gaylord-zuko
Queer Atlaverse
An ATLA/LOK sideblog because why not. Multishipper, mostly zukka and jetko but honestly a little bit of everything. Fic research enthusiast and expert at coming up with too many wip ideas. Some of my headcanons can get pretty angsty so be warned. If you need something tagged, let me know. I’m always open to constructive criticism in my asks and DM’s, but no drama please ❤️ Nsfw is tagged #adult content.
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[id: adult long-haired Zuko in the shower blushing and gazing softly towards the viewer, presumably because he’s thinking about Sokka /end id]
ok i got distracted but i am BACK on my aidays binge and i am yelling about weekend at momo’s because the dip into zuko’s POV after three chapters of sokka POV slays me
#blee getting me back into zukka 😮💨#just like they got me into zukka in the first place lol#fanart#id added
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[id: a tweet that reads, “I hope everyone stays safe during the Eclipse today except one guy” with a retweet adding a screenshot of the gaang at the Day of Black Sun invasion. There’s a speech bubble under Aang to make it look like he’s saying the tweet. /end id.]
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Reblog to let your followers know that despite your current obsession your previous obsessions still exist and are simply lying dormant until they awaken and strike again
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If your oc was a canon character what bad takes/gross mischaracterizations would the fandom come up with for them
#nobu is a sellout for claiming to be anti-monarchist and then marrying the crown princess 😔#izumiverse
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They’re not technically together in Ember Island Summer but they will be! When I finish it… 🙃
Older Zukka fics:
Wanted to enlist our collective wisdom…
These are the only Zukka fics I’m aware of where they’re together in middle age or later. Please feel free to reblog with other recs!
your love, so sweet by verdanthoney
broken lines series: mine. four stories about Zukka coming together later in life and being gentle with each other <3
there are no ghosts here by technicolourbeat
#zukka#izumiverse#ember island summer#crogan writes#sometimes#look it’s been a time okay#but I *will* finish that fic
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one thing that bugs me about atla's feminism is that it kind of does that thing where it encourages women to break roles but still treats the traditionally feminine thing as inferior. like women should learn to fight but there's no corrollary of men should learn to heal, even though that would fit really well with aang's struggle to maintain his peaceful values in a war-torn world. he'd love to learn water-healing! this is a spot where i could genuinely see a new adaptation improving the show, whether by adding an arc of aang learning or even just a background shot of men joining water-healing classes.
but natla somehow did this worse. when water-healing is first introduced in atla, it's as an impressive new power that great benders have, and it feels emotionally significant, as a metaphor for the ability to heal from the fire nation's damage or for being able to heal and forgive a friend who hurt you unintentionally. but in natla, katara gets bait-and-switched, thinks yagoda's just another waterbending master with more openings or something and is kinda interested in healing for .2 seconds before being pissed that that's all she's expected to do. healing is just a thing that waterbenders can do, a magic power, there's no meaning behind it. in the original, katara and the audience see water healing as a cool impressive ability before learning how it's perceived, and it's pakku who tells her that and pakku who she rages at, not yagoda. when she's kicked out of pakku's class and goes into yagoda's class she looks at all the women and girls in the class and we see some conflicted feelings on her face, like she wants to learn fighting but she doesn't want to be disrespectful to these kind women offering to teach her a sacred art of her culture. part of the injustice is that we the audience know water-healing is a great power and don't think it should be seen as lesser. pakku says women are forbidden from learning waterbending and then says that women learn to use their bending to heal - does he think that's not real bending? what an asshole!
and then katara's healing abilities are crucial to two of the show's biggest episodes. we see how wrong it is to treat it as a lesser ability. in fact, we consistantly see non-violent uses of bending (e.g. healing, seismic sense, lightning redirection) portrayed as incredible and special powers, because it's an anti-war show with a pacifist protagonist who ends up refusing to fight on the terms of his oppressors, who refuses to abandon his beliefs and give into violence. that's a major part of the show.
but in natla, all the women abandon the healing huts to fight in the battle - despite nothing showing that they've been trained in fighting, and as if healing doesn't matter on a goddamn battlefield. as if healing doesn't matter period. atla wasn't perfect on this front but at least it established that this non-violent and viewed-as-feminine ability was valuable and powerful and not something to be thrown aside for violence
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Having thoughts about how Toph found people at the Earth Rumble who treated her as an equal and respected her for her skill and listened to her. How she became the Blind Bandit there and the first people to ever take her seriously were The Gecko and Fire Nation Man and the others.
And then she joins the Gaang, people who also treat her as an equal and respect her skill and listen to her, and she starts calling them Twinkle Toes and Snoozles and Sugar Queen and Captain Boomerang.
She's giving them stage names. Because gaining her stage name was the most empowering thing that happened to her up to that point. Because stage names are earned. Because the people who were kindest to her in her life (by treating her how she wanted to be treated) were people who went by things like The Boulder.
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[id: gifs of the scenes from each movie/show described in the post]
Hey Red, sorry if this was asked already, but do you have any advice on writing a trickster hero? And do you have any favorites yourself?
Huh! This is something I've never really thought too hard about before, but I do have some loose and unformed thoughts!
So the trickster archetype is, broadly, a character who wins by being cunning and tricking the people around them. Typically this is because they are an underdog facing a powerful opponent, and if they face that opponent on the terms that opponent defines, they'll lose. For instance, a physically strong opponent might want to make everything into a contest of raw force; a politically powerful opponent might want to make things a legal battle; a commander of a large army might want to battle on a flat terrain-less battlefield and overpower the smaller enemy force through raw numbers; etc etc.
A trickster doesn't have the raw power to make a scenario happen. Instead, they achieve that scenario by making other characters make it happen, usually by misleading them into thinking it'll have some other outcome they want.
A classic example of this is found in a Brer Rabbit story where Brer Rabbit has been snatched by Brer Fox, and Brer Rabbit begs and pleads with him to not throw him into that briar patch, oh the torment he would experience in that briar patch would be unimaginable, drowning or burning would be bad but still better than that briar patch. Brer Fox naturally throws him into the briar patch, at which point Brer Rabbit vanishes into the underbrush and helpfully clarifies that he was born and bred in a briar patch. He was unable to escape through his own power, so instead he convinced Brer Fox that yeeting him into the briar patch would give Brer Fox something he wanted (Brer Rabbit's unimaginable torment) when in actuality it gave Brer Rabbit exactly the cover he needed to escape. It only worked because Brer Rabbit understood that Brer Fox was fundamentally not just hungry, he was cruel.
Tricksters usually achieve victory through lying, stealing, sneaking around and generally being dishonest. These are usually not seen as heroic traits, but the trickster hero is an archetype of character who is broadly heroic - and uses trickster tactics to win. It's an interesting suite of character traits to balance. In order to make a trickster heroic, them being the underdog usually needs to be played up. It's not really easy to root for someone with power to manipulate people for their own ends, but it's easy to root for someone scrappy and underleveled to manage to gumption their way to a victory over a broadly superior opponent.
A sympathetic trickster usually isn't someone who picks fights. Trouble comes to them, and then they need to find a way to escape or stop it. This is the paradigm that makes Bugs Bunny work as a trickster hero - he starts off basically every adventure minding his own business, and when someone comes around with a blunderbuss and a hankering for rabbit stew, their actions are what prompts him to unleash absolute hell on them by using toon physics and trapping them in ironclad social conventions to completely unbalance them until they're eventually defeated.
If we see a big, loud, powerful jerk try to stomp on someone small and innocuous, we're inclined to root for the small and innocuous person. This setup makes us very eager to see the small and innocuous person use tricks and shenanigans to make a fool of the powerful jerk, and it automatically makes us more okay with the sympathetic character doing on-paper unheroic things like lies and manipulation as long as they're doing them to someone we're primed to dislike.
So trickster heroes are usually fundamentally reactive characters. Something bad happens and they respond by unleashing hell. Another easy way to make a character instantly more heroic is to give them an even weaker, even more sympathetic character to protect or assist. Thus, many trickster heroes have a suite of supporting characters they're protecting who are not tricksters by nature, and are instead just there to be endangered or bullied by Nasty Mean Powerful People. Our trickster heroes stepping in to aid and protect other people thus gives their actions an even more heroic cast, because not only are they reactive to an outside threat, they're selflessly reactive.
This is the framing that's used in Leverage, where every episode has a victim of the week being cruelly taken advantage of by a jerkass of the week, at which point our team of liars, grifters and thieves roll up to ply their trade on the jerkass and award the spoils of war to the victim of the week. Because the person they're tricking is proven unequivocally to be truly awful and completely insulated from legal consequence a solid 98% of the time, we don't feel particularly bad seeing our team of heroes manipulate, gaslight and eventually absolutely destroy them over the course of a crisp 40 minutes. The vileness of the villain combos with the innocent powerlessness of the person they're advocating for, and thus their assorted unheroic qualities become reframed as absolutely heroic due to the circumstances under which they use them.
Crucial to the formula is the horrendous nastiness of the villain of the week, because if we were even kind of sympathetic to them, the schemes of the protagonists would be kinda scary. They are very good at quickly getting the bad guy to trust them and then taking apart everything they've built, and that's only fun to watch if the audience is 100% sure the villain deserves it and is not going to spend too much time thinking "wow, it would be terrifying if that happened to me." The fact that our heroes almost always take them down simply by leveraging (heh) the bad guy's badness is a big part of what makes the formula work. Almost every episode is functionally similar to a Briar Patch scenario - "oh gosh I sure hope no SOULLESS CAPITALIST VAMPIRES take advantage of how MANIPULABLE I am to try and get my MONEY and/or VALUABLES", and then the villain's own established cruelty cascades into their downfall when it runs into the dominos our heroes have set up to expose them. And that does a lot to make the audience sympathize with a crew of four self-admitted terrible people (and Hardison, who's an angel and we're delighted to have him)
Another way to get the audience to root for a potentially nonstandard protagonist is to set them up against a villain who is smug. Smugness is a very dangerous trait for any character to have, because it primes the audience to want to see them break. A villain who thinks they are too powerful or too strong or too smart to be defeated has the audience immediately rooting for them to be proven wrong just so they can watch the expression on their face. This is the strat they use in Columbo.
Every Columbo villain is rich and powerful and very insulated from legal consequences, and we start every episode seeing them arrange and execute an attempt at a perfect murder. We know from the start how they did it and usually why, and because they are smug - they are almost never regretful or reluctant - we become invested in seeing how Columbo figures out what they did, how they did it, and how he can prove it and get them arrested. Columbo is a nonstandard kind of trickster hero, because he is deeply and fundamentally a Lawful Good archetype, but he is also a very casual liar. The only time the audience sees Columbo almost certainly telling the truth is when he's dealing with background characters, his fellow policemen or his dog, or when he's by himself silently putting the pieces together; at all other points in the episode he will typically conceal how much he knows, how he knows what he knows and why he's asking specific probing questions. The audience has a tremendous amount of dramatic irony in terms of information about the perfect murder Columbo has to disassemble; we'll see Columbo zero in on exactly the one small detail that pokes a hole in the supposed airtight alibi, but instead of saying "I think you killed them and I am determined to prove it" he'll dance around why he's focusing on those details - just curiosity, just a desire for completeness, his superiors told him to continue the case and he doesn't know why, his wife is just such a big fan of their work, etc etc.
As a rule, the first time in any given episode that Columbo admits he's suspicious of the villain is the beginning of the last scene of the episode when he proves that they did it and they subsequently surrender. When Columbo is dealing with the villain, absolutely nothing he says can be trusted until that final scene - and it's a rare treat to get a glimpse of Columbo showing an honest emotion, especially something like genuine fury. Most of the time he maintains a very harmless and affable attitude, but sometimes when the villains are very smug and they know he's suspicious of them but can't prove anything yet, his righteous anger peeks through and we see why he does this.
He's a trickster hero because he can't unravel the case, the villain's motivation and the shape of the crime if the villain knows everything he knows and can correspondingly keep up with him. But he is 100% committed to exposing the truth of the situation and making the murderer face justice. Their perfect alibi is supposed to protect them from everything, but it's their confidence and certainty that they could never be caught that Columbo leverages to win. They never know entirely what to make of him, and he's never wholly honest with them - and with the audience - until the very end of the episode. It's good, cathartic payoff to an episode's worth of lies and manipulation from both main players, and it's always fun to see the non-smug party on the side of justice come out on top.
Some trickster heroes are more like standard heroes with trickster tendencies that occasionally surface. These guys are usually pretty straightforward, but in a pinch they can bust out a surprisingly cunning scheme or two - one such moment hits at the climax of Across the Spider-Verse, and it's a great moment of characterization for Miles, who has thus far been a pretty typically heroic guy who has unfortunately spent the entire movie thus far being lied to by people he trusted. It kicks off an enormously long and complicated chase sequence that takes the entire spider-community out of the home base chasing him through an absolutely massive complex and eventually onto a space elevator. It's such a fluid scene, you kind of just accept that it's a desperate chase sequence - Miles is just running. It doesn't occur to the other spider-people that Miles might have a plan beyond running until he basically tells Miguel that, hey, he did just get every other spider-person out of the facility that has the portal to get him home. He wasn't just running away, he was luring everybody away so he can leave.
And this moment is fantastic on a meta-level, because Spider-Man is traditionally a bit of a trickster hero. Most of his enemies are able to physically outpace him, and he needs to use mobility and strategy to take them down, often luring them into environments that work against them - like a fun moment in Spectacular Spider-Man where Spidey defeats the Rhino by luring him into a steam tunnel and basically giving him heatstroke through his armor plating. But because the entire core theme of this movie is "Miles isn't a real Spider-Man," it literally doesn't seem to occur to the other spider-people that Miles's seemingly panicked running might be him pulling a Spider-Man on them. We're so used to being in Miles's head and knowing when he's got a plan or a ploy that this is a very fun moment to watch. He's successfully deceived an entire army of spider-people, and the audience is just as blindsided as Miguel - and a little less electrocuted, so it's a lot more fun for us.
So yea, trickster heroes are a fun little space of character, but you gotta be careful to put them in the right kind of situation, lest their fundamental dishonesty come across as alarming rather than extremely rad.
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[ Sokka seeing Izumi bring home a guy. ]
Sokka, waking up Zuko: Zuko. Zuko!
Zuko: Mmmm!
Sokka: There’s a boy in Izumi’s room.
[ Zuko gets up and creates a fireball. ]
Zuko: It’s go time.
#no don’t fireball nobu!! 😖#izumi#posts that remind me to work on izumiverse#nobu is a lovely young man and a top-tier fire lady 🥹
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You know, I’m glad the antis seem to have moved on from the atla/lok fandom (or maybe I’ve just blocked them all lol) but I do miss how diligent they were about adding image id’s 😔
#no it’s not worth the harassment and hypocrisy and weaponization of real life issues that they brought#but they were usually the ones adding image id’s and now it’s much harder to find a reblog with id’s#anyway image id’s are a good practice that the freaks and weirdos should embrace#let low vision fans experience your horny art and xitter screenshots!
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[id: a Twitter thread, beginning with a reply to a tweet that reads, “It literally makes no sense to have disabled people in a fantasy setting. 1) Why can’t the disabled person cast a spell on their broken legs that fixes them instantly…” and cuts off.
The first tweet, from @firelorddany, reads, “meanwhile we've got avatar, where there's characters whose disabilities actually make them stronger and more unique than all other benders” and includes screenshots of Toph and Ming Hua.
The second tweet, also from @firelorddany, reads, “like it's so insane that toph can sense EVERYTHING through her earthbending and actually sees way more than everybody else and ming hua freaking bends water with her MIND and has the ability to fashion those water tendrils into any weapons and use them for extra mobility like...”
The third tweet is a reply from @BokerBigBanana which reads, “I wouldn't say the disability "makes" them stronger. But the resolve they put forth to work with what they're given makes them work harder, and fight in unorthodox ways. That's what makes them strong. They are still disadvantaged but learn to even the playing field!”
The last tweet is a reply from @firelorddany “that's what i meant but i didn't have enough words ☹️💔 or energy ☹️💔 but YES!”
/end id]
Link to thread
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too many "Jet is the abusive ex 😔" fics not enough "Jet is the ONLY ex that Zuko is still on speaking terms with" fics like come on.... funnier, mind-opening, realistic (ignore he is dead), under-explored, confusing,
#au where everyone in zuko’s life knows and loves jet and zuko just has to deal with it#jet and ursa would be besties I just know it
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Dragons are like cats in that they can squeeze into any hole their head can fit through and they're terrified of cucumbers.
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What’s the worse atla episode in ur opinion
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Pardon me as I enter my ATLA phase…
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bolin is such a funny character. he dated the avatar for like 12 hours, he's been kidnapped multiple times, he almost lost his bending, he's the world's first movie star, he's a pro athlete, he's a cop, he's no longer a cop, he pulled a princess, he was directly involved in two civil wars, he keeps ending up in jail, he possesses a type of bending we only see in one other character in the entire franchise, his bending skill genuinely rivals some of the best benders in the world and it's just kinda taken as a given, his best friend is a rat, he is 16 years old.
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Sebastian Amoruso as Jet in Avatar: The Last Airbender
— 1.03 "Omashu"
#THAT’S MY SON!!! THAT’S MY BOY!!!!!!!#idk if the show did him justice bc I haven’t seen it but he looks great!!#jet#atla live action#natla
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