#fandoms as a whole are allergic to nuance and atla is worse about this than most i've been in

[firelxdykatara]

Do you have advice on how to not let the fandoms new hot takes get in your head and ruin the show for you? Such as Iroh is a war criminal that shouldn’t be glorified, Hamma is a racist depiction of natives, shipping Zuko with a water tribe member glorifies colonization, villainizing the Freedom Fighters also does this. I think I managed to get exposed to all these in less than a week and it’s draining me and I’m worried it’ll not let me enjoy the show because these are pretty heavy accusations.

(ok so I rambled a lot in this one, i stuck a tl;dr at the end there if you don’t wanna read the whole thing lmfao)

Honestly, I think the first step is to be able to take a step back from AtLA and realize two things. One: Avatar: the Last Airbender isn’t perfect, no matter how many people will claim it is the be all and end all for Quality Children’s Media. It isn’t, it has it’s faults, and there are aspects to it that simply haven’t aged as well as others, particularly over the last decade.

The second thing? That it’s ok. AtLA can be imperfect and also be an excellent show that did have a lot of quality writing and aspects, for all that it was, ultimately, a pan-asian fantasy epic helmed by two white men with a largely white (largely male) writing staff. There were going to be issues there regardless, and it is absolutely ok to look at this and think “yes, there are issues, the show isn’t perfect, and I still love it anyway.”

There’s a huge difference between acknowledging something has faults and flaws, even occasionally discussing them, and just writing the whole thing off as irredeemable trash because it has problematic elements.

Now, the corollary to that is, of course, that fandom isn’t always right. Particularly whatever latest hot takes are coming out of the depths of tumblr or twitter. Which isn’t to say you should necessarily just disregard everything that is being said, but it is possible for these discussions to have nuance and many of them.....just don’t.

(I’m beginning to think fandom is allergic.)

Calling Iroh a war criminal is just factually inaccurate. War is ugly and it is brutal and he laid siege to Ba Sing Se for nearly two years, but war crimes are an actual classification of behaviors which are inhuman and inexcusable even in times of war. Simply being a general in wartime is not a war crime, and while it’s not impossible that Iroh did things we may classify as war crimes, he did not do them on screen. (Incidentally, though, Azula did. That bit in The Chase where she pretended to surrender in order to get everyone else’s guard down, and then she tried to murder Iroh? That’s technically a war crime.)

People can, of course, talk about the fact that Iroh was a wartime general who was complicit in the Fire Nation’s attempt at expansion and probably oversaw a lot of death and destruction before his heel-face turn, and that because his redemption happened before the series and entirely off-screen, people talk about him as the wise old uncle who could never do anything wrong while ignoring that dark history--but that doesn’t mean he’s a bad character or even a horrible person. He changed, and his is a story that anyone can. Some may not believe his reasons for changing (his son’s death) sufficient, but that’s on them and you don’t have to share that opinion!

It’s also possible to talk about Hama’s and the Freedom Fighters’ (particularly Jet’s) treatments by the narrative, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I believe that Hama’s and Jet’s endings were remarkably lacking in empathy, but that doesn’t mean I think the whole story should be thrown out--it is, however, a show that ended twelve years ago, and in that time people in the fandom have created transformative works to fix that narrative. The original show is what it is, flaws and all, and it’s ok to enjoy it while also admitting that there were plot points and characters and even episodes that could have been handled better, or even just written better.

I mean, I’ve talked plenty about how I think the canon romances (except sukka) were terribly handled and ultimately harmful for both Zuko and Katara, and that I wish that if they’d had to be endgame, they’d been written better so at least my favorite characters wouldn’t be treated so badly in follow-up material. But I still love the show, because for all its flaws, there’s still something beautiful in the story that it told, and I can enjoy that while also turning to fandom to fix the things that I didn’t like in the original! And I obviously disagree that shipping zutara or zukka ‘glorifies colonization’, but the people who believe that aren’t gonna want to listen to what I have to say, and I have no obligation to listen to them, either! And neither do you.

TL;DR (i rambled so much i’m sorry): At the end of the day, that’s my advice to you--acknowledge that atla wasn’t perfect and even, in the perspective of over a decade of life passing since it ended, could or should have been handled better, and then turn to the corners of fandom you want to engage in. My happy place is the zutara tag, and the people I follow who have takes with which I agree and which I enjoy seeing. If the takes which have been exhausting you are coming from people you follow, maybe it’s time for an unfollowing spree! Try to find the common tags (because “I recognize this thing has flaws but I don’t want to focus on those, I’d rather focus on the things about it that make me happy��� is a valid method of engaging with fandom, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise) that are used for those sorts of opinions (’atla critical’ or ‘anti atla’ for a start) and blacklist them, to cut down on the likelihood of seeing them without warning. Ask the people you still follow if they wouldn’t mind using a tag for salt or discourse if you enjoy most of their other content. For the love of the gods, stay away from twitter, it’s a trashpit and as allergic to nuance as fandom already is, that becomes a thousand times worse when you have a platform with such a tiny character limit. There’s literally no room for nuance on twitter.

I’m sorry that 99% of my advice boils down to ‘curate your experience better so you can stop seeing the sorts of posts that are upsetting you’, but that’s really all I can say, other than accepting that some flaws in the show will be dealbreakers for some people, and if they aren’t for you because you still love the source material, that’s ok.