pick your fighter

elodieunderglass:

smallcockroachdudeinthetwinkie:

elodieunderglass:

(This is an ask meme where I try to describe a franchise I’ve never seen based on “dashboard osmosis,” i.e. what I’ve learned of it from fandom.)

Avatar: the last Airbender is an American cartoon series with Japanese-anime-influenced design. It is set in a medieval fantasy world. I have not seen any of the cartoon, but I have seen the ten-minute long “Best of” Rifftrax spoof of the M. Night Shyamalan movie on YouTube. Rifftrax is where the guys who did Mystery Science Theater 3000 create an audio track making fun of a movie, and you play it while watching the movie. I used to really like MST3K as a little kid, but Rifftrax doesn’t age well.

Actually, based on this I think I can talk about Avatar REALLY well. I bet this is going to be such a good Avatar post. Everyone will be really impressed by my knowledge of Avatar. They’ll probably think I’m very good at meta.

There are four nations, that live in harmony until the Fire Nation attacks. See? That right there is Avatar.

The nations are water, which is populated by Inuit(?) inspired character designs; Earth, which is based on China; Air, which is possibly Tibet; and Fire, which I think draws on the aesthetic of India. People born into those nations can have the power to manipulate that element, which is called “bending.” Once in a while someone is reincarnated, like the Dalai Lama, who can bend all four, and they are called the Avatar.

Impressive, huh? Watch this! I can even do the plot and the characters. Hold my beer.

So a smart girl from the Water Nation (Lucy) and her doofy brother (Sokka) are going for your usual amble across a glacier, when they come upon a corpse frozen into the ice. This may sound like any normal Canadian walk to school but in THIS case, when they remove the corpse, it turns out to be AN ALIVE BOY who was somehow frozen alive!!!

He is a small bald boy with a blue arrow on his head. His name is Aang and he is the Avatar. The blue arrow is never explained. In fact, M Night Shyamalan interpreted it as not a bright chalk-blue arrow, but a weird collection of black squiggles in a vague arrow shape. M Night Shyamalan is a coward.

Anyway, the blue arrow may be a brilliant makeup choice to Accentuate Your Best Feature. Aang has enormous eyeballs, so maybe he wants everyone to look at them and thus distract attention from his ears. Or perhaps he feels that he has an oddly shaped chin.

Anyway, he wakes up and starts running about, going “I must go home!” And Lucy and her brother take him to possibly Tibet, or some Himalayan-based aesthetic, please forgive me, I haven’t seen the show. Unfortunately, everyone in possibly-Tibet is dead. It’s entirely possible that they have been dead for ten THOUSAND years. I actually don’t know. They’re all very much dead at this point though.

Oh my god! I bet the Fire Nation did it!

Those bastards!!

And then they have to go… do something else. The General idea is that Aang needs to be trained in bending all of the elements, so they have to go to all of the places. So Lucy organises some kind of Road trip to visit every nation, and I believe Sokka briefly dates the Moon. They meet a visually-impaired small girl in the Earth nation called Toph, and they acquire a flying caterpillar-dog called… Apnea? Like a Great Pyrenees that can float. Which is quite useful because then they can probably fly from place to place instead of walking.

Also, Aang jumps off cliffs with a kite to hold him up. All the time. You can’t stop him. I think Lucy would try, because she’s sensible. “Aang,” she would say, “let me at least tie a piece of string to you. Let me at least reel you in, if you must be a kite - reel you in like some kind of skyfish.” But no, Aang will NOT be tamed, he must ride the thermals - where are the adults in this? Like, I appreciate that he is an airbender and he has Powers to hold him up, but like, he’s also about 9 years old. He doesn’t have all his teeth yet. Lucy must be the most stressed character in the whole fictional universe. I mean if the fate of the current world depended on a 9 year old with a predilection for throwing himself off cliffs with a kite, I would tie a piece of string to him. “No offence, kid, you’re a great kite, but I was kind of hoping to have a future?”

There is also a Cabbages Man and his cabbages, which are frequently overturned.

They are pursued this whole time by a sort of Goth child with a scarred face from the Fire Nation. I feel like I would know his name if I saw it again, but I am reaching for it, and all I am finding is Kylo. I am opening every drawer in the backwater cupboards of my memory and I just find Kylo. Now, the problem here is that I feel (based on some kind of osmosis) that I actually quite like Fire Nation Kylo. I have no idea what he does or sounds like but I feel like I support him. While the brief experience of the Star war Kylo that I got, didn’t so much make my skin crawl as it made my skin bolt, like my skin attempted to launch itself off the sinning meat of my body and fling itself into another room, but it’s anchored all over, so he just made my skin ripple. Like a horse twitching flies. I made a lot of weird faces watching that movie. So I’m going to call this Kylo “Scruffy Dave.” I can’t go any farther with this if his name is Kylo, even if it is, which I’m sure it isn’t.

I don’t know why Scruffy Dave is pursuing a bunch of other children all over Asia. I believe it is to do with “honour,” but he’s like 12. I remember being 12 and horribly conscious of my dignity, sensitive to all kinds of perceived slights, but I don’t think I would pursue the offenders as far as Fantasy Outer Mongolia. Maybe, like, Fantasy Next Town over. So I suspect there’s more plot to it than that. Scruffy Dave-O has an uncle called Uncle Iroh who likes tea. Uncle Iroh is cute, but useless. As the only adult in the show, you’d think he would say things like “Little Scruff, let’s find some fucking chill here. Let’s go on a quest to restore your missing chill.” But no, the cavalcade of fuckups tumbles all over creation, instead, overturning cabbages.

I’m handwaving here. I assume more adventures are involved. Give me back my beer for a sec. I’m going to need both hands free for the handwaving finale.

So Scruffy Davoh and his inadequate babysitter catch up with Lucy’s herd of children and I believe they have some kind of battle, at the end of which, Scruffy Davenport converts to Aang’s side and has a redemption arc! I believe it is a good one.

But there’s a lot of plot after this? So I assume that the new bad guy is the Fire Nation. I think they all team up to attack the Fire Nation.

Oh wait! Aang must be the last airbender because the show is called “Avatar: the last airbender.” Maybe that’s what changed when the Fire Nation attacked. They got rid of all the airbenders. I think airbender would be a good name for a salamander. Like a hellbender crossed with a nice feathery axolotl. But how did the Fire Nation get away with that? Was it 1000 years ago? Why was it ok for them to destabilise an element-based continent like that. How did Aang get in a glacier. I don’t care to find out.

They are all underage children. I think it’s important to stress that they are all underage children, and I am vexed and pained by their unsupervised shenanigans. Why didn’t somebody sort this out earlier.

So that is the plot. Then eventually they all die of old age, and it’s time for Legend of Korra, which is the same show but everyone is an adult and gay, and it’s somehow the 1920s. Korra has basically reinvented bi culture and saved us all, as well as providing us with feudal lord/handmaiden jokes. I haven’t seen that show either, but that’s the gist of it.

Also, I think Lucy’s name might be Katara. But it only just came to me now.

Did I mention, I think Sokka dates the moon? I’m really not clear on this. And I think Toph owns a haunted squirrel. That might be important too.

Here, finish this beer for me, I can’t, I’m still breastfeeding.

I also believe, but cannot cite evidence, that there is no war in Ba Sing Se.

2:50, 10/1/19

@elodieunderglass

This is fucking priceless!!!

I am seriously in shock over how funny this is.

Jesus christ.

I am so glad that it made sense to you! Actually, in the two-week Holiday Void, my whole household came down with a terrible germ. We don’t watch television, but when your whole family including a little toddler is ill, then YOU WATCH TELEVISION, and what I decided to do was to put on “Avatar” via Amazon Prime. Because I could reasonably expect it wouldn’t be too violent/vile/sex-laden for the toddler, and it might amuse the bleary adults.

And we liked it! We really really did! It was exactly the thing you want to watch when you feel like you can’t move. You are happy to accept it all, and the fact that you’re literally just watching children run in perilous circles, on endless repeat, is acceptable and soothing. All they do is run in circles! And there are occasionally bad jokes. None of you told me there would be bad jokes. So now I am a person who has seen some episodes of “Avatar: the last airbender,” and I don’t mind at all! You guys steered me right! It’s made me officially forgive Tumblr for the tragic misfire that was my actual experience of trying to watch Leverage.

I never did work out about Ba Sing Se, which seemed to be important in my dashboard osmosis, but it was never spoken of. That might be a different show.