#atla fandom problems

[spop-romanticizes-abuse]

i don't often talk about atla by itself here unless i'm comparing it to spop, but there's something i've been meaning to talk about.

i hate how the fandom reduced Toph to “chaotic murder child” when she's clearly so much more than that.

the thing that especially pisses me off is when fans act like Toph is reckless and stupid, when her WHOLE DEAL is that she's extremely observant and patient when it comes to fighting.

this is what set her apart from other earthbenders, she doesn't just use brute strength to win fights. she concentrates on the sound and vibrations, and she waits for the perfect moment to strike. this was the main reason WHY Toph was one of the best earthbenders.

and the fandom acknowledges that she's the best, but somehow doesn't seem to realize WHY she's the best, when it was practically spelled out for us. Toph isn't the best because she's super strong or muscular, she's the best because she crafted her own form of earthbending that utilizes patience and attention to detail. how do people not understand this?

[sad-endings-suck]

some of you are too angry at fictional children

[avrelia]

"Aang is not mature enough for romantic relationships..."

Nobody of the Gaang and adjacent characters of AtLA are mature enough for romantic relationships. There are days I am not sure Uncle Iroh is mature enough for a romantic relationship.

That doesn’t mean nobody should engage in any kind of romantic relationships without passing a maturity test first. Or even reaching a set age. In the morning of the eighteenth birthday humans don’t get all the adult knowledge downloaded in their brains.

Relationships – romantic, familial, friendly and everything in between are a part of the human experience. They happen not because we are mature enough, but because we are human. We just deal with them differently and often better when we mature enough.

And yes, I remember that they are fictional characters, and nothing “just happens” to them. But they are not in a morality play that’s supposed to give viewers pre-chewed, easily digestible answers to all the problems in a sweet wholesome wrapper.

Inside their world they are alive, and that’s why we love them so much. Writers throw problems and feelings, and people, and accidents at them and we watch how they deal with them, mature or not.

They are not mature enough to fight in a war, let alone be responsible for stopping it, yet they do, and we cheer them up and feel heartbroken for them. They are not mature enough to have romantic relationships, yet they fall in love and try to figure out their way about it.

[melu-lis]

i'm convinced that the "zutara is a colonizer x colonized ship" argument is often an upfront to find a "reasonable" excuse to hate zutara because you can't say stuff like "you only like zutara bc you see katara as a self-insert and think zuko is a hot bad boy" without rightfully being calling misogynistic and it's very convenient to justify misogyny if you can paint your opposition as a bunch of ignorant white women who don't understand the repercussions of colonialism since many believe that misogyny is acceptable if it's exclusively targeted towards white women. what further leads me to this conclusion is that a great deal of zutara antis ship pairings that can be classified as "colonizer x colonized ships" and they often ignore the pitfalls bryke, two white men with a centrist liberal worldview, had in handling colonialism in their show. that isn't to say that poc can't be uncomfortable with zutara, but as a black woman who does ship zutara, i don't see how policing what i can and can't ship is creating a safe place for poc in the atla fandom.

[missaccuracy]

Azula was literally generating lightning while casually lying down and some people still have the audacity to say that she's a bad firebender.

[leantailean]

Mind you, these are the people who say that zutara is a “female gaze”

[quobalt]

After prowling through tags related to this franchise, I’ve seen a concerning trend amongst certain peeps in the fandom.

(Talking about Katara and Aang on the first panel, Zuko and Azula on the second)

[jahtrashh]

You all could never make me hate aang, katara, sokka, toph, zuko, jet, suki, mai, ty lee, or azula. You can however make me hate you though.

[coconutsaiyan]

Putting atla on Netflix was a mistake cuz what the fuck is this

[longing-for-rain]

ATLA Discourse Simulator: 2024 Revival Edition

🌊 katara-stan Follow

It’s sad to me how Katara was forced to take on so many responsibilities from a young age. I relate to it as an eldest daughter with trauma in my childhood.

👺 404-literacy-not-found Follow

How DARE you parentify Katara! She’s just a silly little 14 year old not mom friend!!!

74 notes

🌙 zutara-fan Follow

I like Zutara

🚓 avatar-fandom-police Follow

You’re not allowed to do this as it is personally offensive to me, a balding middle-aged man. Your femcel fantasies are pathetic and no man will ever want you. By the way I’m gay so I’m not sexist.

32 notes

🍼 aang-lover Follow

How DARE anyone criticize my perfect little angel boy, he never did anything wrong! Touching girls without their consent is just a SMALL MISTAKE and I’m sure his implied apology was really good!

🙏undercover-tradwife Follow

SO TRUE it’s so sad how many women want to ruin an innocent boy’s whole life over nothing 😢

12,547 notes

▪️zvtara-was-never-canon Follow

Zutara fans are such bitter harpies who self-project their desire to have a fulfilling relationship with a partner who respects them! It’s such a boring relationship anyway. I don’t care about it at all, which is why I made a whole blog dedicated to bashing it.

⛓️ basement-dwelling-pedo Follow

So true kitten! You put those stupid cunts in their place! By the way, when is the next chapter of your bdsm incest rape fetish fanfic updating? I’m getting thirsty 😩

▪️ zvtara-was-never-canon Follow

Don’t worry Daddy, I’ll service you soon. I can’t believe how horribly Zutara shippers characterize Aang. They should be more like me, and write Zuko as a pervert who rapes his sister instead. Please tell me how special and talented I am again, please please Daddy I need it!

29 notes

🔥 firelady-mai Follow

I love Zuko’s redemption arc so much! What a beautifully written story about breaking the cycle of abuse!

🌊 zutara-lover Follow

I really like Zuko too! I always admired his character 😊

🔥 firelady-mai Follow

Fuck you, I take it all back. Zuko is an evil racist toxic abuser. How dare you suggest he taint Katara’s purity with his colonizer genes?

976 notes

[starlight-bread-blog]

It's always "No I don't hate A@ng or Ma! I just want to criticize how their characters were handled", and never "They're fictional and you're offended on the behalf of literal nothing".

Ps: Zks say what you gotta say to avoid harassment. I don't hate them either. It's just absurd that hating a fictional character that doesn't exist is something to be denounced in order to be taken seriously.

[atla-confessions]

It's really telling with Zuko stans are like "Zuko can't be a colonizer and never ever was, he's an innocent 16 year old boy who doesn't know what he's doing and had an abusive dad! You want a colonizer, look at Azula!"

It really gives away the game. Azula had the exact same abusive parents and is even younger.

They're both Fire Nation Royalty and colonizers, but for Zuko, well, yes he leads a militaristic fleet with one of the most powerful retired generals on a quest to murder the last survivor of a genocide and purposeless terrorizes water tribe settlements and kyoshi island villages with that militaristic force, yes he physically assaulted an old woman to pressure the village to give someone else up like the fire nation systemically did while it was culling them of waterbenders a few years back, and yes he made the fully informed decision to team up with Azula to capture Ba Sing Se and reaped the rewards and glory of it, and he hired an assassin because he really, really wanted to make sure kill that genocide survivor he set out to hunt down. But boys will be boys!

But Azula, that's a 14-year-old grown woman who is the embodiment of all that is evil, so when she does those things, it counts for real.

No analysis of intent or material harm. Only vibes. And also misogyny.

X

[avrelia]

So… I’ve met another strange idea taking root in the AtlA fandom. I’ve seen it a couple of times around here, and I’ve head in on the Braving the Elements podcast from one of the guests.

The idea is that Aang has never seen a girl before Katara.

And at first I rolled my eyes and moved on, but after listened to it said aloud I decided to write a counterargument.

1) Aang was raised in the Southern Air Temple among monks and boys, but we have no evidence that he was locked there.

2) Aang is an Air Nomad. He traveled all over the world making friends everywhere. There is an ample evidence of this in the show: his familiarity with the different places in the world, his friendship with Bumi and Kuzon. He knows dances popular in the Fire Nation. He couldn’t possible have traveled the world and had not meet girls. Because you know, girls are not all locked down either.

3) we have seen in Appa’s memory young Aang at the Eastern Air temple with a grown Airbender nun who was overseeing sky bison babies meet Air nomad kids. Air Nomad men and women did mingle together.

4) we don’t know much about Air Nomad culture from the AtLA show, for obvious reasons. But if you are willing to accept supplementary evidence: in The Rift Comic Aang remembers Yangchen festival that brings all Air Nomads together; and in the Dawn of Yangchen novel we see young nuns hanging out in the Northern Air Temple where men live.

5) also don’t forget, it is from our point of view Katara is the first girl Aang sees in a century. From Aang’s POV, two days ago he was hanging out with his friends. And maybe a month ago he was playing a friendly air ball match with the girls’ teams. Katara is not special because she is a girl. Katara is special because she is Katara.

[spop-romanticizes-abuse]

the way the atla fandom treats azula reminds me so much of how the spop fandom treats catra. don’t get me wrong, i actually love azula, i think she was a very interesting and complex character. but that doesn’t take away from the fact that she was still dangerous and toxic, willing to manipulate and control and kill without remorse.

one huge example of azula being coddled by the fandom is when the comics came out, and she was restrained and put into a straitjacket. i saw many fans complaining about how this was ableist and demonizing trauma and mental illnesses.

which.. i mean i’m sure azula has her fair share of mental health issues after all that she went through. but she wasn’t restrained because she was mentally unstable, she was restrained because she was (at that point) the strongest firebender who could and would kill everyone in a heartbeat.

literally it feels like people sometimes forget that this was a fantasy world where people had magic powers. azula had to be restrained because she was a firebending prodigy who has killed once, and will kill again. yes, she was mentally unstable but she was also a threat to everyone.

and you can see, in this universe, how every criminal was restrained in some sort of way. in tlok, the red lotus were each contained in custom-made high security prisons because they were that big of a threat to everyone around them. ming-hua was disabled and she was not provided prosthetics in her prison, but this was because she used water as her prosthetics and was a waterbending prodigy with criminal intentions.

if azula was mentally unstable but not dangerous, the straitjacket would not be necessary. and i know that irl there’s a lot of history and ethical discourse surrounding the use of straitjackets but in azula’s case, i believe it was necessary. it wasn’t ableism or demonizing mental illnesses, it was simply a safety measure to assure that no one else got hurt by azula.

[ionlybleedbubbles]

[valariecomet]

Right. Because that's how story's work. When a plotline happens off screen that is amazinggggg writing. Absolutely great. I love it when characters randomly start acting entirely different to how they usually do! It's sooooo much fun!

Seriously? I haven't read much of the comics and I don't plan to since from what I have seen they're shit, I read the promise years ago and I tried to read imbalance before giving up on it (the only comic I enjoyed was Katara and the pirates silver), so I'm not even sure if this criticism is justified. However, that doesn't mean this defense is right. If a character grows or changes, show it on screen or give an explanation, if not it's bad writing. Simple.

This isn't the real world, it's fiction so while in real life they should change over that time, in a fictional setting they shouldn't grow off screen because you have to suspend your disbelief and be able to easily follow along. If a character randomly changes it disrupts this flow of the story and messes with the audience. If this happens on the comics (which again, I'm not saying it does) it's bad writing. Plain and simple.

If this seems salty it's because I am. I am genuinely so tired of this fandom, it can't handle any fucking criticism against this show or any of the related bloody comics. Please just accept that nothing is perfect (except Katara) and no piece of media is entirely great. I'm not saying you have to engage with the criticism, just acknowledge there is stuff to critique.