“I’m Joo Dee. Welcome to Ba Sing Se!”
@angryinterrobang relevant to your interests?
Haha, it’s funny because Joo Dees are brainwashed women who keep a city in a great and terrible order while White Pearl is an automaton who might have once had agency but now has no voice of her own and is working for a being of purelight with no empathy! Haha! Hahahaaaaaaaaaa! Great comparison! Haaaaahahahahahahahahaha~
I’ve said it before and i’ll say it again, both Avatar and Steven Universe have done great stuff with the idea of authority-as-horror (”there is no war in ba sing se!” every new fact we discover about the pearls! the claustrophobic minefield of the fire nation court! white pearl specifically, jesus!)
and imo, good authority-as-horror plots are some of the most chilling horror because even though they’re often partly based on things happening behind closed doors, they’re not based on fear of the unknown, not really. They’re based on fear of the wish-it-wasn’t-known: the creeping suspicion that a lot of the powerful authorities we live under don’t have our best interests at heart.
1. You’re a genius.
2. This is partly why Aang and Steven both succeed with help from a healthy sense of chaos. Both the Dai Li and the Diamonds have the power to create an order that inherently has to be exploitive to function. In both cases these societies have existed for a veryyyy long time to the point where the people inside can’t see it changing.
Then here come our boys turning their fingers into kittens and riding giant koi fish. They’ve both faced the darkness and they’ve seen it’s usually some asshole with a cape and an official title who’s really the problem. The worst dirty dealings in the dark were sanctioned in the daylight.
Heck, even irl the deprivation of darkness is a form of punishment. Aang and Steven are allowed to be unhappy. The citizens of Homeworld and Ba Sing Se are not.
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