2003 called. It wants its update schedule back. Also its lawnmowner, and those DVDs.

(I kid because I love.)

So let's do this thing.

>The chairs were not mere mortal folding jobs,
>because that was not the way things were -done-
>at Tenjou Academy

Now I'm imagining a Student Council meeting shortly after the change in management...

"Third item of business: Prince Tenjou has asked if the budget can bear a campus-wide... Keiko, stop snickering... 'chair replacement program.' Thoughts?"

"Sweet Pillar, YES. -Can- the budget bear that? These things are awful. Every damn chair in this school is made out of metal. I mean, we look pretty stylish sitting on them in our uniforms, drinking tea and generally being fancy, but they're like torture devices. My ass may be permanently deformed. I'm considering a class-action suit."

"Thank you, Keiko. That's ever so helpful."

>Utena and Corwin were having a -much-
>better time, because - in their own world,
>surrounded by their happily-pitching-in friends
>and colleagues - they were able to put their
>heads down and kick it all school-project stylee.

I'm hesitant to even bring this up, because I'm usually wrong, but is that a typo?

It seems like you'd want that to be either 'styles' or 'stylez' (yes, with the z) or just plain old 'style.' But I might just be crazy, or simply ill-informed. I've never seen 'stylee' before, even as slang, so...

>(This was a trick reserved for advanced Lens
>users; get it wrong and you could end up mentally
>smooching every Lensman on the network, which
>would be embarrassing on a level not previously
>within the scope of human understanding.)

"Hey, Gryph, remember that time in the 21st century when you accidentally CC'd the entire WDF on a mash note to Kei?"

"Yes. Yes I do. That's still in my top three most embarrassing moments ever, you know. I think my actual murder trial may have been more dignified."

"Uh-huh. Remember last night when you gave her a kiss through the Lens before you turned in for the night?"

"How do you know about tha- oh. Oh GOD."

"Yeah, we have a new winner, I think."

>Keiko shrugged. "I dunno, man, they're dressed
>like a SWAT team and they're wearing makeup like
>Gene Simmons. What would -you- call them?"

This reference seems... off, coming out of Keiko's mouth. She's a native Cephirean who hasn't spent much time in Midgard, watching her make a reference that's even a little dated -now- (to say nothing of 400 years in the future in another dimension) just doesn't scan right. Seems overly precious.

>"Ha -haa!-" he cried delightedly as he approached,
>his arms wide in welcome. "It's -true!- The Warriors
>of Kyoshi, live and in person here in my very own
>little universe. That can only mean one thing!"

Good lord, I think we have a new modern record.

I know that it's nowhere near the top record, as back in the early nineties Ben could see something new and interesting and have 20,000 words integrating it into UF written that same night, but man, he went from 'I don't know what that series is, you crazy forum dwellers' to 'tightly integrated' in like three weeks. That's FAST these days. :)

>Before Tsuwabuki could reply, Kardon Felz let out
>a booming bark of laughter and said, "Are you
>kidding, boss? Those girls are -into- our boy MT."

Space is far too limited here for me to get in all of his greatest hits, but just about everything involving Kardon? Pure gold.

You guys are smart to only deploy him in small doses, though. He's funny when he's around for three or four paragraphs. He'd turn grating FAST if we had to deal with him being 'on' for three or four -pages- in a row. Tsuwabuki is lucky he graduated through Nanami Kiryuu's intense two-semester course in verbal and emotional abuse; otherwise I'm not sure he'd have the tolerance to put up with it.

>She did this with a fluid but surefooted motion that was
>part martial artist's kata and part dance, completing a
>pattern that was at once ancient and unique to this one moment.

Stylistic quibbling: maybe consider replacing that 'but' with an 'and.' Fluid BUT surefooted implies that you would normally expect those two states to be exclusive, and so it's notable that Korra has achieved both at once. That isn't really the case, or at least, not in my own opinion. 'and' makes it a more straightforward case of simply listing the traits of Korra's veilbending kata.

>She removed a set of wireless earbuds, tucked them away in her
>jacket pocket, then declared, "Corwin!" and grabbed him up in a bear
>hug.

I really really like the subtlety at work here, and in other places latter in the movement that I'm too lazy to collect all in one place. You guys do a great job of conveying the necessary information for us to understand that Diqiu is... further along the development curve than it is in ATLA/LOK, without hitting us over the head with it.

>Korra rolled her eyes. "Don't remind me," she said. "Honestly,
>-pirates?- It's the third century, people!"

See, like right there. That's the sort of thing that might just sail right by people unless they're paying attention. Subtle.

It took me a few minutes to realize "Wait a minute... THIRD century?" :checks Annotations: "And they are using the Sozin's Comet calendar. That means Korra is... at -least- forty-seven, assuming she was still born in 153 ASC. Wow. She looks GREAT for her age. Someone is trying to beat Kyoshi's record, I guess."

>"After you guys had your, uh, adventure here,"
>she went on, gesturing generally around to Cephiro,
>"word got back to them somehow, I'm still looking into that,

I'm prepared to blame Clef in some capacity. It's like Bumi said: "ALL old people know each other. Don't you know that?"

>"No, no," Korra assured him as she followed him back
>out of the room and down the hall. "Well after my time.
>My boys made it to the semis that year, though!"

On the chance she's using "my boys" in a literal sense, dear sweet flying spaghetti monster, I seriously hope that UF-Korra did NOT lower herself to actually breeding with Mako. Or at least that UF-Mako isn't the giant douchenozzle he is in canon.

(I have Opinions when it comes to Mako.)

>In the event, it took nearly an hour,
>which was quite a respectable showing for her -
>though, in fairness, 45 minutes of that was spent
>reading the library's copy of So You Didn't
>Know There Were Ten Worlds.

"Hey, aren't there eleven now? The Lotus was saying something about it."

"Cripes, they know about that? -We- only found out a couple months ago. Yeah, there are. Derek will prepare a second edition at some point. Friggin' Akio."

>"... what do you put in the -noodles- around here?" Korra
>wondered.

I like this linguistic compromise for the one-liner. As the annotations say, Korra ain't really a cornflakes gal, but saying 'congee' would probably have been a tad bit TOO obscure. So, noodles. Aesthetically pleasing.

>"That is NOT supposed to happen. I mean, that's
>got to be what, 1400 tons of water in there? I
>don't mean to brag here, but I'm the best living
>waterbender I know, and even I shouldn't be able
>to bend that much water that casually - if at all!
>- without being in the full Avatar State."

This passage made something occur to me: if Korra is indeed living in the third century ASC, then she was around and in her prime during a passage of Sozin's Comet.

She must have had quite a bit of fun with THAT. Supercharged firebending for a whole day? That is a recipe for awesome in Korra's hands.

I also bet that in the back of her mind, the seventeen year old Korra who ran away to Republic City is yelling at her "Don't TELL him, you idiot! He'll figure out some way to turn this off! This is AWESOME. Look, there's a whole ocean nearby! Why don't we go down there and see what we can really do, get our Red Sea on a little?"

>"Most of the time they stay in the Spirit World," she replied.
>"The visions do get annoying sometimes if I don't lay down the law,
>though."

I like how she's gone from "Dammit, past lives, I could use some guidance here!" to "Okay seriously dead guys, shut up. Trying to sleep here."

>"Anthy, this - at long last - is Korra, of 'once
>when I was five' fame."

Man, is there anybody Corwin didn't meet when he was five? The dude has some serious Jenny Sparks action going on. I keep expecting to find out that Bill Clark visited his grade school once (photo op) and that Eidun Palpatine gave him piano lessons.

>Corwin laughed, then pointed a mock-chiding finger at Anthy and said,
>"You never told me Chu Chu was from outside Cephiro."

When Anthy Himemiya decides to choose a familiar, she doesn't screw around. ANY witch can have a CAT.

>One in particular, a tall, green-eyed girl with long black hair
>and a cycling jacket,

I realized this was Natsuki pretty quickly, but given that we'd been just soaking in Avatar stuff for the preceding parts of the movement, my brain did some initial cross-firing and thought "... wait, is that Asami Sato?" :)

>A mix of cheers and boos greeted this screen. Someone called
>out, "Oh come on, Hockey Night in WHAT? The EA makes -everything-
>lame," to which there was much laughing agreement.

You know, I love just how... how... how comically -inept- Earthdome at the whole "unification through authoritarianism" thing they have going on.

It's brilliant camouflage. Hiding in plain sight. No government would ever deliberately seek to undercut it's own authority and legitimacy, so they must just be bad at this... right?

>Shizuru looked over from her perch at the edge of the end of the couch
>to her right, noted the name stitched across her shoulders, and said in
>an intrigued tone,
>
>"Your name is 'Avatar'?"

Shizuru is really more right than she knows. It's sort of like how Shepard's first name is "Commander." :)

>the Earth Alliance government had left Hockey Night in
>Canada largely alone, apart from the mandated change in
>its title to reflect the 2406 abolishment of Canada as a country.

You gotta figure the Canadians are getting pretty blase about that by now.

Near as I can figure, in the past 120 years (which is living memory for some Canadians) Canada has been...

-Part of the United States
-Part of Imperial Americana
-Part of the Neo-Soviet Union (!)
-A ward of the Olympus Superstate, and
-An independent country

So at this point one imagines some stoicism regarding the whole thing is setting in. :)

>This got another round of boos from the assembled Duelists and
>friends, many of whom struck up their own chorus of "O Canada" to drown
>out the EA's rather bland tune.

I'm not afraid to assert as a semi-proud American that "O Canada" is about a million times better a national anthem than "The Star-Spangled Banner," which really sort of sucks.

>she found herself wishing that Kyouichi Saionji were here.
>He'd been with her at that game - they'd discovered ice hockey
>and their own fledgling friendship together that night - and
>it didn't sit well with her that he'd disappeared, not just
>from her life, but, as far as she could tell, from -everyone's.-

Wait... what? People have seen Saionji. Anne saw him just a few weeks before the wedding.

...holy shit, have Corwin, Anne, and Kaitlyn not told Utena yet?

That was a month ago! She is going to be PISSED. So is Wakaba. I mean... wow.

Kaitlyn even went off to brief Utena and Anthy after Anne dumped the whole "oh, I saw Saionji. He's not wearing his lens and was hanging out with Touga, who was trying to destroy Cephiro" thing right in her lap. Did she... omit that part?

>"Actually, I automated -all- our jobs. I'm not sure the
>girls have noticed yet."

"I had a devil of a time with the Rose Prince v2.0 object. It had this subroutine that kept wanting slay princesses and rescue dragons. But I think I nailed that down with v2.2."

>Corwin picked it up and examined it;
>the writing on it was so excruciatingly neat and precise that at first
>he took it for a machine-printed font.

Shizuru really is the complete package when it comes to any of the traditional feminine arts, isn't she?

(I bet she knows how to walk in heels, too.)

>"Korra has a
>-very- old soul. Nobody knows the exact number, but there have been
>-hundreds- of Avatars, maybe thousands, and they're... each has a
>unique, individual spirit, but they're all incarnations of the same
>soul. Somehow. Or possibly the other way around."

I like how, despite being pretty Zen at times, Corwin doesn't really do the whole 'Eastern (Earth) mysticism' thing. It's nice that there are fields of knowledge that he's both not versed and really not interested in; paradoxically, NOT being omnicompetent makes him seem more well-rounded as a person.

>The next time Korra
>said "again", she tried that, but what she got wasn't a puff of flame at
>the end of her arm; instead, she managed only to set a lower branch of
>the tree across the courtyard on fire.

You know, it occurs to me that maybe -Anne- could teach the firebending masters of Diqiu something.

Firebending typically involves two things; moving flame outward from your body (usually with an accompanying martial arts move to act as a focus) or, more rarely, moving an already-existing flame around; and even that usually involves getting pretty near the flame in question. Even Combustion Man couldn't just look at something and ignite it.

But Anne can do that. In fact, a lot of pyrokinetics in the 'big universe' can. There are probably many firebending masters who would be very interested in someone who can set something on fire from a distance without needing to hurl flame across the intervening space OR preform a martial arts move. It would likely be regarded as a super-technique, right up there with bloodbending or the kind of stuff Combustion Man got up to.

>"Fear and anger -will- power firebending," Korra mused. "For a
>while, during my predecessor's tenure as Avatar, our world was out of
>balance and the going wisdom was that they were the prime constituents
>of the Fire Within... but they're not. They're shortcuts. Cheap
>imitations."

I now envision Korra having a long and barely civilized (possibly ending in violence) argument with someone like Anakyn shar Atrados or Rianna Santova about fear, anger, and rage being "cheap imitations" and invalid paths to power.

>Even now, so many years after her old friend had (as she
>preferred to think of it) left to scout out the Spirit World ahead of
>her, Korra's unconscious reaction to this was to remark, "Aagh, Naga,
>stop," and fend the creature off without looking. Only when her hand met
>a much coarser pelt than Naga's sleek white coat did she blink, look,
>and say, "Oh. Right. Good morning, Duran."

Calling it now: Duran -is- Naga.

Reincarnation is neat that way.

> bottom of the stairs, Wolfgang (Beagle of the Lens) left Gryphon's side
> and darted straight for the the front of the seating section on the
> left. For a second, Gryphon wondered who the Lenshound was in such a

Duplicated 'the' in there.

>"Doesn't matter, still a princess," said Anne airily.
>"Anyway, it's funny because of Utena. She's Prince of
>Cephiro because she decided when she was little that
>she wanted to be a prince instead of a princess. You
>know - rescue instead of being rescued, and stuff. I
>wondered if it's ever occurred to her how many -badass
>princesses- she knows. That's why I was laughing."

Subverting traditional gender roles is awesome.

This doesn't have much to do with UF, but... I was digging through my Adventure Time stuff just today for the Princess Bubblegum Mad Science Supercut I'm assembling, and I ran across the Princess Cookie episode.

Which is about a guy who wants to be a Princess. Because Princess's are awesome. They go around spreading joy and laughter and making everyone happy. Who WOULDN'T want to be a Princess, even if you're a boy?

And nobody regards that as weird. Criminal, possibly; there are better ways to become a Princess than taking people hostage. But not weird.

It's maybe my favorite episode of the whole series because of that.

Anyway, sharing time over. Back to the review mines!

>With a vaguely indulgent smile, Anthy waited for them to finish,
>then turned them to face the crowd of their friends and well-wishers,
>declaring, "Ladies and gentlemen, your Prince and your Pillar."

The ceremony was lovely, and I know you guys had to wrangle a million and one cast members for this one... but, no Clef? Not involved in the ceremony at all, not even mentioned at all in the movement?

Although I do get that he might not be physically present. Sort of a 'You never have the President and the entire Cabinet all in the same place at the same time thing' maybe; he's off guarding the doors to make sure that anything that thinks the wedding is a GREAT time to pull some shit is disabused of that notion.

>his was his big moment - probably his greatest challenge
>as a lifelong shutterbug - and he rose to it magnificently.

I've had the good fortune to meet Doc in real life a number of times, and extrapolating from that, I can only imagine what sort of crazily weaponized camera equipment Chip came to this wedding wielding.

Seriously. Dude probably has the sort of stuff where you look at it and think "You know, it seems like worrying that thing will steal my soul is a legitimate concern."

>Interspersed with the various friends-and-family moments were
>those in which one or the other would take a turn around the floor with
>various of the Dignitaries and Token Grown-Ups whom they hadn't had a
>chance to meet before the ceremony.

One imagines that they invited various representatives of the major nations of Cephiro and a few media types. No cameras allowed, nothing disruptive, but they probably invited one or two of the more respectable society writers who could write up an account after the fact for Cephiro's finer publications, their New Yorker equivalents.

If nothing else, Anthy probably made those arrangements discreetly. She's more politically adept than she lets on, that one is.

>Then, while some applauded the local Duelists, she stopped
>smiling and pointed straight at one of them, adding flatly, "Except
>you."
>
>Kardon Felz blinked, looked to either side, then pointed
>questioningly to himself.

Kardon IS Sokka. IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW.

>"Just Korra is fine," she said, giving the young blonde a
>friendly grin. "Diqiu is... do you know where Zipang is?"
>
>"A Japanese colony in the Enigma sector," said Umi.

Oh God. That explains everything.

The Enigma Sector: driving stellar cartographers to drink for 15,000 years and counting.

>Korra chuckled. "Very possibly, but we really don't want it
>to come to that. We've had a world war or two of our own,
>internal to Diqiu, and nobody wants that kind of thing to happen
>there ever again. So we... try to keep it on the downlow.

This Korra is far more seasoned than her seventeen-year-old counterpart, who would probably have started babbling blithely about specifics and just brought everyone down. I imagine the thought process:

*This is a wedding, Korra, not a history class. Don't mention the genocide. Or the race riots. Or the OTHER genocide. Remember that quinceneara on Zipang, when you made that girl cry?* "So we... try to keep it on the downlow." *YES. You rock, Korra.*

>"You let me worry about the White Lotus," Korra replied casually
>as they all set off for Ohtori Hall. "After the talking-to they got
>from Kyoshi the other day, I don't think we'll have any problems with
>them, anyway."

You know, I'm not real sure that Korra should be taking semi-secret society managing advice from the woman who founded the Dai Li. It's not a line on Kyoshi's resume that inspires confidence. Although the Dai Li WERE good at what they did.

>"After Corwin's 13th birthday party
>we were hanging around in the banya and Hildy said you know it's only a
>matter of time before he notices we're all women and Aeryn said one of
>us will probably have to put the poor boy out of his misery and then
>Hildy started taking bets and before we knew it we had a whole pool
>going like for fantasy baseball and there was big money involved I'm
>talking big, BIG money and it all sort of got out of control and it's
>Hildy's fault."

Okay, the list? Funniest part of the whole thing. Expository humor is one of my most favorite things, and the list delivered.

A little surprised there were no dudes on it (you'd think someone would put money on that, even at long odds). And man, wouldn't the girls have been awfully surprised if Corwin had just been one of those people who are just... not that interested in sexytime, really? I imagine the list growing old over the course of decades, being handed down from mother to daughter as some sort of venerable treasure.

>"Uhh... no," Utena agreed, hand behind head. "Prrrobably not.
>(I'm not sure -I- am,)" she added under her breath.
>Still smiling her reassuring smile, Anthy patted her arm.
>"We'll get there, my love. We'll get there."

Polyamory is really, really, really hard work. Gryphon makes it look easy, but Gryphon makes a lot of things look easy. It is not.

>Hmm," Nall said thoughtfully. "Sure, I can do that. I'm sure
>nobody will notice a guy lugging a banded ironwood chest that says
>CAUTION CONTENTS EXTREMELY HOT in dragonscript on the lid."

"Can I have a few yuans? You know, to bribe the customs guy with?"

"You don't -have- to bribe the customs guy, Nall. Dragon eggs aren't illegal to transport across international borders."

"I kind of -want- to bribe the customs guy, though. I'm going on a train trip, it's... traditional. It makes me feel like James Bond."

> The Legend of Korra
> created by
> Michael Dante DiMartino
> and
> Brian Konitezko

"Bryan Konietzko"

(Don't sweat that one, I've done the exact same thing.)

...

Well.

That was a heck of a ride.

Not exactly a lot of high drama, but we got our share of "plot" during both Clarion Call and First Dates and Firefights. They can't -all- involve Akio and the Earth Alliance and Kaname almost getting her organs harvested.

I am kind of astounded the wedding went off without a hitch. You'd have expected some sort of awful crisis to fall on them during it, but no. It was just a party. It might, I submit, have even been a par-tay.

(I do suspect they may encounter a nasty surprise or two inside the gift pile; Akio in particular seems like he'd do some sort of overly dramatic dick move like send Utena a single heartbreakingly exquisite red rose with a card that says "Thinking of You" on it. But that's post-wedding.)

I may have further thoughts later, but it's super late and I'm tired, and this'll do for a first pass. It'll all come out in the wash, I expect.

-Merc
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