If someone wants a really good example of the importance of justice in fiction, then Avatar: The Last Airbender did it really well.
See, audiences are obsessed with justice and fairness in stories. They want the characters they like (the protagonists, usually) to win and for the villain to get their comeuppance. Stories get more complicated and really interesting when they question what justice actually is and what it means for characters to get what they deserve. Should the characters get what they want? Or what they need? If the characters haven’t “earned” it, should they get anything at all? If, at the end of a story, a character has gotten neither what they wanted or what they needed, why not?
A:TLA covers justice a lot, in many different ways. There’s Hei Bai’s forest, Jet and the Freedom Fighters, Monk Gyatso’s skeleton, Avatar Kyoshi and Conqueror Chin, the Ocean Spirit’s revenge on Zhao, what happened to Katara and Sokka’s mother, Hama of the Southern Water Tribe, Iroh’s past as the Dragon of the West, Zuko’s suffering versus his sins, Iroh and Zuko’s rejection of the Fire Nation’s war and their efforts towards peace, and so on.
A:TLA’s finale is especially well done because traditional story justice expects Aang to kill Ozai for everything the Fire Nation has done. The characters in the story expect Aang to kill Ozai. It would be long-awaited justice for the world. Ozai is responsible for the deaths and suffering of thousands of people in his time as Fire Lord; it can’t be argued that he doesn’t have a lot coming for him.
But Aang doesn’t kill Ozai.
And it still works, because at that point in the story, it’s not about what Ozai deserves, it’s about what Aang deserves. Aang is a 12-year-old boy who has the fate of the world on his shoulders, the last member of a pacifist culture that’s been essentially wiped from the face of the planet, and he doesn’t want to kill anyone. It’s justice for Aang, the last airbender, not to have to kill Ozai.
Whether or not the audience believes Ozai deserves to die, whether or not the audience believes Ozai’s death was the “right” course of action, they can still at least be somewhat satisfied that Aang is satisfied with this end.
Photographing wild animals has certain risks. But often, the potential hazards are worth it—something photographer Barbara Jensen Vorster
can attest to first hand. In July 2018, she was snapping pictures of a
lion pride in Botswana, until a local lioness stole Vorster’s Canon 7D
after she accidentally dropped it on the ground. (The “thud” piqued the
big cat’s interest.) Luckily, Vorster had another camera on hand and
captured what happened next.
Once the camera dropped, the lioness
mother growled and approached Voster’s group. They withdrew to their
vehicle and watched the drama unfold. “The camera fell with the lens
looking up,” Voster recalled,
“she gently flipped the camera on its side and picked it up by the
barrel of the lens.” The lioness then brought it to her cubs who started
to playfully pounce on it. “They dragged it through the dirt, chewed on
the lens hood and then, fortunately, like most kids, soon grew tired
with their new toy.”
Eventually, Voster was able to fetch her
abandoned camera. She found that it still functioned fine, but the
lioness left her signature. “There are two huge teeth marks on the
rubber focus rings of the lens and small teeth marks on the plastic lens
hood, both of which I decided not to replace.” She spent roughly £200
getting the camera fixed, but the cost was worth the photos she snapped
that day. Calling it a “priceless experience,” she also puts it into
perspective: “What photographer can boast that their lens had been in a
lion’s mouth?”
last night I was denouncing some forgettable shitbag to my girlfriend and said “even the ground wouldn’t want him to rot in it” and was instantly projected into the body of a gnarled old irish woman 200 years ago, spinning thread and spitting on the ground as I bitch and look out to sea.
When you bitch so hard you astral project intobone of your past lives
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