It's a Tuesday night who the hell is going through my blog??
Ahh now there are badges??
"It’s finished, it’s done. You can’t take loved away.”
- Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth
💝 Thank you for 1k. Special thanks to my lovely friend @sessjudoodles for helping sketch the line work for the Albertaceretops :)
hate when everytime i try to enjoy a meal a mf says “please stop biting me”
Ok minor detail but ...
So I noticed in A:TLA, and it’s carried over in LoK, that Airbenders always seem to have an advantage in a fight. And at first, it felt like plot armour, particularly in A:TLA.
But when Aang fought Bumi, he lost most of that advantage. And I realised that this wasn’t just plot armour. Someone had sat and worked it out: nobody has had to fight Airbenders for generations.
None of the other nations have had to train to face them, or practised sparring with them, or anything. Apart from Bumi, no bender in the show has ever even met an airbender before Aang comes along. And in LoK, for the most part people still haven’t. We never see fights between those who have (for e.g. we never see Tenzin and Lin fight); when Korra and Tenzin use airbending, its a unique fighting style that people aren’t trained to manage.
It’s a really small detail, and it fundamentally works to give the heroes an advantage (and make up for Aang’s young age and lack of combat experience), but I love how it’s an advantage in combat for completely logical reasons.
The detail in these shows is amazing.
You can see the same principle in play whenever somebody fights somebody who uses a completely unfamiliar style. Combustion benders and lavabenders aren’t straight up more powerful, but they’re pretty much always something you haven’t dealt with which presents unique challenges. That red lotus lady with no arms is just a perfectly ordinary waterbender, but using forms and styles nobody else has seen before. Jet routinely smacks around benders and soldiers, but loses hard to the first person he met who had actually studied diverse styles of swordplay. When Toph invents metalbending, nobody can deal with that, but seventy years later the counters are pretty well known among people who might have to fight the cops.
And it’s why Azula, a genius prodigy who has thought long and hard about how to counter every kind of magic and martial arts out there, keeps getting messed up by a kid with a boomerang.
it’s also a detail from the second ever episode
aang straight up says to the fire nation guards on zuko’s ship “you’ve probably never fought an airbender before”, because he in-universe figures out that, if what everyone around him is saying is true, and airbenders have been extinct for a century (or at least have gone to ground enough to make people think that) then he is a totally unknown figure in anyone’s calculations
this has been brought up before but it’s also one of the reasons why hama is so thrown in her fight with katara - waterbending is about energy exchange, keeping things flowing, throwing your opponent’s power back at them and we see katara and hama do this in their fight. however, when katara is faced with a powerful blast from hama, she stands her ground and blows it apart:
[image ID: a gif of katara in the puppetmaster. she is a teenage girl with dark skin and hair and blue eyes, wearing a red outfit. she turns and throws her hand out, stopping a blast of water and turning it into a huge shield. the background is a dark forest. end image ID]
why do i bring this up?
because it’s a move - and a mindset - influenced by earthbending, which hama has never faced (she went from the south pole, to prison, to the fire nation). it’s an indication not only of katara’s skill and power, but also how she’s learned from her travels, and from toph
one of my favorite details of atla is how the main characters’ fighting styles adapt as they take on new enemies and make new friends with other bending styles. iroh straight up tells zuko about how he developed a technique for redirecting lightning by studying waterbenders, but if you watch closely especially in the last season, there’s a lot of this sort of thing happening unspoken with the gaang, using the bending forms of other elements like katara does above. it really shows the strength in differences and diversity coming up against a fascist regime that wants everyone to conform.
Look at Korra metal bending here
It’s completely different than anything we’ve seen from other metal benders, who bend metal with sharp movements like the derivative of earth bending that it is
But Korra is fluid. She is bending metal like it’s water. Because she is a water bender. And she is the first person in history to be able to bend both metal and water and so she is able to combine these styles into one and move seamlessly between them. This shows so beautifully how the Avatar is the embodiment of all bending
Every time I think this show has shown me all it can….it gives me more.
You’ve been sentenced to 400 years for multiple murders. It’s been 399 years and your jailers are starting to get nervous.
I was twenty… twenty-five, I think?… when I was sentenced. Four hundred years was a length of time I couldn’t even imagine. It was a length of time I don’t think anyone could imagine, even the judge. It was just a big showy number that let everyone know I’d never see the light of day again. The mages who cast the spells were dramatic about it, practically shouting the part about ‘until death claims you, or four hundred years hath passed, forsooth, thou shalt be imprisoned here’. They don’t waste that kind of magic on most prisoners, but I was special.
The Slayer, they called me then. The Monster of Sentan. I’d killed nineteen people… I remember that number because I was so furious that they stopped me so close to my goal of twenty-one. And I didn’t just kill ordinary people, no, but the Chosen of the Gods. The Great and Good. They were terrified of me. So they locked me away, to die forgotten.
It had been a little less than a hundred years when the king died without heir, and a civil war tore the country apart. When the fighting was all over, the losers were dragged down to the deepest cells under the castle, and the new king and his soldiers stopped and stared at me. “Who… who is this?” he asked, frowning. “Some victim of the usurper?”
People like cooks and jailers and scrubbers don’t change as easily as kings. The same man who’d been bringing me my meals since there was still brown in his hair and beard shuffled forward, hunched and grey now. “No, yer majesty,” he said humbly. “That be a special prisoner, from before the old king died.”
“Special? Special how?” He frowned, moving closer to my cell. “The old king died more than ten years ago. This woman must have been a child then. What could she have done to - “
“Don’t get too close, yer majesty,” the old man said sharply. “That’s the Monster of Sentan… an’ she bites.”
That was true. I do bite.
Fondly remembering the time that a cat owner casually entered their calico Maine Coon in a cat fancier’s competition and the judges lost their minds because the cat was 1) male and 2) able to bear children
Anyway here’s Dawntreader Texas Calboy as a silly lil kitten
Here’s an excerpt from one of the articles about the drama his entry caused among the Cat Fanciers that I thought was very earnest and sweet <3
And also some of Calboy’s children!
He is fearfully and wonderfully made!
ALT
I was about to say he would technically be an intersex king (not because I dislike the concept of trans cats, just bc intersex rep is sorely needed too) but I did some more reading on this icon and actually found the article OP referenced.
ALT
He’s not your usual male calico kitty as it turns out. That’s already cool and rare, but he’s even cooler and rarer than that!
ALT
ALT
Calboy is a chimera!! Which is really fucking cool of you ask me. The chances of having a male calico this way are slim to none, but the mad lad still exists! What an icon. I would die for Calboy.
Everyone in the tags of this post @ cat show judges
Originally I was looking for an adult picture of Calboy
(He’s so pretty 🥰)
But I also found a source for the article screenshotted above! And folks it’s WILD. It’s an incredibly interesting read if you happen to love hearing about niche hobby drama. It’s also just a fantastically written article!
The parts I find the most interesting are about how conservative the cat fanciers association is. This isn’t even all of the parts that talk about that.
People are so mad about this cat spefically because he has female colors. An animal who couldn’t choose how it was born. This is happening in Texas by the way. Hm. I wonder how they treat trans people over there?
Reblogging again for this crucial addition
get okay with being some level of burden on others, seriously
you know what’s a real burden? a person that is so scared of leaning on other people that they try to be completely self sufficient and you end up either having to help them indirectly to save their ego or they have to break down in order to receive help, both of which are so much more heavy to the person that loves them than just being leaned on casually
Im here to do stupid shit then leave.
not art I’ve been cross posting but new quick sketch cause I found the time to lol
Wtf this site got so weird lmao
I keep disappearing and reappearing cause honestly I feel very free here to say whatever I want I just can't figure out how this site works anymore.
I feel bad clearing my follows so that I understand everything again
i think it's time for bed I couldn't remember the word "foal" and i thought to myself "horse sapling"
antlers, a thing that horses have
Welcome to Trilobite Time – come on grab your friends, we’ll go to the very distant past.
I teamed up with @lukas_laibl to produce a series of drawing guides about trilobites so you too, can #InsertAnInvert into your artwork with confidence.
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#InsertAnInvert is a series of invertebrate drawing guides done in collaboration with actual experts (like, literal Dr. Crabs and Dr. Cephalopods and all that) so if you could give them a follow on twitter that’d be swell.
High-res PDFs available for free on my rarely updated Patreon. Absolutely no money required. I just think Patreon is useful for attaching PDFs.
