#Something something Katara having a lot of rage and power and lashing out and learning to wield it wisely and thoughtfully and responsibly

[erisenyo]

I'd say we can blame the Zukka server for this one except it's been kicking around for a while all on it's own

NSFW ahead - Zutara, bloodbending, humiliation kink, D/s vibess, conensual but not sane or safe, I think we can see where this is going

The first time she has him on his knees it’s an accident—almost.

Katara grunts as Appa takes off, instinctively shifting her weight to counterbalance the heave of take-off, the rush of bloodbending still in her ears. It’s a sharp, jagged thing, sticky in the way it clings to her bending, tugging her awareness away from the rolling ocean and toward the smallest rush instead, looking to grab and hold and crush the water to her will and she knows it’s not water but it’s close enough and she’s just doing what she has to do, what Zuko came with her to do, so for him to turn away like he’s horrified by her, like she’s the monster when he—

“What was that?” Katara snarls, the words bursting out of her, her bending thrumming like she can feel the pulse of every venule in her fingertips.

“What?” Zuko says after a pause, delayed and not looking at her, acting like there’s anything at all to see except ocean over the side of Appa’s saddle, when the only thing around to look at is—

“Back there,” Katara snaps, bending throbbing along with the words and her pulse, high and wild and looking for something to grab onto and that’s the hardest part of bloodbending, the way it wants to be used once it’s been called, a rising flood pressing against the dam of her control. “On that ship, when you—”

“My information was out of date,” Zuko has the gall to shrug, even stiffer than usual about it and nearly entirely turned away, like she’s too disgusting to even look, at the edge of the saddle like he’d be leaping out of it if he had anywhere to go. “But it’s fine, we got his location, we just have to go to—”

“I’m not talking about information,” Katara spits, “I’m talking about you.”

A jerk, his voice coming high and thin. “I—me?”

“You think you’re better than me?” Katara hisses, wishing she could revel in that fear except all she wants his for him to snap and snarl back so that she’d have the excuse to— “Like you’ve never done what you had to do? I don’t need your judgment, Prince Zuko.”

“What?” he says, almost turning toward her before he catches himself. “No, I—” Like he has any ground to try to deflect when he’s acting like she’s something too shameful to even acknowledge. “You just—”

“Shut! Up!” The bending lashes out with the force of it, whipping and rolling right at the object of her rage and freezing his jaw if not his throat.

So when he moans in the sudden silence, they both hear it, clear and lingering even in the rush of wind and waves.

“What—” Katara pulls back, her shock quickly twisting into ready anger as he gasps and whirls fully away like she’s— “Are you mocking me? You think this is a joke?” she snarls as he just shakes his head, mute.

“No, no,” he says, the words tripping out of him, “I don’t, I don’t, I—"

“This isn’t some trick—”

“—I know, I know, you’re—"

“—that you can just laugh at,” she shouts, the bending lashing out of her mid-word, snapping his jaw shut and wrapping into his veins and arteries and forcing him to turn and face her.

It’s a rush of adrenaline-fueled rage and she’s braced to counterbalance his resistance, so she overspins when he goes limp into it instead. She stumbles, instinctively yanking him down as she finds her balance and the way he folds right to his knees, not even fighting.

Katara only half-releases him in surprise this time, but it’s enough for his whimper to go from strangled to loud and clear halfway through, the sound loud and clear, fear and—and making fun of her, when they’re—when this whole thing was his—when they wouldn’t even be here if not for—

“Stop mocking me,” Katara screams, her hands clawing the air as she purposefully reaches out this time, gripping him tight and making him feel her, making sure he feels her bending everywhere.

“I’m—not—a—joke,” she snarls, setting her feet and shoving away the part of her that wonders what Aang would think of her using all their time practicing bending in the air for this and focusing on the wild feeling of exactly what she could do to him instead.

She lifts Zuko bodily into the air until he’s barely supporting his own weight, back arched and arms splayed wide and knees just graving the saddle, making sure he feels her power down to his fucking toes. She strangles any more sounds as she flattens his tongue to the roof of his mouth, his head kicking back, and she can feel the way his pulses pounds, feel the flush of fear in him, the blood rushing to his cheeks and extremities and his—

Zuko lets out a sound that any other time would be protest as she releases him so abruptly he collapses down onto the saddle. But she knows its just gasping for breath and the shock of regaining control of himself after—after straining, ice replacing the rolling fury in her veins as she stares at Zuko fumbling up onto his knees and back, scooting away, his knees drawn up like—like protection. Like he needs protection from her. His chest heaving and mouth wide and face turn away so she can only see his scar and just a sliver of skin, usually pale but still flushed red with—

Katara whirls away, fists clenched at her side as she tries to will away the voice too like Aang’s in the back of her head murmuring ‘two-headed rat viper,’ sadly and quietly and understandingly, like there’s anything here to—

“Get us to Yon Rha,” Katara grits out, the words rough in her throat like she was the one fighting to scream, and Zuko just gasps behind her, breaths harsh, and Katara decides that that is answer enough.

--

The second time she has him on his knees, it’s on purpose. Mostly.

Because the problem is she can’t stop thinking about it, that—that sound. About that sound, and about the way he’d looked at her.

So in snatches and glances and sidelong looks, through the rest of the night and into the morning she watches him. Through the trek across the nondescript, nothing island to the nondescript, nothing village to the nondescript, nothing man who killed her mother, she keeps him in the corner of her eye.

And she knows that he can tell she’s watching, she can see it in the way he holds himself and the angle of his head and in the mortified redness that never truly leaves his face. In the stiffness of his body when she makes the rain fall like daggers around them. And in the look in his eye when he snatches furtive looks back, too, even though she doesn’t know how she knows it, something in his gaze she can’t place except that it makes her think again of that sound, and what it felt like to have him helpless in her hold, and he way he’d curled his legs up in front of himself after…

“Why didn’t you fight me,” Katara demands later as they pause by a stream, Zuko crouching down to wipe the sweat from his face and neck, his hands, cupping water into his mouth and the power of the moon is still lingering in her chi and for a while moment she imagines she could cup that water in her bending, too, cup it and follow it past his lip and—

“You didn’t even try,” she snaps when he just avoids her gaze, temper scraped raw by the idea of being denied this on top of being denied the struggle, on top of all the righteous fury crested inside her with nowhere to go. “You always—you fight why wouldn’t you—”

She breaks off, clenching her hands into fists against the jagged surge in the midst of the rolling ocean of her bending, Zuko hunching forward even more and still not answering, hunching over himself just like before, which means this is the same, which means—

Which means not what she thinks its means. Which means she was wrong then, and she’s wrong now, and he’s just mocking her again, mocking her like—

“It’s like you want to be on your knees,” she accuses, remembering the way he—blurting the words before she even fully thinks them, bravado over uncertainty and then when he just looks away, doesn’t even have the nerve to make a sound, “Or like you want me to put you there.”

Zuko just swallows hard, a flush crawling up his face, and Katara feels like her own face is flushing, barely-banked adrenaline surging back to life and her bending along with it.

“Toph told me how to spot a liar, you know,” she says, watching his lips part as he gasps and she has no idea where the threats are coming from. “I can feel hearts beating and pulses pounding just as well as her.” The quick flash of his tongue, like his lips are suddenly dry. “Would you be lying now if I checked you?”

Katara doesn’t know why she holds her breath, jagged anticipation in her throat, but it’s the only reason she hears the whimper that slips past his bitten lip over the sound of the stream, the noise that’s fear but also—it’s also—

“Should I check?” she says, the words coming out taunting, challenging, her bending shivering with readiness, her awareness sharpening from the heavy rush of the stream to the tight-quick-fast pulse on front of her as Zuko pants a moment, still half-folded forward.

Then, unsteady and low, gold eyes suddenly peaking through his lashes and the fall of his hair, “If it would make you feel better.”

Katara bloodbends him. Not like before, not with that sharp urge to wrench, but shoving into every bit of him hard enough to make him gasp, to make his whole body jerk with it and then go still, caught as she holds, flexing against every bit of him and—

“You like this,” she accuses as she quickly releases him, like that does anything to erase the bright feel of the pathways and pools of his blood from her mind.

And Zuko shakes his head, chest heaving and gasping and that’s familiar to her, too familiar, but the flutter of his lashes along with it—

“Are you lying?” she challenges, and she wonders if he can feel the potential of her bending pulling at his blood as he pants, open-mouthed a moment, body going tight.

Then, “You could check,” he rasps, and it’s such an open invitation that even half-expecting it, Katara still stares a moment before grabbing hold again, pushing to the liquid core of him but leaving his throat free because the way he keens, like he wants it, like she doesn’t even need to check his throbbing pulses to know—

Zuko is still folded half over himself, so she makes him straighten to sit back on his heels, first. Then she makes him drag up his head to look at her, makes him keep his eyes open until they bead and water and she’d do something about that except for the way the strain against her grip is like he’s trying to tilt back into it. And then she forces his knees to spread, wide enough to draw out a panting whimper and further than she expected and more than enough to see the bulge in his pants.

“You like it,” Katara says, her mouth suddenly dry—adrenal response, a voice like Yugoda’s says in the back of her head—as she stares at the dark fabric straining against the length of him, the way she can see his shape so clearly, see him press flat by the fabric against his own leg and it can’t be comfortable and—

 Katara gives him enough play to talk, to argue, to say its stress or adrenaline or just the natural responses of a teenage male body experiencing hormonal surges. But he just groans, letting out a low, pleading sound of denial and she can feel the way he strains to close his thighs but she still has him in her hold and she’s attuned to his blood, she can feel the way he’s reacting, she has felt it, and even if she couldn’t she can see.

“You like it,” she says again, more to herself except she can see the way he bites his lip against it even as she can feel the rush of his blood, can feel exactly where it’s pooling and even if he doesn’t like it, his body undeniably does.

Except Katara thinks he might like that, too. Because his invitation is still hanging in the air and she can’t fight the urge to figure this out, figure him out, arching his back—he likes that—and flexing his fingers—he’s indifferent, or what baselines as indifference for him in the current situation—and closing his lips—oh, he really like that, that gives her a new baseline. And she can see the hardness between his legs, the one she isn’t causing, at least not with bending—at least not directly with bending. And she can see the way he gasps and pants as much as she’ll allow it, hear the half-pleading groans that don’t entirely muffle against his sealed lips.

And the way she can feel the strain of his body, what he fights and what he tries to sink into, the shivers and tremors and Tui and La the jerks of his hips that she presses instinctively to stillness, and then again because the way it makes him moan—she shoves with her bending, gripping and pushes and finally following the flow of blood as much as controlling it, making her presence known beneath his skin, deliberately pressing it through him inch by inch and feeling heady with the precision of it, with that she can make his body do, what she can make it feel.

There’s the increased blood pressure throbbing against her pending, the quickened pulse, the blood rushing away from the heart, so like fear except for the way the blood is also flushing up his abdomen and Katara is fascinated by the way she can feel the steady spread of it before she ever sees the wash of red reach his neck and face.

There’s the blood stiffening his nipples, erectile tissue going hard just like his already-full penis, Yugoda’s voice again brisk and papery in the back of Katara’s mind, talking about arteriolar dilation and increased blood flow, about supraspinal centers and spinal reflex mechanisms and Katara wonders wildly which one is, wonders when exactly he got hard, and why, and how and—

Zuko’s blood throbs against her bending like it’s in her own veins and Yugoda’s clinical vice in memory talks through the stages of male arousal, Katara noting each one, wondering what this would feel like with her healer’s sense instead of the jagged sharpness of bloodbending but it’s impossible to do both with Zuko gasping and straining and throbbing this way, with the way she can feel his flush rising even hotter, blood rushing even lower, feel he way he swells even further, so much it has to hurt and the sound he makes says maybe it does but that he doesn’t mind, his muscles straining against her hold, a textbook case of male arousal and on a woman she’d feel—

Katara yank her bending so hard back to herself that Zuko cries out with it, his entire body arching against the hold that’s no longer there. His hips jerk against nothing, a wordless protest breaking past his lips, then another as he falls forward to catch himself on hands and knees, head bowed and body visibly clenching still, gasping almost like sobs with every breath, fingers digging into the dirt.  

“You like it,” Katara finally says, low, watching the flex of his fingers into the dirt, the humiliated hunch of his shoulders and flex of his hips. “You like not liking it,” she realizes, staring another moment and feeling the echo of his throbbing blood before suddenly whirling to stomp back to the path and the beach and Appa, trying not to listen for how long it takes Zuko to follow and forcibly shoving away the awareness of her own pulsing blood.

[aangislove]

Aang is an amazing character

I should preface this by saying I was 7 going on 8 when the show first aired and I watched from the beginning. Also, Aang was my first TV crush at the time and that lasted pretty much the entire show. Now that I gave got that out of the way, I want to talk about why I feel Aang is an amazing character and why he is my favourite from the show.

I want to start this off by talking about how refreshing Aang as a character was to me when I was an 8 year old watching the show for the first time. Here was a male protagonist who was a pacifist, who was silly and goofy and had a big heart. He was flawed but never malicious or intentionally mean. I feel like that was something different for the time and even still today, those are not the characteristics we see every day in male characters on TV. Especially boys. I was used to seeing boys more like Zuko and Sokka, and while Zuko and Sokka are amazing characters in their own right, they are also very different from Aang. As a now 23 year old I appreciate Aang for his nature even more. His more gentle, loving nature is something I think shows that it’s okay if boys aren’t as rough and are more in touch with their feelings. I feel like it shows that being pacifist isn’t a sign of weakness, but can be a sign of strength in it’s own way.

Which brings me to how much Aang grew over time and the flaws he showed in the show. I know Aang gets a lot of hate from people for being weak, for not showing any character growth, for holding onto his love for Katara, for refusing to kill Ozai and many other things.To say Aang doesn’t grow feels wrong to me (it may not to you and that’s fine) but when I think of the little boy we first met in The Boy in the Iceberg, I think of a little boy who didn’t want to be the Avatar, who ran away from it because the people he knew and loved were treating him differently and all he wanted was to be a normal kid. I think of a boy who wanted to go penguin sledding and hid who he was. We see him go from that kid, to a kid who carried so much guilt around with him because he left. Almost everyone he knew was gone. And in his mind they were gone because he ran away, because he was a scared kid who didn’t want the responsibility of being the Avatar. Not only did he lose friends because of this, but he lost the only parental figure he ever had, Gyatso, and when he found his body in the temple, he got lost in his grief. We saw a different boy then. He wasn’t the goofy, silly, happy kid he was in the first two episodes. We saw him react to the realisation that his people were gone and that fact finally sunk in when he saw Gyatso’s body with all the grief and anger any normal person, but especially a kid of that age, would react with. We saw him come down from that a bit, but the grief and guilt never left.

We saw more of his grief and the guilt he felt in the storm, where he shares his reasons for leaving with Katara. We see some flashbacks of him as a child growing up in the Air Temple. We find out he had mastered airbending by the age of 12. We saw him show off and start to teach the other kids some of the tricks he knew (airscooter). And when those same kids rejected him, he wasn’t mad, he didn’t fight them, he walked away feeling sad and left out, and wishing he could be normal like them. He never showed any anger towards them for saying he couldn’t play anymore. What he did show was he saw being Avatar as the reason he couldn’t be normal and that was why he didn’t want to be. We learned he only ran away when he thought even Gyatso wouldn’t be able to keep him there.

Which leads me to point out that Aang was 12 when he learned he was The Avatar. 12. From watching the show we are led to believe Avatar’s aren’t told about their status until they’re 16. So at the time Aang was the youngest known Avatar. He was the youngest who was going to be sent to start his training. And he did what I think a lot of kids would do if their whole worlds were turned upside down overnight. He ran away from it.

Despite everything he had been through, his childish nature didn’t leave him. He was still playful. He still made mistakes. Like hiding the whereabouts of Katara and Sokka’s father from them and when the truth came out and they were angry and left him behind (understandable), he didn’t run away and hide out of shame. He went back to protect them. He faced up to what he had done. And when he got so excitable and eager to learn firebending, and hurt Katara in the process, he was ashamed of what he had done, he was remorseful and he swore off firebending for life. This is almost exactly what a kid would say if they had the power. It’s what he said. But later down the road he realised he needed to learn and he learned from his mistake. He learned to be more patient.

When it comes to Katara, yes, Aang was wrong to kiss her without consent. Yes, I do wish the show had gone into that more. I wish he had apologised for that and they had been able to discuss it. But Aang didn’t do it again and he felt bad afterwards. I think in general this whole thing should have been handled better by the show and could have lead to a good dialogue on consent and learning how to deal with these feelings but that’s getting off the topic.

Through the course of the show we have seen Aang become angry a few times. The most memorable time, for me, is when Appa is stolen and they confront the sandbenders. Aang showed real rage with them because they had stolen the character who had been with Aang from his time with the airbenders to now. They stole one of the last pieces of his past he still had. They stole his buddy who had been with him through everything. Aang could have lashed out worse than he did but he was pulled back, he was calmed down. The anger doesn’t go away after that episode and we see him lash out a few more times, mostly when it comes to him feeling like the others don’t care as much about finding Appa.

But we also see it near the end of the show. When everyone is telling him he needs to kill Ozai. Aang gets angry because he feels pressured to do something against his very nature and when they claim they are trying to help, he doesn’t feel like they are, because he fundamentally doesn’t feel heard or understood. His anger doesn’t last very long but it leads into another aspect of his character that is often overlooked. And that is how his customs and way are life are not understood by those around him.

As an Air Nomad he was taught that all life is sacred, he was brought up to believe every life is worth something, he was taught an openness that other natures do not understand (embracing and normalising same sex attraction, etc). It may not be a huge deal to everyone, but for him it is. Often he tries to keep his customs alive, keep the culture alive, and he’s told he can’t, because he’s the Avatar, because that’s not how the world works. But it’s how his world work. It’s how he works. Fundamentally, these are the values he holds. That doesn’t mean he is judgmental. I mean, he never judges anyone for eating meat though he’s a vegetarian. All he does is point it out so he can get food that works for him, or so he doesn’t offend when he doesn’t eat everything. He never tries to shove it down their throats. When Katara and Zuko wanted to get revenge for Katara’s moms murder, Aang did confront them for trying to take Appa, yes he tried to talk her out of it, but he didn’t berate her or say anything malicious or manipulative. He was trying to look out for his friend. He was trying to stop her from going down the dark path. People might say he wouldn’t understand. But remember, Aang suffered horrific losses too. He suffered so much loss that a lot of people would not be able to recover from. Their losses may not be the same, but it doesn’t make his less than hers or any other characters.

Through all this we can see that he is a good person, a kind, loving person. He is very real with his flaws. He’s real in terms of his struggles. Sure, he can get over some of them easily, but I think with some time at the core he is adaptable.

And when it comes to the final battle with Ozai and being faced with the decision of what to do, he found a way that worked for him. He found a way that allowed him to do his job as Avatar while also keeping true to his nature and way of life from before. It meant he could keep it alive for the future generations. It fitted his character so perfectly. Did energy bending come out of nowhere? Sure, I won’t say it didn’t. Personally, it doesn’t bug me, but i can see it does others. But if you can look past that, it was a perfect way to end the show. Not because it looked cool or added a new element to the show.

It’s because it drove home the message that violence doesn’t always have to be met with more violence and that being pacifist doesn’t always equal being weak. It also stayed true to the character of Aang. It showed his growth. Because Aang stood by his wife of life and showed that growth doesn’t always have to mean change. It can mean becoming more adaptable, learning more about the world, becoming more sure of yourself as a person and finding a balance to the two roles/jobs/aspects of yourself. He found balance between being Aang the Airbender and Aang the Avatar. He found a way for them to work together. He did something no other Avatar had done before. He paved the way for the future of a more pacifistic way of handling conflict and war.

And he did so without every truly losing himself. He did so with a heart that was loving and a kind personality. He did so as a 12 year old who had to grow and mature in order to survive and thrive.

This is why I believe Aang is an amazing character who deserves love and understanding.