So in the past few years I’ve seen so many videos / posts that are like:
“Actually wolves don’t have hierarchies! They live in family groups where the ‘alphas’ are mom and dad and the other wolves are their CHILDREN and offer their respect willingly! :D”
and I just have to say
how dare you try to make normative nuclear families out of wolves
Yes, a lot of the old “nature red in tooth and claw” stuff about wolves is nonsense. (Like anything from Jack London.) And anything ‘alpha’ you see sleazy men trying to relate to dating (yikes!) is especially nonsense.
But wolves are complex social creatures and they create complex social structures. Just as you can’t say “THIS is the way human society is structured. Just THIS single way and no other”, so too there is no single form for a wolf pack.
Some packs are a mom wolf and a dad wolf and their wolf children. Others are two small ragged packs that combine to form a large pack. Others are packs where a lone wolf joins and eventually becomes a leader. Others are packs where a grown child-wolf has pushed their parent out of the leadership role.
Speaking of the latter, let’s look at the tale of Wolf 40 and Wolf 42.
Wolf 40, Wolf 41, and Wolf 42 were wild Yellowstone wolves, daughters of the alphas. Their father was illegally killed by hunters and shortly after ambitious Wolf 40 ousted her mother, driving her out of the pack. Wolf 21 became the new alpha male, and 40′s mate.
Wolves have personalities, and Wolf 40′s personality was “volatile”. Imagine Scar from The Lion King combined with the boss from Office Space, and you have Wolf 40. She habitually bullied the other female wolves, attacking them until they expressed abject submission. And the wolves that got the worst of it were her sisters, Wolves 41 and 42.
Wolf 41 got tired of the bullying and left. Wolf 42 remained, perhaps because she was close to Wolf 21, the alpha male. Despite that, Wolf 21 did not interfere when his mate harassed Wolf 42.
One day, Wolf 40 went out on an important task. She was going to kill another litter of her sister’s pups–having done the same in two previous years. This isn’t uncommon wolf behavior (but is not universal, as we will see.) Typically only the alphas breed.
However, Wolf 40 never returned from her important task because Wolf 42–who previously had submitted to her alpha and sister, who had allowed the killing of two previous litters of pups–had had enough. She fought back.
And the other female wolves jumped to aid her.
Collectively, they killed Wolf 40. Because “alpha” isn’t a magic cloak of protection, it doesn’t even mean “strongest wolf”, it’s just a job title.
The next day Wolf 42 carried her pups, one by one, to her sister’s den. She set her children among the pups of her dead sister and raised both litters together. And when another wolf in the pack had pups, Wolf 42 carried them to the den to be communally raised as well. She was the alpha female now and she made the rules, and the first rule was “we don’t hurt pups here.”
As alpha female, Wolf 42 continued to be supportive and kind towards the other pack members. Wolves who had been nervous wrecks under Wolf 40 began to relax and come into their own; one of the former omega wolves gained self-confidence and became one of the best hunters.
“Alpha”, for wolves, just means leader. They might be good leaders, whom you respect, or they might be bad leaders, who fill you with dread. They might be your parents, or they might not. Even if they are your mother or father, wolves don’t contextualize those relationships the same way humans do.
But one thing wolves have in common with humans is that they have individual personalities and experiences, and their actions derive from those. There is no “typical wolf pack.” And I think that’s beautiful.
If you want to learn more about wild wolf dynamics, I recommend reading the annual Yellowstone Wolf Project Reports. Which are FASCINATING. There are also some good wildlife specials out there.
Wolves are my favorite animal. <3 It pains me to see them misunderstood as crazed bloodthirsty brutes, but it also pains me to see them woobified. They deserve better than that.
So I noticed in A:TLA, and it’s carried over in LoK, that Airbenders always seem to have an advantage in a fight. And at first, it felt like plot armour, particularly in A:TLA.
But when Aang fought Bumi, he lost most of that advantage. And I realised that this wasn’t just plot armour. Someone had sat and worked it out: nobody has had to fight Airbenders for generations.
None of the other nations have had to train to face them, or practised sparring with them, or anything. Apart from Bumi, no bender in the show has ever even met an airbender before Aang comes along. And in LoK, for the most part people still haven’t. We never see fights between those who have (for e.g. we never see Tenzin and Lin fight); when Korra and Tenzin use airbending, its a unique fighting style that people aren’t trained to manage.
It’s a really small detail, and it fundamentally works to give the heroes an advantage (and make up for Aang’s young age and lack of combat experience), but I love how it’s an advantage in combat for completely logical reasons.
The detail in these shows is amazing.
You can see the same principle in play whenever somebody fights somebody who uses a completely unfamiliar style. Combustion benders and lavabenders aren’t straight up more powerful, but they’re pretty much always something you haven’t dealt with which presents unique challenges. That red lotus lady with no arms is just a perfectly ordinary waterbender, but using forms and styles nobody else has seen before. Jet routinely smacks around benders and soldiers, but loses hard to the first person he met who had actually studied diverse styles of swordplay. When Toph invents metalbending, nobody can deal with that, but seventy years later the counters are pretty well known among people who might have to fight the cops.
And it’s why Azula, a genius prodigy who has thought long and hard about how to counter every kind of magic and martial arts out there, keeps getting messed up by a kid with a boomerang.
it’s also a detail from the second ever episode
aang straight up says to the fire nation guards on zuko’s ship “you’ve probably never fought an airbender before”, because he in-universe figures out that, if what everyone around him is saying is true, and airbenders have been extinct for a century (or at least have gone to ground enough to make people think that) then he is a totally unknown figure in anyone’s calculations
this has been brought up before but it’s also one of the reasons why hama is so thrown in her fight with katara - waterbending is about energy exchange, keeping things flowing, throwing your opponent’s power back at them and we see katara and hama do this in their fight. however, when katara is faced with a powerful blast from hama, she stands her ground and blows it apart:
[image ID: a gif of katara in the puppetmaster. she is a teenage girl with dark skin and hair and blue eyes, wearing a red outfit. she turns and throws her hand out, stopping a blast of water and turning it into a huge shield. the background is a dark forest. end image ID]
why do i bring this up?
because it’s a move - and a mindset - influenced by earthbending, which hama has never faced (she went from the south pole, to prison, to the fire nation). it’s an indication not only of katara’s skill and power, but also how she’s learned from her travels, and from toph
one of my favorite details of atla is how the main characters’ fighting styles adapt as they take on new enemies and make new friends with other bending styles. iroh straight up tells zuko about how he developed a technique for redirecting lightning by studying waterbenders, but if you watch closely especially in the last season, there’s a lot of this sort of thing happening unspoken with the gaang, using the bending forms of other elements like katara does above. it really shows the strength in differences and diversity coming up against a fascist regime that wants everyone to conform.
Look at Korra metal bending here
It’s completely different than anything we’ve seen from other metal benders, who bend metal with sharp movements like the derivative of earth bending that it is
But Korra is fluid. She is bending metal like it’s water. Because she is a water bender. And she is the first person in history to be able to bend both metal and water and so she is able to combine these styles into one and move seamlessly between them. This shows so beautifully how the Avatar is the embodiment of all bending
Every time I think this show has shown me all it can….it gives me more.
i love people who dissect every part of asoiaf to develop theories. babe grrm doesn’t remember anything he writes or any of his own rules he just goes “fuck it bloodcrow king emperor evil man” and by accident it all matches up
Having ADHD is like just now I went to look up salmon recipes but suddenly I’m building a shelf
The transition also came from a purely logical train of thought but that doesn’t mean it was correct
I actually walked away from washing dishes because my train of thought went “I’m tired of cleaning dishes and I have to go to work soon and then I will have to come home and make dinner and I will be MORE tired” and then I thought “wait I can save myself being tired making dinner LATER if I simply put dinner in the slow cooker to cook NOW” and we have leftover salmon that will go bad if I don’t use it soon so I started googling salmon slow cooker recipes but halfway through I thought about how getting the slow cooker out is a hassle because there is never enough counter space and then I REMEMBERED I bought a shelf to put counter things to have more counter space but I’d left the box in the car so I went out and got the box and completely assembled a shelf but I still haven’t started dinner OR finished the dishes.
Hey OP, you are late for work now
FUCK
This is it.
This is exactly what an ADHD train of thought can look like. And I’d bet money that this happened in the span of about 10 seconds.
Hello welcome my ADHD themed gameshow, “So you were holding it literally moments ago but now it’s gone” the where YOU look for whatever you were just holding while going increasingly mad
