META ACCEPTED - Tumblr Posts
Broke: Adult Warlock looks back on his childhood being raised by a demonic Mary Poppins and her boyfriend/archnemesis the oddly religious gardener and is rightly a bit freaked out.
Woke: Being the son of a man who doesn’t really have time for him and has expectations for a Male Child that he keeps pushing onto him, and a woman who is clearly willing to use him to get at her husband (listen to her voice when she says “hello Warlock” after rejecting the family name Thaddeus. Tell me that isn’t the voice of revenge) was way weirder. Nanny Astoreth and Brother Francis were actually pretty good caretakers and, though he admits they had their eccentricities, Warlock looks back on them fondly.
Bespoke: Warlock was pretty isolated as a child, since a combination of being homeschooled and constantly living under threat of kidnapping meant he didn’t get to interact with other kids much. When he went to university, as a kind of rebellion against his family he deliberately befriended a lot of people who weren’t of his social class, and so wouldn’t have had nannies and gardeners growing up.
As a result, Warlock Dowling has spent his whole life assuming that all nannies and all gardeners are just Like That, and puts any weirdness down to him having had an unusually posh upbringing.
He quite happily sings Crowley’s lullaby to his own kids. He tells them they’re going to be princes and princesses of Hell in the same way that other parents tell their kids about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Teaches them to refer to animals as ‘brother this’ or ‘sister that’ and makes deliberately cryptic remarks about them ‘coming into their true power’.
Warlock Dowling obliviously passing on the new family tradition, because he wants to raise his kids right.
Hey um what. What goddamn business did Omashu have having a King?? Like I never really questioned it since it came from such an early Book One still-world-building episode but. Omashu is a city, for starters, and it’s a city in the Earth Kingdom. Which. You know. HAS a king.
You know I bet, honestly, Omashu doesn’t have a king. And NEVER had a king. Omashu had a succession of Governors or some shit and on the day that Bumi took the mantle he said “Fuck this ‘Governor Bumi’ stuff that’s lame. Call me King.” and when his advisors said they can’t legally do that Bumi passed a law changing his title from Governor to King, stuck a crown on his head, and called it macaroni.
And the citizens of Omashu were probably just like “alright” cuz like. Bumi strikes me as the kind of Local Town Eccentric who has a working personal relationship with pretty much everyone so all 100,000 people of Omashu heard this decree of Kingship and went “yeah that tracks” and got on with their day.
Outside of Omashu though? Good god. That’s gotta be a fucking look. At this point 112-year-old Bumi has been ‘King’ for a lifetime longer than the actual Earth King. What a look. How much sleep do you think Long Feng loses about this??? How many assassination attempts do you think he tried to carry out, only to have the Dai Lee come crawling home with the imprint of Bumi’s face smashed into their armor and some rock candy stuffed into their socks?
Ba Sing Se adores its appearance of order and structure and hierarchy and I cannot even begin to imagine their Daily Hell of dealing with Omashu’s centenarian feast-loving candy-munching batshit unhinged and utterly unkillable pseudo-King.
The Fire Nation taking over Omashu was probably the happiest goddamn day of Long Feng’s life.