This Is A Really Odd Thing To Consider With Atla, But For A Show That Loves Taking Liberal Scoops Of

this is a really odd thing to consider with atla, but for a show that loves taking liberal scoops of hinduism, buddhism and south and east asian cultures for its worldbuilding, atla is really weird about letting its characters practice religion.

everything in atla is people taking about spirituality, defining themselves with spirituality, yet nobody engages it in the context of belief. we are given the concept of worshipped beings in the atla universe; tui and la and agni for example. but none of these gods are ever seen as gods that the characters hold belief in. we barely get a framework of belief with the earth kingdom (the earth kingdom is examined politically and never religiously in the series) which would actually be interesting because so many cultures did have a god or goddess of the earth. the water tribe goes into cultural rituals, but only for an episode. we know nothing about air nation religious practices beyond nonviolence bad and vegetarianism. even the fire nation is practically a blank slate.

it's almost like the creators were nervous at the idea of letting the characters practice a religion, even a created religion that's foreign to the majority of their (most likely christian) audience. the weddings are very christian-coded (you're telling me that the FIRE nation wouldn't have a hindu-style marriage which literally involves FIRE), and the characters are never seen worshipping or participating in cultural festivals beyond the usual 'oohh fireworks and food' type thing. normally i wouldn't care, speaking as a former kid who did spend religious festivals like that, but if you're going to put characters forward that practice eastern religions and then have them interact in the most surface level way possible, what's even the point?

there's baiting and then there's whatever this is.

Manuscripts don't burn.

Sun-jae, standing at the front of the crowd

Being taller than almost every person there

What a jerk

my unpopular opinion about lovely runner is that i think that sun-jae actually killed himself in the original timeline, and that he was only murdered in the second timeline.

read below, for my analysis!

if you look at the sun-jae perspectives in the first timelines (i.e. before im sol came back to the future from the second try after her successful running away from the kidnapper), he's clearly miserable. He clearly hates being an idol, he doesn't seem to get on with his bandmates (i love that when im sol changed the timeline, baek in-hyuk and sun-jae became close friends again; they have good friend chemistry, and their relationship is genuinely sweet), and he definitely feels tremendous guilt over what happened to sol (he definitely internalized what she said in the hospital).

if we look at the murderer, the way that sun-jae would've died, which is being pushed off the balcony into the swimming pool, would become way more difficult, and harder to pull off. we didn't get the best look at that corpse, but there were virtually no signs of struggle. dude is kind of smiling, or it is more contentment (this could just be me not understanding facial expressions or byeon woo seok breaking character as a dead guy) if you look at ep 9, then we see that the killer would struggle against sun-jae, who's pretty broad and taller than the killer. even if the killer had the element of surprise, he'd still have to get sun-jae knocked down, which he couldn't do in ep 9 even with sun-jae still not expecting it, and then drag him to the balcony and push him off. also from what we see about this killer (which is practically nothing as far as i know; why does he even want to kill sol? is he like a serial killer who just kills random people, and then sol and sun-jae just happen to escape?) , but given that the murder that is confirmed is done by knife stabbing, it seems like just throwing him off the balcony is not usually his MO. people also stab themselves to commit suicide.

also if you look at his final interaction with sol from his perspective, he's suddenly onslaught with all of the guilt and self-hatred that he had dealt with fifteen years ago along with his current problems. he loves her no doubt, but he's also wracked with guilt over what he feels is his fault in putting her in a wheelchair, and also some despair over the fact that she doesn't remember. When all of those feelings smash together, who wouldn't fall into such deep despair that they'd consider something?