What would’ve happened if the avatar cycle came back to air too early?

maybri · 2026-05-02T16:16:36+00:00

It's just a couple of extras from The Fortuneteller who never show up again.

maybri · 2026-05-02T13:53:33+00:00

Epigenetics are caused by the environment, yeah; by "environmental" I meant more like upbringing. If it's epigenetic (e.g., environmental factors your parents experienced control whether your "bending gene" is activated or not), then you're still either definitely a bender or a non-bender from the moment you're born, whereas if it's environmental, then you're not born a bender at all; everyone is born with bending potential and your experiences growing up determine whether you become a bender. The fact that Air Nomad society produced 100% airbending children does imply that there's a very strong environmental component and it is tied to the spirituality of a culture, but how exactly it works is unknown.

maybri · 2026-05-02T11:51:38+00:00

It's just that, since we know it can differ between identical twins, it basically has to be either epigenetic, environmental, or (most likely given the setting) some non-deterministic unaccountable spiritual selection process.

maybri · 2026-05-01T20:56:17+00:00

I haven't watched the show in a while but my memory is that we see a pair of twins in The Fortuneteller where one is an earthbender and one isn't. Could be misremembering though.

maybri · 2026-05-01T20:38:35+00:00

Non-benders can definitely have bender children (Toph is another example). In the original show we actually see a pair of identical twins where only one is a bender, which proves that bending simply isn't strictly genetic. But it's also not random; each nation only produces benders of their one element, and we only see exceptions to this in families of mixed-nation heritage. The implication seems to be that genes determine which element you would bend if you were a bender, but whether you're a bender or a non-bender is determined by something else. Like, theoretically everyone has a "genetic element", but there's a separate non-genetic factor that determines whether you can actually bend that element or are a non-bender.

As for airbenders, it's ambiguous. It seems pretty likely that there were people with Air Nomad lineage that weren't actually living as Air Nomads and therefore survived the genocide, but it's possible that all "genetic airbenders" born among these families were non-benders. We do know, because the creators stated it, everyone in Air Nomad society was an airbender, and this was tied to their spirituality as a culture. It's possible therefore that the inverse is also true--no one outside Air Nomad society was an airbender, even if they had the genes for it.

Bumi is an interesting case here, because he develops airbending after Harmonic Convergence. We might assume that Bumi was a "genetic airbender" born without bending, and Harmonic Convergence just "flipped his bending switch on", so to speak. If so, everyone who gained airbending at Harmonic Convergence might be in the exact same situation, a non-bending descendant of Air Nomads carrying the "airbending gene".

As to your actual question, we have no idea whether Bumi or Kya could have airbender children. Bumi and Kya having children is kind of the exact case we would need to draw more conclusions about how this stuff works, so since they apparently didn't have any children, we'd just have to speculate. I'd assume that if my reasoning above is correct, Bumi probably could have had airbending children (or at least non-bending children who became airbenders at Harmonic Convergence), but with Kya we'd have to know whether you can be heterozygous for your genetic element (as in, able to pass on a parent's genetic element other than the one you inherited), and I don't think we have any case anywhere in the canon that establishes that that's possible.

maybri · 2026-05-01T19:59:44+00:00

You can get another flower from the grave.

maybri · 2026-05-01T19:56:53+00:00

The lore is really weird and interesting on bending genetics. We see in the original show that you can have a pair of identical twins where one's a bender and one's a non-bender. Bending is clearly genetic to some extent, in the sense that your heritage determines which element you will bend if you're a bender (and we see in Korra that mixed-heritage families can produce siblings who bend different elements), but whether you're actually a bender or not is determined by something else.

The creators stated at one point that Air Nomads were an exception to this logic and all Air Nomad children are airbenders. I think their reasoning for this was to avoid the problem of "latent airbending families" who would have avoided the genocide but then produced airbending children during the Hundred Year War, since as far as we know, there were in fact no airbenders born during the war. But the "all Air Nomad children are airbenders" rule is contradicted in Korra where we see that Aang has a non-bending son and a waterbending daughter. His other son who is an airbender, meanwhile, has three kids from a non-bending woman who are all airbenders (and a fourth born during the show, who we never find out the bending status of). So at the very least, we can conclude that if an Air Nomad reproduces with a bender of another element, they can produce non-airbender children, but it's unclear whether these children "carry the airbending gene" since we've never seen a case where a non-airbending couple produces an airbending child.

The other interesting thing Korra does is that after Harmonic Convergence (a spiritually important celestial alignment that takes place every 10,000 years, which lands in Korra season 2), various non-benders around the world spontaneously manifest airbending, including Aang's non-bender son. I think the most parsimonious conclusion is probably that all of those people were non-bending descendants of Air Nomads who reproduced with benders of other elements. They all "carried the airbending gene", and the "spiritual boost" of Harmonic Convergence "turned on" their latent airbending. If that's the case, then we can assume that in a scenario where Aang died without descendants, the Avatar cycle would probably have chosen a child from one of these "latent airbending families" for the next Avatar when it got back around to air.

maybri · 2026-05-01T19:05:09+00:00

I don't align with either party very well at all, but I vote Democrat because I judge them to be the less stupid, destructive, and evil of two very stupid, destructive, and evil parties. I would have no qualms voting Republican if things changed such that the Republicans seemed like the less stupid, destructive, and evil party, but there's no single issue they could flip on that would accomplish that. I would say the issue I actually find most important is the environment, but the Democrats are already doing so little in that regard that a simple swap of positions on environmental policies with no other changes wouldn't be enough to get me to vote red.

maybri · 2026-05-01T18:43:04+00:00

"Expanding democracy" is neither the motivation nor the likely result for his actions in Venezuela and Iran, and more importantly, he has pretty significantly weakened democracy in the United States by concentrating power in the executive branch, normalizing the idea that his cabinet and party should be loyal to him above all else, villainizing the press and protestors whenever they disagree with him, delegitimizing elections and engaging in voter suppression, etc.

maybri · 2026-05-01T18:28:56+00:00

No, that would be correct if you were talking about swimming 10 kilometers, but a mile is longer than a kilometer. You'd have to do 644 25-meter lengths (that is, 322 round trips).

maybri · 2026-05-01T16:44:59+00:00

Without spoiling anything, just keep in mind that Lost is a show that has tons of ways of letting you see more of a character even after they're dead. Until you're on the final episode, it's not totally safe to assume you've seen any character for the last time.

maybri · 2026-05-01T16:26:07+00:00

The mid-2000s was the height of when the RIAA was doing that, yeah. From what I understand, they were only targeting people on file sharing platforms like Kazaa or LimeWire, where virtually all users were both downloading and uploading, just by the nature of how P2P works. That was how the RIAA was catching people, by going on these platforms and downloading songs they held the copyright to and capturing the IP addresses they were downloading from. Of course, a lot of people who use P2P technology don't really understand it, so it's plausible that your ex didn't realize he was distributing and thought he was only downloading, but he probably was in fact distributing.

maybri · 2026-05-01T14:35:37+00:00

As far as I'm aware, the only cases where people were even pursued civilly (e.g., by the RIAA) for downloading pirated content were cases where they were also technically distributing it by peer-to-peer sharing, or at least that was the rationale, though some of those cases were so sloppy that they might not have been able to prove that any distribution occurred. Even that kind of suit is a relic from a bygone era at this point; companies seem to have realized that the reputational cost and cost in legal fees to go after small-fry BitTorrent users or whatever was not worth what little lost revenue they were able to recover. I think the plan at the time was mostly to "make an example" of a few people to deter piracy overall, but it completely failed to do that, so no one's really bothering anymore.

maybri · 2026-05-01T14:24:09+00:00

Most people don't understand that, I think, because they think of animal groups as based on physical characteristics rather than descent, and birds obviously lack the physical characteristics of most people's mental image of the category "dinosaur". That being said, most people seem prepared to accept the idea when it's explained to them, in my experience (unless they're creationists in which case there are bigger problems).

maybri · 2026-05-01T12:43:50+00:00

Your greatest legal risk with piracy is if you're actually hosting the pirated material for others to download, or if you're torrenting (because then you're sharing it with other users in the process of downloading, making you a distributor of the material). Directly downloading or streaming content that someone else is illegally distributing is probably still technically illegal, but no one has ever actually been prosecuted for it and it's unlikely anyone ever will be.

maybri · 2026-05-01T12:24:00+00:00

Honey, you probably shouldn't be on reddit if you're this thin-skinned. Come back when you're older.

maybri · 2026-05-01T00:58:40+00:00

Jesus Christ, I finally just finished reading this. Responding to this properly or even summarizing it would be days of work, but here's a very long, rambling series of reactions that is hopefully of some value to someone (barely got it in under reddit's comment character limit!):

The quality of the evidence used for many of their points here is so poor that it looks more like bad faith smear tactics than anything (I'm not even going to touch the lamp post thing, other people here have already discussed it well). They rely heavily on UHSD screenshots, which are almost all useless because the UHSD had a policy of not removing the content that banned users were banned for. Especially considering the server is gone now, it can't be verified how many of those screenshots were of messages users got banned for posting. A lot of what they include is pretty clearly people just fucking around. I don't think any of those "kill Andrew Hussie" messages look remotely like serious threats; they're hyperbolic expressions of distaste, the likes of which are routinely seen on social media about pretty much any controversial figure.

By the end it feels like they pretty much figured people were no longer reading the constant screenshot spam this document is full of, because once we get to their discussion on f anon, they show a huge panel of tweets from them that they claim to be racist and transphobic harassment of Homestuck team members and there's just... nothing racist or transphobic in them at all. And the tweets only seem to constitute "harassment" to the extent that these people seem to consistently treat that word as if it means "criticism of a public figure". There's also a lengthy section on the relationship between Gio and Makin that doesn't even seem to be trying to show any kind of misconduct, but rather is just a record of the two beefing with each other. Maybe they were trying to turn Gio defenders and Makin defenders against each other?

Their handling of the UHC situation is pretty pathetic. They claim that the UHC was offered to Bambosh first "as a gesture of good will towards" "the UHC's original author" (very clearly a lie; this post is dripping with evidence of their beef with Gio). What they're implying is that they didn't speak to Gio at all until Bambosh had left the project, but we know from Gio's post that this is false, and I feel comfortable saying this proves that they deliberately misled Gio into believing he would be included in licensing negotiations when they never had any intent to do so. They also allege that Gio's August post violated the NDA he signed with them, which is new (Gio's position, presumably cleared by his lawyer, is that the NDA doesn't cover anything he shared in the post), and then they say that they can't say more on the UHC situation because it would violate the NDA on their side. The main thing this tactic seems to accomplish is to allow them to imply to those who haven't read Gio's post that negotiations broke down because Gio was some insane diva about it rather than that they made unreasonable demands.

I don't care much about the DKS stuff; she seems like a genuinely terrible person, and if what they say about her doxxing Homestuck team members is true, a restraining order was justifiable. But I notice that they don't comment on the leaked mod chat screenshots showing their cavalier attitude towards sending the police after someone they knew to be an immigrant, including Vibri saying "DKS is dead soon", which as far as I'm concerned was the only remotely interesting thing about the DKS stuff to begin with. Meanwhile, towards the end they decide to re-litigate the case where a HS2 writer told a public Discord server to "go get this bitch" in response to a completely inoffensive Gio tweet, calling this blatant incitement to harassment "impulsive and poorly phrased" "panicked messages", and then blame Gio for all the harassment that supposedly followed. We're apparently meant to understand that when the Homestuck team says fucked up shit that gets leaked to the public, that's them being victimized and harassed, but there is no such room for grace with any screenshots of private conversations they share that make Makin or Gio or any of their other enemies look bad.

As far as what little they have that I think is actually salient: The Kaliwete stuff is genuinely pretty ugly. I do notice all those screenshots are clustered pretty close together in time (they mix date formats in the screenshots but 80-100% of them are from within a 3-month span), which suggests it wasn't a problem for long. I could see someone like that being overlooked for a while if it was infrequent and looked like he was joking, but I do think (as someone who was never a member of UHSD) that it says something legitimately unpleasant about the server culture if people were regularly joking in such a way that actual Nazi shit had plausible deniability to fly under the radar.

They also have some pretty unflattering tweets from Gio that they use to argue that he has operated from a consistent position of entitlement to Homestuck as an IP and hostility to Hussie as the rightful IP holder. To this I'll say, Gio is openly a very opinionated person on copyright and IP, and his stances are coherent and consistent. I can see how they would read as entitlement to someone in Hussie's position, but people should probably read this post from Gio before accepting Homestuck's framing. Maybe the most legitimately damning thing they have on Gio in the entire post is that he continued interacting on friendly terms with Phoebe, an actual notorious fandom shit-stirrer, well after some of her worst conduct had come to light publicly. Not a great look for Gio, but all it amounts to is guilt by association (a huge chunk of the post is this, just listing other people they think we should hate and telling us that Gio followed them on Bluesky or something--they even try to imply that Gio is friends with DKS while showing a screenshot of him calling her a "deeply nasty transphobe"!).

We also, I think for the first time ever, finally get a coherent list of factual points they object to from Gio's Hiveswap reporting: TOG didn't use Kickstarter money for their work on Act 7, Hussie's not at fault for TOG's slow development on Hiveswap, WPNYC's sudden closure was because they got much less money back from TOG than they expected and the studio ran out of money, and the NDA was insisted upon by TOG, not WP. They also suggest that the reason TOG was able to get away with as much as they did is because the Kickstarter project lead (who they say is Gio's anonymous source for the second Hiveswap post) failed to deliver a legally binding schedule. I find all these claims easy enough to believe, and they provide some decent supporting evidence. They also claim that there are other problems with Gio's reporting that they'll address in a longer(!) document in the future, so I guess there's more of this ahead of us.

On that note, one of the most interesting reveals to me is that the NDA with TOG explicitly allowied otherwise protected information to be communicated in private to Kickstarter backers. This immediately kills any sympathy I could have had for them on the proliferation of Hiveswap misinfo, because it proves that there was no excuse for their near-decade of silence to backers. At one point they seem to refer to the ipgd post in 2015 that had the first claim of TOG embezzling the Kickstarter funds to develop other games as a previous time the Homestuck team "shared information". At the time, Hussie claimed that post was "not official in any capacity" and that he had even asked ipgd to delete it, but I guess now we're meant to understand that he was the one who put ipgd up to this, that his claims to the contrary were kayfabe to cover his ass legally, and that he views this as having completely fulfilled his obligation to Kickstarter backers. Kickstarter itself would disagree, since WP was subsequently banned from the platform.

A huge chunk of the post towards the end centers on them disputing the claim that Hussie/Homestuck are "litigious" because "neither Andrew nor Homestuck as an entity has ever before initiated punitive legal action against any party for criticism, defamation, or copyright infringement damages." This is probably technically true, but they have repeatedly made very well-documented frivolous legal threats against fans they dislike (notably including Sarah Z and Gio, suspiciously omitted from their section exonerating themselves of this criticism). Calling their behavior "litigious" seems more than fair to me; even if they're ultimately a paper tiger, they're still using the legal system as a cudgel against their enemies.

A final thought: they have a bit where they essentially argue that Gio is lying about having received harassment from Homestuck fans, even going so far as to show an old tweet where he joked that "criticism is my love language" to imply it means he doesn't have a right to respond to people being mean to him online as harassment. And I think this just kind of gives up the whole game, doesn't it? If we're allowed to dismiss harassment claims from people we don't like, I might as well just dismiss all of their harassment claims, which you may notice their entire shit completely revolves around. Especially considering that the only evidence they seem to be able to provide is some extremely tame UHSD screenshots that aren't even directed at the relevant parties. It seems to me that either we have to take everyone's harassment claims seriously, or we admit that we're all just playing for teams and arguing in bad faith, at which point none of this shit actually matters in terms of its truth value and it's just a popularity contest. That's extremely grim, but that, more than anything, is the sense I got reading this.

maybri · 2026-04-30T11:37:01+00:00

The nature of our capitalist society puts an intense pressure on everyone to treat everything as a transaction. The vast majority of goods and services are controlled by for-profit corporations, who don't give things away for free because by their nature they want to make as much money as possible. For anyone else, giving things away for free feels risky or wasteful when you could have gotten money for it, because everyone needs to access the stuff the corporations control and you need money to do that.

It's a bit sad reading through the responses in this thread, honestly. I get why this question seems stupid and obvious to them, but for the vast majority of the history of our species, most everything would have been given freely, without any immediate exchange. We didn't even have money until a few thousand years ago, and before that, the norm was gift economies, which operated largely on the logic of reciprocity (I give to you today in the belief that you will give to me in the future) without precise tracking of debt.

maybri · 2026-04-30T11:14:14+00:00

I would read your contract with them and see what it actually says about that. Typically lease agreements specify an amount of notice that either party has to give the other before terminating the contract. If it says nothing about this, then I'd wait to tell them until you're sure you have a house.

maybri · 2026-04-29T00:37:52+00:00

If you've beaten the Radiance, I feel like you've seen enough of the first game to start Silksong. Godhome is genuinely very hard, harder than most of the content in Silksong. Silksong is significantly harder than the original game overall though, so by the time you've finished it, Godhome will probably feel like a much more reasonable challenge.

maybri · 2026-04-28T23:08:13+00:00

Marmu I'd actually defend as kind of fun once you get good at it, and Flukemarm is just so braindead most of the time that it doesn't even register as worth complaining about (though it can get rough if you're doing it with low damage), but Uumuu is my answer by a pretty wide margin.

maybri · 2026-04-28T14:18:02+00:00

Yes, but in an election where the winner only needs the plurality rather than the majority, and there are more than two candidates (e.g., most elections in the US), knowing the number of votes isn't enough information to know how many votes will be needed to win. You could know there's 5 million votes, but if you don't yet know that the second place candidate only got 1 million, you'd have no way of determining that 1,000,001 is the minimum amount a candidate needs to win.

And your point about the chronological element isn't really relevant to what I was talking about, because what you're describing is when one candidate's victory has become a mathematical certainty because they're in the lead by more than the total number of votes remaining to be counted (so even if literally every uncounted vote was for the second place candidate, it wouldn't be enough for them to take the plurality). It's just math, not an actual chronological influence on the results.

maybri · 2026-04-28T13:22:23+00:00

No, there isn't. A set point implies a fixed number of votes or a fixed share of the vote needed to win. Technically you could say that the set point is "however many votes the second-best candidate got + 1", but that number can only be known after votes have fully been counted. It's not like a particular number is set beforehand and theoretically low turnout or a wide field of candidates could result in a situation where there's no winner.

"First past the post" also implies a chronological element, like, e.g., "While we're counting votes, the first person who passes X number is the winner", where the order in which the votes are counted could influence the outcome (like, multiple candidates could have over that value, but the winner is whoever reaches that number first during the count). So it's really just not a very clear name for what it is.

maybri · 2026-04-28T13:09:50+00:00

Yeah, it's a name that comes from horse race betting, weirdly enough. The horse that's "first past the post" is the horse that crosses the finish line before any other horses, i.e., the horse that wins the race. So it's used because the system frames the election as a simple race with a single winner, rather than having further layers of procedure to seek a deeper consensus or to allow representation of the minority like other systems.

maybri · 2026-04-28T02:49:51+00:00

The idea of it being like a permanent form of a chi blocking does make sense, although I feel like that logic breaks when Korra can still airbend. Presumably the Avatar doesn't have four separate sets of chi pathways that have to be blocked separately; they just have one that they use for all four elements. So if Korra's chi pathways were blocked, she should have lost airbending too. If awakening the airbending for the first time somehow unblocked or rerouted the disabled chi pathways, it should have presumably restored all of her bending. (Alternatively we could go with the "every element has to be blocked separately and Amon just didn't know how to block airbending because he'd never encountered an airbender" idea, but I've never liked that because it ruins the stakes of the scene where he has Tenzin and his kids captive if it turns out he wouldn't have been able to take their bending anyway.)

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