#zuko would probably be pissed for a few days but want to support his kids and eventually get over it

[yourhighness6]

Saw a shitpost about how the steambabies would be airbenders because of the elements mixing and all I could think was that it was the ultimate ex's revenge

[ssreeder]

Hi sreedy! I finished your little happy chappy yesterday, and I have opinions that want to be expressed.

Firstly, a polite message from past me, yesterday night, who just finished the chapter:

BA SING FUCKING SE?????? YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME! UNBELIEVABLE! OUTRAGEOUS! INSANE! THAT'S WHAT YOU ARE! YOU ARE GONNA DRUG HIM AGAIN? "wHaT wOuLd mAkE hIm bEg" bitch don't you even try. I will feed your kneecaps to my fucking dog in front of you. Glad to hear they're all gonNA BE IN THE SAME FUCKING CITY THOUGH! SOME REAL COMFORT THERE! AND CAN JET JUST PISS OFF FOR ONE GOD DAMN MINUTE!? I hope the guilt eats him from inside out.

Now let's continue with a... less emotional message from future me, who has slept a night over it and calmed down a little:

Okay, hi again, sorry for past me's yelling but in their defense you did kind of deserve it. The pillow was not okay.

I don't like this Jet much and every time I remember he wrote that letter anger fills me and I just want to yell at him, take a deep breath, pinch my nose and sit him down amd give him a very sarcastic lecture. (I heavily support any more dirt on this guy and that comment about the Kyoshi face paint making his eyebrows pop is definetly my Highlight of the week)

Ba Sing Se? Seriously Sreedy, I don't know whether I love or hate that. Like: fuck yes! It's excruciating! But also: fuck no! it's excruciating! Good chances that Azula finds him first though.

I am still very mad that they have liquid bending suppressants now because that means Zuko will be afraid of needles and we don't know what this thing does yet.

Jet is such a little bitch I hate it but I love him. You really do all the characters so well I could talk about this for days.

Suki? SUKII!!! I love her but hun, you can't fix him. I admire your confidence, but there is a lot more going on with him than you think. *Insert that one Nick Nelson scene on the beach with his Mom*

Anyways, Glad to hear that Quon is not as bad as Zhao was. He just thinks Zuko is challenging and interesting instead of feeling like jerking off after being done with him. Quon emotionally distances himself from his prisoner, I like that in a man /j. No but seriously, I'm very glad Quon doesn't hurt him entirely for his personal satisfaction.

Maybe I'll slide into your askbox and drop a few more opinions in the next weeks (probably), but until then:

Ly, still no kneecaps for you, take care of yourself and hydrate, take as many breaks as you need and please for the love of god do not kill Shen.

*Quon & I both rocking no kneecaps and feeling better than ever*

Haha… Jet is officially the main character of LIAB because I think more people comment about him than any other character. & his eyebrows are always popping. ;)

Didn’t you hear the news? Ba sing se is where the party’s at. Everyone’s invited.

I don’t know if Suki wants to fix Sokka, which is nice, I think she just wants to support him and make sure he is alright. But Sokka is being sketch right now so good luck girl…

I think Quon would rather just execute Zuko and be done with it but he has to play the game. Luckily the game isn’t with Zuko he is merely a pawn, so Quon won’t be emotionally invested in any sick torture or anything because he doesn’t really care haha.

I hope to see you in my askbox at least I know I can hunt you down on discord to get my kneecaps back eventually.

[applecherry108]

first of all hooooooooolyyyy shiitttt

FUCK tungle. it took like 30 tries to log in on desktop. admittedly, i was using the wrong password at first, BUT, even when i remembered the right one it kept giving me shit. This is what i get for being L337 i guess... -_-

anyways, im only on desktop so i can add a readmore to say:

i just,,,,,hate voltron. okay? It sucked. it fucking sucked. i watched the first season and it was like, okay yeah, this has potential. and then s2 was like, okay yeah not as good but maybe s3 will pick up...

s3 didn’t pick up. it was just one long death spiral by the same idiots who fucked up the atla sequel. i hate their writing, i hate their story plots, i hate how they butcher any good ideas they have, and i especially hate their inability to have good character AND plot development happen at the same time.

I got swept up in storm of klance and that’s about it. i have soft spots for other ships but at the end of the day i don’t care. i just don.t fucking,,, care???

the fandom is a mess, the crew was a mess, everything was a fucking mess from the get go.

Like who tf is this show written for?? it has to be for like, 8-10 year olds. It has to be. Everything is just so....stupid. Nothing is ever properly explained, motivations never really given, everyone is just a 2 dimensional cardboard cutout of a trope. And that pisses me off so much bc like??? other shows aimed at young kids can still have great world building. they can have good world building and characters and overall story and still be cheesy and a lil dumb. cheesy and a lil dumb is completely fine!! but voltron is just so...godammn... BORING!! it’s like i WANT to like the characters but its just so goddamn hard when everybody is so fucking flat. by all rights, i should want to marry allura. shes everything i loved when i was little, from her color pallet to her princesshood to her white fucking hair!! i should LOVE allura but i don’t!! i kind of hate her. why?? i don’t know!! shes so...boring! and flat! and fucking PASSIVE! everything in this show lands so fucking flat holy shit.

pidge at matts “grave”? yikes, that was second hand hard to watch for like.... “oooh this is so serious!” but the buildup wasnt there...it was kind of funny tbh... and HELLA awkward...

don’t get me started on lance and hunk. bolin was my favorite look character for the first few episodes and then he got knocked to Comic Relief and had maybe two (2) importantish moments. he/they may be part of the main cast but they’re not main characters. they feel like background props to the Actual Main characters.

which brings me to keith.

FUCK keith.

that’s my reaction after every! new! season!! is just,, FUCK keith. god the show functioned SO WELL without him. he’s just so...idk. i also don’t care. what was his character arc anyway? it SHOULD have been about learning to love and trust others but we only get that in lip service and speed run character development (i hate the quantum abyss...so much... like yeah, who cares about SHOWING our characters mature, let’s just tell that it happened in afucking montage.) if keith were a properly developed character he shouldve remained PASSIONATE and idk, run support?? that boy SHOULD have piloted red, end of story. period. keith doesn’t need to lead he needs to learn to TRUST others and that insludes trusting other WITH HIS LIFE. i won’t rant about how we should have had black paladin lance, but keith should have never ever been black paladin. even after he “matures” he still sucks at. he’s this awful,,little,, Shiro 2.0. and I hate it. i ahte it and i hate shiro just a little bit. even though he was arguably the most likeable character, he shouldve stayed dead. or missing. or whatever. he didn’t need to come back and they didnt need to make keith a little offbrand clone of him. i ESPECIALLY hate that they aged keith up 2 years for no goddamn reason other than to make him the Adult (tm). keith’s dedication to others was gre4at, but it should have, and im failing for this word here so forgive me, climaxed? cresscendo’d? whatever. /resulted/ in him playing support. not leader. lone wolf keith doesn’t need how to lead his pack, he needed to learn to HELP his pack. to be a TEAM PLAYER. he didn’t want the responsibility of leading bc guess what?? some people hate leading!! there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be support! keith’s entire arc is a huge mess of missed opportunities and a grand illustration that he is lm’s and jds’ favorite, just like fucking mako.

i won’t rant about mako, but just know i fucking hate him and the special treatment he gets, and good LORD does keith take over mako. keith isn’t space zuko he’s space mako and it fucking SHOWS.

okay, i’m losing steam here, but like.... so apple, why tf where u voltron 24/7 if you hated it so much? because homestuck was over and i needed a new hyperfixation. and i really had to force it for vld tbh. and at the end of the day, it wasn’t so much about the show itself as the potential of klance (or sheith, up until s3). between the interviews, the coding, the fucking EVERYTHING--it really felt like it could be canon. i knew in my heart it was queer baiting but i had HOPE dammit. hope that this could be killer representation, hope that these characters would delvelopment into something incredible. again, there was so much POTENTIAL. and all of it was wasted. everything really came to a head during the fucking game show episode. it was like lm and lds giving everyone who likes lance the middle finger, really driving home that “no no, he IS just stupid. he’s the comic releif. there’s nothing deeper about him and no one will stand up for him bc they all think of him as such.” and that just....broke my heart. we were so...SO close to lance actually mattering but nope! bolin’d again! and what was his purpose in s8? why to be an accessory to allura of course!

i’ve seen a lot of people really divorce themselves from canon and live solely for fanon, esp fanon klance but like.... i can’t. i just can’t. it’s so fucking hard to work with these cardboard characters. you can only draw so much depth onto them, you know? until the very last moments they had potential, but then it all got snuffed out. but who cares about canon? why bother with it? because! we don’t have a solid consistent fanon version of them! no one sat down and delivered the ten commandments of “here’s what we agree k and l are actually like” it’s stupid and it sucks because everyone has their own little differences and its so so tiring to basically be interacting with minutely different ocs all the goddamn time. canon matters bc it gives everyone the same base to work with. like a cooking showing with the same basket ingredients, but now it’s like.... ya’ll don’t wanna use the mandatory ingredients (and why would you? those canon ingredients are like, a century egg and spoiled sardines, they’re awful.)

okay, and im at work and just came back to this and dont remember my train of thought so like... what really threw all this into sharp clarity was the recent steven universe episodes. they were so...GOOD. so fucking good. so much plot and foreshadowing coming to a head. it was such a wonderfully satisfying payoff that it made me remember what a GOOD show is like, how vld is so very very /bad/. the difference is fucking striking. where one is an intricately woven tale with excellent character development and clear story AND character arcs, that can progress AT THE SAME TIME, one is a hacked together flaming dumpster firing that constantly falls flat and doesn’t know where its going or why. and it s so BORING! like fight scenes can be amazing! they can be well coreographed and tense! and we as the audience can be anxious about the outcome! and vld just wasn’t that! it was boring repetetive action in the least exciting way. and where su set up a lot of potential, holy shit they DELIVERED on that potential. not just for rep, but for characters! for story! for plain ol simple character interactions! and then, again, two dimensional cardboard cutouts.

and now with this difference in good vs bad show so very clearly highlighted for me, i just.... i can’t, anymore, with vld. it sucks. it sucked and i can’t pretend or force a fixation with it that just isn’t there, and truthfully, probably never was. maybe that’s why i’ve been struggling to finish my fic, struggling ever since i posted the last chapter, ever since s7, which, again, that game show was really the nail in the coffin as far as holding onto any hope that this tire fire would ever pick up. like a physically feel ill trying to finishing this stupid fic bc i don’t care so hard. i don’t care and i just... really want to be over it. im sick of seeing it everywhere, im sick of the drama, of the Discourse. like all fandoms have their issues, but hold fuck does vld fandom have a massive Purity problem. like, god, let people ship whatever. who cares. die mad about it.

like homestuck, idk if i’ll ever fully ween myself off vld but i want to move on. i want to enjoy Other Things without having this lackluster weight on my shoulders. and more than anything, i want to stop feeling like im obligated to like the same shit as i did two years ago, or last year, or hell, last week! feel free to unfollow, but yeah i just.... really needed to let this out in a proper post and not in the misc tags somewhere.

[seyaryminamoto]

I am curious about what's your opinion on how Katara is treated in the comics vs in the show (both ATLA and LOK). Maybe a better question is, what do you think the dynamics between Katara and Aang have with each other and to the kids should have been like?

God I had written up a huge response and the browser shut down so I lost it *sobs*

But alright, I’ll try to be brief this time.

I think Katara is not written well in the comics. You can see it clearly not only because of her flawlessness (I’m not saying this as a compliment), but because some elements of her character have been as good as wiped out for no reason. There’s no sign of the sass she had in spades in Book 1, and that she still had to some degree during Book 2 (can’t really remember much of it in Book 3, that was mostly just passive-aggressiveness towards Zuko). She’s not really the same character we knew from the show, and that’s obviously not her fault, since the one I hold responsible for this is Yang.

Katara is her own character in the show, but in the comics she’s mostly coded as “Aang’s girlfriend”. There’s not a lot of material for her as a character, which is a lot of what happens to Asami in LOK - her agency in the story is relegated to her relationships with other people. Sometimes Katara’s relevance, like in The Search, is in relation to her sibling relationship with Sokka (which is then used as a parallel to Azula and Zuko’s), but most times it’s in relation to Aang. And that’s not how her character worked in the show at all. Granted she was Aang’s friend, but she could get important subplots where you could see what her character really was made of. Her subplots in the comics (up until North and South) are so few, so lacking, and do nothing for her character overall. Sokka gets subplots in nearly every single trilogy (subplots that also do nothing for his character, because it’s usually just Sokka being a goof all the time), Katara is mostly in them right next to Aang, to kiss him or support him and curiously, seldom do we see it the other way around (I guess North and South may have changed that at last, but I haven’t read part 2 so I can’t say for sure).

In LOK, I absolutely understand Katara being an old woman who doesn’t do a lot in the plot (if anything what ticks me off is Zuko and Toph being brought back to fight while Katara isn’t, in my frank opinion none of them should’ve been brought back for action if LOK was supposed to be a story of “late teens and adults”, unlike ATLA which was the “kids and old people show”). But it’s certainly annoying that we don’t know nearly enough about what Katara did in her adult life, and that the only news we have is that she got bloodbending banned (when technically that sort of bending could have done wonders for medicinal purposes of different sorts, but I guess that never crossed her mind…). Outside of that, there’s not a lot of news on what Katara was up to, and it’s not too surprising that there’s not, since LOK and the comics were written with the same idea of Katara in mind: she seldom gets to do anything important, mostly just helps and supports whoever needs it.

Granted, part of her character was about being the “mom-friend”, but that’s PART of it. It’s not 100% of what comprised Katara. Her more aggressive sides, the sass, the stubbornness, most of that is gone in the comics, and in what little we saw of her in LOK. It’s not something I can understand, really.

Lastly, regarding how her children were raised, I’m actually pretty bothered by that topic. Not only do I fail to understand how Aang could be such a mess of a father, but I don’t like that it’s implied that Katara did nothing about it. I’m not here to toot Zutara’s horn or anything, but I THINK they like the idea of Katara calling out Zuko when he needs it. Zuko will make mistakes all the time, that’s just what he’s like, and whoever he marries should be able to make him rethink whatever he does wrong. Of course, Katara is no paragon of perfect morality, but on most regards she’s better with morals than Zuko. 

Now, I guess the problem is that we’re told Aang is perfect in regards of morality (… which is not entirely true), and ever since they got together, Katara somehow thinks he’s always right? Which is why she swallows her jealousy in The Promise and ends up thinking she’s the selfish one for not being a fan of Aang’s fan club (tbh that was one of the lousiest things that trilogy did). And it’s also why she hasn’t really defied him at all throughout the entire comics’ run. I can’t remember any defiance at all, actually. Not even a “Hey, why the hell did you forget to invite ME to your fancy lunch but you didn’t forget to invite Toph?!” in The Rift. Nothing. And… that’s another thing that makes Katara feel weird in the comics. She just seems to turn a blind eye to any mistakes Aang makes, regardless of the magnitude of those mistakes (and in the Rift it actually pisses me off a lot, because Aang literally forgets about Katara for an entire volume of the comic, and only remembers her when Sokka tells him she’s stuck in a cave-in, and so far I think I’m the only person who’s claimed to be bothered by it). I know we’re expected to think Aang is a better human being than everyone else in general, but he makes mistakes: and Katara is PERFECT for calling them out. She’s born for that, calls out everyone else’s already!

But not Aang’s, at least not since the show ended. She won’t do it in the comics, she didn’t do it between the comics and LOK (that is, if we assume she probably stood by and allowed Aang to take Tenzin on vacations while neglecting the rest of their children). It’s not something that can sit well with me. I don’t know why they’ve started writing her this way, but I mostly dislike the way her character has been written in the comics and LOK. It doesn’t look like she was a bad mother, but she still could have been a better mother and wife if the writers had just wanted her to be one.

Now, what do I think Katara should be like in comics and LOK?

First off, I’d scratch all the “sweeties” nonsense. Dear god is it corny and it feels out of place ten times out of nine. I don’t like it, it’s not cute for me, it really feels forced. Terms of endearment aren’t impossible, but I wouldn’t have them refer to each other as sweetie ALL THE TIME. NO. *heavy breathing*

Secondly, I’d want Katara’s subplots to not be only about Aang or on a lesser degree about Sokka. How about seeing her interact with other characters, like Suki, like Toph, like Zuko? Why didn’t she befriend Kiyi too in The Search, for instance? Even Toph gets a weird BFF comic with Ty Lee, but Katara is relegated to mainly interacting with her boyfriend and her brother. Sokka gets to spend time with Toph, with Suki (in Shells exclusively), with Aang, with Zuko, even has a pretty personal one-on-one competition with Azula throughout The Search that Katara did NOT have. But Katara is stuck with Sokka and Aang only. If we wanted to see her character being as it used to be in the show once more? That would need to change. We could have more stories like that one in the Lost Adventures, where she goes out with Toph for a day. We could have stories about her and, I don’t know, Mai! Anything!

Third, in regards of LOK: if we’re going to relegate Katara to the role of the “healer”, which I’m not the biggest fan of, but I figure that’s what Bryke went for… why the hell didn’t she inaugurate Republic City’s Main Hospital or something epic of that sort? That’s the perfect place for her to have a superb statue! It could be a place that employs all sorts of bending healing types, where research is done to find new ways to use bending for healing, or new means to cure people without bending, too. Why didn’t this happen? Beats me. I’m not saying Katara wasn’t allowed to be a housewife, because she is, but it bugs me that as a housewife she apparently doesn’t even get a say upon how Aang plays favorites with their kids. So, if she’s not going to have much of a say in that, why not give her a job? She could handle a job and raising kids at the same time, so could Aang. I really have no doubts about it.

And there’s probably more things I’d add, but those three would be the first steps to giving Katara some of her agency back. If she didn’t want to be a healer she could easily have a waterbending academy too, why not? She really could do lots of things for Republic City and I’m sure she would have been happy to do it. Fact is, it’s just unfair that everyone else gets to make their “mark” on Republic City but Katara doesn’t (and obviously Suki doesn’t either, but let’s just pretend she left her own mark in the Fire Nation instead…). It feels out of place for a character who was the third most important one of ATLA’s franchise, right behind Aang and Zuko. She should have gotten a little bit more recognition, inside the story and out, too. The writers could have done her character justice, and they should have. But well, who knows? Maybe North and South Part 2 gave her some of what her character was sorely lacking…

So, that was a long answer anyways, lots of grumbling and rambling but I hope I answered your question properly!