#and then occasionally ‘my boy sokka would never do this. for shame malcolm! for shame’

[comradekatara]

in the avatar: the last airbender episode “the fortuneteller,” sokka spends an entire day making desperate, futile attempts to convince the villagers of makapu that aunt wu, the village psychic, is a hack, and implores them to instead conduct their lives on a platform of empirical reasoning by pointing out the overt flaws in their belief system. one villager asks him, “can your science explain why it rains?” to which an exasperated sokka responds, “yes! yes it can!” ultimately, sokka is proven right when aunt wu predicts that the volcano near their village will remain dormant for another year, and within hours it begins to erupt. while sokka may not have changed any minds by the end of the episode, his insistence on operating rationally saves an entire village from being destroyed, and he is framed as a champion of logic and science.

in the malcolm in the middle episode “polly in the middle,” malcolm (the sokka of white people) spends days attempting to convince dewey that his belief in his so-called “lucky shirt” is an idiotic superstition to hold, and implores him to look at the world rationally. malcolm claims that, “believing in that kind of nonsense isn’t smart or healthy or good for society. the world doesn’t work by magic or superstition, it’s rational.” to which dewey retorts, “maybe you believe that because all you’re good at is thinking, and if the world isn’t logical then you’re lost.”

both sokka and malcolm bring about their own misfortune constantly through overthinking and practically inviting the universe to taunt them. when comically unfortunate coincidences befall them immediately upon concluding their diatribes that the world is purely rational, both insist that "this proves nothing!" however, by the end of the episode, malcolm's infant brother jamie falls through an air vent and is only saved upon his fall being cushioned by none other than dewey's lucky shirt. the framing of the episode, as well as the entire show as a whole, suggests that dewey's hypothesis is correct: dewey is ontologically lucky, and malcolm is doomed to a life of misery.

so i guess my point here is that while sokka may think he has it bad—and don't get me wrong, he certainly does—it nevertheless could be far, far worse. he could be malcolm.

#watching mitm just means seeing malcolm constantly undergo various injustices like ‘this literally happened to sokka’ #‘this probably happened to sokka’ ‘this would happen to sokka if he lived in the suburbs’ etc etc #and then occasionally ‘my boy sokka would never do this. for shame malcolm! for shame’ #(im still a deweygirl tho) #synthesis #sokka