caelum-in-the-avatarverse

[caelum-in-the-avatarverse]

Firestarter

#lol #zuko #sokka

[caelum-in-the-avatarverse]

i know that a lot of people take issue with the fact that pakku only agrees to teach katara because he realizes that she’s the granddaughter of the woman he tried to get with a bajillion years ago, but i actually see that moment of him realizing that kanna left to escape their marriage as a moment of self-reflection from him. like, imagine having to contend with the fact that your rancid vibes drove the love of your life away after having just publicly humiliated her fourteen year old granddaughter who was begat on the literal other side of the earth because how that’s far she went to escape him. sokka gets the moment of realizing “oh, men and woman are ontological equal in their capacities, and divisions between genders are socially assigned and arbitrary,” but that isn’t really pakku’s deal at all. pakku’s deal is more like, “oh, my unyielding insistence on adhering to and imposing unjust patriarchal traditions actually makes me deeply unpleasant to be around and drives my loved ones away. maybe I should take a fucking chill pill perhaps.”

like, the fact that katara ultimately loses the fight and nothing she actually says or does persuades him is interesting, because it means that his reflection is internal, his moment of revelation not brought about by didactic moralizing, but through taking a long, hard look in the mirror, and realizing that being kind is more important than being right. and that’s why he seems to make an effort to be friendlier and more helpful, more so than making any effort to become a male feminist and fight for women’s rights. sokka, for example, initially has a narrow view of gender because his worldview is limited and then it expands, but pakku, by contrast, is literally a member of the white lotus; he is old and worldly, so he clearly already understands that their tribe’s traditions are not ontologically necessitated, but he nonetheless supports them because they benefit him. it is only when he learns that the love of his love literally escaped their tribe and left behind everything she ever knew just to avoid him that he decides to reevaluate his staunch insistence on clinging to his patriarchal values. and who wouldn’t. i mean, that’s gotta fucking hurt!

i know that katara’s fight against him does feel like a grand feminist moment as she fights for her ideals and her rights as a girl, and to her (and to us as the audience) it certainly does feel that way, but to pakku, his change of heart is one of realizing that he should probably stop being an asshole to every woman he’s ever met while he still has a few good years left. a core motif of katara’s arc is that she cannot actually preach her ideals and simply enlighten every asshole she meets, as much as she’d certainly like to; enlightenment comes from within. and so it is pakku’s regrets that motivate him to be kinder, because it’s never too late to change for the better. and that’s kind of beautiful actually.

#meta #character analysis #pakku #katara #water tribe

[caelum-in-the-avatarverse]

I appreciate the thought of whoever submitted this! But oh my GOD the ratio is KILLING me and is also completely expected. XD

Like, this fic takes place decades pre-series. It's 95% OCs and worldbuilding and politics I completely made up. Only two canon characters are in it and in canon they were minor characters and antagonists who no one is ever gonna search the character tags for.

Idk, I think this is beautiful and hilarious. I love seeing how niche my fics are. I can't believe there's 6 days left to vote on this oh my GOD. XD

Summary: 86 years pre-series. At age 14, Prince Azulon finds himself completely alone in the Fire Nation's royal court after the latest round of political scheming takes away every family member he thought he could trust.

Author: @caelum-in-the-avatarverse

Note from submitter: This one-shot is part of a larger series full of all sorts of Fire Nation Royal Family drama and political intrigue. It's very interesting and well-written and I highly recommend it!

#caelum babbles

[caelum-in-the-avatarverse]

I think it needs to be reiterated: The Water Tribes weren’t colonized. Katara does not have “colonial trauma”, as one post suggests. The Water Tribes were never claimed by anyone else and were left completely alone besides The Fire Nation enacting genocide. If we are going to discuss “zutara colonization discourse”, then please do it right. Especially if y’all are gonna write long essays about it, given that all that time writing would end being partially for nothing since the thing you’re focusing on isn’t relevant to what anyone is saying.

#meta #southern water tribe #colonialism

[caelum-in-the-avatarverse]

lol maybe to celebrate I should get back to writing those 15 prompts for the 15th anniversary

atla turning 20 next year in 2025... 😳

#the writing process is ridiculous

[caelum-in-the-avatarverse]

:-P

#art #penguins #water tribe #zuko #katara #aang #yue #sokka

[caelum-in-the-avatarverse]

Don’t forget we invade the Fire Nation today

#lol #sokka #eclipse

[caelum-in-the-avatarverse]

Sokka's girlfriend looked great today.

#lol #eclipse #yue #sokka

[caelum-in-the-avatarverse]

oop. crawls out of my red lotus cave

+ bonus:

#red lotus #zaheer #ghazan #p'li #ming hua

[caelum-in-the-avatarverse]

A little baby Aang and Gyatso to start the week 👶🏻🥹

Happy Monday! 🩵

Find me here: Instagram | Website & Portfolio

#art #gyatso #aang #air nomads #airbenders

[caelum-in-the-avatarverse]

Has the live-action given you any little scraps that fits in your 'verse? or anything you'd consider incorporating if it hadn't gone against something you'd written previously?

Haven't gotten around to watching it yet. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Eventually!

But yeah I'll probably adopt something from it, it's just how my patchwork headcanon works. I'm completely underwhelmed by the comics but there's still things from them that I use. Heck, even the original live action film gave me the idea to incorporate Indian names/culture into my Fire Nation headcanon.

#asks #caelum babbles

[caelum-in-the-avatarverse]

Princess Yue as the Moon Spirit in a style inspired by Alphonse Mucha.

🌸 This piece is available as a print here! 🌸

#yue #art #water tribe

[caelum-in-the-avatarverse]

Having thoughts about how Toph found people at the Earth Rumble who treated her as an equal and respected her for her skill and listened to her. How she became the Blind Bandit there and the first people to ever take her seriously were The Gecko and Fire Nation Man and the others.

And then she joins the Gaang, people who also treat her as an equal and respect her skill and listen to her, and she starts calling them Twinkle Toes and Snoozles and Sugar Queen and Captain Boomerang.

She's giving them stage names. Because gaining her stage name was the most empowering thing that happened to her up to that point. Because stage names are earned. Because the people who were kindest to her in her life (by treating her how she wanted to be treated) were people who went by things like The Boulder.

#toph beifong #meta #character analysis

[caelum-in-the-avatarverse]

We're fanfic writers, we spend hours researching an incredibly niche topic we know nothing about so that we can have one sentence be factually correct

#the writing process is ridiculous #fanfiction

[caelum-in-the-avatarverse]

Oh, yes, I like this interpretation a lot.

uncle iroh is treated very much like a paragon of virtue in the series. yes we know he has had a violent past, that he has done terrible things, committed atrocities in the service of the fire nation— but we don’t really feel it because all of that had happened off screen and prior to the series. instead, he comes to us as a more perfect being and one deified with secret good deeds revealed throughout the story: uncle iroh is the keeper of the dragons and an important member of the white lotus, he is just that awesome.

uncle iroh is so divorced from his immediate past that we don’t see him haunted by any of it unless it’s by lu ten— which begs the question: did he really turn his back on the fire nation due to a moral awakening or was it only/mostly for his own good? he certainly doesn’t behave in a manner you’d expect from a repentant ex-imperialist: he’s not too worried about walking the streets of ba singe se, let alone actually staying there after the war ended. (the same war he participated in on the side of the aggressors, mind you.) he is shameless enough to be living there while hiding away and was unscrupulous in accepting hospitality from earth kingdom folks who were made refugees by the fire nation, i.e., song’s family. does he not feel guilty or at least uncomfortable with his circumstances, especially since it has only been 5 or so years since the siege at ba sing se and thus still very fresh in the grand scheme of things? is iroh just that Enlightened and At Peace with his past that it doesn’t color his every movement? or is his lack of a moral hangover just a writing oversight? were they scared to make their most lovable character in a rated TV-Y7 cartoon a tad more polarizing?

while uncle iroh does his job well for the story— that is, to act as zuko’s guiding light— i do wish he were knocked off his pedestal a bit more. uncle iroh is, after all, the proto-zuko to ozai’s proto-azula. i wish to see him at least slightly paranoid about people recognizing him from his military days and vice versa. i wish to see him uneasy about being in the earth kingdom (out of guilt? as opposed to zuko’s superiority complex and anger). i wish to see him meet another person who also has visible burn scars, one that has nothing to do with zuko/his family, and still look away in shame or disgust by the implications. et cetera et cetera. anything to indicate he feels something more about himself and other people that isn’t just Wise Old Man.

#iroh #azula #fire nation royal family #character analysis #meta

[caelum-in-the-avatarverse]

WARNING very graphic visual of Lu-Tens last moments. the footage shows, how prince Lu-Ten son of Iroh second in line. has to fight off on his own, two small hatchlings, both enraged by their pray being stolen. and you can clearly see, how his father, the general, dragon of the west crown prince Iroh, JUST SITS ON THE SIDELINES SIPPING HIS TEA AND LAUGHING HIS BELLY OF!

#lu ten #zuko #azula #iroh #art #fire nation royal family

[caelum-in-the-avatarverse]

Whenever I return to ATLA brainrot, I usually go through a re-re-read of your fanfics, and your Da Li OCs tend to take over my brain for a while.

Recently I’ve rewatched Avatar Day, and I’ve wondered how your OCs would react to literal Kyoshi showing up.

To me, Zan would probably be the most excited. I know she would be number 1 defender of Kyoshi from Chin defenders. But not like Aang, who tried to say she’s innocent, but Zan would argue that Kyoshi did the right thing. Not just that, I feel that if she learned of Kyoshi’s opinion on the present day Dai Li, she probably would feel more motivated to change the Dai Li back to how they once were.

Delun would probably shit himself at the sight of Kyoshi. You know, he probably would have wanted to go up and have a looooonnnnnggg conversation with her about probably everything.

Really anyone from the Preservation branch would love to see Kyoshi in person.

Listen. Every Preservation agent, at all times, is a massive simp for Kyoshi.

Oh, they're consummate professionals. They understand the importance of historical nuance. But also Avatar Kyoshi was objectively the greatest person to ever exist in all of history and anyone who says otherwise is wrong.

You are absolutely right, Zan would 100% defend Kyoshi in the exact way Aang wouldn't want to defend Kyoshi. Yeah, she killed Chin, she did it in the most spectacular way imaginable, and she was totally justified in doing so because he sucked. You want to insist that's not what happened? You have your "just us"? Zan has a stack of eyewitness accounts and primary sources.

Zan and the rest of Preservation would also be completely unsurprised at Kyoshi's opinion of the present-day Dai Li. Well, no, actually, they would be surprised...that Kyoshi would be more upset about the "secret police are bad, actually" thing, and less about the "the Dai Li don't focus on history anymore" thing. That's the thing about Preservation--just because they disagree with Long Feng, that doesn't make them "good". They don't like the fact that the Dai Li have become the secret police, but that's because they don't like that the Dai Li are the secret police. They feel like Long Feng should've co-opted some other government agency to micromanage the other rings and left the Dai Li to take care of the Upper Ring.

But yeah, if Zan ever met Avatar Kyoshi, her reaction would be one of "internally squealing fangirl professionally holding it together" lol

Delun would just go speechless with awe. And possibly cry.

Pretty much any Preservation agent would lose it if they ever got to meet Kyoshi (and a good chunk of the other agents, too; just cuz they aren't history buffs doesn't mean they don't revere her). When they realize that 1) the current Avatar can channel past Avatars, and 2) the Dai Li's strained relationship with Avatar Aang means they can't wheedle him into channeling Kyoshi on a whim, there's a definite resurgence in grumbling against Long Feng.

Also, ty for all the re-reads! I'm glad to be able to support your ATLA brainrot. ^_^

#asks #caelum rambles #dai li