Zuko: Well, If I Was The Blue Spirit

Zuko: well, if I was the blue spirit

Zuko: AND I’M NOT

Sokka: *suspiciously and reluctantly crosses out Zuko’s name on his list of possible blue spirit suspects*

Warmup doodle... Turtleducks?

TURTLEDUCK S

Every time I reread a bit of Spinning Silver, I notice new ways the Staryk king is 100% a panicking, highly reactive dufus who does not know what he's doing at any point in the book any more than Miryem ever quite does.

Miryem and the Staryk king are peak clown-to-clown communication; to the point that they come to understand each other on a deeply personal, cross-cultural level - enough to realize that they are actually well-matched in terms of their values and long-term goals enough to actually fall in love with each other - all while still completely missing like 90% of everything the other one is trying to say at any given moment.

I love them and I love this book so much.

lahee prints now available

as round 2 heats up, reminder that there is a line between being annoying (honorable, joyous, part of fandom's legacy) and just being an asshole. mobilize your followers, write propaganda meta in defense of your ship, bribe people to vote how you want with drabbles or doodles, make twelve accounts and vote on all of them— but don't send anon hate.

Sometimes tumblr takes established academic terms for discussing social issues around systematic oppression and privilege, and strips all reasonable nuance and utility from those terms in order to use them as blunt force weapons in fandom wank.

Other times, tumblr seems to create its own nonsense terms, like 'female coded' male characters.

My biggest problem with that term is that it seems to almost always refer to badly written characters. Is it a problem that many female characters are still poorly written? That they are often relegated to secondary characters or passive narrative objects in someone else's story, that many female characters are written to lack agency even in their own narratives? Yes. Yes it is.

But the misogyny comes from the lack of well written stories about girls/women as compared to stories about boys/men, not when individuals dislike any given badly written character. Especially not when someone dislikes a badly written male character!

Trying to justify liking poorly written male characters on moral grounds by labeling them 'female coded' also implies that bad writing is an inherent trait of female characters. Which, I would argue, actually indicates a much more dismal view towards fictional women than someone who doesn't like a male character with a shoddy narrative that treats him more like a passive object than a person.

Characters are not real people, people are allowed to dislike a fictional character on the basis of bad writing, and for the love of god please stop conflating 'passive narrative object' with 'inherent trait of a female character'!