live wesley reaction

@jetara-week-2025, day 2 – Memories

The lineart version is below

I don't tend to apply strict colonial theory towards a:tla, because the second you try to, the whole thing crumbles apart. I tried to make a list of questionable stuff this show does in its canon and in its orientalism and the list just keeps going. the show's perspective is that war and genocide is bad and hurts everybody. the deeper you interrogate the political stance of a children's cartoon from 2005, the less it holds up. this is ultimately a fantasy epic story for children, written by two white men who really loved anime and the aesthetics of east and south east asian culture. (the sun warriors are based on mesoamerican and indonesian indigenous groups too). and they just smushed all of that together.

katara helps zuko earn back his throne. she canonically believes he's earned it.

basically, if you think zutara fundamentally romanticises coloniser x colonised, then I don't think I can change your mind but then there are about a billion other things that actually happen in the show that ought to render the whole thing unforgivable to you (and those that do apply these critiques to the show as a whole still have no issue calling themselves a:tla fans and actively making fanworks all these years later right?)

Also, any argument that can be dismantled via the Geneva convention section on child soldiers probably shouldn’t be taken seriously anyways…

No, you pieces of shit, Zuko wasn’t “basically in the IDF” and Katara wouldn’t automatically be a victim of systemic sexual violence or a war prize if he fell in love with her…

 I’ve also seen an increase in arguments that Zuko isn’t a victim of the fire nation, and benefited more from his situation than he was hurt by it, ignoring the fact that Zuko was a victim of SEVERE abuse from his family, and his family IS THE Fire Nation… Zuko sees himself as a victim of war. (The Geneva convention would agree btw.) So they’re victim blaming now too.

Acting like it's an accurate 1:1 model of real-world atrocities is silly. It's sillier to act like because you see it this way, everyone else must as well. The only common denominator between everyone who watched the show is the simple sandbox it created for us, and you can't expect everyone to extrapolate the same assumptions that some of these people do. Because they simply do not exist in the text of the show. The show will never be even .000001% as complex as the real world. It's comparing the tiny sandbox of the canon text, the realities of this world, to a vast desert of assumptions based on how things work in the real world.

This is not the real world; it is a story. Stories are controlled. Characters like Zuko can turn their lives around and be healthy and perfect examples of redemption when in real life most people remain the same for the whole of their lives. People who have hated each other for generations are now all friends making amends and getting along. Also, there's like... magic and shit lol.

If you think it's toxic because in your mind you've added on a bunch of things you assume would affect it that aren't present in the text of the show, that's fine to explain why you personally don't like it. It is not accurate to say it reflects the idea as a whole because it is not evidenced by the text. It is your own personal headcanon. And it is not okay to attack other people for liking it by imposing your own imagination onto others. No one is obligated to expand that sandbox into your desert.

Funny how they also only do this for Zutara and not all the shitty implications that Kataang carries (they are very happy to keep the negatives of Kataang in a sandbox smaller than even the show presented), but that's expected, because none of this is about the interesting moral implications of a more complex hypothetical ATLA world, it's about justifying patting themselves on the back because they aren't shipping the dirty, deviant ship. It's just pretentious and stupidly unserious. There's no reason to be mad at other people for shipping the horrible things they're making up in their heads because most people aren't (and because getting mad about how people are having fun is both incredibly childish and sounds like a miserable existence x.x get a hobby). That is their own fabrication. They're fighting ghosts.

Katara is right where she wants to be....

they have all dated each other with varying degrees of success, so they decided it was easier to just all be together at the same time.

I imagine in this AU they met in high school and have been a constant in each others life throughout college, and now live with each other navigating the highs and lows of young adult hood!