Latest Posts by j-drawings - Page 2
Please make a post about the story of the RMS Carpathia, because it's something that's almost beyond belief and more people should know about it.
Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.
(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)
Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.
All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.
I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.
Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.
And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.
Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.
I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.
Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.
No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a respondibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.
They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.
This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.
In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.
At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.
I think the least we can do is remember them for it.
an instance of NT ideology shows itself clearly when what autistic people characterize as a strong sense of justice is mischaracterized by NTs as an inappropriate obsession with rules and morality
like seriously wtf are they on
I’m getting really tired of the wise serene pacifist trope in fiction. Every committed pacifist, prison abolitionist, antiwar activist, etc I’ve ever met in real life has been vibrating with compressed rage at all times. Do you know what it’s like to believe deeply in your heart that doing harm to others is wrong and the goal of society should be to alleviate suffering for all people and live in the United States of America? IT’S NOT FUN. Show Us The Pissed-Off Pacifists.
It starts like this:
Cody stops dead in the middle of the hall, passkey tumbling from his fingers to clatter on the deck. Everything is grey and white and grim, and his armor is white white white without any markings at all. There’s an ache in his brain, a tremble in his hands, and not even the mercy of momentary amnesia to blunt the realization of what he’s done.
He remembers, vivid, vicious, the way it felt to take aim at Obi-Wan, the way he pulled the trigger. Remembers the fall, the look of surprise, the satisfaction. Remembers, too clear, what happened on the planet below just this morning, and the Rebel cell they put down, leaving no survivors.
There were children down there, he thinks, and feels sick to his stomach when before he’d only felt vague distaste.
Cody doesn’t know what happened. Doesn’t understand. There was the Emperor’s voice, the order—execute traitorous commanding officers, reliant on Palpatine’s verbal command alone—but…he doesn’t know how that became kill the Jedi, all the Jedi.
The 501st marched on the Temple. The 501stmurdered every child in the crèche.
Cody staggers, knees giving way. He stumbles into the wall, grabbing desperately for something to hold him on his feet, but there’s nothing. His stomach turns, and bile bubbles in the back of his throat as his vision wavers towards darkness.
Hells, but what have they done?
Instinct more than willpower pushes him back to his feet, gets him standing even as the world lurches. Cody thinks of his men, of the rest of the 212th, and has to swallow hard. He took casualty counts after they stormed the Rebel base. He saw the list of numbers marking the men who died, and all he felt was satisfaction at an operation successfully executed. No care for those under his command, his brothers. No thought for the lives cut short as anything other than statistics. And—it was him, it was him and Cody knows that, but what the hell was he even thinking? What was he doing? How could any part of him take that, accept that, and not even bother to spare a moment to grieve?
Cody’s breath hitches hard in his chest, not a sob but a close cousin, all tangled up with horror and remorse. All he has is slow-burn anger, the hotter burn of tears behind his eyes, and he aches.
His general is dead. His general is dead because Cody killed him, and Cody has spent the last two years serving an empire that declared every Jedi a traitor and burned the Republic to the ground.
A sob breaks through the quiet of the night-shift ship, loud and ragged and desperate, but it’s not from Cody’s throat. His head snaps up, and in an instant he’s moving, practically running down the corridor and around the next bend of the hall. There’s a figure in featureless armor slumped in the middle of the walkway, and Cody has one horrifying second where he can’t tell who it is. He looks and he doesn’t know, because the blank white armor is nothing but plastoid,
not even a hint of paint to set it apart from every other trooper on the ship. Hands are scrabbling at the helmet, hauling it off, but even that doesn’t help. Regulation haircut, no tattoos—they’re not allowed them, aren’t allowed any marks of individuality. Or maybe they just don’t want them, and that’s a thousand times more chilling to consider.
But—
But.
That gasping breath, that hitched sob. Cody remembers, because he’s the one who had to deliver the news of Waxer’s death in friendly fire. He’s the one who sat up for night after night, letting his brother cry into his shoulder, shaking, broken.
“Boil,” he says, and Boil chokes, shakes.
“We—we killed them,” he says, ragged, ruined, and Cody closes his eyes, reaches out. Hauls Boil in, clutching him close like he did after Waxer’s death, and tries not to think about how Boil’s face is just like every other clone’s, indistinct and unremarkable. How, ten minutes before, Cody would have thought of him by his CT number and seen nothing wrong with it, and Boil would have answered without so much as a second thought.
Cody doesn’t who which them Boil means. There have been far too many bodies left behind these last two years, too many victims. Too many Jedi, and Cody wants to shake, wants to curl up with Boil somewhere dark and hunker down until this all fades away, until they wake up, until it’s all a dream and it’s not real.
“Yeah, vod,” he says, and the name is unfamiliar on his tongue after two years without speaking it, clumsy and rough and half-forgotten. No brothers, in the Empire. Just soldiers. “We did.”
“It was us,” Boil whispers. “It was us but it wasn’t.”
There was something. Something that changed them. Not a lot. Not enough to take away memories or thoughts or training. But—they faded, after Order 66. They conformed. They let their generals and admirals do the thinking, took orders, followed them. there was nothing left of the individuals behind the identical faces, and no trace of the desire to find them.
Maybe that’s the most insidious thing of all. Whatever controlled them, it stripped away all thought of wanting to be people and not just weapons to be aimed and fired.
“Kriff,” Cody breathes, and digs his fingers into Boil’s hair. Sits back on his knees, lightheaded, and realizes that he’s shaking. He’s trembling, so hard he couldn’t aim a blaster even if he was pressing it against the side of his own head. And—maybe that’s a more tempting thought than it’s ever been. Maybe he would try, if he didn’t have Boil in his arms, coming apart.
Boil’s gauntlets scrape the plastoid of Cody’s armor, dig in. The sound that shatters out of is throat is almost a laugh, and he buries his face in Cody’s throat.
“Never heard you swear before, sir,” he manages.
Cody chokes on a breath, breathes out something that might be a chuckle in a kinder universe. “I was saving it,” he says, “for a time when it felt right.”
No need to say that that time is now. It’s obvious. So clearly, achingly obvious.
Boil’s words break into a sob before he can even get them out, and he digs his fingers into Cody’s armor like he’s going to try and claw his way through. “Waxer,” he breathes. “Waxer would shoot me himself, with what we did. He’d have executed me.”
Cody wants to argue, wants to protest. Waxer was kind. He was the kindest soul Cody ever met. But—
He thinks of Waxer, and then he thinks of Rex. Rex, lost during the Siege of Mandalore, dead and burned and gone, but if he could see Cody now—
Cody wouldn’t even deserve the mercy of a quick death, but Rex would probably give it to him anyway. And Cody wouldn’t even try to protest, knowing—everything.
It wasn’t them, but it was.
Cody doesn’t know what changed them, has even less of an idea what changed them back. But there was a change, there was something, and he knows it, feels it, sees it.
They’ve got their names back, and even if it’s much too little and far too late, they’re going to have to make the most of it.
.
(Or maybe it starts like this:
There’s a storm outside lashing the windows, but there’s always a storm on Kamino. There’s blood on the floor of the lab, a body, but Te Tinu can’t feel regret, can’t feel remorse. Not for this, not ever.
Her hand is steady on the blaster, unwavering as she presses it to the center of Nala Se’s chest. One hand on the weapon, her other on the computer, and she’s been studying for half a decade now to know how to do precisely this. The command is multilayered, delicate, precise, but Te Tinu is a scientist just as much as she’s a Rebel.
The Empire hasn’t reached its claws into Kamino yet. Nothing much has changed. But Te Tinu has seen the outside world, has watched the clones she grew from genetic material be born and raised and ruined, every shred of personhood stripped away.
Te Tinu is a scientist just as much as she’s a Rebel. They were creating souls in this lab, and Nala Se stripped all of that away with one organic chip, all for the sake of credits.
“You won’t be allowed to do this,” Nala Se says, coldly furious, but she keeps her hands raised, her body still. Her eyes are arctic, but Te Tinu meets them defiance, with hatred, with the resentment that she’s kept buried all these many, many years.
There are guards coming. That’s fine. Te Tinu never planned to leave this laboratory alive.
“You made your army, Nala Se,” she hisses. “You made your army and then you destroyed them. You stripped them of value, of meaning, for credits. You are the one who should have been stopped long ago.”
The computer chimes, the program loaded. Te Tinu smiles, even as Nala Se’s eyes widen.
“Look,” she says, and shifts just enough that Nala Se can see the holograms. The systems, the code she’s added, the command. “Look at this, Nala Se. Look at victory.”
“This isn’t victory, this is madness,” Nala Se tells her, but Te Tinu just smiles.
“It is a victory for science,” she corrects, and tips her head. “A victory for the Rebellion, too.”
Nala Se’s nostrils flare. “You will be slaughtered before you can take one step from this lab,” she says. “And I will undo every last piece of your shoddy work, Te Tinu.”
“Ah,” Te Tinu says, as though the thought hadn’t occurred to her before the threat. “That would be most inconvenient, wouldn’t it? I spent so long on this, after all.”
Nala Se registers what she’s about to do half an instant before Te Tinu pulls the trigger. She always was the smartest person in any given room.
Coldly, Te Tinu watches her body collapse, long limbs tangling, bright blue blood seeping out across the tile. Deftly, she holsters the blaster, checks that the other scientist is equally dead, and turns back to the computer. There’s a thump against the door, a raised voice, but Te Tinu ignores it, focusing on her program. The biochips implanted in the clone armies are as flawless as any other aspect of Kaminoan design, for all that they’re meant for a fundamentally flawed purpose, so they’re almost impossible to disrupt. Te Tinu doesn’t need to disrupt them, though, just…change their current function.
The pre-encoded orders can’t be stripped away, replaced by new ones. It would be like reprogramming the chips from the ground up, but they’re already active, already working. A soft reboot is what’s needed, and Te Tinu’s program will do just that.
There’s no more Chancellor to pass out orders. He’s the emperor now, and the coding in the chips is quite specific. Without the direct title of Supreme Chancellor, Palpatine’s commands will mean as little as anyone else’s.
A weakness, though Nala Se never would have termed it so.
The door of the lab shudders, creaks. Te Tinu doesn’t look back, types in the last set of commands and activates them.
There’s a long, long moment as the blood pools and the door groans and someone speaks loudly, quickly, fiercely, so very unlike a Kaminoan.
Then, soft, the computer beeps.
The chips reset.
Te Tinu smiles, even as the door gives way. She turns to face the Defense Force, one hand going for her blaster, the other hitting the button that will trigger a wipe of every computer in the lab and leave them unable to reverse her work.
“For science,” she says, and raises the blaster, taking a graceful step forward. “For liberty.”
The Defense Force fires, but they’re already far too late.
Te Tinu dies with a smile on her face, bright blood on the floor of the lab, and regrets nothing but the time it took to make it here.
She’s won.)
.
Or maybe, maybe, it starts like this:
Cody looks around the room, at the figures there, at the familiar faces. At the same face, repeated, and some have scars to set them apart, some have old tattoos, but most don’t. Most of them have lost their markers, their names. Most of them have been turned into nothing but puppets for a greater cause. Puppets for a cause they once gave their lives to stop.
Cody looks around the room, at the remnants of Ghost and Torrent and the Wolfpack, at trooper after trooper who woke up this morning with the desperate, horrified realization of what they became. Of what they did, and how their hands were forced, and how they killed their generals, killed civilians, killed for an empire that destroyed them.
His hands are still shaking. They haven’t stopped since he remembered himself.
Cody wishes, dearly, just for a moment, that he had Rex at his back again, or Wolffe. But they’re both dead, and probably better off for it. He can’t imagine what Rex’s reaction would have been to the massacre at the Temple. To the fact that the 501st was used to do it.
Jesse is sitting in the corner, side by side with Boil and Wooley. They’re tangled together, grieving together, and it’s only seeing them like that that makes Cody realize how long it’s been since he saw any brothers touching. Not something deemed essential to performance, and so it was quietly shunted away.
Cody breathes, and breathes, and still his hands won’t stop shaking.
It’s Neyo, of all the troopers, who steps up beside him. He curls a hand around Cody’s shoulder, and—
Oh, Cody thinks, and has to swallow. It’s been a hell of a long time since anyone touched him, hasn’t it? Before Neyo, before Boil—he can’t even begin to remember.
“Breathe,” Neyo says, short, curt, but not unkind. “We all know we’re going to do something. The only question is what.”
Cody was a marshal commander, once, before the empire rose. Back when he could think clearly enough to be a commander, rather than just another follower. He knows strategy, and he knows tactics, and he knows how to prioritize what has to be done over what he wants to do. And yet—
He can’t make that decision here. Looking at the identical, unaltered faces, the unchanging grey uniforms, the plain white armor, all he can think is that he wants to burn the whole damned cruiser down around them and be done with it.
The break room is empty of anyone who isn’t a clone. The other officers don’t come here, don’t care. The clones make good obedient drones, who work well without supervision and don’t need a firm hand to maintain their fanatic belief in the Empire. Or at least, that’s how it was. That’s how it’s been for two years now.
Cody doesn’t care. In this, at least, it’s valuable, because it lets the clones gather without anyone thinking things are off.
He leans forward, elbows on the table, trembling hands clasped. Tries not to think too hard, tries not to dwell, but—
“It’s all of us, now?” he asks Neyo.
Neyo pauses, mouth tightening. Cody pretends not to see the way he presses his fingers tight against the numbers tattooed beneath his eye. “As far as I could tell,” he says roughly. “I contacted three other clone commanders on different cruisers, and they’re all…”
“Awake,” Cody supplies quietly, because that’s the only word for it. They were in a daze, these last two years. Dreaming, maybe, trapped in a nightmare. Now they’re all awake, but unlike with a dream, they have to deal with the fallout now.
Neyo grimaces, but doesn’t argue. “We don’t even know what happened,” he says, and there’s a thread of anger to it. “Or if we could go back.”
Back to sleepwalking, placid and loyal. Back to the haze of not caring, not being. Cody breathes out, and it shakes, but—
With rage, this time.
“We might not know how, but we know who,” he says tightly. “Only one person benefitted from us becoming…that.”
“So what are we going to do about it?” Sinker, at the next table over, asks roughly. His eyes are red, and Boost is nowhere to be seen.
The Wolfpack shot Plo Koon out of the air over Cato Neimoidia, fired on him from behind and brought his fighter down in a ball of flames. Until yesterday, every last one of them was proud of that fact.
Cody closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to look at Sinker’s face, his once-white hair grown in dark again, because individuality was another thing stripped from them alongside their free will. So that he doesn’t have to think about firing on Obi-Wan, and watching him fall, and feeling glad to have carried out an order.
They all murdered their generals. The only people in the galaxy who ever tried to fight for them, who ever treated them like people in their own right, and he and his brothers slaughtered them right down to the last youngling.
Cody’s going to be sick. But—later. When he can lock himself in his bunk and be weak, just for a little while.
Right now his brothers need him.
Forcing his eyes open, his breathing back under control, Cody looks up. He meets Neyo’s eyes, then Sinker’s, and smiles. It’s a rictus, death’s-head grin, full of teeth. “Glory to the emperor,” he says. “Long may he reign.”
Tom Holland does Rihanna’s “Umbrella” on Lip Sync Battle
THIS SIGNLE HANDEDLY CURED MY DEPRESSION, CLEARED MY SKIN AND TOLD ME TO HAVE A GOOD DAY
GUYS I’VE FOUND A VERY IMPORTANT WEBSITE FOR PEOPLE WHO CAN KNIT WITHOUT INJURING THEMSELVES!!!!
Concept: combine the “you don’t know you live on a death world until you leave it” trope with the whole Cthulhu-in-space genre of weird fiction, except in reverse: humanity’s Special Thing™ is that humans (and, by extension, all terrestrial life-forms) are weirdly resistant to reality-bending bullshit, which is what lets us survive and build a relatively functional civilisation in spite of hailing from a world that plays host to multiple Other Gods – which is, of course, otherwise unheard of; having even one of those squamous bastards in the neighbourhood is generally enough to ruin a whole star system’s day.
Non-human vessels can’t approach within a dozen light years of Sol without their crews being driven mad by the corrosive psychic resonance emanating from Earth’s deepest oceans, and we’re wandering around living our lives and not noticing. Aliens can never travel on human ships because our FTL drives kind of maybe tunnel through Hell, a process that horribly warps non-terrestrial life, and we just think it looks pretty when the n-dimensional hellfire coruscates across the viewports.
This sort of thing kept humanity uncontacted for a long time, until the aliens’ observers eventually figured out that we weren’t a bunch of weirdly normal-looking elder thralls, we just straight up weren’t aware there was a problem. It’s only then that they arranged first contact – remotely, of course – to basically ask “dude, what the fuck?”
(Humans are reasonably well-integrated into the galactic community these days, though most worlds enforce strict screening and quarantine procedures before allowing a Terran traveller planetside; it’s just like a human to have a class 7 epistemivore hitchhiking in their brain, and when informed, go “you know, I have been getting these headaches lately”.)
math help bc i can’t watch ya’ll suffer anymore
I’m in my fourth year of engineering school and I didn’t get here without lots of outside help bc assigned math textbooks are lame and confusing and professors/teachers are more worried about feeling superior to bunch of groggy teenagers than actually teaching.
I have personally used all of these websites without receiving any security warnings from Bitdefender TrafficLight or AdGuard AdBlocker. They are all either completely free or have a free version that isn’t shit.
Wolfram Demonstrations (animated graphics)
Khan Academy (arithmetic through differential equations)
She Loves Math (arithmetic through differential equations)
math24 (calculus & differential equations)
Paul’s Online Math Notes (algebra through differential equations)
MIT OpenCourseWare (calculus through graduate-level mathmatics)
OpenStax Math (precalculus, trigonometry, & calculus)
Wolfram Alpha Examples
Desmos (online calculators)
GeoGebra (online calculators)
SparkNotes Math Study Guides (pre-algebra through calculus)
eMathHelp (calculators, but more specific)
Software for your TI calculator
ticalc (programs for your TI calculator)
Wikibooks Math Department (all the math)
Andy’s Cheat Sheets (calculus)
Cheatography (find free cheat sheets)
Open Access Math Textbooks
Engineer4Free (Calc, DiffyQ, & Linear Algebra tutorials)
Flammable Maths on YouTube (general high school/college level problems and derivations)
3Blue1Brown on Youtube (very, very good for understanding spacial concepts in calculus and beyond)
Vihart on Youtube (explaining math with doodles)
Bonus: Stay hydrated, take vitamin c, study next to a window during the day if possible, and remember not to let people base your worth on your aptitude for math.
me: [listens to a new song]
my brain, upon receiving one single hit of Döpamine™: we shall listen to only this until we have wrung every last neurotransmitter out of it
Naruto (crack) Plotbunny: ANBU are the only social services
So, like, in canon, we all strongly suspect ANBU were the ones to raise bby Naruto for the first few years of his life, supporting evidence A) he's not nearly as fucked up as a kid neglected from birth would be.
(Babies who are not held and talked to, & fed and changed regularly, provided with stimulus, comforted when sick or frightened, etc, do not grow up to be even half as well adjusted as Naruto at 12.)
Taking that, and extrapolating wildly, I purpose an AU where ANBU are the only fucking shinobi who realize traumatized children do not well-adjusted shinobi make.
And goddammit, if they're the only fucking people in the village who understand basic child psychology, fine, it's absolutely fine, the hokage is a damn idiot, but everything is F I N E.
ANBU, looking at every shinobi under the age of 18: our kids now.
Kakashi joins ANBU at 14, looking to bury himself in work and maybe (hopefully) die.
He instead gets assigned a grief therapist and a statistically improbable number of missions which begin with 'We need you to summon a puppy'.
Tenzo is lovingly bullied into developing a backbone and his own opinions.
Itachi gets pushed into ANBU at 11 by his father and the hokage. ANBU spends precisely 3 seconds pretending Itachi is actually going to be an agent, and then dumps him in a pile of kittens and sends him to go play with civilian kids as 'infiltration practice'.
Itachi, 13: Taicho, Danzo-sama just ordered me to kill my entire clan
Hatake Kakashi, a graduate of the ANBU school of social services: I'm glad you told us, Itachi-kun. Sit tight while the adults go and murder the problem, okay?
an expert analysis of my five day old chicks
if you read in a frog paper “specimen was released in the field immediately after capture” chances are very good that what it actually means is
“i dropped the damn frog and despite the fact that we fell all over each other no one could recapture it”
an author i love just tweeted about how “big joy and small joy are the same” and how she was just as content the other night eating chocolate and cuddling her dog as she was on her Big Trip to new york and honestly. i think that’s it. this morning i was listening to an audiobook while baking shortbread in my joggers and i realised i really didn’t care what Big Things happened in my future as long as i could keep baking and reading at the weekend and maybe that is the kind of bar we have to set to guard ourselves against disappointment. just appreciate and cherish the mundane stuff and see everything else as a bonus.
I was today years old when I learned that when you type "otp: true" in AO3 search results it filters out fics with additional ships, leaving only the fics where your otp is the main ship
This is so true: airnomadwannabe,tumblr,com/post/625266561858650112/a-probably-not-comprehensive-list-of-kataras
Ok, but the problem with this post by @airnomadwannabe is that our argument has never been that Katara didn’t, canonically, accomplish anything with her life.
It’s that virtually none of these accomplishments matter in the context of LoK. Very little that Katara did during or after the war is so much as referenced, and even the things that are referenced matter very little. Katara never talks about her life except as it pertains to Aang, or her children. She doesn’t get to do anything during the series either, despite there being multiple things that--were it not for her entire personality being vacuumed out with almost surgical precision--she should have done if she were being kept true to character, or if she, like, cared about her family and people at all. (Things like, oh, attending her own granddaughter’s Air Master ceremony, or lifting finger one to save her family when they were in danger, or lifting finger one to step in when her people were getting thrown into a whole ass civil war........but more on that later.)
I always go back to @araeph‘s Consumed by Destiny series (and I’m sorry I keep tagging you, I love your metas and reference them frequently, and incidentally, everyone should go read through araeph’s meta posts and analysis, they’re quite thorough and enjoyable to read), because it throws Katara’s treatment in LoK into incredibly sharp relief, especially once you compare it to her character arc in AtLA towards the end of the meta series.
To illustrate what I mean, I’ll go through the examples listed in the post anon sent me:
finished her work as Avatar Aang’s waterbending master
This is vaguely referenced, but honestly, you wouldn’t have any real idea about Katara’s waterbending prowess and her journey with Aang unless you watched AtLA first. Katara’s own experiences are almost never talked about, she makes a vague reference to her own trauma one (1) time and goes into much more detail about Aang’s pain, rather than her own. But she never talks about her experiences as his teacher, and someone who only watched LoK and knew nothing about AtLA would be justifiably confused at anyone who talks about Katara like she was important, even integral, to his journey.
played a major role in mediation of political conflict and land disputes following the war in both the Earth Kingdom and Southern Water Tribe
You wouldn’t know this at all unless you read the comics or looked it up on the wiki. It’s never so much as vaguely referenced, and considering the comics are a whole other kettle of badly-written fish, that may be just as well. But the fact is that this particular accomplishment may as well never have happened, as far as LoK is concerned. (And, actually, considering what happened in North & South and the civil war in LoK book 2, this is particularly galling. Why wasn’t Katara more active [or active at all] during that arc???? Did she stop giving a shit about her people and their sovereignty at some point in the last sixty years?)
helped to recover Ursa, the lost Fire Lady
Again, a comics-only plotline, which has no effect on anything in LoK and is never referenced. Furthermore, Katara isn’t allowed to share a single scene with Zuko--not even her own granddaughter’s Air Master ceremony.
revived the near extinct Southern Style waterbending and became the master to the Southern Tribe’s first new waterbenders in generations
This is something we can assume from conjecture, but so far as I know it isn’t actually stated in canon, even in the comics. Hama talks about teaching Katara Southern Waterbending, but the only technique she actually teaches her is bloodbending, which was outlawed by the time of LoK (which may seem like an accomplishment of Katara’s, but we’ll get there later). It’s entirely possible that Katara discovered Southern Waterbending techniques (my personal headcanon is that Zuko found and returned a whole boatload of waterbending scrolls from the Fire Nation Library archives, from which she was able to bring the Southern style of bending back), but this isn’t explored anywhere in canon. Even North & South doesn’t touch much on it, outside of the two kids Katara tries to help teach some basics (and who are promptly forgotten about), probably because it’s more about the South getting recolonized by the North and Katara being painted as unreasonable for resisting, but that’s another rant entirely.
became a noted human rights activist by leading the movement to outlaw bloodbending
This almost counts. Katara did nearly single-handedly get bloodbending outlawed, and this is even explicitly stated in the text of LoK! Finally, an accomplishment of Katara’s that was actually important to the sequel series! Except........where was Katara during Yakone’s trial?
The primary antagonist of Book 1 is revealed to be a bloodbender. His father taught him how to bloodbend, and cited Katara as the reason for bloodbending being outlawed. He had a personal grudge against her which he carried to his grave! And yet... she’s nowhere to be found during the flashback in which we see this notorious bloodbender being tried for a crime she was responsible for criminalizing in the first place. She isn’t mentioned even once during that flashback. Aang is there as the Avatar, and Toph is there in her capacity as police chief, and even Sokka is there--where the fuck is Katara? Wouldn’t you think they’d want an insanely powerful waterbender who also knew how to bloodbend on hand in case things went wrong and the bloodbender tried to escape? Especially once you remember that Katara, at fourteen years old, was able to break a master bloodbender’s hold on her body.
But she was nowhere to be found.
Hm.
was an internationally respected master waterbender and healer, even canonically called the greatest of her time in LoK
I will admit, lipservice is paid to Master Katara’s bending abilities. She’s called a master, and she’s allegedly the best healer in the world. The issue here is, we never see any evidence of this in the series. She’s a master waterbender, but we never see her fight--not even to protect her family, when her children and grandchildren were held hostage and threatened with death. (And before you bring up her age, Toph is only two years younger and gets to kick ass on screen to protect her family, and that’s not even mentioning the old ass men in the White Lotus who got to kick ass all over the place onscreen during AtLA.) She’s the greatest healer in the world, but we never see her heal a single significant injury on-screen--not even those caused by bloodbending (when Amon blocked benders from their bending)--and while she does coax Korra through physical therapy, she never once tries to heal her mind (despite this having some success on Jet, who was brainwashed by the Dai Li, back in AtLA). Katara’s healing abilities only get pulled out during LoK when the show has an injury she can’t heal, so they can say ‘look at this horrific injury that even the greatest healer in the world can’t do anything about!’
The Worf Effect comes to mind, but even Worf got to throw down and kick ass sometimes on screen.
demonstrated skill in non-bending forms of medicine such as midwifery and physiotherapy
I’ll give you this one! I don’t recall if Katara’s skills as a midwife are ever referenced in LoK, but she spent the entire series chained to the healing huts, so I’ll accept this on a technical.
became the waterbending master for a second Avatar in her lifetime by teaching Korra both combat waterbending and healing
Again, this is something the series paid lipservice to, but it’s never shown on screen. Korra had already mastered waterbending, earthbending, and was taking her firebending mastery test when we officially meet her current self in LoK, and we don’t see any flashbacks to her training with Katara in the series at all. There may be some in the comics, but again, a whole other kettle of badly written fish. (Sorry, I just really enjoyed that metaphor.)
was obviously a beloved and respected elder of the Southern Water Tribe
Was she? Was she really?
I’m just saying, for a ‘beloved and respected elder of the Southern Water Tribe’, she didn’t seem to have any political sway at all. Unless she just didn’t care about the North trying to take over the South (again!!!!! lest we forget lmfao) and her people plunging themselves into a full-blown civil war. You’d think that someone so beloved and respected, who helped to save the world by ending a war that had lasted for a century, who trained two avatars and was one of the most powerful waterbenders on the planet, would have had some pull with her own people.
LoK implies she is a member of the White Lotus
Considering everything else that is talked about or vaguely mentioned but not shown, this... doesn’t mean much. Especially since, by the time of Korra, the White Lotus had become a group entirely dedicated to training the avatar and were otherwise completely ineffectual.
They certainly weren’t around to help when the Red Lotus were causing problems.
until Book 3 of LoK, is the matriarch of the only existing airbenders and thus is a historical figure related to the revival of an entire culture following a catastrophic genocide
Who she does nothing to try to save when all of the existing (natural-born) airbenders, who make up two generations of Katara’s family, are captured by the Red Lotus and held hostage, threatened with death.
They nearly committed a second Air Nomad genocide (remembering that while airbending had been back, the airbenders who were given that power from the harmonic convergence weren’t actually Air Nomads themselves), and Katara didn’t lift a single finger to stop them, or even try, despite the fact that said genocide was going to involve the murder of her entire family.
raised* ** three amazing children who did incredible work for the world in their own right
The issues with the cloud family could fill an entire book. Yes, they all grew up to do great things, but less great is the fact that Aang blatantly favored one child over the other two to the point where they were bitter about it well into their fifties and sixties is....really not a good look. Add to that the fact that Katara let it happen? That’s a whole lot of yikes.
(And not to belabor the point too much, but before anyone tries to say ‘but they were exaggerating’ or ‘but they were a happy family’: Kya and Bumi having Nice Feelings over a family photo where Tenzin was a literal infant doesn’t compare to the fact that the Air Acolytes, who literally worshiped Aang, had no idea that he had other children. Bumi had to speak to a statue, hoping that his father would finally be proud of him--not for anything he did, but because he was finally an airbender, because that was the only thing he believed his father valued. These are events that occur in the text, and they say more about Aang as a father than anything else does. And Katara as a mother, since she never actually gets to talk about her experiences as such in the show.)
As for this bit:
**you can’t convince me, after spending her youth fighting for the greater good, Katara -gentle-hearted, empathetic, mom-friend extraordinaire, for whom family was everything- wasn’t perfectly happy to spend the rest of her life living peacefully as a teacher, wife, mother, and grandmother, and if that is what made her happy then she deserves it, and we don’t get to judge.
If family was everything to Katara, why didn’t she go to Jinora’s Air Master ceremony, quite literally the most important moment in an airbender’s life? And why was she ready to stand by and let them all be murdered? If she loved her people so much, why didn’t she say a word when they were plunging themselves into a needless civil war? Why does her deciding to spend her life living peacefully mean that she’s never allowed to do anything to protect the people she loves so much? Why didn’t she step in when Aang was blatantly favoring Tenzin and abandoning her at home to raise his other two kids?
Yes, Katara is empathetic and loving, a mom-friend extraordinaire, but honestly? No, she was not gentle-hearted--her heart was fierce, from a very young age. One of her most iconic lines is “No! I will never, ever turn my back on people who need me!”
But isn’t that exactly what she did, when first her people, and then her entire family, needed her the most in LoK?
That is why we think the creators made Katara nothing more than a trophy wife in LoK--because the only things she was that were important at all to the narrative of LoK were the Avatar’s wife, and the mother and grandmother of the new generations of airbenders. Nothing she did or accomplished during AtLA means a damn thing in LoK, and there’s no trace of her fierce heart, her bravery and courage, her daring nature, her talent for lifting spirits of a group of people and inspiring them to act.
No, LoK wasn’t about the gaang, but AtLA wasn’t about the White Lotus either, and those old men got to do shit and accomplish shit on screen! Why was Katara sent to languish in the healing huts when she wasn’t even going to be allowed to accomplish anything as a healer for the entirety of the series? Particularly when Zuko, Toph, and even Aang and Sokka were given some focus, allowed to fight to save their family (or at least mention going to protect his daughter, in Zuko’s case), given statues to commemorate their accomplishments, allowed to visibly take part in Republic City politics.....but Katara wasn’t.
The only member of the gaang who got less focus in LoK was Suki, and I would argue that she got the better end of the deal--she, at least, was allowed the dignity of disappearing completely, leaving fans to entirely headcanon her life post-war. We get to see Katara, she’s just... a shell of her former self.
And it’s incredibly disheartening to see people continue to bend over backwards to justify it with ‘but she did all of these things!!!!’ as if that actually has anything to do with how she was treated in the show itself.
Good lord I’m not saying “you personally have to be violently harmed by cishets to be queer” I’m saying that the term is exclusively reserved for the communities who’ve historically experienced oppression centered around that slur and experienced the violence that it embodies (ie LGBT people)
You’re spouting some nonsense interpretation where you could say “some lesbians are queer but not all” when what I’m literally saying is “lesbians can call themselves queer because the lesbian community has been a target of this slur and experienced horrific violence as part of it”. Ace/aro people who lack same-gender attraction have no place trying to reclaim it because it was never aimed at their community.
Happy APAHM and here’s a poem comic about my experiences being trans and Chinese I did in three days for my English class!
“What is significant about fan fiction is that it often spins the kind of stories that showrunners wouldn’t think to tell, because fanficcers often come from a different demographic. The discomfort seems to be not that the shows are being reinterpreted by fans, but that they are being reinterpreted by the wrong sorts of fans - women, people of colour, queer kids, horny teenagers, people who are not professional writers, people who actually care about continuity (sorry). The proper way for cultural mythmaking to progress, it is implied, is for privileged men to recreate the works of privileged men from previous generations whilst everyone else listens quietly.”
— Sherlock and the Adventure of the Overzealous Fanbase by Laurie Penny (via basilandtheblues)
bending laws of physics is easy for us
people are like "if you put crabs in a bucket they can't escape because they keep pulling each other back in, this is called crab bucket mentality and describes why people don't help each other" and never acknowledge that crabs do not naturally occur in buckets, a human with more power had to put them there
nothing is more disappointing than getting into a piece of media and finding out its not even gay
“hi, i’m an author and this is my american character, chair lightbulb. in american, ‘chair’ means to be in a position of leadership, while ‘lightbulb’ means intelligence. yeah it’s kind of an unusual name in american. she’s always been distant from her american heritage, but her parents wanted her name to honor the american language, while still being unique. don’t worry, she’s very embarrassed about her heritage and it will hardly ever come up.”
that paper about how adhd is only viewed through the lens of capitalism.. i think thats why all the advice neurotypical psychs give adhd people is basically "you cant do this thing very well so make sure to do it extra good". they literally can't concieve of someone living a life without strict deadlines and monotonous routine. not to mention that they never mention anything about the severe emotional processing symptoms because peoples mental health issues and disabilities are always categorized by the ways in which they impact a person's ability to produce profit and not by the pain and suffering they can cause
I will never forgive nintendo for having Lusamine fuse with a pokemon or whatever and turn into this big monster gal and then the game hits you with the battle transition and OH FUCK THERE SHE IS YOU’RE GONNA FIGHT H- [she throws out a pokeball]
I know the Geneva convention don’t exist in like the faerie realm or whatever, but sometimes I’ll look at the actions of “good guys” in a fantasy book and go like ok so this is definitely a war crime
only the true king could remove the sword from the stone…. no one else could…… they didn’t have…. arthurization