I saw this trend on x(Twitter) of drawing zuko in southern water tribe parka with different objects/ cute hats on him based on the picture above (credits to my friend @ zutaraslife on x! )

so I decided why not PUT IZUMI ON HIS HEAD

ehehe here's firelord zuko giving his daughter izumi a shoulder ride :)

nb sweep

Sitting with Takofuusen 7/23/23 - 7/25/23

some swt sukka for the soul

A friend of mine had a thought:

Y‘all know how in the episode The Puppetmaster, Katara tells the story of little Nini and how she disappears and is a ghost trying to get warm. She also says that sometimes you can see the smoke coming from her house. Katara also swears that it was a real story which happened to her mom. Anyways looking at it from a perspective of mythology, couldn’t those sorts of ghost stories be the explanation that Kanna‘s generation told Kya and Hakoda‘s, to explain why so many of their people went missing during the raids, going down to the detail of fearing smoke. Furthermore right after the story, Hama appears, Hama is one of the „missing ghosts“ who is now making others disappear.

𝓎ℴ𝓊 𝓀ℯℯ𝓅 𝓂ℯ 𝒾𝓃 𝓎ℴ𝓊𝓇 ℴ𝓇𝒷𝒾𝓉, 𝓌ℯ𝓁𝓁 𝐼 𝓀𝓃ℴ𝓌 𝐼'𝓂 𝒶 𝒽𝒶𝓇𝒹 ℴ𝓃ℯ 𝓉ℴ 𝓅𝓁ℯ𝒶𝓈ℯ ☾⋆⭒˚｡⋆

my waterbender OC, Keelak (name pending!) I adore her and cannot wait to continue developing her.

Big shoutout to @atlaculture and @chiptrillino for their wonderfully insightful and inspiring blogs!

in my heart of hearts i know katara becomes the next chief of the southern water tribe. she simply cares about people too much and loves her culture and home.

Sitting with Takofuusen 2/27/2024 - 2/29/2024

Some SWT Zutara for a solstice exchange

Sokka vs. Wan Shi Tong

Was listening to the latest episode of the “Braving the Elements” Podcast about “the Library” episode (which starts off with a solid discussion about Asian representation and appropriation in Hollywood). They started discussing the groups’ contributions of knowledge to Wan Shi Tong. They discussed Katara’s offering of the Waterbending Scroll and joked about how easily she gave it up after working so hard to get it. “She has it in her body now,” Dante said. Now, I think he has a major point about that, and I discussed water tribe relationships to writing in ANOTHER POST. Basically, writing and visual depictions can be read as something more sacred to the Water Tribe, so it makes sense that Katara would entrust this sacred object to a spirit.

But then that primed my mind for thinking about Sokka’s gift and his antagonistic relationship to Wan Shi Tong and the library in a new light. Sokka offers a knot to Wan Shi Tong, and it’s played for laughs, but Dante and Janet and guest host, Phil Yu, fairly identify his knot as a credible piece of nautical knowledge. Nautical knowledge, as we saw in Bato of the Watertribe, is a highly regarded part of SWT culture. It also reminded me of khipu (or quipu), a complex Incan method of record keeping using knots in strings, which were ordered to be suppressed and burned by the Spanish Church in 1583. Wan Shi Tong’s disparagement of the gift is more than just a impartial assessment on Sokka’s intelligence. There’s a cultural prejudice at work. 

If it’s simply the pursuit of knowledge he’s after, why does Wan Shi Tong compliment the first edition status of Professor Zei’s book? The god is interested in more than the knowledge within, he’s interested in the book, itself: the material its made out of, whose hands its been through, its production process. He does not simply collect knowledge, he is an archivist. And in a show that’s uniquely obsessed with the erasure of knowledge, cultures, and peoples, he is an immensely important figure for the preservation he represents. Yet, the gaang betrays him, and Sokka leads the charge. We are lead to believe that Sokka and the gaang receive their comeuppance for their betrayal of the archive when their invasion fails. I want to suggest, though, that Sokka’s irreverence toward Wan Shi Tong and the library might actually be a hidden theme the show celebrates in the episode and throughout the series. 

Above image from A:TLA Annotations

There are references beyond Sokka’s flippancy encouraging skepticism of ‘the archive’ as an all powerful body of knowledge. When the gaang meets the Professor, he uses a head measuring device to measure Aang’s head as he interrogates him about air nomad culture. That device, a craniometer, is associated with the debunked and racist scientific concept of phrenology, the study of head shapes as indicative of intelligence and character traits. Race science is as much a part of academia’s history as any wisdom revealed through it. Wan Shi Tong in a similar vein, refers to Katara as “one specimen to add to my collection,” recalling the history of empires and their academics collecting and displaying indigenous bodies for ‘education.’ The show, then, draws a connection between ‘the archive’ and the history of domination. Collection, preservation, documentation--from a certain perspective they all embody attempts to dominate the world through containment. If only I could name it, have the knowledge in my possession, keep it safe under my protection... At worst this looks like Zhao’s use of the library as a means to slaughter the moon and destroy the Northern Water Tribe, while torching all the fire nation archives to protect his own people and power. But Wan Shi Tong’s academic hubris and avarice are another form of domination. 

There are pieces beyond the cultures of imperialism. Toph refuses to go in the library out of disinterest, pointing at the failures of visual culture toward the blind. Leaving her and Appa, an animal who similarly has little interest in writing, behind in pursuit of written knowledge has tragic consequences for Aang and his friends. It was only the last episode in which Toph blindfolded Aang to teach him about earthbending and his own persistent inner strength. He abandons it for pre-written answers so quickly now, the way I open up an internet browser as soon as I wonder whether or not my finger tapping is a trauma coping mechanism. Why don’t I trust myself to observe and learn from my own body? Why doesn’t the team trust themselves to face the fire nation? Let’s be clear, it’s not absurd to seek out wisdom and strategy from others past and present. However, it’s only one source of knowledge and so many people, like Aang, Katara, and Sokka, overlook the other forms of knowledge available to them.

I think its apt that they learn their strategy from merely a scrap of written information (a scrap which Sokka steals using his his hunting dagger made of jawbone, pointing us toward the indigenous perspective he brings to bear on his exploration of the library), which they then interpret through celestial means. The planetarium returns us to the natural and the spiritual world at once despite being within the archive. Tracking eclipses and the movements of astrological bodies has a deep history for humankind (and animal kind!) preceding writing and has been especially important to seafaring people like the Southern Water Tribe (Moana’s “We Know the Way” does a solid job of illustrating these traditions and their blending with oral story traditions). The information they gain from ‘the archive’ is information that was available to them in the world had they observed closely, and perhaps that’s all an archive is.

Still, there are things an archive can’t contain. Impermanence creeps into everything. That can be a deeply sad fact to face. When we see the incinerated Fire Nation archive, we feel for Wan Shi Tong in the same way we cry over the Library of Alexandria’s end. There’s a joyous side to impermanence, though, which is that there is always new transformed things coming into being and giving us more to learn. “That’s called Sokka style--learn it!” Sokka shouts as he whacks Wan Shi Tong on the head with one of his beloved books. Not only does Sokka reveal the book for its material reality as just a plain old heavy and hard object, his line points us to the novelty of his individual self even within all the indigenous traditions Wan Shi Tong claims to have ‘mastered.’ This is the same method Aang gets to discover in the finale, too. Beyond the labels and titles and data, a strange and unique self, a self that’s both free and connected to the people and traditions and values that made us, exists and emanates for a brief and brilliant flash of time.