![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingStill watching Avatar! Here are LOTS of thoughts on episodes 7-9 [The Spirit World (Winter Solstice, Part 1); Avatar Roku (Winter Solstice, Part 2); The Waterbending Scroll]:
The Spirit World (Winter Solstice, Part 1)
1. The whole sequence around Iroh's capture is brilliant. Iroh and Zuko both do really well at figuring out what's going on and communicating with each other. They are smart, they are skilled, and they trust each other; note that no matter how much Zuko wants to find the Avatar, he decides that rescuing his uncle is more important. Iroh is also a goofball and Zuko a dork, but that just makes the rest of it better. *grin*
2. I love the thought and care that have gone into this series. The architecture, the clothing styles, the greeting gestures, the patterns on the Hei Bai forest spirit... this feels like a coherent world, and it is presented as perfectly normal to have a world with no (or very, very few) European influences, beyond the use of English dialogue and some modern Western attitudes toward family. Even the theme music and some of the incidental scene background music has heavy Eastern and Native American influences!
3. Huh, so the comet plot thread is laid this early! I like that the series is clearly designed with a beginning, a middle, and an end instead of an eternal episodic muddle. Knowing that you have a conclusion allows you to write things like character growth, without trying to trap your characters and world in an eternal, unrealistic holding pattern.
4. More random world-building notes: judging by the number of statues in the Southern Air Temple (and assuming that each Avatar is born the day the old one dies, and each lives for… oh, at least 50 years on average), this world must have at least 5,000 years of recorded history, quite probably more. That's a lot of scope to work with, and makes the Fire Nation's level of technology (and the Earth Kingdom's level of logistical organization, as seen in the Omashu delivery system) much less surprising. Actually, I will be surprised if the Fire Nation hasn't invented the internal combustion engine and related technologies, though given that their territory is mostly volcanic islands, they may well not have things like a highway system and personal automobiles. And, of course, if you have people who can create fireballs with a thought, inventing cannons seems a bit less urgent; catapults will suffice. *grin*
-----
Avatar Roku (Winter Solstice, Part 2)
5. Wait a minute. At the end of episode 7, the moon is a waxing crescent. At the beginning of episode 8, the very same night, the moon is full. Astronomy fail for the lose!
6. Zuko, shoving old men through doors in the middle of the night is not proper behavior. Stop it.
7. I am trying to get Zuko's timeline straight. A few episodes back, he says he's been searching for the Avatar for two years. In this episode, Iroh says Zuko is sixteen. That implies he was exiled at 14... yet fandom and fic consensus is that Zuko was thirteen when exiled. So who's rounding which numbers?
8. The Fire Nation has a hell of a lot of ships if they can afford to keep that many maintaining a double line blockade. No wonder they need colonies; they cannot possibly have enough coal, iron, or people in their own islands to maintain that kind of military buildup.
9. I stand by my previous statement that Commander Zhao is creepy. Intelligent and capable, and not bad-looking without a shirt, but fundamentally creepy.
10. Sokka with the homemade bombs, not as stupid as he looks! And Katara with the deception! They make a good team when they're not ragging on each other. *grin* (And yet again, we have fun with Momo's shadow, sort of a callback to his first appearance.)
11. Oh! Zuko made it to the temple! *bites fingernails*
12. And Aang made it inside! (Is is bad that I kind of want both of them to succeed, even though their current goals are mutually exclusive? *sigh*)
13. I really wonder what Sokka and Katara make of Zhao and Zuko's little argument. Especially when Zuko seems, for a moment, almost to be defending Aang... or at least preferring him to Zhao.
14. More timeline information: it is now winter solstice in the northern hemisphere (it cannot be the southern winter solstice, since Sokka talked about midnight sun madness, and we never saw night at the south pole), and the comet will arrive by the end of summer. That means... late August, I guess? Which gives Aang about eight months to learn waterbending, earthbending, and firebending, and beat Ozai. Therefore, the entire series occurs over about nine months, since I think it's been about a month since Aang got out of the iceberg. Good to know!
-----
The Waterbending Scroll
15. The 'puddle' joke. *cracks up* Oh, the matching doofy glee on Katara's and Aang's faces! *cracks up again*
16. Iroh takes great pleasure in wrong-footing people, doesn't he? Zuko especially (and there it is done with love), but he loves playing on people's expectations. I love Iroh.
17. And Aang has lots of power and no judgment whatsoever. Now both groups are heading to town for supplies. I foresee hijinks!
18. Ooh, look at the sails on those ships! *lusts after*
19. Parrots mean pirates. Duh. Even if they seem to be half iguana. *grin*
20. Aang, you suck at money. Please stop trying.
21. Cabbage Man returns! Is he... caressing that cabbage? My goodness, he really is! *cracks up*
22. Huh. Seeing Zuko's ship (which, courtesy of episode 8, we now know is relatively small for a Fire Nation warship) next to those sailing ships gives a real sense of scale. And it makes the blockade last episode even more ostentatiously impressive. Seriously, why are so many ships out in the middle of the ocean? The Fire Nation obviously has more control of the seas than the Earth Kingdom, and the Water Tribes don't seem to be much of an obstacle at this point, so what is Zhao guarding against?
23. Katara, do I detect you displacing guilt as anger? I think I do.
24. Zuko and the pirates: first, yay for Zuko recognizing stray details and figuring out what's going on. Second, Zuko is obviously better at predicting what the GAang are going to do. Third, he is very sure he has the upper hand and doesn't mind flaunting it. Fourth, so he didn't mention Aang is the Avatar, eh? I can see why he didn't, but Sokka is very clever to pick up on that and break up that unstable alliance. Fifth... the pirates didn't strike me as that good at fighting; maybe the captain is captain because he can beat up all his crew? Or maybe the GAang does better than they ought to because the pirates are used to fighting more conventional opponents. I dunno; the relative power and skill levels seem oddly variable in this episode.
25. My quest to understand Zutara continues: in this episode, Zuko and Katara finally interact. He mentions his lost honor, and there is the business with her mother's necklace. Okay, yes, that can be read as enemy-shipping subtext, especially since he apparently noticed that the necklace was hers... unless he was just making a safe guess, since she's the only girl in the group and it doesn't look like the sort of jewelry an earthbender would have left on the prison platform. But all that aside, if people object to Kataang because it reads to them as a young woman with a little boy, I have to say this scene reads to me as a young man with a little girl. And Zuko is clearly only interested in Katara as a way of getting to Aang, while she thinks he's a dangerous, evil jerk. So, you know, I can see the subtext, but it does nothing for me. I will keep an eye out, since this is apparently the most popular noncanon pairing (and is even more popular than many canon pairings), but I think it's just not really to my taste. *shrug*
26. Aang, you idiot, blowing air at a net is not going to work. There's nothing to push against.
27. Sokka doesn't know how to work an Earth Kingdom sailboat. And why should he? It's not as if he's ever been on one before. Yay world-building details! Actually, the whole sequence with the double ship theft, the river battle, and the waterfall is really cool. (And funny. But mostly cool.)
28. "Maybe it should be a proverb." *cracks up* Oh, Iroh, never stop being crazy awesome, okay?
-----
Dinner now. Then I will either get some writing done or watch another three episodes.
Also, Halloween has been and gone. My basket of candy was emptied by 6pm or so, after which Downstairs Neighbors L & M replaced it with their own bowl and candy, taking advantage of the small end table I set out on the porch to hold my basket at a reasonable child height. I brought in the end table at 9pm, after their bowl was also emptied.
The Spirit World (Winter Solstice, Part 1)
1. The whole sequence around Iroh's capture is brilliant. Iroh and Zuko both do really well at figuring out what's going on and communicating with each other. They are smart, they are skilled, and they trust each other; note that no matter how much Zuko wants to find the Avatar, he decides that rescuing his uncle is more important. Iroh is also a goofball and Zuko a dork, but that just makes the rest of it better. *grin*
2. I love the thought and care that have gone into this series. The architecture, the clothing styles, the greeting gestures, the patterns on the Hei Bai forest spirit... this feels like a coherent world, and it is presented as perfectly normal to have a world with no (or very, very few) European influences, beyond the use of English dialogue and some modern Western attitudes toward family. Even the theme music and some of the incidental scene background music has heavy Eastern and Native American influences!
3. Huh, so the comet plot thread is laid this early! I like that the series is clearly designed with a beginning, a middle, and an end instead of an eternal episodic muddle. Knowing that you have a conclusion allows you to write things like character growth, without trying to trap your characters and world in an eternal, unrealistic holding pattern.
4. More random world-building notes: judging by the number of statues in the Southern Air Temple (and assuming that each Avatar is born the day the old one dies, and each lives for… oh, at least 50 years on average), this world must have at least 5,000 years of recorded history, quite probably more. That's a lot of scope to work with, and makes the Fire Nation's level of technology (and the Earth Kingdom's level of logistical organization, as seen in the Omashu delivery system) much less surprising. Actually, I will be surprised if the Fire Nation hasn't invented the internal combustion engine and related technologies, though given that their territory is mostly volcanic islands, they may well not have things like a highway system and personal automobiles. And, of course, if you have people who can create fireballs with a thought, inventing cannons seems a bit less urgent; catapults will suffice. *grin*
-----
Avatar Roku (Winter Solstice, Part 2)
5. Wait a minute. At the end of episode 7, the moon is a waxing crescent. At the beginning of episode 8, the very same night, the moon is full. Astronomy fail for the lose!
6. Zuko, shoving old men through doors in the middle of the night is not proper behavior. Stop it.
7. I am trying to get Zuko's timeline straight. A few episodes back, he says he's been searching for the Avatar for two years. In this episode, Iroh says Zuko is sixteen. That implies he was exiled at 14... yet fandom and fic consensus is that Zuko was thirteen when exiled. So who's rounding which numbers?
8. The Fire Nation has a hell of a lot of ships if they can afford to keep that many maintaining a double line blockade. No wonder they need colonies; they cannot possibly have enough coal, iron, or people in their own islands to maintain that kind of military buildup.
9. I stand by my previous statement that Commander Zhao is creepy. Intelligent and capable, and not bad-looking without a shirt, but fundamentally creepy.
10. Sokka with the homemade bombs, not as stupid as he looks! And Katara with the deception! They make a good team when they're not ragging on each other. *grin* (And yet again, we have fun with Momo's shadow, sort of a callback to his first appearance.)
11. Oh! Zuko made it to the temple! *bites fingernails*
12. And Aang made it inside! (Is is bad that I kind of want both of them to succeed, even though their current goals are mutually exclusive? *sigh*)
13. I really wonder what Sokka and Katara make of Zhao and Zuko's little argument. Especially when Zuko seems, for a moment, almost to be defending Aang... or at least preferring him to Zhao.
14. More timeline information: it is now winter solstice in the northern hemisphere (it cannot be the southern winter solstice, since Sokka talked about midnight sun madness, and we never saw night at the south pole), and the comet will arrive by the end of summer. That means... late August, I guess? Which gives Aang about eight months to learn waterbending, earthbending, and firebending, and beat Ozai. Therefore, the entire series occurs over about nine months, since I think it's been about a month since Aang got out of the iceberg. Good to know!
-----
The Waterbending Scroll
15. The 'puddle' joke. *cracks up* Oh, the matching doofy glee on Katara's and Aang's faces! *cracks up again*
16. Iroh takes great pleasure in wrong-footing people, doesn't he? Zuko especially (and there it is done with love), but he loves playing on people's expectations. I love Iroh.
17. And Aang has lots of power and no judgment whatsoever. Now both groups are heading to town for supplies. I foresee hijinks!
18. Ooh, look at the sails on those ships! *lusts after*
19. Parrots mean pirates. Duh. Even if they seem to be half iguana. *grin*
20. Aang, you suck at money. Please stop trying.
21. Cabbage Man returns! Is he... caressing that cabbage? My goodness, he really is! *cracks up*
22. Huh. Seeing Zuko's ship (which, courtesy of episode 8, we now know is relatively small for a Fire Nation warship) next to those sailing ships gives a real sense of scale. And it makes the blockade last episode even more ostentatiously impressive. Seriously, why are so many ships out in the middle of the ocean? The Fire Nation obviously has more control of the seas than the Earth Kingdom, and the Water Tribes don't seem to be much of an obstacle at this point, so what is Zhao guarding against?
23. Katara, do I detect you displacing guilt as anger? I think I do.
24. Zuko and the pirates: first, yay for Zuko recognizing stray details and figuring out what's going on. Second, Zuko is obviously better at predicting what the GAang are going to do. Third, he is very sure he has the upper hand and doesn't mind flaunting it. Fourth, so he didn't mention Aang is the Avatar, eh? I can see why he didn't, but Sokka is very clever to pick up on that and break up that unstable alliance. Fifth... the pirates didn't strike me as that good at fighting; maybe the captain is captain because he can beat up all his crew? Or maybe the GAang does better than they ought to because the pirates are used to fighting more conventional opponents. I dunno; the relative power and skill levels seem oddly variable in this episode.
25. My quest to understand Zutara continues: in this episode, Zuko and Katara finally interact. He mentions his lost honor, and there is the business with her mother's necklace. Okay, yes, that can be read as enemy-shipping subtext, especially since he apparently noticed that the necklace was hers... unless he was just making a safe guess, since she's the only girl in the group and it doesn't look like the sort of jewelry an earthbender would have left on the prison platform. But all that aside, if people object to Kataang because it reads to them as a young woman with a little boy, I have to say this scene reads to me as a young man with a little girl. And Zuko is clearly only interested in Katara as a way of getting to Aang, while she thinks he's a dangerous, evil jerk. So, you know, I can see the subtext, but it does nothing for me. I will keep an eye out, since this is apparently the most popular noncanon pairing (and is even more popular than many canon pairings), but I think it's just not really to my taste. *shrug*
26. Aang, you idiot, blowing air at a net is not going to work. There's nothing to push against.
27. Sokka doesn't know how to work an Earth Kingdom sailboat. And why should he? It's not as if he's ever been on one before. Yay world-building details! Actually, the whole sequence with the double ship theft, the river battle, and the waterfall is really cool. (And funny. But mostly cool.)
28. "Maybe it should be a proverb." *cracks up* Oh, Iroh, never stop being crazy awesome, okay?
-----
Dinner now. Then I will either get some writing done or watch another three episodes.
Also, Halloween has been and gone. My basket of candy was emptied by 6pm or so, after which Downstairs Neighbors L & M replaced it with their own bowl and candy, taking advantage of the small end table I set out on the porch to hold my basket at a reasonable child height. I brought in the end table at 9pm, after their bowl was also emptied.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-01 08:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-01 10:59 am (UTC)Also, the fire nation apparently uses fire bending to power their vehicles. No need to burn coal to make water into steam for steam engines when you have humans who can make fire... y'know. ^_^
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-01 06:25 pm (UTC)I will keep an eye on that issue, to see what canon does with it and how it can be rationalized. Thanks for the heads-up!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-01 07:00 pm (UTC)But I suppose you're right about there being a dual-use power system for the ships, if not outright coal burning.
Also, Sokka is BRILLIANT and will eventually experience something dreadful... character growth.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-01 06:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-02 02:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-02 03:22 am (UTC)