i feel like if you stabbed an angel the blood trail would look like this

ATLA as Scents

NATLA Season 2 thoughts

Thinking about Iroh and how the White Lotus stuff is done in NTLA and how much I love it. The merging of storylines and adjusting things (Toph using raised lettering to read and Earth bending to write is amazing) but one thing with the carton that always confused me is Iroh and the Grand Lotus.

ok do i think natla is like. as amazing as it possibly could have been. no. there are obviously ways this show could have worked better, i find it rushed production-side relative to its scope, and it has myriad flaws as knock on effects of that – plus what i would guess to be a high level of studio interference with writing and various other production elements, which gives the whole project a major 'too many cooks' vibe overall. it has problems, but 99% of ppls criticisms of it are honestly just horseshit. it typically comes down to "they changed x, so it's wrong and bad" w no real reason why it's important other than that they think the adaptation should be an exact replica of the og show, which is and always would have been functionally impossible. changes that seem clearly down to something simply not working in a live action version, or not reading as well in a 2020s era show vs a 2000s era show, or getting the thumbs down from test audiences for some other reason, or getting shuffled around in order to accommodate the low episode count, or just being left on the cutting room floor in favor of prioritizing the story's limited space elsewhere, are getting labeled evidence of incompetence or even malice on the part of the writers. This always happens with adaptations esp if they have a large fandom already, but it pisses me off every time because the majority is just reactionary nerd rage being framed as legitimate criticism, which it is not. legitimate criticism is capable of approaching and evaluating the work on its own terms without holding onto prescriptive ideas about it with such a death grip. it's fine to compare as a mode of analysis, but if redacting the comparison leaves your criticism impossible to explain, then you're not making a real argument about how the text is working. eg a character "has" to have this specific arc ("why did they remove sokka doing a complete 180 from misogynist to feminist in basically 2 episodes"*), the narrative "has" to happen in this order with these specific things included ("why is serpents pass happening so early and with the wrong characters there"). in reality there's no reason choices like that are anything but neutral and subjective, except in light of being aggressively, constantly compared to the source material. a criticism like "this storyline is awkwardly paced", for instance, stands on its own without requiring any reference to the source material. im just so over the entitled bitching about changes, get over yourselves and either don't watch the show or start figuring out why you don't like it for different, better reasons.

Toph: I’m the earth-bending teacher by the way.

Toph holding her own against KYOSHI was such a great bit.

Toph: I’m the earth-bending teacher by the way.

i think my main issue with natla isn’t so much the acting but the fact that the actors can’t really do much with how their characters are written.