I can’t believe they removed Tumblr from the app store because you were all mean to me
This is obviously sarcasm, but the fact that you’d even make this joke considering the massive amounts of blogs being deleted because of this incident shows how massively overinflated your ego is.
they had to be deleted to make more room for my ego
@jakoski literally has a gamergate mascot for their avatar. what a fuckhead
And that’s relevant how, exactly?
this just gets worse and worse
Really? Doss it now? Pray tell, how so?
Just… stop. It’s not a big deal. We understand how concerned you are about other people, or whatever, but it was a joke and literally there’s no reason to be all “uwu you shouldn’t make this joke that harms no one and has no problematic elements to it because SOMEONE might get mad!!” Like… it’s a joke. If you wanna make some sort of difference go into a discourse tag.
I normally wouldn’t care if someone else made a joke like this because they’d almost definitely be 100% ironic about it. But this is Adam Ellis. He’s an elitist asshole who let his celebrity status get to his head. He obviously doesn’t think that umber actually got shut down because of him, but the fact that he’s making this joke shows that he really doesn’t give a shit about the issue or he thinks that’s he’s somehow exempt from it or that he’s too famous or too important for it to happen to him, even though, based on the blogs that have been deleted, he fits the criteria perfectly and he could get deleted at any time. That’s why I responded. He’s a narcissistic asshole who needs a reality check. I just hope he gets one soon.
I introduced a friend to ATLA a few nights ago, and they had only
known two things about the entire show: the cabbage meme, and that Aang
apparently wants to ride every large and dangerous animal he can
possibly find. We got through the first five or so episodes, and my
friend noted that Aang is exactly what a 12-year-old would be like if
given godlike powers, and that this is literally just what he
could do with airbending. He can’t even wield any of the other elements,
and he’s one of the most powerful people on the planet, because he’s an
airbender.
And that got me thinking.
This snippet from Bitter Work is one of the few pieces of concrete information we get about the airbenders, at least in ATLA. Iroh is explaining to Zuko how all four of the elements connect to the world and to each other.
Fire is the element of power, of desire and will, of ambition and the ability to see it through. Power is crucial to the world; without it, there’s no drive, no momentum, no push. But fire can easily grow out of control and become dangerous; it can become unpredictable, unless it is nurtured and watched and structured.
Earth is the element of substance, persistence, and enduring. Earth is strong, consistent, and blunt. It can construct things with a sense of permanence; a house, a town, a walled city. But earth is also stubborn; it’s liable to get stuck, dig in, and stay put even when it’s best to move on.
Water is the element of change, of adaptation, of movement. Water is incredibly powerful both as a liquid and a solid; it will flow and redirect. But it also will change, even when you don’t want it to; ice will melt, liquid will evaporate. A life dedicated to change necessarily involves constant movement, never putting down roots, never letting yourself become too comfortable.
We see only a few flashbacks to Aang’s life in the temples, and we get a sense of who he was and what kind of upbringing he had.
This is a preteen with the power to fucking fly. He’s got no fear of falling, and a much reduced fear of death. There’s a reason why the sages avoid telling the new avatar their status until they turn sixteen; could you imagine a firebender, at twelve years old, learning that they were going to be the most powerful person in the whole world? Depending on that child, that could go so badly.
But the thing about Aang, and the thing about the Air Nomads, is that they were part of the world too. They contributed to the balance, and then they were all but wiped out by Sozin. What was lost, there? Was it freedom? Yes, but I think there’s something else too, and it’s just yet another piece of the utter brilliance of the worldbuilding of ATLA.
To recap: we have power to push us forward; we have stability to keep us strong; we have change to keep us moving.
The air nomads brought fun to the world. They brought a very literal sense of lightheartedness.
Sozin saw this as a weakness. I think a lot of the world did, in ATLA. Why do the Air Nomads bother, right? They’re just up there in their temples, playing games, baking pies in order to throw them as a gag. As Iroh said above, they had pretty great senses of humour, and they didn’t take themselves too seriously.
But that’s a huge part of having a world of balance and peace.
It’s not just about power, or might, or the ability to adapt. You can have all of those, but you also need fun. You need the ability to be vulnerable, to have no ambitions beyond just having a good day. You need to be able to embrace silliness, to nurture play, to have that space where a very specific kind of emotional growth can occur. Fun makes a hard life a little easier. Fun makes your own mortality a little less frightening to grasp. Fun is the spaces in between, that can’t be measured by money or military might. Fun is what nurtures imagination, allows you to see a situation in a whole new light, to find new solutions to problems previously considered impossible.
Fun is what makes a stranger into a friend, rather than an enemy.
I hate the internet. I hate how this poem doesn’t need to be finished but it has 13.9k retweets and 21.1k likes. Everyone knows how this poem ends and I hate it
