#but my friends to lovers standards are HIGH because of spelivia from all american

[tea-and-la]

I see you have met the ATLA fandom's Dear Old Friend. (I'm officially calling him that 😆) I'm surprised you found him worthy of responding to. You know, the funny thing is, I don't hate the concept of KA as friends to lovers, what I hate is the execution, that's exactly why I couldn't care less if they are in a canon romantic relationship or not. (I don't even know what canon has to do with this conversation, but cool, I guess 🤷🏾‍♀️) All characters can be shipped according to each person's choices and tastes. In fact, I have found myself seeing romantic Ka/taang and Zvkka better on my Zutara AUs because (and I know this is pretentious) I like their friendship better in those stories. It's not about forcing anything onto anyone, it's about constructing relationships between the characters and interpreting them as you want

angel! i feel you. i don't vibe completely with the dynamic of ka that we are given (like you said it's about execution), but if certain things were fixed, i'd have less of an ick towards it. i actually like katara and aang's friendship and some of their moments (like when aang encouraged her to bend the ship into the water to get away from the pirates). it's bryke's decision wrt the shift to romantic that made things very murky for me, and the little effort put into developing katara's pov. i think for me, the thing with ka is that i felt i didn't end up with a why towards the question of "why specifically they like(d)/love each other." like for aang, he pretty much is smitten by her as soon as he sees her (practically love at first sight) which can only really be based on appearance since he doesn't really know her. plus ... the absolute lack of addressing things like EIP in a mature way (bryke dropped the ball on this), and i would've respected it a lot more if aang had this realization of "okay, cool. she doesn't want to be together right now and i'm content with that." that would've given me growth and maturity and now that his feelings were out in the air, that could've been developed in the comics. but ... instead we got the finale!kiss. i have a few hcs for how i would actually like kata/ang.

i got side-tracked lol. like you said, i also don't care what's canon or not. some people treat canon as the be-all-end-all as if break-ups don't happen, or AUs can't be explored. it's that sort of rigidity in thinking patterns that makes me think that these people are really .. boring. like you said, shipping is based on what appeals to a person's tastes. and in fandom, we're all individuals, so we shouldn't be expected to just blindly like the same things just because it's canon. we all have different life experiences and that may give us a different lens into how we see a ship vs how another person does. it's why i don't consider myself really an anti of any of the ships, because i'm not going to waste time harassing the shippers about something that makes them happy just because it doesn't appeal to me. you have to be pretty miserable as a person to do something like that imo.