Ty "Lee"
We all remember that Ty Lee has six identical sisters and joined the circus so she wouldn't be part of a matched set forever, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone talk about one specific sentence in that moment (I certainly hadn't thought about it before today)
And then I realized.
It's well-established that Lee is the most common, generic name anyone can have in the Avatar Universe. The perfect no-effort name to dump on a child you weren't expecting to have because no one expects to birth 7 babies in one go.
6 though? That's a sensible number. The rest of 'em can have more meaningful given names.
Thus, Ty Lee had the double burden of being part of a matched set and being the singled-out runt of said set.
That's why "Circus Freak" is a compliment. Not because she preferred the circus, but because it's a more creative name.
Ouch.
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Absolute love visiting Borth beach as the tide goes out and the remains of a 5000 year old forest appear from the waves.
At low tide you can see the remains of hundreds and hundreds of trees dating back to around 2000BCE. It is so amazing to see the remains of these gnarly stumps no longer supporting leaves, but instead seaweed.
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There was a lot of conversation suddenly about that scene in The Beach episode where Zuko brings stuff to Mai, and whether it means Mai is a bad girlfriend for not being more grateful.
And here is my opinion, which I personally consider the ultimate truth, but YMMV,as they say.
Mai is not a bag girlfriend
Zuko is not a bad boyfriend.
Their relationship is not toxic, abusive, or problematic, but it does have problems, since they are both troubled, traumatized teens who hasn’t seen how healthy relationship work, but they are both trying their best.
Let’s try to imagine ourselves inside Zuko’s head. He wants to do something nice, looks around, sees a shell, remembers that girls are supposed to like pretty things and uncle Iroh thought shells were pretty, picks it up and offers it to Mai.
Let’s move to Mai’s head now. She sees Zuko picking up some random trash from the sand and giving it to her, saying that all girls supposed to like it. She doesn’t like and her response is an eyeroll and a sarcastic remark. Zuko is angry, but is it Mai’s fault? No, it is not.
Zuko had good intentions, but good intention don’t necessarily translate into good action. Imagine, a more common scenario from our world: a girl is given cut roses, because girls are supposed to love flowers, and roses are the best flowers. Must a girl be happy and grateful? Roses are usually really beautiful, after all.
Yet she – might hate flowers
- might hate cut flowers
- might dislike roses
- might be allergic to roses
- might be looking forward to daisies instead
- something else entirely
Mai’s reaction might not have been perfect, but it is realistic and understandable.
now, Zuko realized his mistake, and went to get ice cream – something Mai actually loved and wanted to have.
He almost did it – and then didn’t. Imagine Mai’s disappointment, when a cool delicious icecream drops out of your hand and onto your clothes. What did she do? She thanked Zuko, in mildly sarcastic tone. It is a perfect reaction to the silly mishap, really. Zuko is even more disappointed – but not in Mai and her reaction, remember, all this time he is mad at himself, and everything he does and doesn’t do, feeds that anger.
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Fanon: “Azula’s relationships with her ‘friends’ were always fake”
Canon:
Because we all know that pictures never lie, right?
Also, there's a difference between Azula actively faking her regard for her friends and her being manipulative and abusive to the people she cares for. These are not healthy relationships in canon, and no amount of nostalgia lighting on the final shot is going to change that.
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Azula thinks that because she’s not treated like zuko that she’s “better”. her entire self worth is based on her brother’s abuse as a means of keeping her in mental competition with him. In their father’s eyes, Everything that is “good” about her is relative to the failures of zuko..compelling her to participate in the abuse to maintain her position as “the good one”…and zuko being told he could never even be in competition with Azula, because he could never compare, making him feel the need to prove himself through obedience. All the while their father is using both of them for his personal gain, couldn’t give less of a shit about either of them, and they’re none the wiser because they’re too focused on each other.
They are seriously one of the most accurate depictions of sibling relationships in abusive homes I’ve ever seen.
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The Family Portrait
Every time I watch The Beach episode and it gets to the part where Zuko burns the family portrait, I always think about how Azula felt when he does that.
We see Zuko's facial expression as this is going on, which is anger
Although he was pretty much angry about everything at this point, so it may not have had anything to do with burning the photo at all. But what about Azula? How did she feel about this? We know that the family beach house holds painful memories for her too, as shown when she immediately knew where to find Zuko after the party.
She sees that being there is bringing Zuko down, so she tells him to come down to the beach with her, and then she turns around and begins walking away while saying "this place is depressing". Which means that, much like Zuko, she has feelings about that place too. But as per usual, the writers just made everything that had to do with their family about Zuko, instead of the both of them. That was Azula's family too, not just Zuko's. Really wish that we got scenes of what Azula thought about these things.
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