#forgot how much i love southern raiders and the katara&toph dynamic

[narrativelysignificantturtleduck]

7 & 12 for aang and 10 & 13 for toph

ooh these are good!

aang

7. A quote of them that you remember

"it's easy to do nothing, but it's hard to forgive", because when i watched the series with my mom she said "spoken like a true buddhist" after that line. i know that doesn't mean much when i say that came from a white woman who reads buddhist books, but i kind of hope she's right bc i think what aang has to say about forgiveness and the futility of revenge in that episode is very wise and it'd be cool if it was culturally accurate. what he says isn't that the harm should be denied or you have to make nice with those who hurt you, but that you can't let yourself be consumed by hatred for the person. it seems in line with what i know of buddhist beliefs on attachment - not that you can't care about things, but clinging to something, holding too tightly, causes you suffering because everything is impermanent.

i love that aang doesn't stop katara from going on her quest, and i love that she eventually realizes he's right and chooses to spare yon rha's life. she doesn't forgive yon rha, absolve him of his crimes, or downplay the harm he caused, but she lets go of her desire for revenge and realizes it won't bring her peace.

southern raiders reminds me a lot of a star trek episode in its committment to exploring an ethical issue and following it through to a powerful conclusion. best episode of atla no contest

12. Sexuality hc!

aang is bi or pan or whatever word you use to mean "attracted to multiple genders". despite zero canon evidence i am 100% convinced he and kuzon would've dated if he hadn't gotten frozen

toph

10. Describe the character in one sentence

toph breaks free of the sheltered environment she was raised in to become the powerful and fiercely independent earthbending master she was meant to be - making some friends along the way.

13. Your favorite friendship they have

i really love her dynamic with katara, the way that their different personalities and backstories rub up against each other. katara had to take on more responsibility because her parents weren't around, whereas toph was never allowed any responsibility at all. katara yearns for other people to help her and share her burden, while toph wants to be independant. katara is correct that toph should contribute to the group, but toph's resistance to it makes sense. she has to learn that katara offers and expects help because she thinks toph is capable, not because she thinks toph is weak.

honestly i just kind of admire how well-written it is. a conflict between two female characters where both sides are understandable, one that stems from their personalities and backstories, that is not free of gendered dimensions (katara trying to be her mom and thus coming off as mothering/toph hating being treated as a delicate girl and thus being overly independent) but not defined by them either...it feels like a novelty in fiction. they're not instant bffs and they're not fighting over a guy. they have an actual conflict and work through it.

thanks, these were super fun!

ask game

[firelxdykatara]

ppl love to forget that katara: 1. has her own taste, 2. developed around aang, he needed her for his development and vice versa, 3. ZUTARA IS SHIP BETWEEN AN OPPRESOR X OPPRESSED!!! Ignoring all of the development they had with their respective partners and the trauma Zuko caused Katara!!

In the infamous words of one Luke Skywalker: amazing. every word of what you just said was wrong.

It’s actually kind of ironic that you bring up Katara’s taste, since, throughout the show, we have examples of the guys she likes, to greater or lesser extents in canon--Jet (explicit romantic feelings on her part, word of god that jet was her first kiss--a kiss that would have been consensual, incidentally, something you should keep in mind for later) and Haru (she denies the crush, but that could just as easily have been because of the abomination he’d been growing on his lip rather than denying those feelings ever existed), both of whom have much more in common (in terms of both emotional and physical maturity, and physical appearance) with Zuko than either of them has with Aang.

Zuko’s book 3 hairstyle is almost exactly reminiscent of Jet’s, even, if not quite as floofy.

(This is probably in part because of Jet’s function as a foil of Zuko within the narrative, particularly given their book 2 encounters, which I think just further solidifies my point that, were it not for extenuating circumstances [like the fact that Zuko was introduced as an enemy and they had significant obstacles to hurdle before they could be friends], Zuko would have been exactly Katara’s type. Had they met under different circumstances, she could have been the girl he went on a date with in Ba Sing Se. Just something to think about.)

So, yes, we’ve established that Katara has her own taste. Her tastes seem to be boys with great hair who are taller than her, the same age or older, and of a similar maturity level.

Aang falls short (heh, short) on all counts. So it isn’t Katara’s taste in boys that led her to be interested in him. Hm!

Next, you claim that Katara ‘developed around Aang’--that she was necessary for his development, and that he was necessary for hers.

Let’s take a moment to examine that, shall we?

I will absolutely grant you that Katara was necessary for Aang’s development--only to a point, of course, but we’ll get to that later--but was he really necessary for Katara‘s growth? I suppose I could grant you this on a generous technicality--he did, after all, provide her with the means to finally leave the South Pole and find a waterbending master to teach her (although she wound up largely self-taught anyway). But that had nothing to do with his relationship to Katara and everything to do with the structure of the plot--Katara and Sokka find Aang (and he never would have gotten out of that iceberg without Katara’s own righteous anger, so even that leads back to her own power), and then they go on a quest to find teachers for the Chosen One and save the world.

The story could not have begun without first finding Aang and then providing means for the other main characters to travel with him (or, in Zuko’s case, chase him), but this has nothing at all to do with Aang’s relationship to Katara. Aang was not a mover in Katara’s developmental arc--if anything, he acted as an obstacle more often than not, his actions ranging from innocent but obnoxious (playing and flirting with girls rather than helping with chores like picking up vital supplies, leaving Katara to do all of the quite literal heavy lifting and keeping her stuck in the role of caretaker that she’d been thrust into following the death of her mother), to deliberate and harmful (hiding the map to Katara and Sokka’s father, a truly selfish action, regardless of his lack of malicious intent, and one for which he never actually apologized), to somewhere in between (”she didn’t really mean that” he says to the man refusing to train Katara because she’s a girl, when yes, she very much did mean that, and Aang was no help in finally getting the old codger to eat his words--Katara had to shove them down his throat her own damn self).

While Katara’s overall arc wasn’t exactly big and dynamic (like Zuko’s redemption arc), or in-your-face (like Sokka getting force-fed Respect Women Juice and his eventual growth into a tactician and leader), it was very much present and woven into her character--and Aang had almost no part in it. He provided her with the means to get to the North Pole, but left Katara alone to fight the patriarchy herself. He messed around while Katara took it on herself to do the chores and keep the Gaang alive, but he did almost nothing to decrease that burden so she could grow out of the caretaker role. (Contrary to popular shipper claims, Aang didn’t actually teach Katara to have fun. She already knew how to have fun. But she couldn’t indulge, because she had a responsibility to her family and her tribe, and later to her brother and Aang and Toph, and Aang goofing off and trying to get her to do the same only added to her burdens rather than subtracting from them.) He provided Katara with the necessary motive to learn to heal herself, but he certainly didn’t seem to learn from the experience of accidentally burning her, preferring instead to claim he was never going to firebend again, despite already knowing, at that point, that he was going to need to master fire along with the other elements to become a fully realized Avatar and defeat the Firelord.

He didn’t help Katara keep them alive during The Desert. (In fact, he ran off, leaving her to desperately try to keep Sokka and Toph from succumbing to the heat while worrying for his safety.) In The Painted Lady, Katara makes the decision to stall the Gaang and do what she can to help the Fire Nation villagers on her own--Aang agrees to help her when he finds out, but he wasn’t actually instrumental in her making that choice. The Puppetmaster was, again, Katara finding a master of her own, and having to deal with the fallout from that. And in The Southern Raiders, Aang was--perhaps unknowingly, if I’m being generous, because he is a child and could not reasonably be expected to fully understand the implications of what he was asking her to do or why it was impossible--actively impeding Katara’s development! She desperately needed closure, something he could not understand and actively belittled and dismissed. The only reason he relented in the end (but not without a condescending ‘I forgive you! Does that give you any ideas???’ parting shot lmao) was because Katara was planning to take Appa anyway, and letting her go (and hoping she’d just magically wind up doing things his way) was easier than trying to fight her on it.

While Aang’s existence was necessary for Katara to start down her own path, she needed neither his guidance nor his approval to follow it--and absolutely nothing would change about Katara’s arc if you removed their romantic relationship entirely.

Possibly because the only changes needed to do so would be to remove the two times Aang kissed Katara without her consent (which, hopefully, no one would actually miss), and the epilogue kiss (which was awkward and unnecessary to begin with, since ending the entire show on a romantic kiss as the final shot kind of missed the point of the story to begin with, but that’s another discussion). None of these kisses (which are the only moments in which Katara’s feelings for Aang are so much as addressed; do note that addressing them, or hinting that they needed to be, is not the same as saying she exhibited any sign of reciprocating them) altered anything about Katara’s behavior, her personal arc, or (and perhaps most critically) her relationship with Aang.

It’s that last point that is really damning, as far as ‘Katara obviously had feelings for Aang, she kissed him in the finale!’ goes. Because she didn’t ‘obviously’ have feelings for him. And the fact that he kissed her before the invasion and then she forgot about it (she literally had no idea what he was talking about during the play’s intermission until he reminded her that he’d kissed her) is pretty clear evidence that she didn’t actually have feelings for him. Not the kind he had for her.

I’ve been a teenage girl. I know what it’s like to be surprise!kissed by your crush. And I absolutely for a full fact know that I had not completely forgotten about that kiss three months later and had, in fact, spent most of my waking hours thinking about it and remembering it and trying to talk to him about it. Now, granted, I was not in the middle of a war, but even if I had been, I doubt I would have needed reminding about the fact that the boy I’ve supposedly been developing feelings for had kissed me and showed clearly that he had those feelings for me too.

At the very least, if Katara was harboring feelings that she was worried about approaching until after the war, her relationship dynamic with Aang should have shifted. But it didn’t. She acted the exact same way with him after the Day of Black Sun as she did before it--that is, as a mother figure and a caretaker, responsible for his wellbeing. (And it’s clear she never took him down off the pedestal she needed him to occupy, either--let it not be said that the unhealthy aspects of their relationship only went one way.)

And book 3 is, incidentally, where Katara went from being vital to Aang’s development to being detrimental to it--or, rather, Aang’s refusal to let go of his attachment to her (despite ostensibly having done as much at the end of book 2) was. Because despite having been told by, perhaps, the greatest authority left in the world on Air Nomad culture (even more than Aang, who had left his temple with a child’s understanding of his culture that was never able to mature because he got stuck in the ice berg while his people were wiped out) that he had to let go of his possessive attachment to this girl who never even expressed the possibility that she might harbor romantic feelings for him to begin with, after Azula killed him and Katara brought him back, he went right back into the mindset of Katara is mine, it’s just a matter of time.

And the narrative validated him for it.

Notice how, during Ember Island Players, Aang says the following (emphasis mine):

“We kissed at the invasion, and I thought we were gonna be together. But we’re not.”

First of all, if you go back and watch the scene, it’s clear it wasn’t a mutual kiss. Aang sprang a surprise kiss on Katara, which left her shocked and unhappy after he flew off. (The decision to have her looking away and frowning was a deliberate one on the part of Bryke, who wanted Katara’s feelings kept ambiguous. Heaven forbid you allow the animators to make it clear that this fourteen-year-old girl who was just kissed without her consent by someone she’d never once demonstrated romantic feelings toward might actually have some. Heaven forbid she have a little agency in her own romantic narrative. But whatever.)

Second, he says he thought they were gonna be together.

He thought.

He never once even asked Katara what she thought--or even how she felt. He just assumes. He assumes that if he kisses her, she’ll kiss him back and they’ll get together. He assumes that she must have feelings for him, even though her body language is closed off and she told him with her words that she did not want to talk or think about this right now, and kisses her regardless of those signals, upsetting her and leading her to storm off.

And the narrative rewards him, because despite the fact that they don’t have a single significant scene together after that second disastrous kiss, Katara just decides off-screen that she Does Love Him Really and walks onto the balcony to make out with him.

The upshot of all this being that, while Katara was indeed instrumental to a lot of Aang’s early growth and development, Aang was not necessary for her own arc, and their romantic relationship (such as it was) actively hampered Aang’s development in book 3, while removing it would change absolutely nothing for Katara (except saving her from some painfully embarrassing memories).

As far as your third point, I’m simply not going to get baited into explaining how reducing Zutara to an ‘oppressor/oppressed’ relationship is not only insulting to interracial couples irl (not to mention any other couple with a potentially unbalanced dynamic of societal power, since there are many more axis of oppression than just racial), but demeaning to Zuko and Katara, their personal arcs as well as their relationship development together.

However, I will point out that Zuko was not responsible for any of Katara’s trauma. She did not find violence and fighting in bending battles to be traumatic--in fact, she reveled in it. She enjoyed fighting against Zuko at multiple points (especially noticeable in their battle at the end of book 1), because she wanted to fight--she always had--and once she had the ability, she was ready to throw down with anyone who gave her the slightest reason. (Including, by the way, her own potential waterbending master.) Aang’s death at the end of book 2 was Azula’s doing, and while I think that contributed to Katara’s extreme reaction to Zuko joining the gaang, it was not something for which she actively blamed him, and it wasn’t something she believed would be repeated--she let him go off alone on a journey to find the original firebending masters with Aang well before she chose to forgive him. So she already trusted Zuko’s intentions and that Aang would be safe with him.

Finally, because this has gotten long enough already, I hope you now understand that Zuko and Katara getting together would not require ignoring any of their development with their canonical romantic partners. We’ve already established that Katara’s arc wouldn’t change in the slightest if all of Aang’s romantic advances were removed, and I haven’t even gotten into how Mai meant nothing in the grand scheme of Zuko’s development because I’m pretty sure that’s just self-evident. I mean, the video compilation put together by Nick showcasing Zuko’s journey throughout the series doesn’t include a single scene with Mai, though it does include several with Katara, and even Jin makes an appearance--because Katara, and even Jin, played key roles in Zuko’s personal journey, while his relationship with Mai happened entirely off-screen and her only real function was to showcase just how unhealthy trying to force himself back into the role of the Crown Prince was for him.

What development, exactly, is there between them to even ignore?

At any rate, I’ve gone on long enough--I hope you enjoy the fact that you activated my wordvomit trap card right when i was about to go to bed, anon, because I just spent two hours writing this instead. In case you’re interested in the TL;DR: at the end of the day, there was no meaningful, mutual development in Kataang’s romantic relationship, and those romantic feelings that did exist were largely one-sided and ultimately detrimental to Aang’s development in the final third of his overall arc. Meanwhile, Mai meant nothing to Zuko’s journey--rather like Aang’s romantic overtures, she could be removed from the show completely and nothing about his story would change--while Zuko and Katara were both vital to each other’s overall storylines, arcs and development. This, coupled with the fact that Zuko never actually traumatized Katara and, in fact, helped her achieve closure from the biggest source of her own trauma, means that Zuko and Katara have better and more believable build up that could potentially lead to a romantic relationship than either of them have with their canon romantic partners.

So no, anon, I didn’t forget anything--I think you may have, though. Perhaps a rewatch is in order? Make sure not to close your eyes for the back half of book 3 this time.

[tuiyla]

So i'm expecting A LOT of changes to atla for the live adaptation. In a perfect world there wouldn't be any changes ,but what are some adjustments or additions to the series that you wouldn't mind seeing? Like something you would like to see more of or less of. ?For me I would love to see more of Tophs and Zuko's friendship. Also would love to see a scene with Katara talking w sokka or someone admitting that she blood b for the second time. Maybe in this scene is where she finally decides that she never wants to to blood bend again maybe a little bit of foreshadowing because she eventually makes it illegal later on

So hey Anon. I know it’s been two months and I’m really sorry I just straight up forgot about this but I’m really hoping you’re somehow reading this.

I’m gonna be honest and say part of the reason I forgot about this is that the Netflix live-action series kind of just left my mind. I’ve been growing distant from it ever since Bryke left the project but then Avatar Studios was announced so I was like “Netflix who?” But like, I’m still hoping the live-action will be at least decent.

I actually think that even in a perfect world there’d be changes, if for no other reason than the medium change. Also, as much I believe ATLA is the pinnacle of television there for sure are changes that would improve it, especially in season 1. I’ve been wondering about what episodes they’d do since the Netflix show was announced since I think it’s fair to say they won’t do 20 episode seasons. I expect episodes to be longer than 25 minutes but the adventure of the week nature of book 1 means they’d still leave some stuff out. Given that there isn’t a single episode of ATLA that doesn’t get referenced in some way or another later on it’s a tough call but I think we can all live without “Great Divide” lol.

A general rule of thumb with adaptations, imho, is that characters come first. There was that (probably baseless) rumour about making Katara the elder sibling. That’d be a great example of not understanding the source material and the characters so I do hope that doesn’t happen. The thing about every single change is that, especially with a story that as carefully constructed as ATLA, it can change everything. It’s a ripple effect. For example, change Jet in a substantial way and it would change Sokka, Zuko and Katara - that’s three out of the five mains! So while I’d welcome some changes, pretty much ones like what you listed, I’m wary of them.

Seeing more interactions between characters is always good but there has to be a point. I love me some quality time between Zuko and Toph but, contrary to popular belief, they didn’t need a life-changing adventure. If any additional scenes between them serve the characters, such as highlighting thematic parallels then yeah that’d be good. Glob knows I adore the water sibs and the one thing I’d probably elaborate on is bloodbending but again, this is very tricky. Bloodbending is one of the most cohesive and thematically consistent aspects of the whole franchise and there’s a part of me that thinks any more scenes would dilute that.

That said I always did feel like Katara’s moment of darkness should have been reflected upon more. Part of the reason she’s so misunderstood in the fandom, imo, is that her arc is a lot more subtle than e.g. Zuko’s and some acknowledgement of “The Puppetmaster” and her bloodbending in “The Southern Raiders” could have changed that. I’d probably have her reflection at the end of the episode be primarily with Sokka and include an honest conversation about trauma and how they dealt with it differently. It doesn’t have to be too on the nose as that would go against their dynamic but Sokka deserved a bigger part in that story. Ngl I kinda dislike that the end of “The Southern Raiders” is used to introduce Aang’s moral dilemma. This is my favourite episode ever but the very beginning and very end feel somewhat disjointed from the rest. Understandable since it’s so close to the finale and the last “serious” ep before Sozin’s Comet but I think the adaptation could introduce that dilemma earlier and allow TSR to be entirely about Katara (and also more about Sokka). Katara can still have that moment of forgiveness with Zuko and it’s still a life-changing field trip between them but, yeah.

Going back to bloodbending, I do think that even just one impactful line about it would be a good addition to the story. You know, like when Toph says “he’s lying” in “Lake Laogai?” Yeah like that. Just a small gut punchy moment. Because Katara’s reflection on bloodbending, as is now, is more implied than anything so I think that final decision on her part to reject it would be good, and you’re right, foreshadowing her outlawing the practice.

Surprise surprise I got carried away with bloodbending, again, but yeah there are a few small things I’d change but it’s always tricky. As it stands now, I honestly don’t trust Netflix to make the good kind of changes. Transforming book 1 into something more cohesive could be interesting but that adventure of the week format is part of its charm and makes sense for the story of that season. I fear that they’ll make the same mistake as the godawful movie did in that Zuko’s arc will be much more on the nose. I fear a lot of things about it, actually. And maybe I’ll talk more about this as we get closer to actually getting any news from this project or as I inevitably do my annual Avatar rewatch. For now, I’ll say that there are things that could be changed but I don’t trust the production to make the right choices so I’m very happy Avatar Studios will most likely overshadow whatever Netflix does. And I hope Avatar Studios dares to come up with new content! But that’s another discussion.