid. Wrong choices - maybe? Good impulse. Sure. We can give her that. But as much trauma and pressure as she was under at the moment and is still under *now*? From the people she trusts? From the adults around her? Was it a choice that Marinette made or a situation where the window is broken and she's the one left holding the ball?

Learn from it? I have so much fucking compassion for this little girl that at this point I am just rooting for her to *survive* all of this. This is a lot of complex trauma for someone who is already carrying so much. She doesn't need a lesson. She needs a hug. And like yeah, pick your own fandom experience and all that. I have a big block list. But I was 13 when I first joined fandom spaces. And the prevailing attitudes in mlb fandom as a whole make it unsafe for teens and holding hard lines about responsibilities for trauma and trauma reactions.

There is intent. There is willful desire to cause harm vs a desire to protect oneself and others from harm. There is reveling in lies vs the burden of lies.

And through it all, regardless of the situation, the hate is going to the person who is actually TRYING.

Trying to protect.

Trying to help.

Trying to be good.

Trying to make up for her mistakes.

Trying to simply FUNCTION without accidentally causing the destruction of an entire city by accident with every choice she makes.

Doing all this while effectively being the ONLY responsible party and the one to apologize and be accountable in every situation that goes wrong.

And yet they insist that not only is she the bad guy but that she isn’t suffering enough.

black hair? check. bad parent(s)? check. trauma? double check.

bruce: how’d you get your scar?

zuko: my dad got mad at me for saying that killing people is wrong so he lit my face on fire and banished me.

J: "wan na kno w h ow i go t thes e sc ar s"

Consider

Iroh: you too must learn patience. Boiling the water ruins the delicate flavor of the white jade

Alfred: oh I'm dreadfully sorry - for some reason I expected this tea to have TEA in it

(later)

Alfred: *aggressively laying out full tea service with milk, lemon, sugar, and, just to drive his point in, jam*

while Zuko is enthusiastic about cream and sugar

It’s not even necessarily about the willingness to murder or help her murder.

Zuko worked WITH Katara, meeting her where she was at. No expectations. No judgement. No condemnation or lectures or metaphorical finger wagging. He went out of his way to learn about her, to LISTEN to her, to understand what she needed. And he helped her to find closure on HER terms.

Aang was trying to get her to accept closure on HIS terms. He tried to guilt Katara into getting over her own trauma. He tried to shame her for how she was dealing with her trauma. He tried to push her to “be the bigger person” and follow his standards by “forgiving her” and expecting her to “learn a lesson” herself and forgive the harm done to her…by comparing her taking Appa without permission to the murder of her mother.

#Howard recruited hydra while building SHIELD#Not saying he deserves to die and certainly Maria seems to have done nothing wrong BUT#I want to make that point#Howard chose to work with Hydra#and it was because of him Hydra could thrive in the shadows and become so powerful#also Tony was well into his ratpack years when Howard died so his crappy parenting was solely on his own actions#Not dying wouldn't have change much for Tony in that regard#other then maybe way down the line Howard could have in person apologized for being a crappy dad#anyway that being said#Screw dying to save Morgan being the perfect end to Bucky's arc#why does his arc have to revolve around Tony#why is saving multiple lives. actually confronting and apologizing to people inperson--#-- doing what he can to take the people hydra put in power in jail--#--and helping saving world multiple times not good enough?#why is none of that counting to his arc?#why act like somehow the starks are the most important most central people in the world?#That wouldn't be the perfect end to Bucky's arc#that would just be the story saying Tony is the most important character in the franchise

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Also Howard chose to take is wife on that drive wit the super soldier serum ...

Just saying

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I do think it would be a nice little lateral arabesque if Bucky safed Tony or someone from is family (without dying) becasue it would be like

Dead in every way that matters and controlled by hydra he kills

Wenn he is himself, he safes

Would be kind a nice, you know

ripfic

#it's not like a chunk of this fanbase still uses tony's parents as justification for the accords or anything#<- prev tags so true#why is everyone convinced that death or sacrifice is required in order to give a character a meaningful ending to their arc??#can’t the man just retire in peace#why does he need to die as some sort of sick twisted redemption for something he was literally tortured and brainwashed into doing#bucky barnes

He lost his life. He lost his place in time. He lost his memories. He lost his free will. He lost his morals. He’s lost his best friend. Why does he still need to sacrifice for a rich asshole with daddy issues who had no issue making weapons until they were turned on him and no issue screwing over the universe so long as HIS happy peaceful life was untouched.