The Avatar_500 Jump Start Posting And Comments Meme

[attackfish]

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 byclockwerkchaos
How Tenzin Met Pema by lavanyasix


Fills:

Forwolfs_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

Comments

Re: Quiet Shadowed Places - The Cooler

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Probably not navigation per se, except in very small spaces when he's alone, but he's figured out that he can tell surface details of something if he can blow fire at it. Go Zuko!

No one has ever asked about podfic before, but I have had people do translations of my fic, and I think that policy works well here too. I don't mind at all, and am in fact very flattered. I just like to be credited and told where it's posted.

Re: Quiet Shadowed Places - The Cooler

[chordatesrock.livejournal.com]

That could be very dangerous in wooden buildings. Aside from the cooler, it's only really useful around metal and rock, in situations where he can't just touch things. I don't think he needs to avoid leaving fingerprints anywhere, so it's basically down to learning about the ceilings of buildings in the Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom.

Oh, and spotting rocks being bent at him. If he kept his fire going all around himself, then when a rock came toward him, it would reach the fire and he'd know to dodge.

Re: Quiet Shadowed Places - The Cooler

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah, it's a skill of only mild utility, but you put together enough skills of mild utility, and suddenly... Also, it's faster than trying to feel around with his hands.

And yes, it would make fighting easier. Earthbending makes a noise. When he hears it, he can send out a circle of fire, and where it stops tells him where the rock is. You just have to get clever with this kind of thing.

Re: Quiet Shadowed Places - The Cooler

[chordatesrock.livejournal.com]

That's true. It would be useful if he needed to see something quickly.

He could try multiple pulses of fire-bubbles, too, although he might be able to get information about the speed and direction of movement from just one. On the other hand, an earthbender could fake him out with a rock heading in one direction as he sends out his fire, then wait for him to dodge and aim the rock at his new location. Multiple pulses would be safest and he could accidentally fry his enemy, which is what he's trying to do anyway. (That would make it difficult for Zuko to fight alongside someone.)

What kind of equivalent skills do you think blind air and waterbenders would have, if any? If a blind airbender can tell the shape of everything the air is touching, that's basically like not being blind. You couldn't use that skill to read, but you could use it to see around corners. (The fact that Aang neither does that nor mentions it suggests that a blind airbender would not have a gamebreaking skill like that.) A less overwhelmingly unfair version might be the ability to sense air currents. That could allow an airbender to find people and obstacles by the way they divert wind around them, but only on a windy day.

If a waterbender could feel the shape and size of any nearby body of water, that could also potentially be an overwhelming advantage, if sensing the location and configuration of, say, a person's cytoplasm and blood plasma counts as sensing a body of water. While ink is still wet, I believe it has water in it, which would allow a blind waterbender to write and spot any drops of ink that get on the paper, but not to read. So a blind waterbender could feel where people are and could write well, but would not be able to get environmental information except by using a trick similar to Zuko's.

On the other hand, depending on the definition of earth, Toph might be able to read pencil lead, if pencils existed in her world. (It occurs to me that if Toph can read something, she can bend it. Written contracts simply would not work for her.)

Speaking of creative uses of bending, I always wondered why no one on the show ever spat for bending material (especially when Katara was desperate enough to sweat for it and Hama was desperate enough to bend rats) or cut xemself for bending material (considering how dark Hama's backstory got already, she seems like an obvious choice of person to bite a vein open and use that as a weapon).

Re: Quiet Shadowed Places - The Cooler

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

It's ironic that just as Zuko starts fighting against his own people, who he has been relatively able to fight all along, he finally starts gaining the skills that would enable him to fight people of other nations and nonbenders. And also that as he finally starts fighting with others at his side, he develops a skill that necessitates fighting alone.

It's very possible blind airbenders could theoretically do all of that but that all of the ones who thought of it died smashing into a cliff face before they had fully mastered it.

As far as waterbenders go, since bloodbending is such a specialized skill that takes so much power and for most people requires the full moon, and also because Toph never talks about being able to see people's bones, using waterbending to see people would probably not work. Sensing water in the air probably wouldn't work well either.

I did some research on ink in Asia before modern chemistry before to see about whether or not Toph could be able to learn to read ink, and found out that while in Europe people used an oil base and a mix of earth and organic pigments, in Asia, they used almost exclusively organic pigments in water based ink. Shame about that. However, a waterbender would be able to write, but how would you teach them when they couldn't read?

Opening one's own veins would make it lose its Y7 rating? And spit is pretty viscous. It might be troublesome to bend.

Re: Quiet Shadowed Places - The Cooler

[chordatesrock.livejournal.com]

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...

Re: Quiet Shadowed Places - The Cooler

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

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.

Re: Quiet Shadowed Places - The Cooler

[chordatesrock.livejournal.com]

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?)

Re: Quiet Shadowed Places - The Cooler

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

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!

Re: Quiet Shadowed Places - The Cooler

[(Anonymous)]

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.

Re: Quiet Shadowed Places - The Cooler

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

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.

Re: Quiet Shadowed Places - The Cooler

[chordatesrock.livejournal.com]

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

Re: Quiet Shadowed Places - The Coolernon

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

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