“abandonment issues girl x devoted til death boy” trope my beloved

Kind of actually wild to me that they finally voiced the issue of Katara being forced into a maternal role because of her mother’s death in season 3 and then had her open up to only one other character about the severity of how traumatic that event had been for her and it was in the episode where she was allowed to step out of that maternal role and try to reclaim apart of her childhood, facilitated by that same character. AND THEN! That character sacrificed himself for her in an extremely similar fashion to how her mother had, the woman whose role she had to bear, symbolizing him taking that burden from her and effectively putting her back in a position of being cared for instead being the caretaker while also granting her the opportunity to realize that if she had the power to save her mother she could’ve and would’ve through saving him.

So as an Antarctic expert I need to add to this that we had not in fact been to Antarctica when it was named. The ancient Greeks decided that because there was an Arctic at the top of the world, with bears, there had to be an opposite at the other end, without bears. Which is kind of ridiculous except that the fuckers were dead on

Not to be a *complete* killjoy, but technically (TECHNICALLY), the "bear" (Greek arktos) in "Arctic" does not refer to polar bears, but rather to the constellation Ursa Major or "Great Bear," also known as the Big Dipper, which is prominently visible at northern latitudes and was well known to the Greeks via Ptolemy and earlier astronomers. The fact that there are in fact polar bears at the north pole, and no polar bears at the south pole, is but a happy coincidence, as the Greeks had obviously also not been to the Arctic when they gave it the name. Nonetheless, Bear/No Bear is a delightful way of looking at it either way.

let’s travel through the vast unknown with mama

Posts like this are why I'll never leave Tumblr