I’m not sure that canon truly supports this thought, but the idea of young Lunars who haven’t quite mastered their abilities running around with flawed glamours the same way little middle schoolers run around with shaky eyeliner and too much blush when they’re still figuring out cosmetics just won’t leave me alone.
One is aiming to create bright blue braids like the Queen’s advisor wears, but she can’t hold the illusion as long as she’d like just yet, so the image wavers between her own black curls and the desired braids when she gets tired. Another tries to recreate Princess Winter’s scars for a historical figures day at school, but just can’t quite make them look like right.
They try to pull the same fancy tricks and copy the intricate glamours that their parents and older siblings wear, but their execution is off: the signature wild Lunar party colors come out flat and muddy if they don’t concentrate just right, the impossible hairdos look off-center and blatantly fake if they’re constructed without a friend on hand to act as a live mirror (”A little to the right. No, a little to the left. Okay, it’s even now, but you lost the color you were going for.”), and while any experienced Lunar knows that any attempts at changing their bodily appearance must be made with care to avoid wildly unnatural proportions, the young ones occasionally arrive at parties looking like a badly photoshopped holoimage.
Puberty’s rough, no matter what planet you’re on.
I really like this. I’m also not sure if it’s supported by canon, but it seems like the sort of thing that would happen. And just imagine kids trying to glamour themselves to look like Cinder, and ending up with vastly incorrect cybernetic limbs because they’ve never actually seen Cinder, or really any cyborg before, so they don’t know how it’s supposed to look. And then Cinder seeing them and being flattered and just very, very embarrassed because that’s how she is.
On the note of cybernetics and glamours, I think that glamouring cybernetics would become vastly popular because everyone loves the adorably awkward cyborg princess who freed them from Levant, and it becomes a trend, and at first it’s really awkward for Cinder, but then when she sees people, she complements them, and maybe gives them tips on how to make their glamours look more realistic.
Cinder’s brief rule/the change to democracy and just the overall change of leadership changing lunar culture, especially when it comes to glamours.
I know this isn’t what you meant, but since I just binged all of AtLA, I’m imagining that this kind of scenario happens from time to time, too.
ruby-dear archive 