a place of bells & trees

What do I mean?

Well, let's take the Drill. When faced with the problem of Big Wall, Ozai's Fire Nation comes up with Big Drill. One singular Big Drill. Which, as anyone except an idiot could have predicted, immediately breaks down and accomplishes nothing. And if the Fire Nation had made it past the wall, then they would have been fighting through a narrow opening against people who can hurl long distance rocks! Which, if your face or body is vulnerable to high velocity rocks, is a bad thing for you and also for the battle.

Not to mention the resource cost of that thing! It's so insanely gigantic, it must have cost the Fire Nation the equivalent of trillions. For ONE drill. Not ten smaller drills. Just ONE drill. (Fanfic fuel: how much did Ba Sing Se profit off of stripping that drill for parts? Did they reverse engineer it? Did Long Feng keep that for himself?)

And you might be thinking, fairly, that it was War Minister Qin who came up with the drill and you'd be right, but it's Ozai who's approving all this shit. Instead of doing the reasonable thing and asking Qin if he et the whole edible, or even the in-character thing of burning him to death, Ozai just goes... big drill. Makes sense. We should have the biggest drill, because we are the biggest nation. Drill, baby, drill. sorry

It's not the first time, either! He also approves Zhao's invasion of the North Pole, apparently just because Zhao is good at kissing ass and hates Zuko? I couldn't tell you what merits Zhao has. We do not see him lead a single successful mission. The closest he comes is Pohuai, and even then its the Yuyan archers who do most of the work. (My longstanding headcanon is that the reason we don't see the Yuyan archers again is because Zhao blamed the whole thing on them and they were disbanded. This is great fic fuel for displaced Yuyan archers just, wandering around, being elite.)

He approved a massive naval invasion of the North Pole, surrounded by and made of water and ice, inhabited by people who bend water. A nation that was, by its own choice, completely out of the war.

Every time we see Ozai doing something, it's something stupid. Like disfiguring and banishing his firstborn child in a culture that has primogeniture. And then (once he's done pissing away a massive fleet of ships) he does the logical thing and sends his only other heir to bring his first heir back - even though his first heir would have been willing to return with a simple invitation. Like he could have sent a letter saying "dear son come home miss u pick up 200 000 tons of steel qin wants 2 build a drill lol", and Zuko would have come. (Okay, he did have a valid reason for having Zuko escorted, since he thought Iroh was a traitor, but there's absolutely NO reason to risk Azula. Why not send Combustion Man? It's the luckiest stroke of luck ever that Azula is 100 times more competent than her dad.)

Of course, a dictator(-wannabe) sending his daughter on high-level diplomatic missions is pure fiction. Nobody would do that.

The best part of this is that it's entirely realistic and in-character. I could absolutely imagine Ozai purging all of his competent admirals and generals, and then promoting brownnoses like Zhao and crackpots like Qin, because they promised him glorious destinies and secret knowledge of Big Drill.

I also really, really want a scene of Zuko and Azula realizing that their father is a fucking idiot.

Next up someone is going to claim that the Narnia series isn't kids books.

but sometimes it drops little things like this:

which. a) that's absolutely wild and TIL material. what the fuck. (wikipedia says versions of the treamill for power actually predate corporal punishment, but yes, in the 1800s prisoners were forced to use them as punishment. altho i would quibble at the word "torture." the point was more "indentured survitude" or "slavery," as the treadmill still like. did stuff. it wasn't JUST for the sake of pain, just free unethical labor. as opposed to something like solitary confinement, something designed just for torture reasons.)

tutorial for how to draw these ball style shrubs from my scene above (cos a friend asked)

have fun all

The video is actually about how all of those things don't equate to a sense of self. She talks about how this "list of traits" often backed by corporations is a trap to further remove yourself from discovering any actual deeper meaning and feelings, when Myers Briggs could do the work for you.