Changing Direction

I’ve always been very reluctant to equate Kuvira to either Chaing or Mao. Part of the problem is that if you start looking for 1:1 historical analogies in fantasy worlds you end up developing tunnel vision you miss out on what the writer is actually trying to do with their setting. The other issue is that Bryke never really made it clear what Kuvira’s beliefs and ideology were beyond a few speeches and a handful of background details that don’t entirely fit together. Back when B4 was airing the revelation of the Earth Empire’s internment camps caused a stir in the fandom (at least among the Kuvira fans), since there was literally nothing in Kuvira’s backstory or behavior to explain why she would be an ethnic chauvinist. This old blog post took an interesting tack by discussing Kuvira’s context in the world history of Avatar and suggesting that she might be closer to Kemal Atatürk than any figure from modern Chinese history. (There’s also some neat discussion of the personal and political relationship between Kuvira and Suyin too!)

A piece I did for avatarfanzine - Children of the Earth zine, which if you pre-ordered it, should be getting it real soon. I wished Kuvira would’ve had a longer season to shine a lot more. She genuinely saw herself as the hero of the people.

“Oh, and if you’ve been possessed by a sentient alien being, you’re gonna want to go across the quad to the Dexter Remmick Memorial Medical Center. Victims of energy beings meet up in 512, but if you were bodyjacked by a malevolent parasite you’ll wanna to head down to 337. Benevolent parasites are on 212, God knows why.”

Starfleet Support Groups

The scary thing is that Starfleet probably needs a separate support group for “people who have accidentally lived decades/entire lifetimes in alternate realities until it turned out it was just an hour in the real world.”

What? Oh, no, you’re looking for the “I was caught in a timeloop and went insane” support group. That’s next door.

“Mirror Universe trauma”? Down the hall.

“Dealing With My Duplicate Self” meets on Thursdays.

(O’Brien just attends all of them. If it hasn’t happened, it’s probably going to.)

Awesome Childhood Spelling

Uhh…where it says “looked” read “lopped”. lol This is based on the original tweet you see up there by Twitter user @Sal_Perez4 (see the original tweet here).

Credit @Aelkus on Twitter

Oh, you just reminded me of my second-favorite Shakespeare adaptation: Rupert Goold's 2010 film adaptation of Macbeth, with Sir Patrick Stewart himself as Macbeth and Kate Fleetwood as Lady Macbeth. It's based on a production Goold put on in 2007 with Stewart, and it sets the play in a nebulously-modern setting with a "subterranean Soviet" aesthetic. It's not quite what anon was looking for, but it's in the ballpark. Oh, and in this adaptation the witches take the guise of WWI-era war nurses.

Having seen the 1995 version of Richard III, I am now convinced that there needs to be an adaptation set in the dying days of tsarist Russia, if only for the red-white symbolism. Just like, the ostentation, the moral ambiguity/amorality of literally everyone involved, the end-of-an-era vibe, except the era definitely needs to end. Also, Elizabeth Woodville in a kokoshnik? Elizabeth Woodville in a kokoshnik.

DUDE YOUR MIND

Incredible, but true: @coppermarigolds deserves to have a good day today.

:3

Could you make one daily Kuvira a drunk Kuvira?

Daily Kuvira #31

Tbh I don’t know much about drawin’ drunks. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But Kuvira probably rarely drinks and when she does she’s the ultimate giddy dumbass.

i wish orson welles was here to run a toxic blog

Ah, but you see:

1. Any man can go out and buy one cake and spend something like US$12 on a cake, but it takes a man of true genius and cunning to steal US$480 worth of cake and not even get a police reprimand.

2. For Lex, it’s not enough that he has forty cakes. EVERYONE ELSE MUST HAVE ZERO CAKES!!!

And That’s Terrible!

Dream big, Madiha. In the meantime, take a look at an old Charles Stross called Missile Gap. Something very strange happens to the Earth in the early 1970s and the Soviet Union builds ekranoplans to explore its new neighborhood. He also has an older story called A Colder War, which has no ekranoplans, but the Great Old Ones are weaponized by the superpowers during the Cold War and Oliver North becomes the death of worlds.

someday im gonna write a battle where ekranoplans are the key to victory