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2015-01-20, 06:17 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Legend of Korra, Book 5: It's canon. Deal with it.
LoK was always going to be a different show than ATLA. Less meandering, more focused. But even for that, 12-14 episodes a season just weren't going to cut it - that's not to mention the less-than-skilful pacing. In Books 2-4, it's a problem. Book 1 is hit with it like a crowbar to the kneecaps, since, like I said, it just has more to do than the others. It's not just about the Equalists, but also about introducing the cast, and showing how the world changed since the original show. If the Equalist revolution had been faced by the Gaang, or if the Krew had been already established, it would have been a different story.
As far as bender/non-bender relation go, one thing that might have been cool to see is chi-blocking and modern weaponry being intentionally suppressed because the bending elite don't want to lose their advantage. Which means non-benders in law enforcement and the army face a glass ceiling. Which also means that non-bending civilians are unhappy about being protected from the bending Triads by other benders. And an internal sabotage by disgruntled non-bending soldiers would have been a much more interesting counter to the United Forces than a fleet of airplanes out of nowhere.My FFRP characters. Avatar by Ashen Lilies. Sigatars by Ashen Lilies, Gullara and Purple Eagle.
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2015-01-20, 06:38 PM (ISO 8601)
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2015-01-20, 06:49 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Legend of Korra, Book 5: It's canon. Deal with it.
I understand you're sarcastic, but the bending elite isn't actually the "good guys", regardless. They're people like Tarrlok, the Republic City Council, and the Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom aristocracy. Tenzin could be the lone voice of reason supporting, or at least not actively opposing, the non-bender agenda.
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2015-01-22, 05:52 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Legend of Korra, Book 5: It's canon. Deal with it.
The fact that you only have 12-14 eps per season is not an excuse to pace your 1st season poorly. Plenty of good anime shows (for example Madoka Magica) have only 12-14 eps to work with, yet successfully introduce a brand new setting with brand new characters which resolve thematically at the end, with memorable character arcs which ppl still remember today.
Legend Of Korra even had a pre-established setting to work with. It didn't have to explain what bending is, or what the 4 Nations are (and what their ppl are like), or who Aang was, etc. It only had to explain how ONE CITY is changed in the decades after ATLA. And you get 12-14 half-hour episodes to introduce a few main characters in that setting... It's really not that hard.
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2015-01-22, 12:02 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Legend of Korra, Book 5: It's canon. Deal with it.
I agree with this, only insofar as you can be sure that they knew how many episodes they had to deal with. If they were told they had 26, and then got two episodes in and were told "Nope, make it 12", then you've got a problem. If they were told "You've got 12 episodes", then I think it falls a lot more on the authors that you had issues.
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2015-01-22, 12:24 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Legend of Korra, Book 5: It's canon. Deal with it.
I'm not really interested in assigning blame, here. Especially since we don't know the inner workings of pitching, approving and the rest of the process. Maybe it was their decision to have that many episodes, maybe it wasn't. Either way, I'm looking at Book One and I see no way for it to work in 12 episodes. And it didn't.
I ran across an interview from 2013 recently where they said that their goal for Book One was to put non-benders in the spotlight, as opposed to ATLA, where they were on the sidelines. They also seem to be under the impression they succeeded. Well, then.My FFRP characters. Avatar by Ashen Lilies. Sigatars by Ashen Lilies, Gullara and Purple Eagle.
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2015-01-22, 12:53 PM (ISO 8601)
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2015-01-22, 04:49 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2011
Re: The Legend of Korra, Book 5: It's canon. Deal with it.
And it's not as though we know the network cut there budget mid way into production of a later season and forced them to stop and go back and rewrite stuff to get the clip show ep in there. Oh. Wait. We do know that.
And if they'd do that too them during the final season, and pitch a hissy fit about the lead being female before the show was green lit, I would in no way, shape or form put it past them to tell the creators "You have twenty Six Eps." have them approve the scrips, and then at the last possible second tell them "Hey, were cutting your budget and we want it shortened to twelve, make it happen, no we don't care that it's unreasonable, do it or else."
And I seem to recall for the longest time people thinking Varrick and Zhu Li being the absolute best thing to come out of this installment of the franchise, so, yeah, based on that alone I'd call this a success."I Burn!"
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2015-01-22, 07:19 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Legend of Korra, Book 5: It's canon. Deal with it.
My FFRP characters. Avatar by Ashen Lilies. Sigatars by Ashen Lilies, Gullara and Purple Eagle.
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2015-01-22, 07:38 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Legend of Korra, Book 5: It's canon. Deal with it.
Bumi says hi. And wasn't Amon's number 2 named?
"I Burn!"
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2015-01-22, 07:58 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Legend of Korra, Book 5: It's canon. Deal with it.
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2015-01-22, 08:11 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2011
Re: The Legend of Korra, Book 5: It's canon. Deal with it.
The fact that he later was one of the people who did the impossible and became a bender after not being BORN a bender doesn't change that at that point in the timeline, he was in fact, not a bender.
"I Burn!"
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2015-01-22, 09:11 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Legend of Korra, Book 5: It's canon. Deal with it.
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2015-01-22, 09:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2008
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2015-01-22, 09:22 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2013
Re: The Legend of Korra, Book 5: It's canon. Deal with it.
Wait, at what point did Lieutenant become an airbender?
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2015-01-22, 09:50 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Legend of Korra, Book 5: It's canon. Deal with it.
He didn't. He was brutally murdered on screen.
Bumi became an Airbender."I Burn!"
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2015-01-23, 04:03 AM (ISO 8601)
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2015-01-23, 06:39 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Legend of Korra, Book 5: It's canon. Deal with it.
Again, Book One. Bumi's sole appearance in there consists of a few seconds right at the end. Amon's Lieutenant was only referred to as "Lieutenant" and his job consisted mostly of getting his ass kicked in an increasingly undignified manner. He also enjoyed electrocuting benders more than is entirely healthy, and that's the extent of our knowledge about him.
According to his TVTropes page, the writers said he had actually survived Amon's Force Choke, but I don't know the source of this statement.
EDIT: On an entirely unrelated note, we have some family trees. Which means Mako and Bolin's and Asami's mothers finally have names to them. Not Su's father or Izumi's mother, though.Last edited by Morty; 2015-01-23 at 01:55 PM.
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2015-01-24, 09:59 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Legend of Korra, Book 5: It's canon. Deal with it.
They kind of did, though, since the entire season was about non-Benders being rallied to civil war and how non-Benders had revolutionised the technology of the world. If there had been more episodes they might have been able to show us more of how non-Benders were viewing things, like the episode where hundreds of non-Benders were on the streets actively protesting, but we were kinda just stuck watching the events play out from Korra's perspective - and her perspective wasn't very revealing since she lived on Air Temple Island, nowhere near the non-Bending population, and focused on mastering Airbending, beating up militant Equalists and getting mixed up in love triangles.
Bolin was too good for her anyway. :'("Don't think of it as dying," said Death,
"Just think of it as leaving early to avoid the rush."
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2015-01-24, 08:23 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Legend of Korra, Book 5: It's canon. Deal with it.
I think there are two problems with the Equalists-arc as showing the non-bender perspective:
1) We see everything through Korra's perspective. Korra tells the Equalist spokesman that there is no one oppressing them and that they are "oppressing themselves," we don't get anything to tell us there is any oppression of non-benders until Tarrlok starts his crackdown, which is presented as a one time thing.
(And yes, Korra's perspective is obvious naive and wrong; that isn't enough to count)
It is the 2nd problem that has yet to be properly discussed here after 4 books:
2) The Equalist perspective is obviously narrow, bigoted, conspiratorial and plainly wrong
Even if there was unitary "bending establishment" (the police, the triad, and the council were all in on it together and all actively working to keep non-benders down), reacting the way the Equalists does, by targeting every bender and removing what makes them different is clearly (simply going by how its portrayed, notwithstanding being objectively racist) and simply extraordinarily bigoted, racist, and wrong.
There wasn't any bending establishment, benders were the friends and family of non-benders. Benders naturally became leaders within a wider police and the gangs in Republic city because of their martial prowess (and it was a mere coincidence that the council happened to be made up of benders at the time). When we get to know Lin Beifong, we don't see any signs she's prejudiced against non-benders, in fact the police department has non-benders in it in high positions when we get a good look at it (the two blundering detectives; these are superiors to Mako, who isn't a metal or even an earth bender).
What this means is that, by giving us only the Equalist perspective as a counter to Korra's, we are given a false dichotomy between the extraordinary youthful naivety of the most sheltered spiritual figure since Siddhartha Gautama and extreme xenophobic bigotry. Perhaps, we were supposed to understand that what was going on, and the proper answer to the crisis was someplace in between, but they never even properly asked the question. All we did was see the resolution and then sometime in the middle of a recap episode in Book 4 we got a line from Asami that spun the Presidential election as something Korra brought about as a positive change for [somewhat disadvantaged....somehow?] non-benders.
Even into Book 5, I do not think there was anything about the political structure of Republic City that disadvantaged non-benders. There was nothing in the makeup of the council that favored benders (it was chosen by outside rulers though, we get a completely external-to-story message that democracy is just plain better than autocratic styles of government). The Police wasn't particularly discriminatory, except in choosing to create elite units made up of a very, very, rare breed of benders (which we never got the message was disbanded or there was anything wrong about it). Maybe the Triple-Threat Triad was discriminatory (weren't they explicitly branded "bending gangs?"), but they were criminals anyway, and hardly tolerated.
Edit: I just thought of another problem:
3) If there actually was systematic discrimination of minority, choosing a president from a disadvantaged minority doesn't automatically right all the wrongs and patch up all the problems. To send that message is show extraordinary ignorance of the racial politics they are referencing!
I'm still not sure what politics the Equalists hatred of non-benders is supposed to channel (we debate about whether it is between Communists and Nazis, but could it also be politics unique to Japan, China, India or even Africa) but there are plenty of cases in which leaders were promoted among disadvantaged minorities...none in which all the problem just magically disappeared overnight immediately thereafter, like it does in Korra.Last edited by Reddish Mage; 2015-01-24 at 08:34 PM.
The laws of physics are not crying in a corner, they are bawling in the forums.
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2015-01-24, 09:34 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Legend of Korra, Book 5: It's canon. Deal with it.
I still think we're expecting a little too much from a show commissioned by a network dedicated to children, designed for children and written by a handful of people who might very well not be completely clued in in the historical, political and social dynamics of minorities living under discrimination, social reform and political turmoil in times of great changes in the very fabric of reality. Expecting a bunch of artists and TV writers to portray these things accurately when so many heavyweights in the intellectual milieu have wildly different opinions about these matters, in turn leading to different conclusions, seems a bit ingenerous... Especially considering that to the average target viewers, what matters is to have a plausible conflict situation that stands up to the scrutiny of him and his mates, possibly showcasing some cool bending techniques... And as many holes we might want to poke at it from the vantage point of a higher education or a couple of decades of newspaper, I still think the plot does that sufficiently.
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2015-01-25, 12:15 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Legend of Korra, Book 5: It's canon. Deal with it.
I must say, I do enjoy the irony of how that turns out in the end. Out of that painful love triangle, nothing good actually comes for anyone - each pair breaks up and never gets back together. Mako, the center of it, ends up as the only member of the main cast to be single at the end of the show, while Korra and Asami, previously vying for his affections, end up with each other instead. Not that it makes up for having to sit through the thing in the first place, but it's about the most entertaining outcome for it that I can imagine when all's said and done.
Last edited by Zevox; 2015-01-25 at 12:16 AM.
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"When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." -C.S. Lewis
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2015-01-25, 12:25 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Legend of Korra, Book 5: It's canon. Deal with it.
No. It doesn't.
All the relationships felt forced to be honest. From Varrick's to Korra's. Say what you want about ATLA, but at least there relationships didn't felt crammed (and they all tied up to the story somewhat). I get the feeling writers of LoK can't write believable romances between adults.Last edited by -D-; 2015-01-25 at 12:27 AM.
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2015-01-25, 12:38 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Legend of Korra, Book 5: It's canon. Deal with it.
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2015-01-25, 01:10 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Legend of Korra, Book 5: It's canon. Deal with it.
Eh, the ones that they kept short and sweet were fine by me. Never minded Jinora and Kai, Bolin and Opal were even a little cute together at times, and Varrick and Zhu Li have a certain weird charm to them. Korra and Asami I'm torn between being disappointed that they couldn't do more than drop a few hints that it was coming and being thankful that they couldn't give it the kind of focus they gave the season 1-2 relationships, though.
Oh, and I guess there was the villain relationships too (Zaheer and P'li, Kuvira and Baatar Jr), but they did so little with them that they hardly count.
There weren't many adults in AtLA to begin with, at least not in any recurring role. You pretty much had Iroh (presumably widowed, though who his wife[?] was is never even brought up), Ozai (estranged from Ursa for reasons of evil plot), Katara and Sokka's father (widowed), and minor supporting characters who were only involved in like 1-3 episodes.
If you're just looking for any example of an adult couple in the show, I suppose off the top of my head there's Toph's parents. They're such a small part though, and the relationship between them is never once remarked on - all that mattered for their role is how protective they were of Toph.Toph Pony avatar by Dirtytabs. Thanks!
"When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." -C.S. Lewis
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2015-01-25, 07:38 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Legend of Korra, Book 5: It's canon. Deal with it.
None of them felt... Right. My favorite relationship in LoK so far was Bolin and ice princess. And that's saying a lot about just how bad the others were...
Also don't mention Varrick. Zhu Li managed to remove Varrick's funny bone. When he is with her he stops Varrick I know and love, and becomes boring Varrick.
It actually had two characters acting like they are in a real albeit abusive relationship. It felt like there were two genuine people making a dumb decision, instead of a character and a sheet of paper being paired together. It fits the characters, and it actually has some overall significance to the plot.
In ATLA with Zuko and Mai or Aang and Katara or Sokka and Suki, all had much stronger characters and more impact on the plot. Every single one of them felt right.
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2015-01-25, 08:30 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Legend of Korra, Book 5: It's canon. Deal with it.
So they succeeded... but didn't? In seriousness, though, the season only focuses on non-benders in the most technical sense in that only one antagonist is a bender... but said antagonist is also the main villain. Which kind of damages the season's claim of putting non-benders in the spotlight. I wouldn't say there's no difference between the Equalists and Ozai's or Kuvira's non-bending henchmen and henchwomen, but it's closer than it should be. Either way the only reason they got as far as they did was because a bender happened to agree with them. And in the end that bender's personal trauma and revenge are central to the conflict.
Especially since only Hiroshi got a motivation, out of all non-benders in the season - Equalist or otherwise. Like it's been discussed thoroughly, the issues that supposedly drove non-benders into the ranks of a terrorist organization led by a crazy bigot are left to our imagination. And they disband off-screen once Amon is exposed. Those that don't sign up for Amon's revolution are even more sidelined. We don't know what Asami thinks, or what Pema thinks. Or the Air Acolytes. Come to think of it, Mako and Bolin's parents were also killed by the notorious A. Firebender, and it's possible they weren't benders themselves. But it's not brought up.
Like you said, Korra is completely ill-equipped to actually consider the situation from their point of view, but it should have changed. Of course, there was no time - but to say that just shifts blame. It means the source of the problem might be external circumstances rather than writer incompetence (although if it was their idea to have such a short season, it doesn't), but the problem remains.
I wouldn't say it has yet to be properly discussed. People just talked a lot about how there's a dearth of viable reasons for so many non-benders joining the Equalists. Other than that, you're right, of course. We hardly got the Equalists' perspective at all, and the point of view of non-benders who hadn't joined the movement was absent.
The President's election that supposedly fixed all the problems was, to me, a quick and dirty way to have the first season have some consequence when they got to work on the second one.
It doesn't, but it certainly makes watching their interaction in Season One with knowledge that they'll end up together very amusing.
Generally speaking, as awful as the love triangle was, I think they managed to turn it into something good, eventually. Not just because Korra and Asami ended up together, but because Korra and Mako's breakup was handled surprisingly maturely. They fell in love, but then they realized that it doesn't work. Things got awkward, but they moved past it and remained friends, with Mako promising that he'll have Korra's back no matter what. In a medium where people staying with their first crushes forever after is the norm, it's pretty refreshing and valuable.
Speaking of people staying with their crushes forever after, I find it very interesting that Aang and Katara's family evidently wasn't sunshine and roses. While it's obvious they both loved their children and meant the best for them, all three of them have issues through the roof. Tenzin is cracking under the weight of having an entire culture depending on him, Bumi has a crippling inferiority complex and Kya... Kya is a bit of a mystery. She seems to have taken to drifting as means of escaping the pressure of being the daughter of the Avatar and a Fire Lord-stomping war hero. It's a shame we didn't see more of it. As it is, Bumi's character arc leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.Last edited by Morty; 2015-01-25 at 08:45 AM.
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2015-01-25, 10:22 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Legend of Korra, Book 5: It's canon. Deal with it.
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2015-01-25, 01:17 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Legend of Korra, Book 5: It's canon. Deal with it.
For a show to take on these issues at all is laudable. However, if we ignore the tone and just look at the content of what Season 1 suggests we get the following message:
Racism, bigotry, is a simple problem caused by preening camera-hogging men doing something once or twice. It is solved immediately by electing a member of said minority as a preening camera-hogging president.
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Also benders and non-benders of Avatar world have always led a tightly integrated existence, and we've seen plenty of evidence that non-benders regularly attain the heights of martial prowess as well as political office. Anti-bender sentiment is a sort of momentary flare up, and racism as such is utterly alien to this world.
Actually come to think about it, it isn't. ATLA addresses it a lot more with Fire/Eath nation (not to mention Air nation genocide). Tribalism is big in Avatar world, but having bending looks more like being double jointed than being dark-colored.The laws of physics are not crying in a corner, they are bawling in the forums.
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2015-01-25, 01:41 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Legend of Korra, Book 5: It's canon. Deal with it.
Toph Pony avatar by Dirtytabs. Thanks!
"When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." -C.S. Lewis