Sea_Gull [they/them]

  • 6 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: April 21st, 2022

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  • I hate how Amon is given a sympathetic backstory that gets no exploration at all. He’s supposedly orphaned by benders who his parents couldn’t fight.

    That’s legit what happens to Katara before the start of TLA. But instead of exploring that trauma, the story focuses on what it feels like to bend and how losing that is a profound loss.

    It could’ve been a cool exploration on the themes of powerlessness and coping with that, but instead it’s just that benders are just better and if you don’t bend then you need to get out of the way.

    In stories, it’s easy to assume you’d be a character with powers or knowledge, but the reality is more likely to be you’re the one on the outside of power in these fictional settings












  • In my book’s setting, anyone can learn magic, but the time, teaching, and practice required isn’t allotted equally. Different learning styles and material conditions mean that people who would be talented sorcerers end up doing mundane work augmented by magic.

    One part of the history though is that there’s been a history of laborers who used magic derived from servitude to cause a class-based revolution. The nobles who practiced fancy complex magic were few in number and lacked the experience to fight a long war with farmers who water crops by hauling thousands of gallons at once or cleaners who can sweep a castle with a single wind spell.

    The tools of their oppression (being railroaded into service-based magic) became their liberation. Centuries later, that informs policy on magic and how it’s accessed.