ALL EYES ON RAFAH. WE WILL NOT FORGIVE. WE WILL NOT FORGET.

They built a concentration camp.

HES SEVENTEEN

He hasn’t been civilised in 4 years, his entire teenage experience consists of living on a boat and sleeping rough. The most stable bed he has was probably in Ba Sing Se he probably will just nap anywhere.

He has customer service experience which means he probably uses his customer service voice on his minsters.

Additionally he probably just wanders into to kitchen to get his own snacks and tea because he forgets what servants do.

He probably has no idea why he can’t just chase after an assassin he used to hunt the avatar for Agnis sake why is the captain of the guard demanding he stay in his room he’ll find the guy first (he’s probably right)

Katara probably has a free pass on Eco terrorism because what’s he going to do challenge her, she’ll beat his ass.

If he saw a minster doing something shady he will either invite lady Beifong to detect their BS or commit B&E and look for evidence himself.

He somehow found a baby dragon and raises it.

He will be far to willing to give Kyoshi island anything they want cause he feels bad and Suki scares him.

He randomly insisted on giving some earth kingdom village 100 ostrich horses.

The Avatar will just show up call him Hotman and demand the go on adventures and the Firelord will just dip because he’s been confined to long and has the Zoomies.

He takes far to much advice from Sokka and will genuinely believe if someone doesn’t get Sokkas plans they must be an idiot because Sokka is 16.

Sokka and Zuko also get into a lot of teenage rebellion phases by accident.

Toph just walks in breaks a wall of his palace and demands a field trip that always involves the Firelord having to explain himself to the cops.

He somehow knows every dangerous teen in the world and they all come for tea uninvited.

He has broken into both the NWT and Ba Sing Se.

He has a really well documented facial scar and official portraits but still disappears to be Lee the tea guy like no one knows.

One thing that struck me about the series is the almost deliberate use of Slavic loanwords to lend a different flavor to the English and German generally spoken in the series.

The words can be traced back to actual Slavic terms (on this, more below), but what I also found interesting is that their pronunciation has been modified and affected by two factors:

English orthographical j producing a "dzh" or "zh" type sound, and

Lack of iotation in German removing prefacing /j/ sounds

Thus, the Slavic term boj (prounounced roughly like "buoy") is pronounced, in the series, as "bozh" as though an English speaker saw the word and didn't know its origin. The term itself comes from a word that generally means "fight" in Czech, Serbian and Croatian.

And then we have three words ending in "-nik", which is an imported ending from both Yiddish (itself influenced by Slavic as well as High German) and Russian: "lubovnik", "volnik" and "svobodnik"

Interestingly the root "lubov", clearly drawn from Russian lyubov, does not show the iotation of the original word (so that /ju/ -> /u/), which shows German influence on the loanword "lubovnik", meaning, very loosely, "lover". (I'm purposely being a bit vague here to avoid spoilers, but the context is decidedly not as benign as the word would lead you to believe)

The word "volnik" appears to be generated internally within the German of the Crows by analogy to "lubovnik" and it refers to "person who works with wolk [a drug in the series]". It's not clear to me why the orthographical /v/ of "wolk" has been changed to what would be an orthographical /f/ in "volnik", but that may, ironically, be partial English influence since English does not devoice "V" at the beginning of a word and so "volnik" and "wolk" are pronounced the same phrase-initially.

Svoboda in Czech and Slovenian means, quite ironically, "freedom", so that "svobodnik" means loosely, "free worker". Given that svobodniks don't mine wolk, but rather process it, they're removed from the damaging effects of the raw drug, so in that sense, they are indeed relatively free.

There are some other odds and ends relating to language, but they're mostly one-offs so I won't go into detail about those.

If you ever needed a good demonstration of the quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", have I got an exercise for you.

Somebody made a small article explaining the basics of atomic theory but it's written in Anglish. Anglish is basically a made-up version of English where they remove any elements (words, prefixes, etc) that were originally borrowed from romance languages like french and latin, as well as greek and other foreign loanwords, keeping only those of germanic origin.

What happens is an english which is for the most part intelligible, but since a lot everyday english, and especially the scientific vocabulary, has has heavy latin and greek influence, they have to make up new words from the existing germanic-english vocabulary. For me it kind of reads super viking-ey.

Anyway when you read this article on atomic theory, in Anglish called Uncleftish Beholding, you get this text which kind of reads like a fantasy novel. Like in my mind it feels like it recontextualizes advanced scientific concepts to explain it to a viking audience from ancient times.

Even though you're familiar with the scientific ideas, because it bypasses the normal language we use for these concepts, you get a chance to examine these ideas as if you were a visitor from another civilization - and guess what, it does feel like it's about magic. It has a mythical quality to it, like it feels like a book about magic written during viking times. For me this has the same vibe as reading deep magic lore from a Robert Jordan book.

The Hunger Games (2012) The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

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