That Infamous Prison Escape.

talent is something you make bloom

First

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I’ve been drawing hurt no comfort disaster twins Lmao here’s a sweet childhood memory

Leo was a late bloomer and didn’t say his first words until he was like four even then he would only speak Japanese until he was like six.

prometheus: hot take,

the greek gods: no give that back

ppl will be like “that’s my favorite band!!” and it’s just a group of 4 australians who regularly film sauce commercials

I really like your modern ATLA takes and art :) I was wondering how the circumstances of Yue's passing change in a modern au since I imagine she doesn't give her life back to the Moon Spirit.

thank you! over the years my own personal modern au has kind of just developed a life & lore of its own. you can go thru my modern au tag for some of that lore, but i’ll also rehash the saga of yue here, because if i’m being completely honest, her life & death was the initial foundation upon which this AU was conceived. i just love yue a lot.

yue meets sokka on the first day of fifth grade. he’s still pretty raw from the death of his mother that summer. it’s her first day of “real” school, since she was homeschooled as a kid due to her chronic illness that made her parents extremely overprotective. she was finally able to argue with them that she was well enough to go to school, but really it’s just because she got bad vibes from the tutors her father picked out for her. she still keeps to herself and doesn’t make many friends. aside from sokka, of course. they immediately get along, and are attached at the hip from that moment forward.

for years, katara likes to joke that yue is sokka’s girlfriend (a hilarious joke specifically because it’s so obvious that she’s way too pretty to ever date him) until yue shyly asks him out For Real. they go to the library, a thing they have done together a million times before, but this time they’re going to The Library on a Date, and they’re both extremely nervous. until they realize that they’re both nervous, at which point they start laughing over the absurdity of their mutual nerves. nothing much changes about their dynamic after that except for the fact that they occasionally hold hands and kiss.

yue spends a lot of time at home, or she’ll go to school and then realize that she’s not actually well enough to be at school, at which point sokka will notice and insist on walking her home (during the middle of the day, which his teachers just love, of course). he always brings her whatever homework she’s missed when she’s absent, and then if she’s feeling up for it, they’ll sit in her bed together and just listen to music or read or talk – whatever she has the capacity to do that day. they are just happy to spend time in each other’s company.

they enter highschool together and sokka is like “i can’t believe we’re literally adults now” and yue is torn between being like “um. i don’t think we are, actually?” and feeling one million years old (pain ages you). sokka has a whole plan mapped out for their futures together: they’ll go to the same college, and then the same grad schools. they’ll be lab partners somehow, even though they’re both interested in different fields. sokka will finally solve GUT, and yue will singlehandedly cure her own illness (and all other illnesses) through the power of her research. they will win nobel prizes in the same year and they’ll be displayed on one of the shelves of their expansive home library.

yue’s a little more realistic about her own physical limitations (although she doesn’t actually doubt that sokka could win a nobel if he set his mind to it) but she still lets herself indulge in the fantasy of getting a little house with a vegetable garden and having two kids (both daughters of course. no sons!) and after that discussion (which sort of just makes official what they’ve both personally agreed on since they first met), they’re both in perfect agreement that no matter what happens to them, they are life partners. aang has already long called being the best man at their wedding. katara and toph fight over who will get to be the maid of honor, but sokka and yue quietly suspect that they don’t really care all that much, and it’s just an excuse for them to fight.

yue and sokka mainly keep to themselves in high school, and don’t have many friends outside of each other. they’re friends with katara, aang, and toph, but they’ve all yet to enter high school, so they can’t exactly see them in the halls. yue sits next to a kid with a giant bandage over one eye in her english class, and they bond over making snarky comments about the quality of the books they’re being forced to read, but even he gets kind of exasperated by the frequency with which she talks about her beloved boyfriend. (“my boyfriend gave me this rock he found in the park. isn’t it amazing?" she eagerly asks him, and it's literally the most normal rock you've ever seen.)

(it takes zuko years to make the connection that yue’s precious boyfriend from her stories is the same guy who azula considers her academic rival and is definitely obsessed with to an unhealthy degree. zuko’s just like “why is literally everyone so obsessed with this guy??” and then he meets sokka and immediately becomes obsessed with him, so, well. fuck.)

a few weeks after yue’s sixteenth birthday, sokka is walking her back home from his house one evening, when it starts to rain. yue suggests that they go back to his house to grab an umbrella (really, she just wants an excuse to stay out longer. her father has been inviting hahn over more and more often lately, and she fucking hates hahn) but sokka argues that they’re already more than halfway of the way there to her house, so it’s completely illogical to head back to get an umbrella when it would be faster just to continue walking. his logic is correct, and it’s already getting pretty late, so yue acquiesces. sokka will regret not going back for an umbrella for the rest of his life.

it’s at that hour between night and day where it’s just too dark to see clearly, but a driver could easily neglect to turn on their headlights. between that and the rain making the roads slippery, there isn’t enough time for them to run out of the way when a car skids into them. on instinct, sokka shields her with his body, but she still falls and hits the ground really hard. even though sokka is the one who was hit by the full force of the car, the impact of it is devastating for her. the driver calls an ambulance while sokka holds her in his arms, but by the time the ambulance arrives, it’s too late. they can’t save her. he couldn’t protect her.

sokka spends the next month refusing to get out of bed. it’s the second hardest month of katara’s life. on the day of her funeral, he climbs up onto the roof of her house with the first bottle of liquor he could find in her parents’ cupboard. he spends hours on her roof, just drinking in silence and thinking about how he failed her, how if he’d just been better, then his life would still have meaning. it’s his fault, really. sokka will later insist that he fell, but katara can see right through him. he breaks his leg from the fall.

eventually he returns to school, hobbling in on his crutches. he was always a smart kid, but kind of a lazy student. everyone expects his grades to plummet, but now that he has no distractions (and in fact is in desperate need of a distraction) he becomes an insatiable overachiever. instead of just doing crosswords during math class, he takes tests to place out of high school math and starts taking math classes at the local college instead. he wins his regional science olympiad. he starts tutoring half the school. anything to fill any and all of his spare time.

he never really stops being an academic overachiever (and once he and mai become college roommates, he infects her with his crazy pretty quickly, although eventually she drops out of their grad school program because she realizes she doesn’t actually wanna be an academic, and that her real dream is to be an indie horror game developer). he also never stops insisting that he “doesn’t do relationships” (a lot of people just assume that he’s a fuckboy, and he does nothing to dispel that notion) even though whatever he and suki have going on is clearly a relationship of a kind. he has one million hobbies, and he never sleeps. he spirals every time he’s forced to be alone with his thoughts. but if he just keeps moving, and achieving, and proving his value, then maybe he’ll forget for a moment that his life has long since lost its purpose.

he never truly gets over her. how could he?

Ruffnut, gesturing to Hiccup: Tuff, look what you did! You made Mom upset!

Tuffnut: I’m sorry Mom... :(

Hiccup, near tears: I DON’T REMEMBER GIVING BIRTH TO NEITHER OF YOU!

Dick Grayson's unmatched success as a child vigilante makes a lot more sense when you remember the Court of Owls was a thing and that Dick was meant to be the next Grey Son.

There is no way that someone at Haly's Circus wasn't there keeping an eye on him while he grew up. A future weapon needs to be trained and monitored after all, and a circus, a place where weird skills are completely normal, is actually a great place to secretly train a child.

You know, just some knife tricks that translated really well into actual fighting. How to get out of restraints and pick locks while under a time limit. Death defying acrobatic stunts that coincidentally do wonders for parkouring. That sort of thing. Nothing that seems out of place for a boy growing up around circus performers to learn, but would literally any where else.

I mean, while I fully believe that most kids would want to kill the man responsible for their parents deaths, Dick was weirdly prepared to go through it. He tracked down Zucco with way more ease than any normal child should have too. He became the first child vigilante, for goodness sake. The first Robin! He only started getting formal training after he basically forced Bruce into it!

Bruce himself has no idea that this kind of competency in a child is unusual, considering he was much too blinded by the similarities between his and Dick's tragic orphanhoods.

Alfred is in a similar boat because he’s desensitized to weird children after he somehow managed to successfully raise Bruce 'The Batman' Wayne, so he doesn't clock the hyper-competency as abnormal either.

By the time the other batkids start popping up (Jason 'The Audacity' Todd, borderline-street rat with no fear) (Tim 'the greatest stalker in Gotham history' Drake, child genius, also bullied his way into becoming Robin) (Barbara 'raised by the only uncorrupt cop in gotham' Gordon) (Stephanie 'daddy issues and spite' Brown) (Duke 'Pretends he's the normal one and people believe him' Thomas) it's too late.

It would also explain how Dick got along so well with Damian out of all of them. Similar childhood with different approaches and all that. On some subconscious level, Dick recognises and resonates with the murderous ten year old assassin with strong familial ties to a secret elite assassin organization.

It isn't until after the whole Court of Owls and Grey Son reveal that suddenly Dick realises a whole lot of things about his childhood that suddenly make a lot more sense.

me holding a gun to a mushroom: tell me the name of god you fungal piece of shit

mushroom: can you feel your heart burning? can you feel the struggle within? the fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. you cannot kill me in a way that matters

me cocking the gun, tears streaming down my face: I’M NOT FUCKING SCARED OF YOU

Bothering the beast