i think it’s a really good character detail that sokka and toph both love eating meat, because it does serve as a good shorthand to a contemporary audience to signify their relationship to masculinity that also makes sense within the worldbuilding and is consistent with their characters.
like obviously sokka’s diet is meat-based. he lives in a part of a tundra that is (implied to be) frozen over year round. eating meat is a part of his cultural identity. but it’s more than that. katara also grew up eating mostly meat, but it’s not a part of her identity the way it is for sokka. and that’s because being a hunter and providing for his village is crucial to sokka’s conception of who he is. he was “the only man” left, and he felt like it was his sole responsibility to provide ample food for his people, mostly elderly women and young children. throughout the show we see sokka fail to hunt and forage for comedic purposes, whereas we don’t actually see his successes, but that doesn’t mean it’s not implied. he wouldn’t be as effortlessly proficient with a boomerang as he is by the pilot if he hadn’t been practicing on animals over the years. he clearly has a lot of experience hunting, and the pressure he feels as “the sole provider” for his tribe is something that he is also takes great pride in, as if the knowledge that his father had enough faith in him to hunt alone and make sure his people didn’t starve is very precious to him and any challenge to his identity as “the meat guy” is a great blow to his ego.
when he calls himself “the meat and sarcasm guy,” he is being facetious about parts of his identity that are in fact very important to him. meat: he comes from the south pole, so meat is important to his culture; he is a hunter, and it was his role to provide for and protect his people. sarcasm: he’s used to not being taken seriously, as the brother of a waterbender, as the only warrior left behind, as the token nonbender of the gaang, by people throughout the earth kingdom who see a water tribe boy and assume the worst about him before he even opens his mouth; he uses humor as a coping mechanism, for example, in that very moment, when he starts talking to himself while trapped in a hole, genuinely concerned that he might die, but staying glib and flippant nonetheless. it isn’t just eating meat that is part of his identity, but providing it as well. if he isn’t feeding his people, if he isn’t keeping them safe, if he isn’t giving everything he has to protecting them, then is he even a warrior? is he even anything at all?
as for toph, she grew up never having to worry where her next meal was coming from. she probably didn’t even think about how food was prepared until she started traveling with the gaang, probably didn’t even know the name of her cook(s). but when it came to dining, she was undoubtedly policed by her parents on how to eat. sit like this, hold your chopsticks like this, chew like this, only eat so much at a time, be proper, be discreet, be ladylike. the contrast between how toph eats and how sokka eats in “the blind bandit” is played for laughs, but as we’ve just established, sokka is someone who knows what it’s like to not know where your next meal is coming from, and who also knew that if he wanted to eat, and if everyone else in his village wanted to eat, it was his responsibility to go out and kill an animal, so when someone offers him free food, he will not hesitate to eat as much of it as possible, table manners be damned. toph has never experienced food anxiety, but living in high society under the thumb of her ableist parents who excruciatingly monitored all of her behaviors is why she relishes eating as impolitely and as much as possible. if eating as little and as discreetly is a marker of femininity of a certain class (note how zuko says to jin “you have quite an appetite for a girl” because he’s never seen a woman who wasn’t from nobility eat before), then toph rejects her oppressive high society upbringing and its forced femininity and embraces masculinity by loudly proclaiming her love of meat.
in the US, eating meat is seen as a sign of masculinity despite the fact that most of the purported “alpha males” who claim that meat consumption is masculine did not actually hunt and cook that meat themselves (you may as well be a drag queen etc). nevertheless, when the audience hears sokka or toph claim they love meat, they do register that it indicates their complicated relationship to masculinity. sokka always felt an immense pressure to be masculine due to the fact that he was the sole warrior left in his tribe and believed that it was his responsibility and his alone to protect, defend, and provide for what was left of his people. meat signifies masculinity to him because he was actually hunting it himself, and being a good hunter is part of what “being a man” (an ideal he feels incredible pressure to live up to) means to him. toph feels a pressure to be masculine due to her rejection of femininity, which she associates with the submissive, meek, shallow ideal her mother performs and expected her to perform as well. she associates masculinity with strength, power, and agency, which she desireseven as her humility, cunning, and ability to go underestimated are such a crucial component to her strength in the first place. when she claims that she loves meat, she’s celebrating her ability to eat without being policed, she’s embracing her gender nonconformity, and she’s probably mirroring sokka, since she’s still figuring out who she is, and he is her role model.
when u get out of the mindest blocking is only saved for “Bad People” and you can block perfectly fine ppl you just know theyre a little annoying to you, your experience enhances
so fucking true. hitting that block button on people who annoy me like a medieval king ordering his guards to slay the jester for being unfunny
i know we’ve been saying this about every new shitty update but i feel like removing reblog chains could really be the thing to kill this site. like that is literally the main thing that makes tumblr unique
truly the only reason you still see tumblr posts reposted constantly on other sites which claim tumblr to be “dead” is because of our unique form of collaborative posting. also you would not only be taking away what makes the site unique but also the main form of socialization between the users which yknow. some could say is the basis for your whole fucking social media website
why’d this get 100 notes in an hour on a wednesday morning damn 😭 we’re real fucking annoyed about this huh
Being on this website is fun because you can absolutely tell when a blorbo clicks in someone’s brain. You’re scrolling, and suddenly out of nowhere there’s like 12 posts about the same character back to back reposted by the same person, and you just know “oh. They’re a permanent part of their psyche now.” and honestly it’s a vibe go off king
The other night husband and I were watching a documentary about the yeti where they were doing DNA analysis of samples of supposed yeti fur, and every one of them came back as bears.
Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.
So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.
Bears. They’re everywhere. Be wary. Anyone or anything could be a bear.
we’ve started feeding this tortoiseshell-point siamese recently. she’s beautiful, aside from the fact she has disturbingly big, bulging blue eyes. we’ve started calling her… ‘goop’
it’s goop!
GUESS WHO HAD GOOPLETS! SIX ENTIRE BABIES! mama goop held onto her gooplings for an entire week longer than she had to, so the gooplitos came out very well done and fluffy!!
nearly five years ago… since then, mama goop has aged significantly, and as she nears the end of her life, she’s been given a cushy retirement alongside her beloved husband, papa pumpkin. for everyone who remembers this post, the goop troop sends their regards
truly, no harsh noise project can ever approach the sheer auditory torture of existing in the same room as someone scrolling tiktok, like professional bad sound engineers couldn’t make a listening experience this unpleasant if they tried
coming of age film where a girl is really good at shoplifting and her dad finds out and is all like no daughter of mine is gonna be a shoplifter! and she goes but dad you don’t understand I’m really good at it! maybe the best! this could be my calling! my purpose! and he goes absolutely not you’re grounded young lady and at the climax she sneaks out and nabs like hundreds of dollars in fishing equipment and walks out of the store and all her friends are there cheering and lifting her up on their shoulders and the dad is there with his arms crossed and he looks mad as hell but then he sees what she got and realizes she did this to support his fishing hobby he’s like well Christy I may not understand it but if it means this much to you… I guess it’s alright with me and then the movie ends with them on the lake having a couple beers
