this time, i'm not going back to you.
Feb. 25th, 2010 11:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
damkiannaThe blush of new fandom love continues, but, as always, that meta-issues portion of my brain is ticking away. The list of Cliché Bingo prompts that I saved is so, so useful for unloading fic bunnies that would otherwise clog up my mind, and, bonus, it makes me think about things.
For example: when I got to the Five Things prompt, I was somehow inspired to do something with Ursa, and it turned into several iterations of dead-mom retconning, which was startlingly easy to do. This is because A:TLA is absolutely littered with dead moms.
Take the characters who approximately form Aang's generation that I can remember off the top of my head, and whose parents we have some reason to know about: Aang, Katara and Sokka, Toph, Zuko and Azula, Yue, Jet, Haru, and Lu Ten. (Lu Ten's older, granted; but Iroh and Ozai are brothers, he's probably within ten to fifteen years of Zuko and Azula.)
Of the eight mothers:
Two (Toph's and Haru's) are definitely alive. Three (Zuko and Azula's, Yue's, and Lu Ten's) technically might be alive, but two of them don't appear anywhere other than flashbacks/hallucinations, and one, as far as I know, doesn't appear at all. Only three (Kya, Poppy, and Ursa) have names. Of the eight, only Toph's mother, Poppy Bei Fong, is both definitely alive and named - and we all know how essential she is to the plot of the series.
Of the eight fathers:
Six are definitely alive. Two (Aang's and Jet's) are definitely dead; both died in instances of more general death (by which I mean, all Airbenders but one were killed; the rest of Jet's family got slaughtered by the Fire Nation) which made it impossible for their wives to outlive them. All six of the living fathers have names (Hakoda, Lao, Ozai, Arnook, Tyro, and Iroh).
I love Katara and Suki, and I absolutely adore Toph; but it seems pretty obvious that once you look past the main set of characters, the women tend to get the short end of the stick. The way things look at the start of the series, it seems like Azula is likely to become ... uh, a Fire Lady regnant, I guess; and, IIRC, nobody in-universe indicates that this situation is unusual. I was pleased, and surprised, and expecting to find that this had happened before. But when I was noodling around on the A:TLA wiki, trying to put together a series-wide AU for the genderswap prompt, it was all Fire Lord this, Fire Lord that, and, oh, yeah, they were married to somebody whose article is a stub/doesn't exist. The swap gave me four generations of Fire Ladies and female generals, and ... a couple dudes they were married to who didn't do much.
Granted, the Kyoshi Warriors are awesome, and make me very happy; Kyoshi in general makes me very happy, too, and so does Yangchen. But I still kind of wish Azula had been named for her grandmother, the iron-fisted Fire Lady who commissioned the Great Gates of Azula, you know? Sigh.
And then, of course, the impending movie makes me kind of ill. That is just not what Katara looks like, and that is not Sokka, never mind totally unsmiling white!Aang; Dev Patel, on the other hand, would be a ridiculously great Sokka, so why he's playing Zuko is beyond me. I'm sure Nicola Peltz and Noah Ringer are decent actors, and I bet Jackson Rathbone is happy to be playing someone who gets to have actual facial expressions; but if there's any movie that fandom absolutely should not have to do an ideal chromatic recast for, it's TLA. (People like this absolutely boggle my mind. When you are unironically echoing character!Stephen Colbert, you need to take a good hard look at yourself. And that's one of the least obnoxious F!Secrets on the topic.)
For example: when I got to the Five Things prompt, I was somehow inspired to do something with Ursa, and it turned into several iterations of dead-mom retconning, which was startlingly easy to do. This is because A:TLA is absolutely littered with dead moms.
Take the characters who approximately form Aang's generation that I can remember off the top of my head, and whose parents we have some reason to know about: Aang, Katara and Sokka, Toph, Zuko and Azula, Yue, Jet, Haru, and Lu Ten. (Lu Ten's older, granted; but Iroh and Ozai are brothers, he's probably within ten to fifteen years of Zuko and Azula.)
Of the eight mothers:
Two (Toph's and Haru's) are definitely alive. Three (Zuko and Azula's, Yue's, and Lu Ten's) technically might be alive, but two of them don't appear anywhere other than flashbacks/hallucinations, and one, as far as I know, doesn't appear at all. Only three (Kya, Poppy, and Ursa) have names. Of the eight, only Toph's mother, Poppy Bei Fong, is both definitely alive and named - and we all know how essential she is to the plot of the series.
Of the eight fathers:
Six are definitely alive. Two (Aang's and Jet's) are definitely dead; both died in instances of more general death (by which I mean, all Airbenders but one were killed; the rest of Jet's family got slaughtered by the Fire Nation) which made it impossible for their wives to outlive them. All six of the living fathers have names (Hakoda, Lao, Ozai, Arnook, Tyro, and Iroh).
I love Katara and Suki, and I absolutely adore Toph; but it seems pretty obvious that once you look past the main set of characters, the women tend to get the short end of the stick. The way things look at the start of the series, it seems like Azula is likely to become ... uh, a Fire Lady regnant, I guess; and, IIRC, nobody in-universe indicates that this situation is unusual. I was pleased, and surprised, and expecting to find that this had happened before. But when I was noodling around on the A:TLA wiki, trying to put together a series-wide AU for the genderswap prompt, it was all Fire Lord this, Fire Lord that, and, oh, yeah, they were married to somebody whose article is a stub/doesn't exist. The swap gave me four generations of Fire Ladies and female generals, and ... a couple dudes they were married to who didn't do much.
Granted, the Kyoshi Warriors are awesome, and make me very happy; Kyoshi in general makes me very happy, too, and so does Yangchen. But I still kind of wish Azula had been named for her grandmother, the iron-fisted Fire Lady who commissioned the Great Gates of Azula, you know? Sigh.
And then, of course, the impending movie makes me kind of ill. That is just not what Katara looks like, and that is not Sokka, never mind totally unsmiling white!Aang; Dev Patel, on the other hand, would be a ridiculously great Sokka, so why he's playing Zuko is beyond me. I'm sure Nicola Peltz and Noah Ringer are decent actors, and I bet Jackson Rathbone is happy to be playing someone who gets to have actual facial expressions; but if there's any movie that fandom absolutely should not have to do an ideal chromatic recast for, it's TLA. (People like this absolutely boggle my mind. When you are unironically echoing character!Stephen Colbert, you need to take a good hard look at yourself. And that's one of the least obnoxious F!Secrets on the topic.)
