Let Not Your Hands Be Weak

i'm finally getting caught up on cr4 e31 and man. the clear influences of the player's real life culture in their characters (and in the worldbuilding in brennan's case) is amazing and adds such a richness. like thaisha is so clearly influenced by like. black american folk culture Especially with the orcish revolutionaries. idk if liam is irish but he's at least running with a lot of the irish american working class stuff brennan injected into the world in terms of the hal and the culture of the round. and azune's whole bit about not having anyone to speak his native language to and his disconnect to his own identity (diaspora narrative). i Love when real world cultures are reflected in fiction it's so good.

i'm finally getting caught up on cr4 e31 and man. the clear influences of the player's real life culture in their characters (and in the worldbuilding in brennan's case) is amazing and adds such a richness. like thaisha is so clearly influenced by like. black american folk culture Especially with the orcish revolutionaries. idk if liam is irish but he's at least running with a lot of the irish american working class stuff brennan injected into the world in terms of the hal and the culture of the round. and azune's whole bit about not having anyone to speak his native language to and his disconnect to his own identity (diaspora narrative). i Love when real world cultures are reflected in fiction it's so good.

I would also add, I've been really enjoying seeing Marisha play Murray, which feels like a love letter to her southern-ness

the situation with harry potter is kind of unprecedented in some ways imo because it is maybe the largest media franchise in history to be created & owned by a single person who still has direct creative control over it. who is also a billionaire with significant cultural/political influence. like the usual "no ethical consumption under capitalism" type excuses shatter on impact when the bigoted author in question is logging onto twitter every day saying explicitly that when you buy the tim hortons ravenclaw donut she is using your donut money to fund the genocide of trans people. like with big franchises usually there's at least a little more diffusion of responsibility than this

the situation with harry potter is kind of unprecedented in some ways imo because it is maybe the largest media franchise in history to be created & owned by a single person who still has direct creative control over it. who is also a billionaire with significant cultural/political influence. like the usual "no ethical consumption under capitalism" type excuses shatter on impact when the bigoted author in question is logging onto twitter every day saying explicitly that when you buy the tim hortons ravenclaw donut she is using your donut money to fund the genocide of trans people. like with big franchises usually there's at least a little more diffusion of responsibility than this

not wanting to be outdone by the benders in the gang, sokka invents the flamethrower, the supersoaker, the leaf blower, and the concept of throwing rocks at people

my controversial opinion is I don’t think Zuko was confused by “my first girlfriend turned into the moon”

he was there during siege of the North. he infiltrated the spirit oasis. he has an uncle who studies spirits and the spirit world. he watched the sky go dark then the moon suddenly reappear like everyone else in the entire world did. and most importantly he watched zhao get eaten by a giant godzilla fish spirit.

his entire life since he saw that beam of blue-white light in the south pole has been ‘this day has already been so goddamn weird’

The only really new information was that that was Sokka’s girlfriend

Also, Iroh was there? He literally watched Sokka make out with the moon spirit. And you want to tell me that a romantic sap like him would not have immediately told Zuko about this romantic tragedy? Please, Zuko has known about this for ages, he just knows that this is not an acceptable situation in which to say “yeah, I know.”

[image: tags by samwisethebold: #it’s not that he doesn’t get what sokka means #it’s that how on earth do you respond to that]

When you put it like that, this is actually a legendary display of tact on Zuko’s part

I think @comradekatara was the one I read who pointed out that Zuko is the only teenage boy that Sokka really tolerates over the course of the show, and that continues to crack me up.

the tonal shift of that episode was so funny in retrospect. Toph, Aang, and Katara are all giddy about Aang learning to earthbend successfully and Sokka is all grumpy about being trapped in the hole and its all cute and wholesome and then it suddenly shifts to zuko on top of a dark stormy mountain, and i watched the show when i was ten or eleven but even then i was completely stone faced watching that scene. it was so uncomfortable seeing this character- which by then most viewers had grown to be fond of- in such an ugly state. a lot of people cite the inherent silliness of the unflattering angles which hes drawn at, which is goofy in a meme context, but on a serious note its meant to show how undignified and ashamed he feels. the once "prideful" prince zuko, who preferred stealing and breaking into people's properties over begging, was now on his knees begging for pain and suffering, and the one time it seems most appropriate for him, it's not given. the undertones and implications of that scene are absolutely suicidal. his dialogue directly proves it has nothing to do with just lightning. such a quick and depressing scene like that came right after aang and friends fought a giant moose. aang and toph were dealing with a giant moose, sokka was stuck in a hole, and zuko wanted to fucking kill himself

This might just be me (and I haven't watched the full campaign so I could be wrong, an actual Vaxleth/Keyleth fan is welcome to disprove me on this) but in Vax's fantasy about having a family in episode 7 of TLOVM s4, at least to me, doesn't seem like something Keyleth would want. I 100% believe Vax wants kids and a family, but Keyleth knows she'll outlive them. She has enough duties already, why add kids to the bunch?

I feel like it was just showing him a possibility. It doesn't necessarily mean he specifically wants a bunch of kids with her but he wants a life with her. Whatever that may be. Kids was just one possibility, maybe specifically because he is dying, he was thinking about it more than he might otherwise do.

i think the hardest part of writing kaine isn't her lore or her personality or her trauma. it's her vocabulary. i am merely not creative enough to come up with things equivalent to "piss guzzling shit hog"