"Good sound quality, good acting," Beila translates.

"Sure. How come you can make my opinions sound more interesting than I can?"

"I read movie reviews sometimes when I'm trying to decide what to see before actually showing up to the theater," Beila says. "That's the sort of thing they say. Talking about the sound quality."

"A-ha," he says, and laughs.

"Of course, then they go on about things I don't actually generate opinions on, like, historical accuracy - they're movies, not textbooks - but yeah, that's where I picked that up."

"Well, it's probably good to know how historically accurate they are," he says. "Because I bet they mostly aren't. But yeah."

"That's the point, they mostly aren't, you shouldn't be drawing conclusions about history based on the movie version anyway; it doesn't matter that much if this is a hundred percent true or only seventy percent true because they had a vocal coach train everybody to speak in genuine Foggy Swamp accents."

"But if you don't know anything else about that period of history you're going to end up drawing conclusions based on the movie version, people's minds are kind of bad at empty spaces, aren't they?"

"People's minds are bad at that," Beila acknowledges. "I don't put my weight down on conclusions I'm not pretty confident in, but even I don't have much choice but to accept random stuff I heard wherever as possible hypotheses, even if they could have been completely made up."

"Yeah! So it's good to pay some attention to historical accuracy just to kind of... clear out the dirt a little."

"All right, you've convinced me. I shall decline to see Kyoshi Versus the Merpeople. Everyone knows that Kyoshi was actually friendly with the merpeople."

He cracks up.

"Man, in six hundred years I bet people make absolutely terrible movies - or holos or virtual realities or whatever - about me. That's kind of uncomfortable to think about. Yet another reason to live forever, so I can complain if anyone depicts me fighting merpeople."

"I would not really care if people made bad movies about me five hundred years after I died," says Dao.

"Dao Jukai, Structural Engineer, Versus The Structural-Support-Stealing Gnomes," suggests Beila. "They'll give you a sword and terrible one-liners."

"See, that would be awesome!"

Beila laughs. "Why would that be awesome?"

"Because somebody'd be making a movie about me?"

"But by stipulation it is a terrible movie!"

"A historically accurate movie about me would probably be really boring. I bet Dao Versus The Gnomes would be fun."

"Aw, you might do movie-worthy things yet," says Beila. "You're only sixteen, like me, right?"

"Yeah. But I don't really want to do anything anybody would make a movie about," he says. "Besides date the Avatar, I guess."

"There's movies about Katara of the South," Beila points out. "I mean, she accompanied Aang on various noteworthy adventures in addition to marrying him, but there's movies that focus on her."

"So people in the future will make movies about me if I marry you, is that what I'm hearing?"

It is Beila's turn to blush now. "Well. I mean. That is probably a strictly true statement."