Editor’s Note: This week, we mark the winter solstice — and, with it, the element of change. On this day drenched in winter’s chill, join The Dot and Line as we celebrate our inaugural Waterbending Week, turning our focus to the flowing emotions of some of Avatar: The Last Airbender’s most famous, and infamous, Water Tribes citizens. And what better way to start than with a look at a city that makes Babylon look like Newark—or would, if it could ever exist.
While the grimdark HBO incarnation of the middle school game “Fuck Kill Marry” we all know as Game of Thrones is technically an adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s perpetually-in-progress masterwork A Song of Ice and Fire, it is known that spiritually, it is actually just Avatar: The Last Airbender fan fiction gone horribly awry. Which is why, when Marty Baron’s Washington Post Sponsored by LexCorp published a piece this morning examining an actual new study conducted by actual scientists who actually asked whether the Wall—an enormous barrier of ice so big and so cold that it could, paradoxically, make both Donald J. Trump and Gucci Mane (a.k.a. El Gato the Human Glacier) proud—could exist in real life, it was impossible not to ask the much more important follow-up question: Could the outrageously beautiful Northern Water Tribe capital city exist in real life?
Now, if a bunch of hack fake news scientists were to answer this question (which they did, and, also, for the record: Why?) they’d probably say a bunch of boring, obvious, and true stuff like “the problem with ice is that it can flow” and “the ice wall as proposed would not be a practicable defense under typical Earth conditions.” They are, no doubt, technically correct.
That said, this is a cartoon blog, for Tui and La’s sake! As such, and without going into the semantics surrounding whether waterbending is actually magic (it’s not), there are at least two possible answers to this question:
- Climate change. (Duh.)
2. It could exist…in Minecraft.
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