Am Yisrael ☕️

So I've been racking my brain, and I just can't seem to think of any AU where I have current Yuetara. There is one AU where that is definitely where things are going, but I can't tell you which one because that would be much too much of a spoiler, and I think would really take away from what's going on in that AU right now. So instead, I'm going to leave you with an idea that I really like for this ship.

So functionally, Yue is a Goddess, a divine being, and as the Moon Spirit, her domain is waterbending. That makes Katara her devotee. And this is something of a strange relationship by necessity between a divine being and her devotee, because Katara met Yue, in person, when she was a mortal teenager. When they were both mortal teenagers. Yue had a flirtation with Katara's older brother.

And from her comments in the first episode, we know that Katara has a sense of her waterbending as a deeply spiritual and sacred part of herself that ties her to her culture and her people. So Katara has this deep sacred relationship to her bending and to a spirit that again, she once met as a mortal teenager. Any spiritual relationship she has to the moon and her bending is going to color and be colored by, her experiences with Yue the human girl.

And I suspect that the longer Yue is a spirit, the less human she becomes, or more accurately, the less human she seems, to herself and to others.

So I find myself thinking about the deeply personal, emotional, and sacred relationship between a divine being and her devotee, overlayed with a girl who grew to womanhood only after leaving her humanity behind, who is drifting ever farther away from who she once was, and the woman who might be one of the very few people who can understand her, both as who she once was, and as who and what she has become. And if Katara's experience with the sacred edges into the romantic, and even erotic, many spiritual traditions have had room for such things.

Oh honey, 1) that's not creepy, because this is an ask blog, and 2) I don't know you, but I do have a familiarity with your screen name, and that's the best I get most of the time.

Continued from Long Long Way: [Link]. Also continued from: [Link], [Link], and [Link].

1. After leaving Omashu, the gaang find themselves flying over the base of the mountains, and a broad flat swamp. They find themselves pulled down into it, or partly pulled partly chased into it, by a tornado. It's a small tornado, and not especially powerful. They've heard of tornadoes that could peel the flesh off your bones, and send stalks of rice like arrows to embed themselves in wooden houses. But anyway they find themselves in the swamp, and before they find the people who live there, they each see something. Aang sees a laughing young girl with flying boar, Sokka sees Yue.

2. And Jet sees his mother, hair on fire, dying in his place.

3. With a little help from the swamp people, who teach them a valuable lesson in the interconnectivity of the world, they are able to get out of the swamp, and they find themselves in a village where everybody wants Aang dead, gruesomely, because Kyoshi supposedly killed their great leader hundreds of years ago. Why does this always happen to them? Anyway, they go to Kyoshi island, to prove him innocent, but it turns out that actually he or she didn't kill the guy and they only escape when a crack Fire Nation team shows up and Aang has to fight them off to save the people who wanted to kill him. But anyway while they're on Kyoshi Island, they find out that Suki is not there, and Jet has a good long laugh at his brother, because what else are little brothers for then to mock you when you have a crush.

4. After they deal with that whole debacle, they find themselves in the lovely town of Gaoling, and said about actually finding Aang an earthbending teacher. They take in a little local tournament, and the winner of the tournament is very familiar to Aang. This leads to dinner with a high-class family, made much more awkward by the fact that not only are they all not at all rich, but they haven't really been doing laundry either so their clothes kind of have a funk to them. Somehow this all ends with the earthbending tournament champion and daughter of the house getting kidnapped, and them having to go help her break out, and her running off with them. Once again, why do these things always happen to them?

5. But here is where another problem kind of comes in, because with Jet instead of Katara, there is a nurturing element missing from the gaang. Sure, this is an emotional void, but it's also a void of the kind of person who makes sure that they all have clean clothes, and who cooks dinner, and makes life significantly more comfortable and clean and less dangerous in quite a few ways, so it ends up being Aang who does the cooking and he's not terrible but he's not great either, and laundry tends not to get done, and things tend not to be kept in a neat pile and things get lost and left behind and it's not great, and Toph is not any help on this front because Toph is Toph. And it's not like anyone is happy about this situation, but nobody has the skills or the wherewithal to fix it, and Toph is starting to realize just how much it sucks not to have servants.

So I reported this asshole and IP blocked them, for their intense and blatant antisemitism, but I'm screenshotting and posting this ask because it's a perfect example of what I talked about here: [Link] on my other blog.

I am really open about being an atheist. I am of course really open about being Jewish. I frequently talk about the two in conjuction, and when I talk about Christian cultural hegemony in atheist spaces and antisemitism in atheist spaces, I am talking as a Jewish atheist. But the first thing any gentile atheist who doesn't want to think about antisemitism and Christian cultural hegemony does, is erase my atheism and paint me as the outsider religious person attacking atheists.

And the same thing happens when queer Jews bring up antisemitism in the queer community. Our queerness is erased, and it's "Oh the Jews are such bigots, attacking queer people!" Every time. Intracommunity discussions of antisemitism in communities we belong to, over and over are shut down by gentile members of those communities, painting us as outsiders and interlopers trying to atrack the community. Thank you, Nonny, for providing a perfect example.

Continued from: [Link], [Link], [Link], and [Link].

1. It is a source of great consternation for Earth King Kuei, that the firelord, whenever he pleases, can slip into and out of Ba Sing Se, and the Upper Ring, with him none the wiser. And Zuko does this if not all the time, frequently enough that his uncle isn't shocked when he shows up just after the Jasmine Dragon has closed, having purchased honey plum cakes from the bakery he knows his uncle likes best, on his way.

2. He is more surprised when his nephew asks about his northern Earth Kingdom campaign on his way to lay seige to Ba Sing Se. It was military grunt work, the boring background to laying a siege, where you make sure that your supply lines are not going to get cut off, and you're not going to be attacked from behind, and forced to fight on two fronts. It's the kind of thing that fills military manuals, not adventure stories. And of course it caused tremendous human misery as part of a war that never should have been fought. And he of course tells his nephew this, who says what about the village of Gaipan?

3. The name doesn't ring any bells, and he tells Zuko this. Zuko describes what happened there, the Rough Rhinos "clearing it out", a process that involved rounding villagers up, locking them in their homes and setting those homes on fire, the place being picked clean by foraging parties and a garrison being stationed there, about how only a handful of people died, compared to the death toll of the war, and most of the villagers survived, but they were plenty of children left orphaned, and with the landscape picked clean, the next years were hungry ones, and the orphaned children were no one's top priority, and they had to fend for themselves in the forest. Iroh nods along, it has the ring of truth to it, and he does not doubt it. And it is very tragic and it is absolutely his fault, and he was not a good man, but it also cannot be undone, so why is his nephew bringing it up now?

4. So Zuko tells him, Jet was from Gaipan. He was one of those orphaned children, fending for himself in the forest. Ah, says Iroh.

5. When Zuko leaves Ba Sing Se, his uncle comes with him. But he doesn't come to the capital. Instead he heads for the Boiling Rock prison, with a letter from his nephew, remanding convicted murderer and pirate, Jet, into Iroh's custody.

Tears of the Kingdom spoilers and Link being back on his bullshit(tm) under the cut.

Continued from: [Link] and [Link].

1. Li isn't exactly unhappy when Sokka has much more serious grown up stuff to do than go penguin sledding with them. It gives her a chance to be alone with another girl, with no boys and no grownups around. She hasn't had a chance to be alone with another girl since she had to leave the Eastern Air Temple. And she can't stop staring. It makes her feel, maybe not jealous but self-conscious. Katara has such beautiful hair, and it wasn't that long since Li became a master airbender, and they had to shave her head for the tattoos, and her hair is only a few minutes long and awkward and floppy. But she can't stop staring. Maybe that's why sthe almost misses the old Fire Nation war ship, entombed in the ice.

2. But Katara notices, and points it out to her, and in a fit of daring, and a desire to make this time with Katara last longer, and may e to impress her Li talks her into going inside. It's cold, and quiet, with creaky iron floors, and it's appropriately eery, and just a little spooky. But it quickly becomes the wrong kind of spooky when Katara talks about the war, and when she tells Li that she thinks she might have been frozen in the iceberg for a hundred years. That can't be right, can it?

3. On their way out of the ship, Li stumbles right into a booby trap that locks them inside and fires off a flair. But, as she points out to Katara, there's a hole in the ceiling, and she's an airbender. She jumps through, carrying Katara with her, and they run back to the village as fast as they can.

4. When they get back, Sokka yells at them for going into the ship, and accuses Li of being a Fire Nation spy and kicks her out for being trouble and dangerous, and Katara insists on going with her and Li has to tell her she can't, and then an annoying angry guy with a ponytail and a face scar shows up, and she has to go back to the village, to protect them, and the angry ponytail guy demands she surrender to him in exchange for The villages safety, and she agrees, and everything is happening very very fast, and she has to figure out how to escape from here, and before she knows it, Sokka and Katara have shown up on Floofy to rescue her, and they are flying away from angry ponytail guy and his ship, and making plans to go to the North Pole.

5. The thing about Mai is, for all her time with Azula was horrible, and she spent so much of it scared, and angry and miserable and it's a relief to be away from her, being around Azula was never boring. There was something about her, something compelling, that drew Mai in, and without her there it's almost as if things lack color. Nothing feels as intense, as sharp, as real without her there. And honestly it's not even that she wants to go back, is that she desperately needs somebody to talk about any of this with, someone who knew what it was like. When she finds out that Ty Aang was so close, just outside of Omashu, she is not going to take it well.