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We all know at this point that the name Astarion is connected to the word "star" (starry or little star).
But Larian decided that they wanted to go all in with the details and they delivered!
The flower you can place on his tomb in the final romance scene (which I think is such a cute and tender gesture and I love his reaction to it), seems to be an Ornithogalum umbellatum, a star-shaped white flower with six petals. Among the plant's many common names, there are summer snowflake, starflower, and star-of-Bethlehem.
Moreover, in the language of flowers, its meanings are related to trauma, mourning, and welcoming pain without repressing it.
According to Doctor Edward Bach (1886 – 1936), these flowers are "For those who find themselves in a state of great anguish due to situations that, in a given period, have caused so much unhappiness", and can be used to help with the aftermath of a trauma, the alleviation of pain and the mourning process.
Edit: every time I see an artist include this flower in their Astarion fanart my heart swells with joy. Love this community
Super late for I am terrible with posting but Jareth has been finished! It was so fun to wear around the city day and night!
I am already working on my next cosplay from Assassin's Creed Unity Elise de la Serre. But make her much more historically accurate. Working on her 18th century fall front pantaloons currently! Onwards to another multi layer project!
So I noticed in A:TLA, and it’s carried over in LoK, that Airbenders always seem to have an advantage in a fight. And at first, it felt like plot armour, particularly in A:TLA.
But when Aang fought Bumi, he lost most of that advantage. And I realised that this wasn’t just plot armour. Someone had sat and worked it out: nobody has had to fight Airbenders for generations.
None of the other nations have had to train to face them, or practised sparring with them, or anything. Apart from Bumi, no bender in the show has ever even met an airbender before Aang comes along. And in LoK, for the most part people still haven’t. We never see fights between those who have (for e.g. we never see Tenzin and Lin fight); when Korra and Tenzin use airbending, its a unique fighting style that people aren’t trained to manage.
It’s a really small detail, and it fundamentally works to give the heroes an advantage (and make up for Aang’s young age and lack of combat experience), but I love how it’s an advantage in combat for completely logical reasons.
You can see the same principle in play whenever somebody fights somebody who uses a completely unfamiliar style. Combustion benders and lavabenders aren’t straight up more powerful, but they’re pretty much always something you haven’t dealt with which presents unique challenges. That red lotus lady with no arms is just a perfectly ordinary waterbender, but using forms and styles nobody else has seen before. Jet routinely smacks around benders and soldiers, but loses hard to the first person he met who had actually studied diverse styles of swordplay. When Toph invents metalbending, nobody can deal with that, but seventy years later the counters are pretty well known among people who might have to fight the cops.
And it’s why Azula, a genius prodigy who has thought long and hard about how to counter every kind of magic and martial arts out there, keeps getting messed up by a kid with a boomerang.
aang straight up says to the fire nation guards on zuko’s ship “you’ve probably never fought an airbender before”, because he in-universe figures out that, if what everyone around him is saying is true, and airbenders have been extinct for a century (or at least have gone to ground enough to make people think that) then he is a totally unknown figure in anyone’s calculations
this has been brought up before but it’s also one of the reasons why hama is so thrown in her fight with katara - waterbending is about energy exchange, keeping things flowing, throwing your opponent’s power back at them and we see katara and hama do this in their fight. however, when katara is faced with a powerful blast from hama, she stands her ground and blows it apart:
[image ID: a gif of katara in the puppetmaster. she is a teenage girl with dark skin and hair and blue eyes, wearing a red outfit. she turns and throws her hand out, stopping a blast of water and turning it into a huge shield. the background is a dark forest. end image ID]
why do i bring this up?
because it’s a move - and a mindset - influenced by earthbending, which hama has never faced (she went from the south pole, to prison, to the fire nation). it’s an indication not only of katara’s skill and power, but also how she’s learned from her travels, and from toph
one of my favorite details of atla is how the main characters’ fighting styles adapt as they take on new enemies and make new friends with other bending styles. iroh straight up tells zuko about how he developed a technique for redirecting lightning by studying waterbenders, but if you watch closely especially in the last season, there’s a lot of this sort of thing happening unspoken with the gaang, using the bending forms of other elements like katara does above. it really shows the strength in differences and diversity coming up against a fascist regime that wants everyone to conform.
It’s completely different than anything we’ve seen from other metal benders, who bend metal with sharp movements like the derivative of earth bending that it is
But Korra is fluid. She is bending metal like it’s water. Because she is a water bender. And she is the first person in history to be able to bend both metal and water and so she is able to combine these styles into one and move seamlessly between them. This shows so beautifully how the Avatar is the embodiment of all bending
The fight between Tenzin and the Red Lotus reinforces this. Zaheer is pretty skilled for someone who’s only been Airbending for a few months, and he has the advantage against a lot of people because there still aren’t really enough airbenders for people to know how to fight them.
But against an Airbending MASTER like Tenzin? He only wins because he has backup
I just wanna say that this mirrors something I got to watch in real life. I fenced as a teenager, with my wife, who continued fencing in college.
But her college had fencing equipment but no team, so she started coaching them. But she fenced lefthanded. She ended up with a team of fencers who almost ALL learned to fence lefthanded.
A small % of fencers are lefthanded, so even very good fencers are often NOT USED TO fencing lefties.
So her dinky little team of mostly newbies came in and fucked severely with teams of much more experienced fencers who couldn’t cope with fencing leftie after leftie. Her one protégé who was also very tall just laid waste to nationally rated fencers.
Whereas I, a very shitty fencer, can hold my own against my wife no problem, because I’ve fenced her from the start.
This isn’t JUST a fun plot point and a lovely way of showing social influences and planning and creativity, it’s completely based in real life. Even a shitty fighter can be a problem for a good fighter whose never encountered their style before.
Actually, I find the Tamzin vs Red Lotus fight fascinating for a different reason - as you say, Tamzin is a mature Master with decades of experience in the classical forms that he learned directly from his father, and Zaheer only has a few months.
However, Zaheer also moves completely differently from every other Airbender, because he learned to fight as a non-bender.
He moves in from odd angles, he uses his short hops to constantly reposition and use the environment, etc. His Airbending is very different in its movements than Tamzin or even new Airbenders like Kai, because he worked it out from first principles in his cell - hence how he discovers how to fly when no one else can, or the trick he figures out to pull the air out of people’s lungs.
But the other thing about Zaheer is that, before he was in his cell, he learned to fight as a team - and he’s much stronger when he’s working in concert with the others than when he’s on his own. (Which is why he ultimately loses when his team get separated and picked off one by one). The Red Lotus beat Tamzin not just because it’s four on one - other masters have beat those odds before - but because he’s not used to fighting a team of all four elements working together.
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Astarion X F!Tav, ummm, fluff? Set post game, a couple months before the reunion. Warning: blood. long post.
This took me forever! I put some tender loving care into some of the panels =)
Despite feeling dissatisfied with my own artistic abilities, I cherish this little comic. Through Amaara's words, I was able to express why Astarion was dear to me.
Wyll is more physically attractive to me and Gale feels like my kindred soul. For the longest time I find myself wondering why, out of all the characters, I fell in love with Astarion. This comic explains it all, and I'm incredibly grateful to everyone involved in creating him.
the british finally giving david tennant a bafta nomination not for his prestige and heavy roles like des and broadchurch but for his wracking performance of a sopping wet boyfriend ready to give it all up for his blond. truly everyone has a little tennant-dickmatized tumblrina in them
This was such a fun journey! The hardest part was making the "butt cape". I used photos from lovely people who shared their images from the Labyrinth exhibit. But a huge thanks to @pants-magic-pants for their diagrams! They were such a huge help! I could not find anyone else who described the making of in such detail for this coat. Though I am not going to film accurate for I don't like the hot glue look nor the glitter glue.
I am currently still adding some vintage silver metal sequins for more sparkle. As well as sewing down any sequins and beads that have come lose. I keep losing 1 or 2 whenever I pick up the coat.
My himbo orange cat Frumpkin, did not help as per usual. I did try padstitching for the first time! The lapels do stay curled at the right spot but cause of all the layers I don't think it sits quite right overall.
More photos will be shared but here is a sneak of the bedazzled back.
I feel like Stede Bonnet from Our Flag Means Death wearing this coat.
orrrrr they just grew up in this tech focused privacy lacking world
current university students, assuming they went to university at 18 (which would be most of the first years) were maybe 4 when smartphones got popular? the world they have grown up with is one where apps are the only way one interacts with technology, where social media increasingly demands personal information, where someone who refuses to go along with those norms automatically has something to hide, which means everyone polices themselves as if their every fashion choice or sentence structure is subject to judge and jury, because it is
we live in an age which discourages asking questions, where every question is met with offense and "just google it", while google itself fills its entire first page with ads and misinformation
and tumblr is the only place i've seen critique chatgpt. i've had windows 11 (which every laptop comes with these days) advertise chatgpt to me as a search engine
it's not a search engine. frankly, google hardly counts as one either these days. but if you're not surrounded by people telling you chatgpt is bad and fake, how are you supposed to know? when your computer and your phone and your relatives who don't know much more about technology than you all think it's a search engine with a voice, it wouldn't occur to you that all of them are wrong
and they're clearly not stupid! that's the point of this as an exercise - their teacher is telling them for the first time that chatgpt might be wrong. your job is to find out if chatgpt is wrong. and they did the assignment! they had a reason for the first time to question chatgpt, and all of them came to the conclusion that yeah, it is lying to us, and so is everyone else who said it was always right
and they'll go forward now not only knowing they can't blindly trust what computers tell them, but they'll spread that message around, which will decrease misinformation on a bunch of levels
this was a win for the students and a win for the teacher, i think an exercise like this should be mandatory in all schools if we ever hope to combat where technology's going these days
[image: five tweets by CWHowell123, transcribed below as two paragraphs:]
So I followed @/GaryMarcus’s suggestion and had my undergrad class use ChatGPT for a critical assignment. I had them all generate an essay using a prompt I gave them; and then their job was to "grade" it—look for hallucinated info and critique its analysis. *All 63* essays had hallucinated information. Fake quotes, fake sources, or real sources misunderstood and mischaracterized. Every single assignment. I was stunned—I figured the rate would be high, but not that high.
The biggest takeaway from this was that the students all learned that it isn't fully reliable. Before doing it, many of them were under the impression it was always right. Their feedback largely focused on how shocked they were that it could mislead them. Probably 50% of them were unaware it could do this. All of them expressed fears and concerns about mental atrophy and the possibility for misinformation/fake news. One student was worried that their neural pathways formed from critical thinking would start to degrade or weaken. One other student opined that AI both knew more than us but is dumber than we are since it cannot think critically. She wrote, "I'm not worried about AI getting to where we are now. I'm much more worried about the possibility of us reverting to where AI is."
So, uh, Netflix Avatar, huh? Yeah. I guess I'll make a really long post about it because ATLA brainrot has is a cornerstone of my personality at this point.
So.
It's okay. B, maybe a C+.
That's it.
Now for the spoilers:
The biggest issue with the Netflix version is the pacing. Scenes come out of nowhere and many of the episodes are disjointed. Example: Aang escaping from Zuko's ship. We see him getting the key and going "aha!", and in the next scene he's in Zuko's room. And then he just runs out, no fun acrobatics or fights, and immediately they go to the Southern Air Temple where he sees Gyatso's corpse, goes into the Avatar state, and then sees Gyatso being really cheesy, comes out of it, and resolves that conflict. Nothing seems to lead into anything. The characters don't get to breathe.
The show's worst mistake (aside from Iroh fucking murdering Zhao) is its' first one: they start in the past. Instead of immediately introducing us to our main characters and dropping us into a world where we have a perfect dynamic where Aang doesn't know the current state of the world and Katara and Sokka don't know about the past, thus allowing for seamless and organic worldbuilding and exposition, they just... tell us. "Hey, this is what happened, ok, time for Aang!" There's no mystery, no intrigue, just a stream of information being shoved down the audience's throats and then onto the next set piece.
The visuals are for the most part great, but like with most Netflix productions, they just don't have great art direction. It feels like a video game cinematic, where everything is meant to be Maximum Cool - and none of the environments get to breathe. It's like they have tight indoor sets (with some great set design) and then they have a bunch of trailer shots. It's oozing with a kind of very superficial love.
Netflix still doesn't know how to do lighting, and with how disjointed the scenes are, the locations end up feeling like a parade of sets rather than actual cities or forests or temples. As for the costumes, Netflix still doesn't know how to do costumes that look like they're meant to be actually worn, so many of the characters seem weirdly uncomfortable, like they're afraid of creasing their pristine costumes.
The acting is decent to good, for the most part. I can't tell if the weaker moments come down to the actors or the direction and editing, but if I had to guess, I'd say the latter. Iroh and Katara are the weakest, Sokka is the most consistent, Zuko hits the mark most of the time, and Aang is okay. I liked Suki (though... she was weirdly horny? Like?) but Yue just fell kind of flat.
The tight fight choreography of the original is replaced with a bunch of spinny moves and Marvel fighting, though there are some moments of good choreography, like the Agni Kai between Ozai and Zuko (there's a million things I could say about how bad it was thematically, but this post is overly long already.) There's an actually hilarious moment in the first episode when Zuko is shooting down Aang, and he does jazz hands to charge up his attack.
Then there's the characters. Everybody feels very static - Zuko especially gets to have very little agency. A great example of that is the scene in which Iroh tells Lieutenant Jee the story of Zuko's scar.
In the original, it's a very intimate affair, and he doesn't lead the crew into any conclusions. Here, Iroh straight up tells the crew "you are the 41st, he saved your lives" and then the crew shows Zuko some love. A nice moment, but it feels unearned, when contrasted with the perfection of The Storm. In The Storm, Zuko's words and actions directly contradict each other, and Iroh's story gives the crew (and the audience) context as to why, which makes Zuko a compelling character. We get to piece it out along with them. Here - Iroh just flat out says it. He just says it, multiple times, to hammer in the point that hey, Zuko is Good Actually.
And then there's Iroh. You remember the kindly but powerful man who you can see gently nudging Zuko to his own conclusions? No, he's a pretty insecure dude who just tells Zuko that his daddy doesn't love him a lot and then he kills Zhao. Yeah. Iroh just plain kills Zhao dead. Why?
Iroh's characterization also makes Zuko come off as dumb - not just clueless and deluded, no, actually stupid. He constantly gets told that Iroh loves him and his dad doesn't, and he doesn't have any good answers for that, so he just... keeps on keeping on, I guess? This version of Zuko isn't conflicted and willfully ignorant like the OG, he's just... kind of stupid. He's not very compelling.
In the original, Zuko is well aware of Azula's status as the golden child. It motivates him - he twists it around to mean that he, through constant struggle, can become even stronger than her, than anyone. Here, Zhao tells him that "no, ur dad likes her better tee hee" and it's presented as some kind of a revelation. And then Iroh kills Zhao. I'm sorry I keep bringing that up, but it's just such an unforgiveable thematic fuckup that I have to. In the original, Zhao falls victim to his hubris, and Zuko gets to demonstrate his underlying compassion and nobility when he offers his hand to Zhao. Then we get some ambiguity in Zhao: does he refuse Zuko's hand because of his pride, or is it his final honorable action to not drag Zuko down with him? A mix of both? It's a great ending to his character. Here, he tries to backstab Zuko and then Iroh, who just sort of stood off to the side for five minutes, goes "oh well, it's murderin' time :)"
They mess with the worldbuilding in ways that didn't really need to be messed with. The Ice Moon "brings the spirit world and the mortal world closer together"? Give me a break. That's something you made up, as opposed to the millenia of cultural relevance that the Solstice has. That's bad, guys. You replaced something real with something you just hastily made up. There's a lot of that. We DID NOT need any backstory for Koh, for one. And Katara and Sokka certainly didn't need to be captured by Koh. I could go on and on, but again, this post is already way too long.
It's, um, very disappointing. A lot of telling and not very much showing, and I feel like all of the characters just... sort of end up in the same place they started out in. I feel like we don't see any of the characters grow: they're just told over and over again how they need to grow and what they need to do.
To sum it up: Netflix Avatar is a mile wide, but an inch deep.
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I've been rushing to get this story to the second rough stage and managed to create this short clip! The storyboard is still a WIP but I was so excited to share @/stelanox 's (insta) beautiful singing. We're both huuuuuge Centaurworld dorks so it was only fitting to have her be the voice of Plum!
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As my friends know I have been slowly working on Jareth the Goblin King's ballroom coat. It had been a fun project so far. I am at the point of decorating with gems and rhinestones.
Here are so photos from the mock up, which I got so lucky! Only had to make 2! More progress photos will be shared!
origamiaround
romaincrisis
baratheonpilled
kaledo-art
gummygunk
pixelskylines
ellievsbear
