E L Y S I A N

bluey┆3x04, promises

Okay, Aang is so rad. He can see a person wants to hurt him very badly and Aang could probably beat this kid up in like one move, but he doesn’t do that; he dodges the attack doesn’t even make a move to hurt the kid. He probably is concerned he’ll hurt him being the Avatar. I love Aang so much.

yes, and. aang is clearly aware that he has an audience. he knows that as the new kid “from the colonies” (aka “colony trash”), he is an outsider in this school and must be seen being polite and respectful to the kid at the top of the pecking order. it is also simply in his nature to treat everyone politely and respectfully. so when hide (that’s his name btw) throws the first punch, aang dodges out of the way. but he doesn’t just dodge. he literally dodges him by slipping under his legs. aang is not only ensuring that hide doesn’t get hurt and that he doesn’t get hurt, but also demonstrating to the crowd of enthralled onlookers that he is actually a far better fighter than this other kid. and he continues to evade and discombobulate him with perfect poise and grace, without ever throwing a single punch or even making an effort to block his attacks. eventually, hide loses the fight because he gets so tired and confused from aang’s maneuvering that he overexerts himself in an effort to actually land a hit on aang, and so when aang dodges him, he ends up collapsing.

aang is a mischievous and playful kid, but even more than that, he is very socially aware. he knows that by refusing to fight hide on his terms, and in fact rising above, he is humiliating hide, establishing his implicit superiority, “colony trash” utterly trouncing the beloved popular kid who always gets his way. it is a microcosm of how aang eventually defeats ozai: by not succumbing to his ideals of violence and domination, and by instead using the philosophies of his people to guide him, aang is not only winning a fight between two enemies, but in fact demonstrating his ideological superiority in a battle of clashing cultural values. aang proves to ozai why air nomads do, in fact, deserve a place in this world, and he could not have done so if he had simply killed ozai. by refusing to sacrifice the values of his people, and instead rising above ozai’s petty imperialist dogmas, aang proves why he is uniquely fit to be the avatar. and by refusing to stoop to hide’s level, aang rises above and proves why he so thoroughly and immediately establishes himself as the most popular kid at this random fire nation school. aang doesn’t defeat his enemies, but rather humiliates them by demonstrating why it was folly for them to ever assume that they even had the slightest chance of defeating him in the first place.

Canon: and so they never met

Fanfic: here’s a funny story

Canon: There was tension and pining, but they never even kissed.

Fanfic: Actually,

Canon: Torture the cinnamon roll.

Fanfic: Torture the cinnamon roll.

Canon: When they traveled they stayed in separate rooms

Fanfic: AND. THERE. WAS. ONLY. ONE. BED!!!!!

Canon: … and they were roommates.

Fanfic: oh my god, they were roommates…

Canon: They were international assassins who assassinated assassins.

Fanfic: But hot DAMN wait till you hear about this cafe they opened

Canon: They had a coffeeshop

Fanfic: but they were ASSASSINS

Canon: they were mortal enemies and attempted to murder each other on multiple occasions

Fanfic: bUT THEY GOT MARRIED AND ADOPTED CHILDREN

Everytime I reblog this has a new addition and it’s the best

Canon: They were straight

Fanfic: Lol

THE LAST ONE IS THE BEST ONE

I love fanfic so so so much.

Canon: Am I joke to you?

Fanon: No, just a disappointment.

all of taylor’s previous albums, in the style of The Tortured Poets Department (2024)

Feather River Bulletin, Quincy, California, March 20, 1924

In highschool I wrote a story about a middle-generation of stellar travelers. Their parents were born on earth and left as children, and the middle generation will not live long enough to see their destination. They live their entire lives on the ship and I wrote about them trying to find their place in everything. They will never know blue skies and warm beaches and open fields with warm breezes. They’ll never know birdsong or crickets or frogs. They’ll never hear the rain on the roof of a dreary day. I never could find the right way to end the story. I wanted it to be a happy ending, but I didn’t know how to do it.

I realize now that it was a book about me dealing with depression before I even knew it. Looking back at how blatant the projecting was, it’s obvious now. It wasn’t then.

In the story, the middle-generation people are lost. They’re apathetic. They’re just a placeholder. The only job they have is to keep the ship running, have kids, and die. As the middle generation of people began becoming adults, suicide rates were skyrocketing. Crime and drug rates were jumping. This generation was completely apathetic because they felt that they had no use.

In the story, a small group of people in the middle-generation create the Weather Project. They turn the ship into a terrarium. They make magnificent gardens and take the DNA of animals they took with them and recreate them and they make this cold, metal spaceship that they have to live their entire lives on into a home. They take what little they have and they break it and rearrange it into something beautiful. They take this radical idea and turn the ship into a wonderful jungle of trees and birds and sunshine.

And I realize now how much it reflects my state of mind as I transitioned from a child into an adult while dealing with depression. You always hear “it gets better” and “when you’re older things will be easier” and I was so sick of waiting for it to get better. I was in the middle-generation stage. And I was sick of it. I was so sick of waiting.

When I was in highschool I didn’t know how to end the story. I didn’t know how to have a happy ending. I didn’t have the life experience then to finish the story in a meaningful way. I didn’t know how to make it better for these middle-generation characters.

But now that I’m older, I’m learning. That if you sit and wait for things to get better, it never will. You have to take your life and break it apart and rearrange it into something beautiful. You have to make the cold metal ship into the garden that you deserve. You have to make your own meaning. You have to plant your own garden.

You have to teach yourself that being happy is not a radical idea.

God you guys I never thought this would become so popular 😱 I was gonna name it The Weather Project after the art installment that inspired it

By Olafur Eliasson

This is the most important post that I’ve ever made. Its for screaming out with every fiber of your being that you’re worth something. You’re worth everything.

KIMETSU GAKUEN! (2021-?) by hokami natsuki

that part in fellowship where gimli isn't allowed to walk without a blindfold through the Naith of Lorien and Aragorn understands that it is not about the blindfold but about being alone, and so all of the fellowship agree to be blindfolded so that they are all treated equally. That is allyship. aragorn is heir to the throne of gondor and a powerful person in middle earth but he would rather they all be blindfolded so as to point out how outrageous it is that gimli would be blindfolded. As long as the world is unfair we stand with those it is unfair to, and we deny the privileges the unfair world would give us to separate us from our friends

Euripides (Tr. Anne Carson) / @wholeheartedsuggestions / Jenny Slate / Euripides again

ren-o-graphics

sketchbook details 🌕✨

[Image description: Details from a gouache painting. It’s full moon and there are soft, creamy cotton clouds and sprinkle of golden stars.]

— Unknown (via hplyrikz)

Bad Girls Club by Xin Yingzong

the tortured poets department, april 19

the older I get, the more the technological changes I've lived through as a millennial feel bizarre to me. we had computers in my primary school classroom; I first learned to type on a typewriter. I had a cellphone as a teenager, but still needed a physical train timetable. my parents listened to LP records when I was growing up; meanwhile, my childhood cassette tape collection became a CD collection, until I started downloading mp3s on kazaa over our 56k modem internet connection to play in winamp on my desktop computer, and now my laptop doesn't even have a disc tray. I used to save my word documents on floppy discs. I grew up using the rotary phone at my grandparents' house and our wall-connected landline; my mother's first cellphone was so big, we called it The Brick. I once took my desktop computer - monitor, tower and all - on the train to attend a LAN party at a friend's house where we had to connect to the internet with physical cables to play together, and where one friend's massive CRT monitor wouldn't fit on any available table. as kids, we used to make concertina caterpillars in class with the punctured and perforated paper strips that were left over whenever anything was printed on the room's dot matrix printer, which was outdated by the time I was in high school. VHS tapes became DVDs, and you could still rent both at the local video store when I was first married, but those shops all died out within the next six years. my facebook account predates the iphone camera - I used to carry around a separate digital camera and manually upload photos to the computer in order to post them; there are rolls of undeveloped film from my childhood still in envelopes from the chemist's in my childhood photo albums. I have a photo album from my wedding, but no physical albums of my child; by then, we were all posting online, and now that's a decade's worth of pictures I'd have to sort through manually in order to create one. there are video games I tell my son about but can't ever show him because the consoles they used to run on are all obsolete and the games were never remastered for the new ones that don't have the requisite backwards compatibility. I used to have a walkman for car trips as a kid; then I had a discman and a plastic hardshell case of CDs to carry around as a teenager; later, a friend gave my husband and I engraved matching ipods as a wedding present, and we used them both until they stopped working; now they're obsolete. today I texted my mother, who was born in 1950, a tiktok upload of an instructional video for girls from 1956 on how to look after their hair and nails and fold their clothes. my father was born four years after the invention of colour televison; he worked in radio and print journalism, and in the years before his health declined, even though he logically understood that newspapers existed online, he would clip out articles from the physical paper, put them in an envelope and mail them to me overseas if he wanted me to read them. and now I hold the world in a glass-faced rectangle, and I have access to everything and ownership of nothing, and everything I write online can potentially be wiped out at the drop of a hat by the ego of an idiot manchild billionaire. as a child, I wore a watch, but like most of my generation, I stopped when cellphones started telling us the time and they became redundant. now, my son wears a smartwatch so we can call him home from playing in the neighbourhood park, and there's a tanline on his wrist ike the one I haven't had since the age of fifteen. and I wonder: what will 2030 look like?