attackfish | The Avatar_500 Jump Start Posting And Comments Meme

Alright, I'm unwilling to let

avatar_500 go without a fight, so I am going to incentivize participation. Write and post a fic for Round 65 - Air, and I'll fill a drabble request of yours. Comment on all of the fics in the round (everybody said they wanted more comments), and at the end of the round, link me to all of the comments and I'll fill a request for you. Do both, and I will fulfill three requests for commentfic.

The rules for posting to

avatar_500 can be found here.

You don't have to belong to

avatar_500 or have ever participated in it before to earn a request for commenting, and if you do want to join to post a fic for the round, all you have to do is click the "join the community" button, and you're in, easy.

About which I will not write (so don't request):

Ty Zula
NC-17
Incest
Ships where one party is much older or younger than the other(s)
Rape
Other people's OCs

Other than that, everything is fair game.

The deadline to post fic is Saturday December 1st at 11:00 PM EST. The deadline to post comments is Saturday December 8th at 11:00 PM EST.

Fics in The Round So Far:

Marking Boundaries by

attackfish
The Need to be Seen by

lalunatique
Playtime at Air Temple Island by

wolfs_lament
What Are the Odds? by

c3childs
Wrong by

chordatesrock
Four Element - Air- Third Stanza by

clockwerkchaos
How Tenzin Met Pema by

lavanyasix

Fills:

For

wolfs_lament:
For a story: Hufflepuff Zuko, Secret Tunnel

For

chordatesrock:
   For a story: Holding This Breath: the Aftermath of Kidnapping Aang
   For commenting on everyone's fics: Quiet Shadowed Places: the Cooler
   Bonus: Zuko/Toph, all grown up and surviving state dinners

For

lalunatique:
For commenting on everyone's fics: Ty Lee and Suki - Sake

For

somariel:
For commenting on everyone's fics: The Grand Lotus puts out a call

For:

c3childs:
   For a story: Hama - Katara wasn't her first pupil *Warning for violence and death*
   For commenting on everyone's fics: Amon - the vigilante of Republic City
   Bonus: Yakone - he owns Republic City

For

lavanyasix:
   For a story: Lin Realizes Toph is a dirty cop
   For commenting on everyone's fics: Pre-series - Korra encounters prejudice due to being half Northern and half Southern
   Bonus: Ozai marries his son off into an insultingly low-ranked colonial noble family. Zuko/Kori

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Poor Zuko. Will you ever write a scene where QSPverse Zuko is up against an earthbender and has someone he needs to protect? That would make his reason to fight the reason why he couldn't.

QSPverse Zuko would still have been able to fight people of other nations, so long as they didn't have ranged weapons available. He could use a sword against its wielder by heating it and if he couldn't just fry someone unarmed from afar, he could grapple without too much disadvantage. He could also fight alongside a firebender, if his teammate were using fire constantly.

I LOL'd at your rebuttal to my argument.

But earthbenders in general can't bend bones, while waterbenders in general can bend bodily fluids in general, albeit with caveats. Toph also seems to need to be touching the earth to use her earthbending; why should she be able to see people's bones, specifically, when she's not touching them and when they're separated from the ground she's touching by layers of flesh? That being the case, I don't think the situation is analogous.

Well, to be fair, Helen Keller learned to write just fine and I'm sure she's not the only one. But if a waterbender could sense wet ink, then xe could watch while someone else wrote and memorize the shapes before they dried. Or, considering where waterbenders live, writing in the snow would work. So would bending water into the proper shapes. If the waterbender needed more time to study each character, then they could be frozen into that shape, giving xem as long as it took for the ice to melt. Finally, a waterbender could simply use the same techniques real-world blind people use.

The techniques would also be useful to a waterbender who became blind after having sight for some time, maybe in the war.

Spit may be viscous, but we have precedent for waterbenders bending solids (ice), colloids (blood) and muddy slurry. Notably, while ice seems to be bendable even for novices, colloids and slurry are more difficult: blood can only be bent by a master waterbender on the full moon, while Katara needed Toph's help with the slurry. (On the other hand, the swamp waterbenders were able to successfully bend plant life at any time, so the difficulty in bending blood may be a matter of overcoming another's will or something equally mystical, rather than a matter of the physical characteristics.) It's possible that this means that water becomes less bendable the more impurities it has. Further evidence in favor of this view is the potability of Katara's bending water even after a season and a half. Going against this view, Katara bends ocean water, lake water and dedicated bending water with equal ease.

I find it odd that opening one's own veins would be considered that much more disturbing than bloodbending, child abuse, getting struck by lightning and dying in a volcano.

By the way, do parts of existing fics count for avatar-500? Because I have two parts of my Zuko and Aang character swap up right now (one is Wrong, one is up on my journal) and the third is the right length and fits the prompt...

I don't know. I tend to write fills for the verse as I get requests for them. It's not something I particularly dedicate myself to, unlike, say, Kindle the Wind or Good People and Death Eaters. But it's a fun idea to play with.

Zuko is a good grappler, and in close up fighting, he's a force to be reckoned with. However, he can't shove heat into something without touching it, which makes heating up somebody's swords difficult. He has better luck just burning their flesh with that method. However, most of the fighting we see in A:tLA is ranged group fighting, at which he is pretty severely disadvantaged.

It seems like kind of a dangerous skill to perfect.

Hama was the first waterbender to discover bloodbending, so before her, nobody bended bodily fluids inside somebody else's body either, and most earthbenders aren't restricted like Toph to only the earth they are touching. Which means we could be one clever earthbender away from bonebending. Also, we only ever see one swampbender bending plants, and it's heavily implied he's a great master, the sort of anti-Hama. We have no idea if it's more difficult to bend plants. Also, you're right, it may well be mystical. But spit is still not a lot of water. You would have to spit a lot to get good amounts. Faster than sweating, though.

True, but the A:tLA verse uses Chinese characters, of which there are several thousand. That would be a whole lot more difficult to teach than an alphabet. It could be done, but it would take some serious dedication. And then, they would be easy to forget unless you used them constantly.

Visible blood and self injury both raise ratings automatically. A:tLA was pretty sparse on the visible blood. This is also probably why nobody peed for bending material.

I've done that, so yeah, go right ahead.

Hama was the first waterbender to admit to discovering bloodbending, and then only if the swamp waterbenders don't count. Besides, I don't think bones count as earth, because the important aspect of what counts as earth for earthbending doesn't seem to have anything to do with mineral content (or different soils would work differently) but with the fact that it is part of or came from the earth itself. Especially because, if what elements are in something determines its bendability, then earthbending is just too powerful. We've seen them bend coal. Carbonbending would be far too overpowered.

It takes dedication to learn an ideographic written language, but that applies whether or not you can see. It isn't any more complicated or difficult to remember through some other sense.

Yeah, had the show been more sensible, Toph would've totally been all over that. Hama, too, could've held it until a guard came around. "I peed for bending material, used it to slit the guard's throat and lifted his keys up to my cage in a bubble of pee" doesn't sound half as cool, though. (How much do you want to bet Hama actually peed herself free and discovered bloodbending later, but lied to make it sound cooler?)

I'm pretty sure that doesn't negate the ability of earthbenders to bend bone, since most elemental systems figured out pretty quickly that bones were related to stones. And you can't tell me that if bloodbending had been invented several times in the past, that it wouldn't have been whispered about, even if nobody had spoken of it out loud, and we have no indication of that at all.

Also, there's the cool factor of an earthbender making skeletons dance that I am not willing to give up.

When I was learning alphabets, I spent a lot of time looking up letters in the chart. It's not that it's harder to remember with some other sense, it's that it's harder to make reference charts. As I said, it could be done, but it would be really really difficult.

You know, that's my new headcannon. Pee for liberation!

A reference chart doesn't have to be as easy to make as a typical writing system and could be carved from wood or stone.

Skeletons dancing. Okay, you win.

I don't have time to log in, but this is chordatesrock.

This is true. Also, I have a feeling that Katara and Sokka learned without a chart, by repeatedly drawing characters in the snow, which wouldn't be any harder for a blind waterbender to learn, and not unreasonably harder for a blind nonbender to learn.

Also, in case you're interested, there's a really awesome fic about Toph learning to read, with possibly the best summary ever written:

Meanings tied up in dots and lines - http://archiveofourown.org/works/39243

Her parents congratulated Toph on learning to read, but said that as much as they admired her newfound ability to write they'd rather she didn't bend "Toph Bei Fong was here" into all the decorative boulders.

You wrote that one? I love that fic! I didn't realize it was yours!

Nonono, I'm just reccomending it. Because it's awesome.

The Avatar_500 Jump Start Posting And Comments Meme

Re: Quiet Shadowed Places - The Cooler

Re: Quiet Shadowed Places - The Cooler

Re: Quiet Shadowed Places - The Cooler

Re: Quiet Shadowed Places - The Cooler

Re: Quiet Shadowed Places - The Cooler

Re: Quiet Shadowed Places - The Cooler

Re: Quiet Shadowed Places - The Cooler

Re: Quiet Shadowed Places - The Coolernon