Welp, I Did It.

Through determination and sheer bloody-mindedness, that’s how! Seriously, though, congrats. :D

Daily Kuvira #100

Holy crap how have I gone 100 gawt damn days of doing this so far?

This is distressingly on-point. You should share that demo tape with me sometime, @coppermarigolds.

I heard @coppermarigolds wrote an eight verse song about #kuvira ?????

As a fan of alternate histories of various stripes, there’s nothing more disappointing that a story that imagines a world where history went differently, but almost everything is still exactly the same. The whole point of the concept is to have fun extrapolating the changes. On the subject of Beatles-themed alternate histories, Ian R. Macleod, one of my favorite sf/f authors working today, wrote a novella back in 1992 called “Snodgrass” which imagined Lennon leaving the Beatles in 1962 over a fight with a studio executive, only to spend the rest of his life being haunted by the road he never took. It was eventually adapted as a short drama a few years back with Ian Hart as a bitter Lennon in his fifties.

Can a Beatles Fan Believe in ‘Yesterday’?

Our resident hardcore Beatleologist on why this fantasy about a Fab Four-less world should have fixed its holes

… there’s no attempt to have fun with the Twilight Zone possibilities. There’s no humor about the “butterfly effect” in erasing the Beatles from the world they changed. It’s a parallel universe where Coldplay and Neutral Milk Hotel exist without the Fabs, and where all the men have longish haircuts that would have been unthinkable before the mop tops came along. As British critic Dorian Lynskey noted, “‘A world without the Beatles is a world that’s infinitely worse,’ says one character, in a film where a world without the Beatles is almost exactly the same.”

Yeah… I was about to make the argument that you can’t make a movie where everyone save one schlub “forgets”: the Beatles without re-imagining a musical climate in which the Beatles, arguably the biggest pop band of all time, nor their inevitable influence, never existed, but apparently this is too pedantic for Hollywood. 

I thought my parent’s cat Archie was really serious about his breadmaking, but this is a whole other level. (His brother Claude, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to knead that much.) Also, Bodhi is getting so big!!! <3

I remember back in the day when this blanket used to be mine…

So instead of making the story about the political maneuvering in the former EK they’re going all-in on the mind-control plotline? Sigh... At this point, I think it’s safe to say that Bryke don’t know how to write political stories. Every time they introduce a political topic like relations between benders and non-benders in Republic City or discord between the two Water Tribes, they always end up walking it back, changing the subject, or having the issue hinge on some piece of magic or technology rather than on the thoughts and actions of the characters. There’s no shame in not having the knack for writing politics, but when you keep trying to do it despite making a hash of it every time, you really need to step back and reconsider a few things. Heck, Faith Erin Hicks is handling the divisions in proto-Republic City in the AtLA comics far better than Bryke ever did. On a more speculative note, a part of me wonders if DiMartino is actually going to go so far as to walk back the end of B4 and Kuvira ruler of the Earth Kingdom again. Wouldn’t that be a hell of a thing. (Also, is it just me, or Asami just become a damsel in distress for Korra to save ever since their relationship began?)

It’s Korra and Kuvira vs Mako, Bolin, and Asami in The Legend of Korra: Ruins of the Empire Part 3!

We now have the cover and description and they come with a major bombshell: Part Two is still months out and Part Three even further after that, but Mako, Bolin, and Asami become brainwashed and turned against Korra, along with others across the Earth Kingdom, .

This could be the result of the scientific experiments using spirit energy the Earth Empire remnant was conducting.

This is actually kind of exciting because we’ve never seen Team Avatar battle each other before and that’s now a possibility. Of course, Korra should realistically have a much higher base power level, but who knows what the spirit energy experiments have up their sleeve…

Here’s the full description:

“Kuvira’s true nature is revealed, and the Earth Kingdom will feel the consequences!

Thanks to Commander Guan and Doctor Sheng’s brainwashing technology, all hope for a fair election in the Earth Kingdom is lost. Korra works with Toph, Su, and Kuvira to plan a means to rescue not just the brainwashed Mako, Bolin, and Asami, but everyone else caught up in Guan’s plan! With the Earth Empire potentially on the rise again, Kuvira pulls another trick from her sleeve … but whose side is she truly on?”

You can see the cover and description for Part Two here. It comes out November 12th.

Part Three arrives on February 25th, 2020.

source

My own theory is that a majority of the new Air Nation is made up of former Earth Kingdom subjects for two main reasons. First of all, the simple fact that the Earth Kingdom is the most populous nation in the world means that, if the number of people developing airbending was equally distributed, the lion’s share of new airbenders would appear in the Earth Kingdom. Secondly, it seems like Tenzin got the majority of his “recruits” from Ba Sing Se, where they were refugees fleeing conscription and had no choice but to leave the EK, while others presumably came to Republic City as civil war broke out falling the Earth Queen’s assassination. By contrast, the Korra-era Fire Nation and the two Water Tribes were relatively stable and humane places, so the new airbenders probably had less of an impetus to emigrate. I imagine some did, but it wasn’t a matter of life or death for them. As for the airbenders who stayed behind in the Earth Kingdom, I had a dark idea about that. A few years ago, I was playing with story ideas for a potential Kuvira fic, and I hit upon this idea of a bunch of pro-Kuvira EK airbenders joining her army and being put into a special unit. With a training regiment crudely based off of whatever old books about airbending were floating around the EK, these airbenders would learn to control and manipulate poison gas as an offensive weapon against opposing armies and in fortification-clearing operations. While they would seem rather graceless and clumsy compared to someone like Tenzin, the fact that these “gasbenders” would be wielding clouds of the Avatarverse’s equivalents of mustard gas, phosgene, and chlorine would make them terrifying in their own right, and they would be one of the many things that turned the world against Kuvira. Sadly I never came up with an actual story to put this idea in, but I still have the gasbenders in my back pocket for a rainy day.

Were there no new Air benders in the Fire Nation of Water Tribes? We saw the Air benders pop up in Republic City (EK colony) and Lin had reports of Air benders in the Earth Kingdom.

Does this mean Air benders come from “the people of the earth element” or that the other two nations just kept quiet about it?  It certainly would have been interesting to see how the modern Fire Nation deals Air benders in their midst. 

Where did the Air benders come from in the pre- fire- conquest days? Where they all born within the nomadic- monk society? That seems very unlikely. Where they born elsewhere and joined the order as a “higher calling”? Where they Air benders from all nations or just the Earth kingdom? and if so, why? 

While Tenzin & Krew pressured the new Air benders to join it was a voluntary choice in the end. Was it always that way?  what I’m getting at is … there may be people with Air bending abilities that are not part of the Air bending culture/ society. Are they self taught? are they lying dormant? What are the stories of the non joiners?

What happened? I haven’t been following the show, but I’m vaguely aware they did something with Spock in the latest episode.

Wtf, Strange New Worlds is making me hate Star Trek

This is very embarrassing, but I forgot to link the blog post that discussed Kuvira. It’s right here: https://futuristdolmen.wordpress.com/2015/08/23/kuvira-an-appraisal-of-the-woman-and-her-works/

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.

I’m not gonna lie; I got a little caught up when I saw that Picard had kept that banner in the Picard trailer.