Hi! I'm Evie 21 bi ace she/they / I just reblog what I like / fandom account: fandomenthusiastt
Hello everyone, and welcome to my blog! Originally created after I was permanently locked out of my previous blog, this tumblr account is my space to be myself freely and as I choose to be. Saying that:
Please be respectful. This is my blog, I choose to operate it as I want.
As of March 27, 2023, I’m gonna be going dark for some personal reasons. I’ll be back eventually. Thank you for understanding.
“i’m not triggered or upset by or even ideologically opposed to it, i just associate it with something so bad that i can’t enjoy it anymore” is such a frustrating relationship to have with a piece of media
Pyromancy is ridiculously dangerous. Most pyromancers die before they turn 20 and 25 is considered ancient by their standards. You have reached 30 and show no signs of slowing down.
The other people on your shift don’t question it. Firefighters are a superstitious lot. They just know that you’re the one they want around on a serious structural fire. You suit up with them, you wear your bunker gear, you get your SCBA unit, you get the line like the rest of them, but when you’re around, the fire never seems quite as intense.
You think the chief knows. He saw you come out of that house putting your glove back on. You think your buddy knows too. She saw you grabbing the interior frame with your bare hand, and the heat kinda…shimmered.
They don’t treat you special, any more than any of the other lucky folks on the squad. There’s Jay, the guy who you listen to when he says move, there’s Jane, with those ears of hers, and then there’s you. When you’re around, the fire never gets out of control.
You’re in an apartment, you can’t get the electrical fire under control. It jumped to block your way out. You’re surrounded by your comrades in arms. You can’t keep it secret anymore.
“What the hell are you doing?!” Your company leader demands as you pull off your gloves. It’s hot enough to knock out a normal person from shock. You feel the heat like midday sun in Arizona.
You grab the wall and focus, “What are you doing? You’re gonna–” Your company leader trails off as the crackling of the fire decreases. Your hands vibrate as electricity and energy and plasma courses out of the wall into your body.
“Holy…” your buddy murmurs. Your hands are red-hot, with energy not with burns.
“Everybody duck!” You shout, just in time to aim your palms out the window. It blasts a massive cavity in the wall, vaporizing the window.
Your friends look on in shock. You expect terror, admonishment. “Huh. How about that?” Your boss murmurs. “Come on, let’s get the rest of this under control.”
You momentarily forgot who was in this field. People who lost the ability to give a damn when they were born.
Back at the station, after the equipment is cleaned up, rigs restocked and the reports are all filed, Chief ambles over to you. He’s stuffing his pipe with tobacco as he strolls through the bay to the outside door. The station has been smoke-free for years, so when Chief wants a bowl he takes a walk.
He half smiles and jerks his head towards the outside door– a signal that he wants a private word, but it’s not official. Nervously, you follow. You’ve seen him take this walk with other firefighters, he’s never invited you.
“You okay, probie?” he asks as you walk around the block with him.
“Yeah. I’m good,” you say.
He nods and doesn’t say anything for a minute. You wait for the inevitable, your stomach twisted up into knots. It was good while it lasted, but this has happened before. You’ve spent so long bouncing from job to job, career to career. Your mom transferred you to different schools whenever someone came too close to the truth. She was always worried about the prejudice against pyromancers, and she knew the statistics.
Few pyromancers ever made it out of their twenties. Not just because pyromancy itself was dangerous (which it was), but the rates of stress-related illnesses, depression, and suicide among them were very high due to how other people reacted to them. The minute someone heard you were a firestarter, it was all over. Every god damned fire that got out of control was laid at your door. Anytime there was a suspected arson on the news, they would interrogate any registered pyromancer in the neighborhood as if other people did not have access to fuel, heat, and oxygen.
“I think you freaked out the Lieutenant.” The chief snorts at last, chewing on his unlit pipe, his smile sly. “Me and Jay just spent the last half hour explaining to that knucklehead that he did not see what he saw. Not officially, anyway.” His smile is equal parts rueful and proud. “Don’t worry, kiddo, it didn’t go into the report. And don’t worry about Sarah. She has reasons of her own to keep quiet.”
That was… not what you expected.
He pulls a pair of gloves from his pocket. “Here, see if these fit. You can use these until the pair I ordered get here.” He hands you a pair of heavy gloves.
From the back, they look exactly like the type of gloves you have been wearing since you took Firefighter One, but on the palm side, they are completely open. As if to camouflage that someone was using their bare hands to fight fires.
You stop walking, staring at the equipment as you take in the implications, and then you look up at Chief’s shit-eating grin.
Slowly he raises his hand to his pipe. You realize he holds neither lighter nor match, but a tiny flame sparks from his index finger as he sucks on his pipe to light the tobacco.
“Back in ‘98, Tommy Harrington caught a fairy on his trapline and got to have a wish. So Tommy wished for a new Dodge Ram 1500, and that truck was the queen of every mud bog in the county for the next five years.
“Course, by that time folks found out that the truck was alive. We reckon it was really a fey spirit or boggle ensorcelled into a vehicular shape. We didn’t mind it much at first, but then Patty Armstrong got her truck stolen and switched with a changeling.
“So if you go driving on the backroads sometime tonight and see a ‘98 Dodge Ram driving without an owner, that’s Tommy’s truck, and that’s why we hang horseshoes on the rearview. It’s looking for a truck to take back to the faerie, ‘cause Titania saw the fun we were having and she wants in.”
Kelpies still take on the shape of horses when it suits them, but these days you can often see a shiny new pickup that’s just on the edge of a lake or pond., about to fall in. “What a shame they parked it there,” you’ll think, and it’s such a nice truck. Maybe you can rescue it! And the owner surely won’t mind if you drive it just a little, you’ll put it back in a safer place! And the keys are in the ignition, and the engine sounds happy to see you. And the doors lock, and the shining creature drags you into the water and doesn’t come out until it needs to spit out your bones.
my favorite piece of avatar lore i’ve ever learned is that piandao apparently also deserted the Fire Nation military, but instead of going on the run he just. went back the Fire Nation. built a fucking mansion about it. and then when the army sent 100 guys to arrest him, he kicked the shit out of them so hard they just fucked off forever.
jeong jeong is out there in a hut in the woods living his most bitter life meanwhile piandao is sitting in his palatial estate sipping tea, fully daring the fire lord to fuck around and find out. bad bitch behavior
expanding on this, i think it’s significant that the fire nation as an imperial power promotes its actions as benevolent: it says, ‘we are going to improve the world’, and frames its violence as a regrettable necessity. that’s how empires work.
but, crucially, jeong jeong rejected his entire nation, and piando rejected the nationalism.
jeong jeong decided that fire had nothing to offer but destruction, pain, suffering. he lives in a hut as an aescetic. if art and culture and beauty is only available on the other side of a burning fist, he’ll have none of it. he’ll live an utterly uncultured life, as wretched as any unenlightened foreigner the fire nation has set out to conquer, because his own culture is abhorrent to him.
piando looked at the whole mess and went, ‘the culture is great. even the violence can be a meaningful art. it’s the imperialistic overreach that fucking sucks.’ so he went home and continued to practice martial arts, calligraphy, architecture, music. he loves his country and he loves his culture. he lives as a nobleman at the heart of an empire and, while he refuses to participate in the brutal ugliness of a century-long war of conquest, he certainly appreciates the beauty that kind of power can provide.
this gets even more interesting when you look at other parts of their backstories - namely, that jeong jeong was a firebending prodigy & an admiral, and piandao grew up in an orphanage after his parents abandoned him for being a nonbender. jeong jeong seems like he’s being overdramatic and self-punishing for no reason - if piandao deserted and stayed in the fire nation, couldn’t he? but jeong jeong was in the centers of power, someone who would’ve been in those war rooms where generals talked of their soldiers as expendable and plotted out the most efficient ways to subjugate nations. the fire nation believes their element is superior to the others, and values and privileges firebending strength in those nationalistic terms. jeong jeong was the embodiment of the fire nation’s imperialist ideal.
so for him, rebellion is giving up all of it. all the unfair privileges he had as a firebender, all the esteem and respect he had as a military leader, all the trappings of luxury and wealth. he feels it would be wrong to continue benefitting from such an unjust system. and imagine what a blow it was the the military to have someone so highly ranked just up and leave. really undermines all their propaganda if someone in one of the most privileged positions decides it’s wrong and commits treason. what a PR nightmare.
meanwhile, piandao was not privileged. he was was the kind of person who would’ve been treated as disposable by the generals, only valuable to his nation as a body to fuel the war machine (as poor people in imperial nations are). he’s not nobility - he must have built up the wealth we see in canon on his own merits.
and for him, that’s rebellion. being successful and wealthy and powerful is a giant fuck you to his parents and his nation’s belief in bending supremacy, embracing fire nation culture is a rebellion against it because someone like him was never supposed to be the fire nation ideal.
sure, jeong jeong does seem to be doing worse than piandao, with all the black-and-white thinking (waterbending can in fact bring destruction and pain, just ask katara post- “the puppetmaster”) and the self-loathing and guilt simply for being born into an oppressor group. i’d be the first to tell you he needs therapy. but if we’re analyzing his and piandao’s methods of resistance we have got to give him some credit for being in a privileged position and rejecting it all. i mean, as much as it is a rebellion for piandao to live the way he does, he’s still living in wealth in the heart of the empire, still indirectly benefitting from an unjust system. jeong jeong sacrificed everything to make a radical political statement. he doesn’t live a sparse life in the woods because he rejects art and culture (this is the guy who gave the “truth beauty and philosophy” part of the white lotus spiel), it’s because he doesn’t have a lot of stuff after he blew his life up to strike a blow against the system.
look. i’m all for still finding things to love about your country despite its crimes. but maybe sometimes you just have to say fuck you.
