My Mom Says She’s Not A Hugger. But When I Put My Arms Around Her On A Gloomy Day Or After Bad News

Reblog if you also think Toph shouldn’t have been a cop.

I want to see how “unpopular” this opinion really is outside cop-worshipping Reddit.

Of course Zutara is a self inserting ship. Through Zuko I live my wildest fantasy which is having someone showering Katara with attention and understanding, seeing and accepting her flaws and taking care of her for once instead of her taking care of everyone else.

i think we are all forgetting something when we talk about how toxic patrick, tashi, and art are — or when we decide one is “worse” than the other. they all have moments of seeing right through it, seeing each other’s toxic behavior for what it is, and STILL want and need each other in this possessive, envious, visceral way.

1. in the way beginning, tashi is clearly flirting more with art than patrick, and patrick is visibly annoyed. art sees right through it and even challenges him like “okay, let’s leave”, and has this little smirk on his face because he knows patrick won’t give up on tashi.

2. tashi immediately sees the visible tension and love between art and patrick, and literally orchestrates their first kiss. she sees right through their repression, and even calls herself a “home-wrecker” but still entangles herself with them, especially patrick because he’s clearly the better tennis player at that point and that is tash’s ONLY true love. tennis. that’s what she desires most in him, and patrick knows that. he even calls her out on it in the dorm room scene. but they have this mirroring fire in each other that neither of them can give up, not until patrick breaks the balance and bails — tashi’s injury is literally a metaphor for the balance shattering between all three of them when patrick leaves her.

3. before this, patrick sees right through art trying to break them up, and even admires that quality — maybe even feels smug and flattered because art is jealous and feels left out from both tashi and patrick. patrick has known this all along, we saw it in the “tick-serve” scene, where he even swears to tashi he won’t tell anyone but he still tells art, who is desperate to feel a part of them and patrick wants that, too — even keeps that close intimacy with art that we see in the churro scene (swoon swoon swoon).

4. haven’t you noticed that arts desire to be great is only ever tied up in patrick and tashi? how he needs to beat patrick to win tashis affection, how he needs to win in tennis so that tashi can live through him, how he lives up to his potential in the ending only because tashi and patrick push him to it, in their little fucked up ways? he knows this — he even admits that he’s playing for tashi, that he knows she’s living through him. he even admits he’s playing a fucked up little game with patrick when they’re in the sauna. yet he still does it. again, he knows what’s happening, sees right through them — still does it, still loves them.

5. when tashi calls patrick to come pick her up he knows it’s not just to tell him to throw the match — and despite how she battles him about it, they still have sex in the car, because he already knows. he’s so fully aware of her and her game and he’s so willing to be caught up in it, the same as art.

just some examples of how they all have moments of clarity and agency and yet they still choose to be entangled in one another because they’re all fucked up in their own, individual ways, and they’re all living through each other for their own specific needs. arts is to be seen as worthy, as great, but only through their gaze. tashis is to have the career that was stolen from her. patricks is truly to be in love and in lust with both of them, because we even see that from the beginning that tashis love alone will never satiate him; it has to be arts love, too. that scene in the sauna when he thinks he’s lost it from art is the most sad and fucked up we ever even see patrick. on top of tashi asking him to throw the game — he’s so defensive of arts feelings.

in short this is an actual love triangle (and i would go as far as to see it as a polyship). you can’t erase one without the whole thing unraveling, and you can’t say one character was the “worst” without picking apart the motivations and pointing to the fact that their bad behavior was never a secret or left unchecked.

even at the end, patrick signals to art that he slept with tashi — art knows and they still have that intimate completion at the end, all three of them. art living up to his potential and embracing patrick fully (id argue this could even be a metaphor for embracing his bisexuality), patrick having both tashi and arts affection again, and tashi playing a phenomenal tennis match through her little white boys — in such a visceral, emotional way that she cries out like she did in the beginning and the last frame is her smiling.

in a fucked up way, they all get what they wanted out of each other.

Abusive parents can say “I love you”

Abusive parents can give their kids an allowance, gifts, toys and nice things sometimes.

Abusive parents can seem like parent of the year to outsiders.

Abusive parents can defend their children from outside threats and get them in all the best schools and programs and deal with school bullies.

Abusive parents are still abusive, regardless of the things they get right or the nice things they sometimes do.

No, Shipping Zutara Is Not Supporting Amatonormativity (Please Use Some Fucking Braincells For Once)

- a treatise by a severely pissed off aroace zutara shipper

since words don’t mean anything anymore (if they ever did on the esteemed piss-on-the-poor website), let’s start with a definition.

amatonormativity: the set of social assumptions that everyone prospers with a romantic relationship, thereby positioning marriage as a universal goal of adult life. amatonormativity forms the basis of several institutional structures that are built to cater to romantic bonds over all others, also manifesting in social pressure on individuals to find a romantic partner by pushing the false narrative that those who do not experience romance are automatically lonely, unhappy and unfulfilled. it is usually characterized by the prioritization of romantic love over other forms of love, particularly platonic.

the anti-zutara argument based on this is as follows: wanting zutara to happen is amatonormative because it a) devalues zuko and katara’s platonic bond b) pushes the idea that men and women can’t be friends and c) doesn’t align with the themes of the show, as romantic love was never the point of atla.

i would like to take the time today to tell you that this is some fucking bullshit, for the following reasons:

one, this may come as a shock to some of you, but zutara shippers did not invent the concept of romantic love in avatar: the last airbender. you are more than welcome to criticize the pairings of suki/sokka, katara/aang, mai/zuko, yue/sokka, jin/zuko, jet/katara, and even kanna/pakku for perpetuating amatonormativity through their unnecessary romantic subplots. and if you don’t have anything to say about any of those pairings, then here’s a word for you: hypocrite.

zk shippers are not introducing the taint of romantic love into some kind of wholesome platonic utopia where it never existed. when we say zutara should have been canon, it is a statement that ends with the implicit instead of kat.aang and mai.ko tacked on at the back because if we were going to get a romantic relationship anyway, it might as well have been one that was well-developed, narratively impactful, and thematically relevant.

two, saying zutara is amatonormative is fucking rich when the main “romance” of atla is a three season long struggle to get out of the friendzone. aang’s desire to be in a romantic relationship with katara is one of his primary motivations throughout the show, and not once does either he or the narrative ever entertain the thought that just being katara’s friend might be enough. to the contrary, aang’s crush and the potential of its reciprocation is a fundamental part of how the story gets its audience to invest in both his character and the kat.aang relationship. they want you to want him to get the girl, and that’s the driving force of the ship’s development from start to finish.

you can see the influence of this in the way people defend why kat.aang had to happen: “aang would be crushed!” “it would break aang’s heart!” “aang deserves to be happy!” and that in and of itself is more amatonormative than any version of romantic zutara, as if this idea that aang is somehow doomed to a life of misery and loneliness just because he can’t be with the girl he likes isn’t inherently based on the assumption that platonic love can’t be as meaningful and satisfying as romantic love.

three, let’s be so fucking fr: a show written by cishet men in the early 2000s was not “subverting amatonormativity” by not making zutara happen, especially not when they went for the fucking olympic gold of romantic cliches — the hero gets the girl trope — instead. otherwise, why did the entire show end with an uncomfortably long liplock? if romance would’ve devalued zuko and katara’s platonic bond, then what the everloving fuck happened to their friendship in the comics and the legend of korra?

it is blatantly false to say that zutara shippers are the ones devaluing their platonic bond when the creators did it first. they evidently don’t view zutara’s platonic bond as equal to kat.aang’s romantic one, judging by their treatment of both relationships in the comics and LOK and the fact that they talked about kat.aang “winning” the ship war in the first place. because if the two relationships were of equivalent standing, why would there be a winner and a loser at all?

amatonormativity is baked into the DNA of atla, and while some people choose to reject this framework entirely (zk friendship >>> ka romance anyday), it is also not wrong for zk shippers to be annoyed at the treatment zutara received within the context of said framework. since the creators clearly thought a romantic relationship was better than a platonic one, they could at least have picked the couple that actually made sense instead of adding insult to injury by making that romance kat.aang. it is not amatonormative to acknowledge that zutara was not afforded the distinction it should have been in the eyes of those who wrote it, because it’s obvious that the decision to keep zuko and katara’s relationship platonic wasn’t to respect their friendship, but to position them as inferior to kat.aang.

four, detractors of romantic zutara often argue that their platonic relationship is inherently better & i’ve discussed before why that isn’t the case, but i also hate this argument because it’s perpetuating the very thing that aromantic people are trying to get rid of in the first place: the hierarchization of love. it is not the “gotcha!” you think it is to genuinely state that platonic love is better than romantic love, because it’s still buying into the idea that there’s some kind of order to categorizing human relationships. the solution to amatonormativity isn’t changing what form of love gets to be at the top of the list — it’s doing away with the hierarchy entirely.

i ship zuko and katara because canon already gave me their friendship. i already know what their platonic relationship looks like and that gives me more room for imagination in developing their romantic one because it’s a place canon didn’t go.

at the end of the day, friendship and romance are just different avenues of exploring intimacy. neither is inherently more valuable than the other, and neither is inherently more problematic. and if you truly believe in dismantling amatonormative beliefs, you would recognize that making a distinction between the two is only perpetuating the problem, not challenging it.

I knew Hope was a nasty little racist the MINUTE she assumed Adam was the Head Boy… every interaction with any queer or POC felt like the human embodiment of a microaggression

my problem with eloise bridgerton really comes down to these 2 things.

1, she is in an immense place of privilege, and 2, her character arc is bound to fail. Let me elaborate.

Eloise is a member of the Bridgerton family one of, if not the wealthiest family in the ton. They are never concerned about not having enough in fact they are constantly able to splurge on things they do not need. For example throwing a party that no one went to and never speaking about it again. Penelope and the Featheringtons do not have that luxury. They are constantly fighting to remain in their station every season, barely scraping by (we can also see this represented in their clothing as they use their dresses to show how extravagantly they live even though it is a falsehood). Eloise is a woman in a time where women were treated as subhuman, yes BUT she is also a girl from a wealthy family with 3 sisters and 4 brothers. If she really does not want to marry she does not have to, this is literally the reason Eloise becomes a spinster. Many other girls do not have this luxury, but she doesn’t see that. She sees everything she can’t do and then complains about it and this leads into my second point.

Eloise’s purpose as a character was always going to fail because this is a show about romance. It’s not a historical drama, it’s a romance show. Every single Bridgerton is going to get married, so her being this adamant about not wanting to be married(a perfectly valid choice btw) is completely undermined because she does marry later on. And this is made worse by the fact that she is constantly ragging on other women for WANTING to be married. Eloise thinks that every woman should want what she wants and if they don’t they are a disappointment. It’s genuinely so annoying to hear her speak because she doesn’t just want options for herself she is determined to make every other woman feel bad for not wanting what she does. But she never actually does anything about it. Because she’s just that. All talk.

That is why i’m on Penelope’s side, number one people being like “why didn’t she just turn herself in?” did we even watch the same show because Penelope literally would have done that if she thought the queen would have believed her. Number 2 let’s not act like Eloise being “ruined” in society isn’t the exact thing she claimed to have wanted. To be outside of this society she claims to hate so much. Number 3 Pen’s family had a lot more to lose even if the queen did believe her than the Bridgertons. Because they are so well liked and wealthy they can bounce back from pretty much anything. Penelope did do something with her words and yes she wrote them under a pseudonym because how many people do you think would have picked up a gossip column if they saw the name penelope featherington written on it?

To me Eloise is just a brat and i really don’t see that changing any time soon. So while i hope her and Pen make up it’s not for me because i don’t care if they make up, it’s for the audience so you can finally shut up about Penelope being evil.

Also her and Theo are not endgame sorry to burst your bubble.

edit: I also think this issue is exacerbated by the fact that we got Kate in season 2 and she holds a lot of the same beliefs Eloise does but we understand her motivations because of where she comes from.

Will anything ever bring us as much joy and comedic bliss as the reveal of Jason Mendoza? Will I ever feel as alive as I did in that moment when Jason utters the words "heaven is so racist"? Will there ever be a moment in time that slaps me so hard in the face with surprise as the moment Jianu the monk rapidly turns into Jason the Jacksonville dirtbag? Will we as a society ever capture that kind of magic again?

When the thirst is mutual >