Fandom: Brazilian Waterbenders

[nebroadwe]

Sniggled from Bryan Konietzko's Tumblr, the Olympic performance of the Brazilian synchronized waterbending swimming team:

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Okay, Nickelodeon, can we please have an ATLA soundtrack album NOW?

Comments

[gruskek]

That was really neat :) I never really watch synchronized swimming and maybe I should start to :)

[nebroadwe]

I have this weirdly conflicted relationship with synchronized swimming (and with rhythmic gymnastics, actually). On the one hand, the people engaging in it are seriously athletic, so: sport. On the other hand, it's so highly performative it seems to slide away from sport toward art (cf. dance, also engaged in by seriously athletic people but not a sport). On the gripping hand, I have no problem watching figure skating as a sport, which ought to raise the same difficulties. Um.

Mostly, I want my ATLA soundtrack album naow, plz. :-)

[gruskek]

I never had that problem with figure skating because I've been watching it with my family since I was tiny (like before I can remember xD). By the time I got to see any discussion on whether it's a legit sport or not, I'd managed to immerse myself in it so totally, have so much knowledge about it, see so many examples of sportsmanship, that I never had the slightest doubt

[nebroadwe]

Figure skating was one of the sports I got into earliest, too (I date myself: I can remember when Denise Biellmann invented that spin of hers). After all, if it was on Wide World of Sports and had a world championship, how couldn't it be a sport? :-) And then, in college, I was sitting around with a group of friends watching the U.S. nationals or some such, all of us critiquing the performances, when someone's boyfriend walked in. He listened quietly until the commercial break, but then exclaimed, "Wow! It's like a bunch of guys watching football!"

We smirked. ;-)

[cornerofmadness]

very cool

[nebroadwe]

They must have the cardiovascular systems of Time Lords, honestly.

[cornerofmadness]

seriously. I do love synchronized swimming