There's Baiting And Then There's Whatever This Is.

there's baiting and then there's whatever this is.

So here I was

enjoying the details of Oma and Shu in the LA: how Shu has a very Chinese-inspired hanfu outfit and Oma has a very Indian-inspired sari outfit and I realized—

—wait.

Wait.

Shu has a long blue scarf.

Well, well well.

—

edited to correct Shu's outfit misidentification.

I'm curious let's go

man, all you zutara guys are way better at this shipping thing than me. i read through like ninety different metas about the symbolism of the colors associated between the two, the fact that the two of them are the emotional story arc of ATLA, and how their romance falls more into the canon themes of the franchise.....

and then i'm here like, he took lightning for her and she was aang's mom in an episode. i'm sold.

my unpopular opinion about lovely runner is that i think that sun-jae actually killed himself in the original timeline, and that he was only murdered in the second timeline.

read below, for my analysis!

if you look at the sun-jae perspectives in the first timelines (i.e. before im sol came back to the future from the second try after her successful running away from the kidnapper), he's clearly miserable. He clearly hates being an idol, he doesn't seem to get on with his bandmates (i love that when im sol changed the timeline, baek in-hyuk and sun-jae became close friends again; they have good friend chemistry, and their relationship is genuinely sweet), and he definitely feels tremendous guilt over what happened to sol (he definitely internalized what she said in the hospital).

if we look at the murderer, the way that sun-jae would've died, which is being pushed off the balcony into the swimming pool, would become way more difficult, and harder to pull off. we didn't get the best look at that corpse, but there were virtually no signs of struggle. dude is kind of smiling, or it is more contentment (this could just be me not understanding facial expressions or byeon woo seok breaking character as a dead guy) if you look at ep 9, then we see that the killer would struggle against sun-jae, who's pretty broad and taller than the killer. even if the killer had the element of surprise, he'd still have to get sun-jae knocked down, which he couldn't do in ep 9 even with sun-jae still not expecting it, and then drag him to the balcony and push him off. also from what we see about this killer (which is practically nothing as far as i know; why does he even want to kill sol? is he like a serial killer who just kills random people, and then sol and sun-jae just happen to escape?) , but given that the murder that is confirmed is done by knife stabbing, it seems like just throwing him off the balcony is not usually his MO. people also stab themselves to commit suicide.

also if you look at his final interaction with sol from his perspective, he's suddenly onslaught with all of the guilt and self-hatred that he had dealt with fifteen years ago along with his current problems. he loves her no doubt, but he's also wracked with guilt over what he feels is his fault in putting her in a wheelchair, and also some despair over the fact that she doesn't remember. When all of those feelings smash together, who wouldn't fall into such deep despair that they'd consider something?

the hoo books are a bit iffy at times, but i will never forget when I first read calypso is ranting about francis drake and his elizabeth and I legitimately thought that rick riordan implied that francis drake was in love with queen elizabeth I.