In the Making, a project by and for queer students at Harvard, highlights the experiences of LGBTQ people in these simplistic, powerful photos. There are many more at their website, and I bet you’ll identify with more than one. Follow them at inthemakingproject!
so we’ve tried explaining vaccines using science and that scared people
but what if
instead
we told them that vaccines actually contain magic rocks or healing energy
“we left this rabies vaccine in the light of a full moon to cleanse it, so it’s safe. everyone knows about the link between rabies and full moons :)”
“vaccination is an ancient practice going back at least hundreds of years that draws on your body’s natural healing abilities to let you fight disease naturally”
Yeah - these were the same Fairy Terns that chose an empty block next to a building site last yeah - I’d wandered over to see why there were so many plant pots and buckets half buried in the sand, and discovered that while there were warning signs put up around the block, they were only put up on three sides of the block :( Was very sad to hear about the massacre - loosing that many adults and chicks is a serious blow to the species
jesus
please keep your cats indoors.
While there is little an individual can usually do to stem the tide of environmental destruction, proper domestic animal management is one thing that individuals can actually help a lot.
This means not releasing any pet into the wild where it can be invasive, be that pet a cat, fish, reptile or what have you. Goldfish are invasive. Rats are invasive. Cats are not an exception.
@gem-femme For the people in your “keep your cats inside” post who say cats don’t really hurt the environment that much
I love Katara and I love Aang but I really don’t like Katara-and-Aang
Explain; I’m intrigued now
Kataang is a bad pairing that is detrimental to both characters.
How so?
I’m not sure if my reasons will be the same as the OPs (and feel free
to tell me to back off if I’m overstepping) but I live my fandom life
perpetually prepared with this essay so here we go.
The thing is,
from the very beginning Kataang is an incredibly one-sided pairing. You
get to see Aang’s feelings from Katara all the time, but outside of
three isolated incidents (in sixty plus episodes, they really had no excuse) you see nothing
from Katara that even hints she might reciprocate his feelings, or that
her own motherly feelings for Aang ever changed into something
different. (She kisses him on the cheek the same way she kisses Tom-Tom,
a literal baby, and what is probably one of the most powerful shots of the entire series features Katara holding Aang in the famous Pieta pose. They really
should have toned down the motherhood vibes if this was the pairing the
intended from the beginning, that’s all I’ll say about that.)
People frequently site The Fortuneteller
(or, rather, the last twenty seconds of the episode) as ‘evidence’ for
Kataang, or that she was starting to consider him in that light. This
would be fine, except for the fact that a) Katara’s actions and feelings
towards him do not change after this, and b) the entire rest of the episode seems like it is foreshadowing Aang’s future character arc and explicitly not
Kataang. What I mean by this is, the episode itself features a young
girl with a crush on Aang that is deliberately and explicitly paralleled
to his crush on Katara. Meng has marginally more self-awareness than
Aang (for which I’ll given him some leniency, here, because he is
twelve and spent a hundred years as an ice cube) and realizes that he
doesn’t return her feelings. This is incredibly important because the
episode tells us that’s ok–Meng herself realizes that Aang just
sees her as a friend and that he has feelings for someone else, and she
just wants him to be happy. This is an incredibly important message for any
show, especially one aimed at kids, but I can’t help but feel like it’s
severely undermined at the end by Sokka’s oddly placed ‘that kid is one
powerful bender’ and Katara’s seeming ‘consideration’, because that…
really isn’t the lesson that this episode should have ended on.
(But
really, I mean, saying the Avatar is a powerful bender is a little like
saying water is wet. You know who else is a powerful bender? Toph, the
most powerful Earthbender in the entire series. Azula, a
firebending prodigy. Zuko, especially after training with the dragons.
Not to mention that Aunt Wu was kind of a fraud, and the secondary theme
of the episode seemed to be ‘you can’t rely on other people to tell you
your own destiny’. Unless you’re Katara, I guess. This makes me mad in
particular because Katara is my favorite character, and she was so badly
shafted by the way this episode ended and what it represented for the
series as a whole.)
Which brings me to how Kataang, as a ship, is
detrimental to Katara, specifically. I try to ignore the existence of
the comics, but it’s hard when so much of it is borne out by the way
Katara is sidelined in LoK (yes, I know LoK wasn’t about the Gaang, but
even the cabbage merchant got a statue, where the hell was
Katara’s????? and why wasn’t she present in the Gaang flashback about a
bloodbender’s trial, when she was the one who got bloodbending outlawed
and would have been the best equipped to contain him? When Aang, Sokka,
and Toph were all in that scene?). And in the comics, Katara just…
isn’t Katara, anymore. There is one panel in particular that I think
kind of perfectly sums up how heartbreaking their relationship
is, and it’s the one where Aang is having a great time showing off for
his Fanclub, and Katara is…. in the corner. Curled up with her head on
her knees, looking forlorn and completely alone.
And she apologizes for it.
Even
if you ignore the comics, though (and you really should, they are awful
for pretty much every character, especially the gaang),there are a lot
of things in the show itself that make it seem like Katara is, at best, settling,
in spite of her own true feelings. Again, there’s the fact that their
‘relationship development’ is one-sided, with Aang’s feelings for her
explored but not the other way around. There’s also the fact that it’s
an incredibly unequal relationship emotionally. Now, Aang may get a pass
for some of this because he is twelve years old, but then that
becomes part of the problem–an immature twelve-year-old boy really had
no business getting into a serious relationship with anyone
before some serious growing up, and said twelve-year-old boy with a
chronic ‘running away from his problems’ problem should absolutely not have been getting into a relationship with an overly-mature fourteen-year-old girl with serious abandonment issues.
(That last part will be important later.)
Katara takes on herself the responsibility of caregiver, especially for Aang. We really don’t get to see her in a position of not
trying to bear everyone’s emotional burdens until Zuko joins the Gaang
later and shares that task (you’ll pry Momtara and Dadko from my cold
dead fingers, but this isn’t about them), but this is especially
prominent with Aang. She is there for him constantly. She helps
him deal with everything from the genocide of his people to losing Appa,
his friend and last connection to them. And Aang is ‘there’ for her
insofar as he’s the Avatar, sure, and her hope for the world–but that’s
not specific to Katara. And if they were truly going to commit to this pairing, they should have at least had Aang ask Katara about her mother at some point prior to The Southern Raiders.
Even then, he either cannot or chooses
not to understand where Katara is coming from. Part of this is, I
think, because his development was hamstringed for pretty much the
entirety of book three. He was never allowed to grow past parroting the
monks and their advice (rather than doing what Zuko does with Iroh’s
advice, which is internalize it and learn from it and then apply it, and even if he can’t quite put it into a neat little soundbyte he shows he understood and adapted to what he was told), which does
make sense from a certain perspective (because, again, he’s twelve
years old and woke up a hundred years on to find that his entire people
were gone)… except that the narrative never tries to say he’s wrong.
In fact, this is a serious problem I have with book 3 in
particular–Aang’s development was stunted because the narrative would not
let him be wrong. Even the framing of TSR tries to bear this out (the
commentary for the episode, as I recall, tries to paint Aang and Zuko as
the angel and devil on Katara’s shoulders, which is so wrong for so
many reasons–thankfully the bulk of the episode, outside a few
incongruous one-liners, doesn’t really support that reading), but it
only goes to prove that Aang may remember the Monks’ teachings, but he
didn’t fully understand them. He couldn’t! He didn’t get a chance to learn!
Monk Gyatso was found amidst a slew of Fire Nation corpses, proving
that he didn’t just lay down and die but went down fighting to protect
his people, and yet Aang never stops with his ‘the monks think all life
is sacred’ bit.
And, ok this is a bit of a tangent, but no, I don’t
think Aang should have killed Ozai. He was twelve years old, he
shouldn’t have been killing anyone. But I believe the show should have
given him an actual character arc, rather than tossing a deus ex
lionturtle and Rock of Destiny at him so he never had to have his
beliefs or idealization of the Air Nomads challenged in any substantial
way.
But back to my main point–Aang never helps to share Katara’s emotional burdens. He is also, as I mentioned earlier, someone with a chronic
running away problem–this culminates in everyone believing he did just
that right before the Big Battle, because he stormed off and Katara had
no way of knowing if he’d even come back. (She had faith that he would,
but she was concerned, too.) Again, this wouldn’t be a problem if it
were a) presented as an issue he would need to work through, and b) not a
defining characteristic of the boy who is evidently supposed to be
endgame with the girl with severe abandonment issues. (Not to mention how badly both
Aang and Katara were presented in LoK–Aang really just fucked off for
months or years at a time with his airbending kid, leaving Katara to sit
at home raising the other two who would grow up believing their daddy
didn’t love them??? And she just let him do it?????? #NotMyKatara)
As to how this relationship is detrimental to Aang (other than the comics and LoK nonsense)? Just take a look at book 2, when he’s trying to learn Earthbending from Toph. Katara constantly coddles him.
Much of the time, she’s afraid to be anything other than gentle and
understanding with Aang–partly because of her fear that if she pushes
him too far, he’ll run away. (Which he does, several times.) But
sometimes, what Aang needs to grow is a sharp kick in the slats, which
Toph was more than willing to provide–and which worked. Katara was great for teaching Aang to waterbend, but he needed more than that to grow as a person.
And he can’t get that while he’s in a relationship with someone who
will apologize for getting upset when he was very explicitly neglecting
her. (Sorry, it always comes back to that panel for me, it makes me so mad.)
Anyway, uh, tl;dr: Both
Katara and Aang are hampered, narratively speaking, by being placed in
such a one-sided and unequal relationship. I didn’t even get into the
forced EIP kiss, or how it was not good that the entirety of
their relationship development (going from ‘you kissed me and i
explicitly did not like it’ to ‘we’re in a relationship now’) happened
off-screen (the EIP scene was their last one-on-one scene together before that epilogue, and they proceeded to spend the show’s emotional climax with other people),
because this essay was getting long enough. But in short, they are very
poorly matched for two people we’re supposed to believe were blissfully
happy and never had any problems for seventy years.
I would like to add on that Aang and Katara has a very important friendship. But there are people who are just meant to be that, and not more. If we all take a moment to look back at our lives, I think we all have that one friend we wanted to be with at first, but then ended up realizing that a relationship with them, would just not work, and/or be very detrimental to our growth. And Katara and Aang are just like that. They both have a strong friendship. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be friends or stay out of each other’s lives. I don’t think anyone is saying that. But, romantically, they are just not good for each other.
Aang wants someone who will take care of him and let him be the child he is without questioning his beliefs.
What Aang needs is someone who doesn’t enable his childish behavior, but forces him to grow up and helps him evolve as a person.
What Katara wants is someone who is her equal and will help her grow as a person. She wants someone who will understand her pain and allows her to be herself.
What Katara needs is pretty much the same as her desires, with one final twist. She needs someone who compliments her personality and doesn’t clash on core beliefs. She needs someone who will share the burden with her, not be the burden.
In other words, tere are opposites that compliment each other, and opposites that destroy each other. Katara and Aang, are the opposites that destroy each other.
And the proof is in both the comics and LOK. We see the toll their relationship had on each other. We see Katara as a shadow of who she used to be, before they were in a relationship. And with Aang, we see the effects of not growing up in the way he treats, not only Katara, but his children.
So while, Bryke intended on making Kataang the ship of love and happiness, even their writing couldn’t stop the characters from writing the story itself. And the story of Kataang is a tragic one that should have never been told. Because in the end, it only led to heartbreak and self destruction in the worst of ways.
to me, the thing that’s so incredibly frustrating to me is that kataang could have worked – it was classic friends-to-lovers, it just needed aang to come to terms with his bad habits, grow up some, and come to see katara as a partner rather than a goddess. and it needed katara to stop forcing herself into the mother position – they got off to such a great start right off the bat with riding the penguin-otters! they just needed to keep going down that path of aang making katara feel more like a person and katara making aang grow up and become more emotionally mature.
it would have been so. freaking. easy to do the pairing justice.
it would have been so. freaking. easy to make the romance feel natural and be a positive in both of the characters’ arcs.
they managed to take a pairing that should have been, at worst, merely inoffensive and potentially really wholesome and poignant, and made it horrible. it didn’t have to be! there is nothing inherent to the characters that makes them ill-suited! but they managed to make it the worst thing for katara when it! didn’t! have! to! be!
can’t believe ‘coco from foster’s home for imaginary friends was born from a starving child’s dying dream as they spiraled into desperate insanity after getting stranded on an island’ isn’t an edgy theory but something the creator just casually brought up on his deviantart
(Coco is a bit complicated to explain but I’ll try. As you might know from “Good Wilt Hunting” Coco was found on a deserted island. Well I based her look on the images her creator was exposed to on the island. Her head is the palm trees that dominated the landscape. Her body is the crashed wreckage of the plane which brought her creator to the island. Her beak is a deflated rubber life raft. And her orange feet represent the sunburned feet that her creator stared at all day. Her name Coco comes from the Coconuts that her creator ate everyday. Her odd personality derives from the fact that her creator wasn’t mentally all quite there from being on the island for so long. Phew!!)
psych majors should be required to kick it with a mentally ill person for at least 80 hours just to be reminded that we are human and not experiments
As both a psych major and a mentally ill person I cannot begin to tell you how many people I have met in my classes who make me concerned for the safety and health of mentally ill people everywhere, especially the young children who struggle.
My first psychology class was fucking wild. Put of around 35 of us only three (one being a close friend of mine) of us had any sort of mental illness. Intro Psych is mainly about brain development with only a small section at the end being about mental illness but Oh Fucking Boy did everyone’s weird ass stereotypes and fetishes jump out in the last chapter.
We were talking about schizophrenia and the one other girl with mental illness was a schizophrenic (it wasn’t known until this exact moment). We were talking about symptoms when someone just asked outloud, “Aren’t schizos like super likely to murder people though?”
I thought, okay, one guy still stuck in the fucking 80’s, whatever.
But Then A Bunch Of People Start Agreeing
And soon we were 20minutes into class and everyone had shared a case of a schizophrenic murdering, abusing, etc etc and They Saw Nothing Wrong With Thinking These Stereotypes Were A Standard
The prof finally stopped them and asked if anyone wanted to make one last statement and this poor girl just raises her hands and “I just thought you all should know that I’m schizophrenic and have never thought about murdering someone, nor have I ever hurt anyone apart from myself.”
And… no one apologized. They literally felt no guilt at all for bashing this girl.
The same exact thing happened when we talked about depression, anxiety, and ptsd.
“Ptsd is what soldiers get after war right?”
“Yeah sometimes, but anyone can suffer from it after a traumatic event”
“How would you know, are you the professor now?”
“No, but I have ptsd from a car crash that nearly killed me so…”
Like god damn I really fucking hate neurotypicals trying to satisfy some weird curiosity they have for “crazy” people or whatever it is like please stay like 3000ft away from anyone with a mental illness and never fucking talk to them dear god
