ain't that just the luckiest thing?

"Wasn't Thjazi called Shadow?"

Tossing the Iron nail to Julien.

Quickly cutting through all the noise to reveal the truth.

While playing Thaisha, Aabria is so conscious of the world and Thaisha's worldview. As a woman whose religious culture has been persecuted nearly to extinction. As a person from a race that every other race of Aramán was happy to leave in subjugation; the suffering of the Rungjani was a fair price for their comfort.

You can viscerally feel this in her gentle but clear acknowledgement of Bolaire, her tone when she asked him why he was so angry.

"What exactly do you find to be foolishness, Bolaire?"

The calm, despite the fact that, when it comes down to it, he is angry that the actions Thjazi set in motion blew up his comfortable life. The same actions that liberated the Runjani afterlife. He doesn't think "a couple hundred" Rungjani souls are worth it.

"So you're not angry, you're afraid."

It reminded me of when Aranessa was breaking down and overwhelmed because her life was blown up and she has to make hard decisions to move forward. Thaisha used the same gentle, but firm tone then.

"You always had to make a choice and the world was always chaos. It's just touching you now."

Thjazi abused Bolaire and that excuses everything Bolaire has ever done ever. He's Just A Little Guy who only torture-murdered people because he didn't know any better. Uwu.

THE BLEAK (wtf is wrong with you)

Bolaire is lying about Thjazi abusing him because Thjazi is just such a good guy - he would never do that. Freedom fighters never mistreat the people close to them. It isn't narratively satisfying to depict the hero who the DM has explicitly depicted as a Complex Man who, and I quote, 'robbed, killed, and abused people', as actually Complex. Anyway Bolaire is a nasty person so he deserved everything bad that ever happened to him :) In fact, it was WRONG and MEAN of him to kill the soldiers who enslaved him. No wonder Thjazi hated him so much!

THE PEAK

people have pointed out before that zuko probably didn't actually know any of the gaang's names before joining their group. according to the data i've collected, it is unclear as to whether zuko knew any of their names before "the boiling rock," in which he addresses sokka by name multiple times. at no point in the show does he refer to toph, suki, or momo by name.

i find it particularly funny that zuko only seems to refer to katara by name after sokka says her name during their conversation in his tent; the transcript for "the southern raiders" reads as follows:

Sokka: So what's on your mind?

Zuko: Your sister. She hates me! And I don't know why, but I do care what she thinks of me.

Sokka: Nah, she doesn't hate you. Katara doesn't hate anyone. Except maybe some people in the Fire Nation. No, I mean, uh, not people who are good, but used to be bad. I mean, bad people. Fire Nation people who are still bad, who've never been good and probably won't be, ever!

Zuko: Stop. Okay, listen. I know this may seem out of nowhere, but I want you to tell me what happened to your mother.

Sokka: What? Why would you want to know that?

Zuko: Katara mentioned it before when we were imprisoned together in Ba Sing Se, and again just now when she was yelling at me.

we can thus assume that zuko went into this conversation knowing katara only as "[sokka's] sister," heard sokka refer to someone named "katara," and finally connected the dots.

Something I really enjoy about Halsha as a ship in Campaign 4 is that they are a really good and nuanced depiction of a type of polyamorous relationship often referred to in the community as "comet partners." Comet partners do not live together, and spend time together only occasionally. Like a comet passing by the sun, they are bound by gravity and a shared orbit, but the comet comes close to the sun only intermittently.

My read of Halsha is that they never "broke up" in the traditional monogamy sense of the word, but rather transitioned from being nesting partners (partners who live together) to comet partners, and remained as comet partners even as Hal shacked up with a new nesting partner (Elodie) and subsequently ended that relationship. In my many ways, this is an even harder thing to do than "breaking up" in the traditional sense. When you break up, the relationship is over. When you change from nesting partners to comet partners, you have to completely rewrite the terms and norms of your relationship, while trying to preserve the core of what you love about your relationship in the first place. It's even more complicated when you're co-parents, and you have to rewrite the terms of your relationships to the kids as well.

There is a saying in the polyamorous community: "Love is infinite, but time is not." This leads to interesting dynamics between comet partners. What I've noticed from my own experience (I have two comet partners) is that there is an incentive to focus only on the positive when you're together. You don't get to see each other much, so you just want to spend the precious time you have reveling in the joy of being together again. There is a temptation to push aside and ignore any problems in your relationship, because you don't want to ruin your precious short time together, and besides, it can be easier to live with problems in your relationship when you don't have them in your face every single day.

I see this exact dynamic at play with Hal and Thaisha.

Whenever they reunite, they are so joyful and so thrilled. It's really touching to see. At the same time, their relationship has subtle problems that they are choosing to put to the side, both because of All the Shit Happening and because they just want to enjoy each other while they can.

One of the issues that I see between them that they have chosen not to address is that they label their relationship, or conceptualize their relationship, in different ways. In episode 27, the Photarch says to Hal, "I understand, Mr. Fang, that you have brought a woman that I know to be actually your love, yes?"

Watch this moment. It's a little awkward.

Thaisha just smiles broadly and nods. Meanwhile, Hal grimaces awkwardly and says, "We're family, yes."

I'm not sure exactly what's going on in Hal's head here, but it seems to me that either a) he prefers the label "family" to "love" for the relationship between him and Thaisha, and he feels awkward that Thaisha is not on the same page as him about that; or b) he would like there to be one label for what they are in private, and a different label for what they are as far as the broader world and the Sundered Houses are concerned, and he's chagrined that the public image of their relationship is not what he wants people like Yanessa to perceive, while Thaisha is unconcerned about this. Either way, this is something that the two of them ought to communicate about, but they haven't.

The other clear issue that lies between them is that Hal's mental health has severely declined since Thjazi's death, but he has kept this issue firmly under wraps in Thaisha's presence. Hal has been hiding things from Shadia and Hero (e.g., sending Shadia off to go live with Elodie without explaining why), even as Shadia and Hero get increasingly involved with Schemer business, which Thaisha has a right to know about as a co-parent in the polycule. He's also had some awful and worrying episodes with regards to his mental health while she was out of the city, such as his whole PTSD nightmare experience in the sewers, and his angry crashout over Thjazi in episode 24, and he hasn't talked to her about any of these negative feelings or problems, even though they are severe. Throughout the convergence, in front of her, he's just been the visionary artist, the burgeoning revolutionary, the proud dad, and the starry-eyed lover, not the scarred veteran or the grieving brother.