This episode was doing so well. SO WELL.

( spoilers )

Legend of Korra is definitely better watched with a friend. My roommate had missed the past two weeks, so we watched the last three episodes together and spent the entire time laughing about Verrick as Stephen Colbert. It was great.

But this week's episode...

( spoilers )

Honestly, my main thought about this episode?

SKY BISON BABIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

They justified the existence of this episode. I mean, I liked the rest of the episode, but. Come on. Sky bison babies.


( Real spoilers behind the cut )

Now THAT'S what I'm talking about.

( spoilers )


I had other thoughts, but I'm home with family for the weekend, so they've kind of flown out of my mind. But all in all, I enjoyed this episode a LOT more than the premiere, and I'm legitimately excited for next week.

I still need to rewatch it... I think that I'll appreciate it more on the rewatch. There were a lot of things in book 1 that I hated at first and then ended up liking when I rewatched it. (Same goes for pretty much the entire third season of Avatar: The Last Airbender)

But as a first impression? I was pretty underwhelmed. ( spoilers )


Overall, my thoughts are: Thank God for fanfic. But I still can't wait for next week. Love is blind.

I was watching Scandal the other week when Cyrus said this:

I wasn't made to be the Chief of Staff. Do you know what I was made to be? I was made to be the President of the United States. I was made to lead the nation. I was made to ensure this country's place in the world for generations to come. I would've been great at that. I have the stones. I have backbone. I have the will. I would have been a great President. But guess what, I'm fairly short, and I'm not so pretty, and I really like having sex with men, so instead of being President of this land, that I love, I get to be the guy behind the President of the United States, and sure I have power. I influence decisions. I help steer the country. But I'll never be in the history books. My name will never be on an airport or a doctrine. Being the guy behind the guy is as far as my road goes.

My first reaction was complete disdain. Cry more, you big baby. Typical white dude, obsessed with his status rather than getting shit done.

Then I asked myself: What if he were a black man? Or a woman? How would I feel about it then? And I realized that I would be much more sympathetic to his speech if he had been anything other than a white dude.



This is not to say that Cyrus' struggles as a rich, white gay male are equal to other marginalized groups. Cyrus benefits enormously from white male privilege, even as a gay man.


I guess what I found most interesting about my reaction, and my subsequent questioning of that reaction, is how I basically picked & chose which of Cyrus' identities mattered and which didn't. In that moment, for me, Cyrus' whiteness and maleness negated his queerness. His privilege in one area invalidated his marginalization in another.

It's something I'm still chewing over.

Wow. That was racist.

( cut for spoilers )

I've heard the song several times before, but for some reason today I fell head over heels in love with Anberlin's "Downtown Song".

When I first heard it, and wasn't really paying much attention to the lyrics, it reminded me of Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl", and all the other songs from that era about a working class guy falling for a rich girl.

But Joel's song is very much a love song (depending on how you define love, at least). The focus of the lyrics is the girl: how she's tired of her current life and how she's going to get together with him.

Anberlin's song isn't actually a love song at all.

He sees this girl around town ("I watch you walk the streets//wonder who you're thinking of") but there's no indication in the lyrics that he actually knows her, no better than a barista might know a frequent customer. He hopes that she's not in love with anyone else, which is something very different from wishing that she wasn't in love with anyone else. He has no way of knowing if she's actually in love with anyone else or not, because he doesn't actually know her.

Kind of hard to write a love song about someone you don't know. You could argue that he's in love with the idea of this girl rather than the reality of her, but the refrain has absolutely nothing to do with the girl at all.

Only the lonely know
Only the lonely know
Only the lonely know
What nights like these do to me, yeah

He's not calling out to other people who are lovelorn; he's calling out to the lonely. It isn't the girl who is having an affect on him; it's the nights he spends alone.

It's really not a love song. It's a song about loneliness. It's a song about being so lonely that you'll do anything to feel a human connection, even if it's just create a fantasy romance with a stranger.

I keep asking myself if our hands were meant to meet
I know this town is busy but I live on Heartbreak Street

(Also, I don't care what all the lyrics websites say: he is not singing "Public Street." I can't imagine what thematic significance that would have, even to an interpretation of this song that's different than mine.)


It's a very contradictory song, which is what I find so fascinating about it. The tune is so upbeat you could dance to it, but it's not a happy song. The singer thinks he's singing a love song, but the song is much more about how alone he feels. I get the sense that he's putting on a front and lying even to himself.

I really freaking love this song.