I have too many ships

Zuko’s like no, yeah, I totally get it, and just makes her one of his advisors. At first it’s just so she has a good excuse to stay but after the first meeting Toph storms out shouting about how EVERYONE was lying why would you even need to lie about what kind of tea you want??

Zuko: I mean they’re politicians…..but also who, and when, and in what way

They make a subtle Morse code system so Toph can warn him when someone is lying to him without tipping anyone off that she can sense lies.

The most unbelievable part of Motherland: Fort Salem is that all three of the Bellwether Unit are only children. Or more correctly, since it's possible to make arguments for why these particular individuals are only children, why it's unremarked on and unremarkable within the show that they are only children. We know the army need witches, they don't have enough and they burn through them too fast. It makes sense that they've come up against modern decreases in birthrate. A decrease in deaths from childhood illnesses and general increased life expectancy, removal of child labour, increasing costs of educating children and individual wealth replacing support by children late in life, combined with reliable, available birth control has brought birthrates down rapidly in our world. But there are exceptions to that: recent immigrants from places where those things aren't the case, groups with high death rates and fear of disappearing (such as indigenous peoples) the very rich and certain religious groups may maintain high birthrates within lower birthrate societies. I would expect some of these things to effect witch societies. Starting with Abigail: the High Atlantics are literally running a breeding programme on themselves; it makes no sense that they wouldn't be having large families, you cannot tell if a trait has bred true with just one offspring. High Atlantics are also very well off so they can afford the kids - I would guess that the early HA families parleyed their military successes into investment in land, and they now use some of their "at home" men to manage their investments, in such a way that the money goes back into the families, not to individual men - there will be very specific laws around HA family property and marriages, possibly with large dowries on the men, to keep everything within their system, bu that's going off topic. So if they aren't producing large families, and we don't see any recent large families - Abigail's cousin also seems to be an only children, Petra is one of two? Or maybe there are unmentioned brothers? We aren't seeing lots of siblings and cousins and large family age gaps among the students, so something else must be preventing them from optimising family size. Has in- and line breeding for magic traits reduced their fertility? Is the way young women are trained and deployed keeping them from having more than a couple of kids? I feel like the army will have systems in place for women to have children, leave them with the men to raise and head back to the front. Has the number of military witches dying increased so much in the last generation that the birthrate hasn't kept up?

Raelle is at the other end of the army scale, the armies bread and butter, providing canon fodder not officers, families who don't have the resources that the HA have, instead they know their daughters will have to serve no matter what,and rely on the money from their army salaries and the hope that they will advance within the army, maybe marry well, and their children will have more options. Less concerned with bloodlines I'm guessing there's more kids like Raelle with outside fathers, though not all will be openly so, young witches who get pregnant by a non witch may still be married off to a nice witch boy, other mixed kids will be the result of affairs, or illicit relationships that are passed off as good witchblood Beltane outcomes and the like. It seems Willa was punished for marrying out by extra deployments. I'd still expect there to be a reasonable birthrate among the lower witch classes, but I can see how the disenchanted Willa just had the one kid.

So we have Abigail, most likely for her only child status to be commented on, and Raelle, a more likely anomaly, I posit that Tally could only be an only child, unless a brother had been born first. May Craven whose sisters died before she came of age, raised on a matrilocal compound, or choosing to move to one after their deaths can only have one daughter if she wants her dispensation to pass onwards to that daughter. She'll not risk having two and losing one or both to the military.

I can accept that these three characters are only children, and at Fort Salem they find each other as sisters. But that no one on the show comments on their only child statuses, that we aren't seeing how larger families are still something of the norm as a result of the witches precarious mix of power and otherness, that's weird.

Definitely agree with Abigail's only child status being the most notable. There is a possibility that Petra is the exception here, as the Imperatrix referenced her being flighty, and her career ladder-climbing would also be a factor in her not wanting to be on maternal leave for long. Other Bellweathers who aren't under as much pressure from themselves or Minerva may have more children. Charvel picking Abigail to confide in might get wonky if that meant she snubbed her siblings for the same duties, but it might actually be a more likely dynamic in larger families.

The opening credits very notably show Jem's line only having single heirs, though. The "T. Bellweather" here is Jem's daughter. Then again, I wouldn't trust this graphic, because the line to the left are the Collars and the line to the right are the Cravens, and the Craven line very much doesn't match what we know of Tally's family, especially the way it truncated here after just 4 generations.

Raelle's case works according to intuitions, but against empirical evidence, where the lower classes tend to paradoxically have more children despite less financial slack to support them. I'd expect the same for Dodgers like the Ramshorns. Scottie Pippen of the Chicago Bulls, born in the 60s in rural Arkansas, has 11 older siblings.

But this is all exactly why the genderflipped dynamics requires matriline magic to justify. Our world's setup of which gender is acceptable cannon fodder didn't appear out of the ether, it had practical logistical considerations of what made for better chances of survival (through r selection/fast life history reproductive strategy).

One of the best things that happened this season of Strange New Worlds is definitely La'an and Spock. There's a very beautiful and logical reason why they really make sense together.

First of all, when SNW decided to explore Spock’s human half, mainly his romantic feelings one of the things I dreaded most was the possibility that they might make it feel ordinary. The typical slow burn, or hatred-turned-love, or heartbreaks presented in a very human way.

Even in TOS, among all four women Spock encountered, I loved the girl in The Cloud Minders the most. Spock was truly fascinated by her curiosity, acceptance, and open-mindedness, not attracted to her because of some anomaly, confusion, or emotional conundrum. It felt like pure, logical Spock.

I was scared SNW might lose that.

That’s the main reason I loved La'an and Spock. When I watched Spock mind-meld with La’an in Season 1, I felt they had great compatibility. They understood each other’s pain so well. I had a tiny bit of hope, but it faded as the show started exploring his relationship with T'pring and Christine.

Coming back to La’an after T’Pring and Christine felt so meaningful, because the Vulcan in Spock needed T’Pring, and the human in him needed Christine. But the combination of Vulcan and human needed La’an Noonien-Singh. She balances both sides of Spock.

She’s willing to meditate with him and at the same time, smile a little in between. She’s not flawless in the relationship, but she’s willing to grow with him. Spock, on the other hand, loves her in all the right ways she wants to be loved. La’an isn’t someone who demands grand gestures; she needs small, meaningful efforts and that’s exactly what Spock gives her. Those few seconds of him making coffee for her speak volumes about how deeply he understands her.

It’s not loud. It’s not chaos. It’s not yearning, and it’s not extravagant. But it is deep.

One of my friends told me the writers are just exploring Spock’s relationships and emotions that La’an won’t last a season, and they’ll give him another love interest in the coming seasons, turning him into some kind of James Bond… But I really hope that’s not the case. I really hope La’an is the endgame. (Honestly, I'm saying not just because I'm a huge La'an Noonien-Singh fan)

this used to be a common knowledge

Give me a child of Athena with low grades, but very high emotional intelligence— because intelligence comes in many forms

Give me a child of Ares who’s a pacifist and only engages in violence when necessary— because they understand just how dangerous and easily escalated conflict is

VMFC Prompt: Slam Dunk -> Definition: “an action or accomplishment that is easily done”