i’m so interested in hearing your hcs about Linzin!!
Ahaha ok so clearly the Kaz server chat has broken containment, but I’ll indulge lmaoo
At the risk of being one of the insufferable linzin shippers here are a few;
- Lin and Tenzin started dating as teenagers, a time in which discussing having children isn’t even on the table outside of trying to avoid it. They’re both super practical people so I feel like had they been in their 20s or older they would have realized their differences off the bat and ended the relationship before they fell in love.
- they broke up over having children, that’s not an HC though, Bryke said so in an interview. I think when people hear “growing apart” in the series it sends them off in a different direction but it is still referring to the children issue. Imagine how alienated they were from one another with a huge wedge like that growing between them over time. A lot of built up resentment.
- I think a big reason they stayed together so long was that they literally didn’t know anything else? Aside from loving each other it was just like… ok imma start dating for the first time at 40?!? No thanks. Until Tenzin found out he could succeed at dating at 40, that is 😂
- I think they were a couple that mostly kept to themselves. They always showed up to events as a pair and left as soon as it was polite to do so. I think they were a couple of homebodies who mostly socialized with each other and had acquaintances rather than a friend group. They both preferred it that way.
- They were definitely the couple who wake up at dawn and go for some absurdly long run, eat mostly for fuel and not flavor, making people like Bumi feel like a chud whenever he was home on leave stumbling in drunk from the bars with ramen stains on his shirt at the same hour.
- Aang shipped them harder than anyone. I would imagine that was its own pressure. Toph thought Lin could do better and Katara adored them together but was the first to see they were doomed.
- They bonded a lot over their need to live up to their parents’ legacies and generally just their desire to be a pair of rule following goody two shoes. (Most orderly couple award)
- they are still annoyingly compatible and now that they’re friendlyish again they do find themselves falling into old habits, nothing sexual but definitely have moments where they’re like “ope! That was too familiar 🙅🏻♀️ byeeee”
- when they were teenagers they spent more time at Toph’s house than at Air Temple Island because Toph didn’t care what they got up to, but Katara had an open door policy as in: ‘if Lin is in your room keep the door open’
- if Lin had agreed to having children they would still be together, but life on ATI would look a lot different. As it stands now, Tenzin’s life with Pema matches what he envisioned for himself more closely than what he would have gotten with Lin.
- kind of insinuated it above, but they didn’t seriously date anyone else before they dated each other.
- Tenzin made the tentative first move after months of deliberation and anxiety, but Lin made basically every move after that.
- They have enough inside jokes and shared experiences that they can practically talk in code in front of other people.
- The breakup was traumatic for Lin because she lost the only family she was speaking to (Tenzin’s) on top of losing him. I don’t think she knows to this day whether Tenzin physically or emotionally cheated on her, just that at least one of those things happened. Plus she had a public facing job with a lot of interaction with the press. It wasn’t as traumatic for Tenzin at the time, he just compartmentalizrd it and moved on alarmingly fast (also traumatizing for Lin btw) but now that they are friends again he’s having to actually process it for the first time. Katara saw it coming, Kya and Bumi weren’t paying attention, but thought Tenzin was having a midlife crisis and still joke about it. Before there was a “vacation Tenzin” there was a “midlife crisis Tenzin” he just didn’t know about it lol.
- Toph was astounded that Lin was taken by surprise and said something to the effect of: ‘well what did you expect?’ And this is a big factor in why Lin and Toph stopped talking for two decades.
I’ll think of more later. Anything specific you want to know just ask, I promise I’ve thought about nearly every aspect of their characters and relationship to an embarassing degree. This was fun, nobody has asked me about Linzin in ages.