[incomprehensible screaming]

Despite making this post in August, this post spikes in brief periods throughout the year, depending on when folks like to start.

Reading all the cool costume projects people are working on

There’s other instances of people randomly punching slaves that they didn’t even know because they got in their way or something. This was just normal behavior.

And slaves didn’t rebel en masse because if even one slave committed an act of violent rebellion it was common practice to kill every slave and former slave in the household.

People only took notice for posterity when these mass executions got into the hundreds of people. One of the few recorded for the history books is of over 400 people being killed because one guy stabbed his enslaver.

The episode doesn't really ask us to understand bloodbending as an invention born from torture and genocidal violence, but primarily as a horror "Come to the Dark Side, Katara"-test because the reveal is directly linked to the abducted Fire Nation villagers. We don't even bother about Hama's motivation beyond "They deserve the same" (as if what Hama did was in any way symmetrical or proportionate. As if they want me to believe this old woman who can only bloodbend during the full moon could reproduce the carceral torture environment specifically designed to exterminate her bending lineage. This is not a reasonable "both sides are bad" situation.)

The Fire Nation removes water, community, bodily autonomy, hope, and any ordinary means of escape. Hama still feels the charge of the full moon every month, studies and experiments for years to find power in the one remaining source available to her: the water inside living bodies. She invents a technique in a place optimized against waterbenders and perfects it to the point where she can control the fine motor skills in another one's hand to open the cage that holds her. As far as we know, she doesn't even kill the guards when she walks out. Bloodbending is horrifying, but it is also an astonishing act of ingenuity. The Fire Nation reduces her to helpless flesh, and she weaponizes flesh itself against her torturers and murderers of her people.

then someone gets brave and makes a character who is a real bastard and makes all the wrong choices and is maybe even malicious at times and they make this character explicitly queer. and then fans are like "this is what you think of us?? worst representation ever" and the creator gets absolutely lambasted, ESPECIALLY if theyre queer themselves

then everyone else sees this and either thinks its too risky to include a queer character, or wants to make sure they're only doing the good and nice representation with no flaws or mistakes

I can't remember where I first saw this information, but apparently Rocky's aim was to make the wall to the tunnel out of many different materials to find out which one Grace is able to see through easiest, not based on opacity - like a human or something that evolved to see light does - but based on acoustic impedance. For anyone who doesn't know what that is, it's a way of measuring how easily sound passes through a material - usually used in ultrasound scans. Therefore, for a species who uses echo-location, he's working out which material is easiest for Grace to see through - and from what I can tell he just got lucky with the clear Xenonite. I'm also fairly sure that he was completely unaware about species that see through light waves rather than echo-location, based on his reactions to Grace in the movie.

Basically, Rocky wanted to make things as accessible as he could for any alien that he could come across with the limited knowledge that he had of how different species see things. He is essentially setting himself up to be as accessible as he can for anyone he could possible meet out there. Whether its due to desperation for connection, or just because he's Like That, that's why I think he's so neat. His first interaction with Grace is just him trying to make Grace as comfortable as possible.