Let’s skip the flowery intros and get to the point, because this is important.
Lotor’s vindication and reunion with Allura were originally part of VLD s8 and I can prove it. Most animation relating to this plot was excised, while other clips were re-purposed to make it look like he was dead all along: but some are still in there.
The removal of this plot line was one of the major factors in completely messing up season 8, and it was a change that was made very recently; no earlier than August in fact. There is a significant, non-zero chance that an unedited version of Season 8 exists in its entirety; completely finished.
The evidence is below the cut.
Trigger Warnings: Gore - that image and discussion of it, body horror, sexism, and major character death.
who is old enough to be part of the fanfic.net era where we literally talked to our characters? like, had conversations with them?
cause I do. as a lonely child of 12 who had no friends, it was a favorite pasttime of mine to boot up the dial-up internet and type out imaginary conversations with ouran high school host club characters in the beginning notes before even starting the damn chapter (which was inevitably 500 words long and absolutely awful)
darkheartinthesky
Modern Author’s Note on Ao3: might discuss some possible triggers, thank readers for comments, apologize for a delay in update, etc–talking to reader, essentially.
Author’s Note on FFN back in 2010:
Author: Y’all are gonna love this cahpter!!!! [Character] not sooooo much
Character:…wh–what’s gonna happen?
Author: Don’t worry about it! ^.^
Character: WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO ME??
Author: ;)
Character: D:
those were dark, dark days, man. Today’s Fandom Freshman are sure lucky they missed this.
or where you would have ask blogs for your ocs except it was just in a ff.net story. basically an entire classic authors note except people would ask questions. that was my childhood.
Y'all forgot that sometimes we also appeared in the middle of the text with notes like “(author: noooo >:( character is such a b*tch!!!! character: I’M NOT!!!!)” And it was the crimgiest shit ever but we had fun doing it lmao
– I created something similar that is more focused on what not to do when creating a good villain, but I wanted to do a more basis-level post on where to start and which direction to head in when you begin creating a villain. Also, I use a lot of reference to The Joker and Batman in this article because I assume most people have a general knowledge of the characters. I hope the examples make it easier to digest, since this stuff can get difficult to navigate otherwise. Happy Writing!
The protagonist always comes first. Always. The protagonist gets the most page-time. You need to understand the way the protagonist will respond to threat before you introduce the threat. If you simply throw a blank character into the villain’s lair, the story will fall flat, because 80% of the storytelling will focus on getting to know them, how they got into this conflict, and how they’re gonna get out of it.
Decide The Why Before The How
Before you create the villain’s master plans or how they prefer to create issues for the hero, you need to decide what makes them want to make the plans in the first place. The villain’s motivations should never be a mystery to the reader, at least not throughout the whole story. That’s not mystery, that’s bad character development, so make sure you understand what makes the villain want to clash against the hero before you establish how they plan to do it. This can be told to the reader in reverse, like it was in The Dark Knight where The Joker revealed that he simply wants to create chaos after the creation of chaos had been done. This was after the major climax of the actual action scenes, and this is a viable option for your story. Just make sure you share the motivations at some point.
Get In Their Mindset & How It Contrasts The Protagonist’s
The reason the Joker works so well is because Batman has a lot of underlying insecurities and this complex where he refuses to be lethally violent toward even the worst of foes, which complements the Joker’s reckless action that he seems to enjoy while simultaneously not giving a damn what happens to him or what anyone thinks about it. He is mischievous and curious and willing to do whatever he wants in order to create chaos for the sake of chaos, whereas Bruce Wayne is cautious, heavily reliant upon others, and has a lot to lose. Understanding the core drive of the hero’s actions will help you find a contrast to use for the villain’s. Don’t be afraid to spend time thinking about all the little branches and hypotheticals. The more you understand their similarities and differences, the deeper your scenes between them will be.
Create Their Vision
The villain cannot simply be an evil presence that wants the world to burn without any vision or reasoning. In order to understand the villain and therefore portray them, you have to understand what it is they’re after. Your villain might very well be a psychopath with daddy issues that simply wants to watch the world burn because they see no purpose in it, like the famous antagonist from the Batman Universe. However, that archetype is extremely overdone and boring when written poorly. Also, it might not suit your particular antagonist. Find what makes the villain tick, then how they prefer to control that thing, and then decide how that is going to manifest into their grand plan or ultimate goal.
Pay Close Attention To Details
Such as the villain’s temperament, their core values, and how those things came to be. Details like where they came from are important, but what’s more important is how those things are relevant to the present and the conflict at hand. Relate their past to their present and be clear about the future they want vs the future they’ll get, and how they’ll arrive there.
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i’m a bit late but following 2017′s music journey, here is a compilation of some of the stuff i did for voltron last year. looking back, i think my orchestration really has begun to blossom into a style i’m becoming happy with so im looking forward to seeing how my music grows this year!
as always thanks so much for the support and big love!
that fuckin green m&m bambi ps2 femdom thing that was everywhere for like three days and was never mentioned again
zendaya is meechee and how a bunch of anti-sj blogs got really really mad about it???
t posing
the batman comic where his whole dick and balls were out
fbi agent jokes
kung pow penis
sans undertale fucked my mom
hey peabrain, do you know how to teleport?
that whole thing where there were (apparently?) russian spy/hacker accounts on tumblr?????
where’s waldo style lucky luciano edits
that glitch where there were tons of blank reblogs on posts
people randomly started talking about rabies and there was a joke rabies pride flag and then people had to make PSAs saying uh hey rabies is literally fatal don’t go trying to get infected bc you will die because this is a normal website
the person who made a necklace out of a severed toe becomes bone thief 2.0
LET’S GO LESBIANS
that time when i thought the “i don’t feel so good”/disintegrating character jokes were just a surreal meme but they were actually a spoiler for the avengers movie??
the mad rush to desecrate todd howard’s wikipedia page for his birthday
Shout out to everyone that’s reading this and are actually actively applying this to their lives. Not just reblogging it and lying to themselves that they will get to this point “someday”.
i was a hopeful one for 2k19 until yall told me theyre turning a one direction wattpad fic into a movie so. guess its another three hundred days of hell ahead
okay i know this is like funny haha meme and all but anna todd is an almost 30 year old married woman who wrote a fanfiction about harry styles who is many years younger than her that not only has him in a lot of incredibly explicit sex scenes but it also portrays him as an abuser bad boy who only wants the main character (bland self-insert girl next door type) for sex. i read a large chunk of the first book of after when i was in middle school and it’s really Not Good.
after has been a problem in the 1d fandom for fucking years because besides being incredibly disrespectful towards harry, by virtue of it being a ~~harry styles fanfiction~~ on wattpad it attracted A LOT of younger girls who were then exposed to a really really unhealthy relationship dynamic that they are encouraged to want and romanticize because it has their idol.
so yes while the sentence “theyre turning a one direction wattpad fic into a movie” is really funny out of context as someone who has been following 1d since before after’s conception and watched firsthand all the bullshit it caused im really encouraging everyone to think about this and maybe give it the criticism it deserves.
Katara: It’s not magic. It’s waterbending, and it’s- Sokka: Yeah, yeah, an ancient art unique to our culture, blah blah blah. Look, I’m just saying that if I had weird powers, I’d keep my weirdness to myself.
So I wanted to talk a little about Katara, because I think we often focus on her grief for her mother, and forget her relationship to her culture, and her experience of the Southern Water Tribe genocide (unlike the Air Nomads genocide, which was for the greater partover after four big terrifyingly effective simultaneous strikes, this one took place over a long length of time - more than 40 years? 50? - and it wasn’t total, but it definitely was one. genocide = the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group, fwiw)
(Kanna’s village - before and after)
All of the Southern water benders were exterminated or taken away to rot in prison (where they all died eventually except for Hama). Katara was born the only bender left in the whole South Pole. Then when she was eight years old, she survived a raid that was meant to kill her, but took her mother instead (she probably was too young to realize that, to her it must have been a question mark up until she met Yon Rha - gratuitous cruelty? Why her mother in particular? They took nothing else!).
So Katara from a young age had a double burden to bear: that of her mother, and the legacy of her bending (and she was shown as painfully aware of her situation and what it meant on both front). But here’s the thing: Katara could be a mother, she was naturally good at it, and her grandmother could teach her what she didn’t already knew. Her family and tribe demanded that of her, they needed her to be that for them (especially after her father and the rest of the men basically abandoned them). However, there was no one left to teach her how to waterbend - she had almost no hope of ever becoming a master without formal training, her brother thought it was silly and weird and let her know, her grandmother thought it was a waste of time. But she kept practicing, because she knew how important it was, to her and to her tribe, that she kept trying (as the only one left who could).
(…an ancient art unique to our culture, blah blah blah…)
(Of course she would obsess over that waterbending scroll)
When she gets to the North Pole, she meets Pakku, and with him the opportunity of finally becoming a true master. But because she is a girl, he judges her unworthy. He judges her, the only remaining southern waterbender, unworthy of carrying on their culture. The Fire Nation didn’t care about the gender of their prisoners, men and women - they all fought side by side for their freedom in the South, and they were all taken away to the last one, and killed to the last one. In the South, the women had the choice to learn how to fight, or be defenseless. And privileged master Pakku couldn’t possible realize the extend of what he was denying her in that moment.
Katara had to prove herself, she had to earn her right to these teachings. And if she had been less good or less stubborn or not Kanna’s granddaughter - well the North would have refused their sister-tribe the power to use their common cultural heritage to fight back against the nation that destroyed them.
(It’s sexist and terrible.)
Meh, thankfully, she was that good, stubborn, and Kanna’s granddaughter, and she did get to become a master.
Good.
But, of course, her story doesn’t end here, and wrt her culture, the next chapter is a much more traumatizing experience. In the Fire Nation, she meets another master. This time it’s an old woman from the South like her (“You’re a waterbender! I’ve never met another waterbender from our tribe!”), and she is, ah, more than willing to help her.
Look how happy Katara looks at the idea to learn from her in particular:
Katara: I can’t tell you what it means to meet you. It’s an honor! You’re a hero. Hama: I never thought I’d meet another southern waterbender. I‘d like to teach you what I know so that you can carry on the southern tradition when I’m gone. Katara: Yes! Yes, of course! To learn about my heritage… it would mean everything to me.
But when Hama starts her lesson, the techniques she teaches have been obviously developed with one goal in mind: survival in enemy territory. They can’t possibly have been invented in the South Pole, where water is abundant everywhere. They are deadly and cruel, and the damage they do to the environment leaves Katara sad and uncomfortable, but Hama waves that off as unimportant. It doesn’t matter, she doesn’t have the time to worry about flowers or beauty or nature. To her that peace and beauty is probably just an illusion anyway, a lie: years after her escape she is still living the war, and war is ugly and rotten and messy (her world is ugly and rotten and messy - this is her comfort zone).
The last technique she teaches Katara is bloodbending. She forces Katara to learn something she finds disgusting, repulsive (just like Hama was forced to learn?) by torturing her (Hama was tortured), by overpowering her, invading her, making her lose control over her own body, bending her blood (Hama herself is clinging to the last remain of control she managed to get back after rotting in prison for years), and finally by threatening to have the two people she cares most about in the world kill each other right under her eyes (Hama lost everyone too, she had to say goodbye).
(Katara: But, to reach inside someone and control them? I don’t know if I want that kind of power. Hama: The choice is not yours. The power exists…and it’s your duty to use the gifts you’ve been given to win this war. Katara, they tried to wipe us out, our entire culture… your mother! Katara: I know. Hama: Then you should understand what I’m talking about. We’re the last Waterbenders of the Southern Tribe. We have to fight these people whenever we can. Wherever they are, with any means necessary! Katara: It’s you. You’re the one who’s making people disappear during the full moons. Hama: They threw me in prison to rot, along with my brothers and sisters. They deserve the same. You must carry on my work.)
And this, this, is the only truly southern waterbending Katara is ever going to learn. This is her tribe’s bending heritage, what’s left of it: blood, grief, suffering, hatred, loss of control over both your body and mind (because it’s terrible, but I think that’s what’s implied by the show: bloodbending makes you lose your mind. Hama’s only mean of regaining physical freedom ended up trapping her in another nightmare). Hama gifts her with a power she despises (but will use anyway in her darkest hour when she loses control) and a philosophy of violence and revenge.
Katara chose peace and forgiveness. As an adult, she will have bloodbending outlawed, she will become the greatest healer in the world, and she’ll teach her daughter, the next avatar, probably many others. These choices matter, and we should talk about them with that background in mind. Katara redefined her heritage - or rather she created a new one for herself: she refused the condition that was forced upon her (bloodbender) and ensured nobody could legally do to someone else what Hama did to her (and it’s implied this law is valid anywhere in the world). She transmitted Pakku’s warrior teachings, the ones she fought for, to the next generations (and did a great job of it!), but she also taught them how to heal, refusing to separate the arts as in Northern Water Tribe tradition - and healing was something she discovered by herself, that she felt was always a part of her. At that, she became the universally acknowledged best. Her legacy, despite everything that happened to her, will never be one of violence.
tl;dr: Katara is one of the strongest fictional characters ever created bye
macklemuffin
