omashu?.. you mean..

the city founded in honor of star crossed lovers, whose villages were enemies?..

who wore red and blue clothing?..

...

the bait is baiting but i am no better than a fish

The BEST thing Live Action ATLA has done is make Zuko keep a diary. Like that is far too in-character. You know it is filled with the most angsty reflections ever, there are tear stains and burn marks on the pages, like "I am losing my sense of humanity" with glitter pen levels. He saw a turtleduck once and it was effervescent. There are flowers pressed in there, terrible awful poetry.

The most important part is he does not call it his diary, it is his super cool war journal that is NOT about feelings it is (supposedly) about the war, the Avatar and his bending progression.

cutting down sokka's misogyny and calling the live action a serialized drama. we're so cooked

the atla fandom's Great Divide over whether the netflix adaptation is the worst thing ever or actually enjoyable and satifying is seriously distracting us. like I have yet to see anyone meme about zuko's notebook. our emo prince has been writing in a diary for 3 years and we've said NOTHING?

nah, bc they didn’t have any reason to do this

like don’t get me wrong i love the “you rise with the moon, i rise with the sun” scene (hope we get it in later seasons!!) but i’ll take this over that any day 😭

Everyone can say whatever they want about the ATLA live action but it was worth it for Ep 6 alone. I could write an essay on that episode and what they managed to do with it except I can’t because I will start crying.

That scene at the end alone??? Every one of Zuko’s crew bowing to him in respect, feeling gratitude and honor to serve him and the emotions hitting Zuko, who has needed this for three years, as he walks to his room???

I am in fucking tears.

LOOK HOW SOFT HE LOOKS‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️

Completely random but

While I was reading about the ATLA LA creators butchering Sokka's character arc and the Kyoshi Warriors' plot it suddenly hit me

In 2x05 "Avatar's Day" Aang wears full Avatar Kyoshi gear at his trial that Sokka and Katara brought from the Kyoshi island including accurately done makeup

They didn't bring the sensei and Aang couldn't go with them as he was imprisoned, obviously

There's exactly one person in the team who spend the most time with the Kyoshi Warriors

Sokka wore AND learned how to do the Kyoshi makeup, and used his new skill to help Aang months later

And by omitting this "unnecessary" tidbit of him being introduced to the Kyoshi outfit in S1 the LA creators caused a plothole way farther down the line

(unless they're planning on removing the Avatar's Day plot altogether, which is quite big on worldbuilding, should I say)

Like, the og show plot is very condensed while not appearing to be as such, that is until one tries to get rid of the "extra" "not-needed" scenes and nothing makes sense anymore.

Here is some Zuko bc I've been obsessed over atla since the pandemic started and the live action gave me an excuse to reignite my love for it with my friends.

Dallas Liu and Kiawentiio

@ zutara artists please please do your thing 🥹🤌

when i'm in a perfect casting contest and my opponent is maria zhang as suki

I respect Dallas and Ian for rooting so hard for Zukka because if me and my best friend got to play the characters we ship together, we'd be fucking insufferable too. Ship bait everywhere, we would be begging people to write us as if we're married. The ship prevails over all else.

i wonder how zutara nation is reacting to them cutting out the “you rise with the moon, i rise with the sun” line

I believe the most glaring sign of public rejection of the atla live action is the fact that it doesn't have a ao3 tag yet.

sorry not sorry but i'm actually completely fine with getting a version of katara where she wasn't parentified at eight years old (something that was lampshaded but never actually unpacked or presented as something she shouldn't have gone through, it was in fact not part of her arc to work through this in the original show and the proof of that is in the fact that she was shoved into an endgame 'romance' with someone for whom she'd expressed no romantic interest, even when prompted, and whom she spent a large portion of the show mothering). a katara who still had to deal with the trauma of her mother's death, but without having to become her own mother and her brother's mother on top of it in her place. katara whose struggle with waterbending is rooted in trauma, because her power is what her mother was killed for, her mother who died protecting her. katara who struggles to be taken seriously not because she's a silly girl with magic water but because her brother still sees her as his baby sister who needs him to be strong and she desperately wants him to lean on and trust her because that's what she needs to be able to grow.

and i like getting to see sokka actually behaving like a big brother! sokka whose responsibilities to his people and to his sister are treated seriously, rather than as fodder for jokes. sokka who is still a dork and a goofball and a pragmatist but underneath it all is that fear that he isn't actually good enough--that his family and his village don't actually need him, and who is he if his own sister is grown and doesn't need him anymore either? (sokka who is terrified of katara learning to bend not because he doesn't take her power seriously but because that's exactly what got their mother killed, and it's so, so obvious they've had that fight many times before.)

are they the exact same characters we got in the original cartoon? no, but i never expected them to be and frankly i didn't want them to be. something that every fanfic writer doing an AU or canon divergence has to grapple with is how would having these different experiences change the way this character behaves and interacts with and perceives the world. do i think the live action did it perfectly? no, but then the original show was far from perfect to begin with and i never expected perfection in this adaptation.

what i do think, though, is that i can see where certain creative decisions were made and the resulting ripple effect, i can understand the logic behind them--and i can enjoy the end result, because a lot of it is stuff i've rolled around in my brain in the past anyway. and what i really want to see is where things are headed in the future.