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Who Am I?

My name is Amirazat, and for now I’m going to be posting about ATLA. I watched the show as it released while growing up and it’s something I always come back to when I need a comfort watch. This is my first time being active in the fandom, though, so I don’t know all of the past fandom politics.

What are you likely to find here?

- Analysis of the show and its writing, including criticism

- Positivity about all the Gaang members

- Positivity about Zutara (my favourite ATLA ship)

- Positivity about ATLA’s platonic relationships

- Positivity about most other ships (canon and fan, including Kataang)

- Criticism of the way Kataang was executed in canon

- Criticism of Aang’s character writing in season 3

How can I be positive about Kataang and also critical of its writing?

I have no problem with Kataang in theory. I think there’s a lot of good potential there with their mutual experience as genocide survivors, and I like the idea of Aang helping Katara to reclaim her childhood, even if I don’t think this worked in canon.

I also think that the way their romance was executed in canon was an absolute train wreck and actively lowered the quality of the show, but I’m interested in other ways their story could have been told.

About Asks:

My asks are open (if anyone is actually interested), and I’ll try to get to answering anything (civil) as soon as I can, but I don’t plan to post every day.

About Tags:

First off I’ll say that we don’t know exactly how much combat waterbending Katara does as an adult. I haven’t seen the new movie but I’m assuming she’s still a full combatant in that. And we also know that Katara is Korra’s waterbending master. But outside that we mostly see Katara revered as a healer.

Here’s why that bothers me.

Katara is a genocide survivor. She’s the last waterbender of the Southern Water Tribe, and she is incredibly invested in reclaiming her Tribe’s waterbending culture. We can see this very clearly in how excited Katara is to meet and learn from Hama in The Puppetmaster.

The biggest difference we are aware of between the Northern and Southern styles within the show is that bending in the North is gender segregated. Women are only allowed to heal.

This is clearly not true in the South. Beyond what we’re told about the difference in betrothal customs, we also explicitly see a young Hama doing combat waterbending before she’s captured.

Katara fights not only for the right to learn combat waterbending for her own sake - although she clearly enjoys being able to fight - but also as a means of carrying on the Southern tradition. She doesn’t want her tribe’s waterbending culture to be subsumed by the North’s.

That’s why it stings when Katara is known primarily as a healer. She was the genocide survivor who brought back the culture of Southern Waterbending just as much as Aang brought back Airbending. She should be recognised for that, and that necessarily involves being a great combat waterbending master - which Katara clearly is in the original series.

Instead the list of achievements we get for Katara, aside from specifically training Aang and Korra, could just have easily have been the accomplishments of a traditional Northern female waterbender.

Presumably in response to my post where I specifically said that Aang didn’t need to stop loving Katara, he just needed to be open to the possibility of rejection, based on timing.

What is wrong with these people?

Aang, and a lot of KA shippers, seem to interpret letting Katara go as no longer loving Katara. However, as Aang himself points out “three chakras ago love was a good thing”, so we know that love itself isn’t the problem.

Let’s look at how the guru says that love is a good thing.

When unlocking the 4th chakra, we’re told that this chakra deals with love and is blocked by grief. We’re not told that Aang should not love the Air Nomads. We’re told he needs to let go of his grief about their being gone and see that their love is still in the world. We then see Katara’s face, showing that it is her love for Aang which is helping Aang recover from the grief of his loss.

This perfectly connects to the way we’ve seen Aang lose control of the Avatar state. In The Southern Air Temple, Aang loses control because of his grief at their loss.

We see in that same episode that Aang’s realisation that he still has people who can be part of his family is what helps Aang come out of the Avatar State.

The guru isn’t saying that Aang shouldn’t love the Air Nomads. He’s saying Aang needs to be able to carry on in the face of their loss, and be open to new love.

But the loss of the Air Nomads isn’t the only thing to trigger an emotional Avatar State from Aang. We see this again in The Avatar State when General Fong buries Katara.

In order to be able to control the Avatar State, Aang needs to be able to deal with the potential loss of Katara.

But it’s not only the potential loss of Katara’s life that Aang needs to deal with, it’s also the potential loss of her as a romantic prospect.

In The Ember Island Players, Aang tells Katara that if his chakra wasn’t blocked he’d probably be in the Avatar state because of an on stage depiction of Katara and Zuko in a romantic setting.

We are told in canon that Aang is so attached to the idea of his relationship with Katara that it causes him to be unable to control his emotions, and therefore the Avatar state. That’s not healthy, with or without implications about his ability to save the world.

So, what’s the solution? It’s clearly not that Aang cannot love Katara. We know of multiple previous Avatars who fell in love and had happy relationships.

I think that when the guru tells Aang that he needs to let Katara go, that doesn’t mean he needs to stop loving her. It means, as with the Air Nomads, he needs to be able to find peace with the idea of a life without her. He can want her to live, and fight for that with all his might, but if she dies he needs to be able to keep going. He can want to be with Katara, but he needs to be able to accept it if that’s not what she wants.

Sure, this worked out in canon because Aang was a straight guy who wanted children and was able to have them. But what if he wasn’t? What if Aang were gay, or asexual, or bi but fell in love with a man, or just plain didn’t want to have children? With the show’s setup, Aang really had no choice but to have children with a woman, otherwise Airbenders would die out and the Avatar Cycle would break when it rotated back to air.

As a queer person that setup is horrifying.

And the nightmare isn’t over once Aang has had children. What if Tenzin had been gay or ace etc? Would he have felt like he could live his own life the way he wanted to without wondering if his decision to do so was going to have drastic consequences for the world?

Until they managed to get a sufficiently large crop of airbenders, there wouldn’t be any of them who didn’t feel some sort of pressure to reproduce.

And this problem did not have to exist.

It would have been so easy for the show to come up with something about how air bending is fuelled by freedom of spirit and so the airbenders who survived the initial genocide lost their ability to bend because they were forced to hide and conform, to the extent that 100 years later the descendants don’t even know about their heritage.

And then, as people get out from under the pressure of the war, air bending children start cropping up here and there. The parents take their kids to learn from Aang, and in listening to his lessons some of them start airbending too!

Aang could still have been the sole link between the past and the future of his people by being the one to restore the Air Nomads culture, and his kids could have been part of a larger group of kids learning about their culture, some of whom would no doubt have been the non-bending or other element-bending siblings of airbending children from other mixed families. They could have had a community.

Cropped out the poster because regardless of how much I dislike this take I don’t want anyone harassing anyone else.

That said, I really hate this take. The idea that Zuko wouldn’t make a move on Katara because of how close he is with Aang treats Katara like she’s Aang’s property.

If Aang and Katara were in a happy relationship together then absolutely I don’t believe that Zuko would interfere out of respect for both of his friends. But if they never got together or had broken up, then Aang does not get to police who Katara may or may not have a relationship with just because he saw her first.

Thanks so much for your ask!

I actually have a lot of ideas for re-writes and additional scenes to help bolster Aang’s character development and, relatedly, the development of Kataang. I’m happy to share more of them if people are interested, but I figure I should probably start with something (relatively) short easy to digest. I hope I deliver on your expectations!

Since I was on the topic of “The Southern Raiders”, let’s start there. I think there’s a lot of nuance in the way that Aang approaches his discussion with Katara that’s easy to miss (which I expand upon at length in I this post) and I would have loved to have seen a scene at the end of TSR where Aang actually talks to Katara about what happened, and they become closer as a result. In my opinion, this would have made their romance arc a lot better, since I think one of the biggest problems with the way Kataang works out in canon is that even though they get on well for most of the show, they seem to spend the last few episodes having unresolved fights… then they kiss.

I had three main goals when writing this scene

1. Allow Aang and Katara to reconcile after their fight, showing a healthier friendship and making it seem more natural when that friendship transitions to romance.

2. Flesh out Aang’s motivations in this episode, and allow him to reflect on his mistakes

3. Write Katara showing an interest in Aang in a context where the text indicates to us (part of) why she’s interested in him romantically. We hear a lot about why Katara loves Aang, and we see that she’s interested in him romantically, but these scenes don’t tend to coincide so it ends up being difficult to relate to Katara in the romance.

Here’s what I’ve got:

(Some lines are taken directly from the show because I wanted to keep things as consistent with canon as I could while keeping to my goals.)

Instead of having Katara talk to Aang and Zuko on the dock after they get back, we instead have Katara and Zuko reconcile with a “thank you” and their hug while they’re still alone. Later, when Zuko brings the others to Ember Island, Aang approaches Katara by herself on the dock, giving the two of them space to have their own reconciliation.

Aang approaches Katara on the dock, sitting down next to her.

Aang: Katara, Zuko told me what you did. Or what you didn’t do, I guess. Are you alright?

Katara: I’m getting there.

Aang: I want to be here if you need me. I know that forgiveness isn’t easy.

Katara, sharply: I didn’t forgive him. I will never forgive him.

Aang looks at Katara in surprise.

Aang, tentative: But you let him go? I thought you needed closure.

Katara, staring out over the water: I did. And when I saw him, I wanted to do it. I wanted to take out all my anger on him, but I couldn’t. I don’t know if it’s because I’m too weak to or because I’m strong enough not to.

Aang sort of wilts in on himself.

Aang: When I saw you that angry, all I could think about was how I acted after I lost Appa. I yelled at you all. I went after the sandbenders. I wanted to…

Aang takes a deep breath and refocuses.

Aang: I wasn’t strong enough to not take my anger out on those around me. I needed to forgive in order to move on. Like the monks taught me. If either of us is weak, it’s me.

Katara, turning towards Aang and placing a hand on his shoulder: Aang, no. You’re one of the strongest people I know. You lost your entire culture to the Fire Nation, but you’re still here, still loving life, and you’re doing everything you can to save the whole world. That’s amazing.

Aang blushes and looks at Katara shyly.

Aang: I think you’re pretty amazing, too.

When he’s trying to relate to Katara, Aang says “how do you think I felt when the sandbenders took Appa?” And that’s an odd choice for him to make. Thinking about Katara’s situation, the more logical comparison to make would be to when Aang found Monk Gyatso’s body. Gyatso was Aang’s parental figure, and like Kya, he was lost to the fire nation, so this is actually a reasonable reference point. So why choose to talk about Appa instead? I think it’s because Aang’s feelings about his own behaviour when he lost Appa are driving what he’s saying to Katara.

When Aang lost Appa, we saw him at one of his lowest points in the entire series. He yells at his friends and makes unfair accusations.

He seems to genuinely wish harm to the sandbenders in a way that’s very uncharacteristic for him. He even (probably) kills a buzzard wasp, which is I think the only occasion when we see Aang deliberately kill anything.

If Katara hadn’t pulled Aang out of the Avatar State, he may well have killed some sandbenders too.

If Aang regrets the way he reacted to Appa’s loss, and that regret is informing his words, it makes sense that he would see Katara’s anger and become focussed on trying to keep her from making the mistakes that he himself made (and almost made).

The Avatar State is a supernatural uncontrollable rage. Katara’s anger is not.

On multiple occasions, Aang states that he regrets his actions while in the Avatar state, and he doesn’t like feeling out of control in that way. We even see his rational spirit’s reaction to the Avatar State when it detaches from Aang’s body to speak to Roku in “The Avatar State”.

Aang wants to be stopped when he is in this state. When Katara reaches out to him, she is not trying to change his mind, she is trying to allow his rational mind to regain control. She is giving him agency, not denying him agency.

By contrast, while Katara is angry in The Southern Raiders, we’re never told that her rational faculties aren’t still operational. She’s determined. Not possessed.

At no point does Katara say that she regrets acting in anger. Instead, we see her exercise judgement and mercy even when face to face with the man she saw kill her mother.

This is not someone who is out of control.

(Not that she necessarily would have been out of control if she did kill him.)

The fact that Katara wasn’t out of control and didn’t need to be stopped is further reinforced by the fact that, unlike Aang who agonises over his actions in the Avatar State after the fact, Katara doesn’t express regret at her actions or relief that she didn’t kill Yon Rha. Instead she re-states her initial position that she will not forgive him.

All of this makes Katara’s anger at Yon Rha very different from the Avatar State. She is in control of her actions and does not want or need to be stopped. Trying to stop her isn’t helping to reassert her own control over her actions, it’s questioning her active decisions. It’s denying her agency instead of enabling it.