bryke do not care about women.
i left a comment under a post saying but i felt like that wasn’t enough to get this out of my chest so i’m repeat it now: those men do NOT give a fuck about women, let alone indigenous women.
no, them fighting for kataang to be endgame over zutara (what people love to deny even though the writers had talked about that many times) has NOTHING to do with them making an statement on indigenous people not getting paired with their oppressors or to frame this beautiful love story between these two genocide survivors or whatever the lies this fandom likes to spread to pretend bryan and mike are better people than they actually are.
they have reiterated with the new movie they do not care about katara being a genocide survivor, i dare to say they don’t even perceive her as such; in lok and the comics there this big emphasis on rebuilding of the air nomads but zero attention to the southern water tribe because — i can’t stress enough — they do not care about katara, they do not care about survivors and they do not care about indigenous culture or people.
yue, another one of the few indigenous women on the og cartoon wasn’t even on the original plans and she’s killed off just after being introduced.
hama, another survivor of the swt genocide is completely demonized by the writing, there’s no deeper discussions about the times she endured pushing her to creating bloodbending or the possible usages of a technique like that but nooo, she’s just evil.
ozai, the main villain on the cartoon is treated with more grace than her, even mai and ty lee are never showed regretting and reflecting on their acts, they just suddenly with good guys and that’s it (and before someone says “oh they’re just teenagers” well, so was zuko), iroh (who’s a war criminal btw, i like him, everyone likes him but he is) is already redeemed by the beginning of the story, zuko’s arc is all about redemption but none of this grace for hama though, yet i’m suppose to believe these two white men in mid 2000s had this deeply understanding about being a genocide survivor and their opposition of zutara was motivated by that.
the thing is, bryan and mike are very open about why they prefer kataang and dislike zutara, the reason being: because kataang fits their fantasy.
this is literally what they had to say about katara and aang’s dynamic:
the older and more mature girl who finally comes to see the hero not only as a hero, but as a grown up like her, her love being the validation for his maturity (usually without presenting real development), her interest on him being the confirmation he grew from a boy to a man.
them saying they wanted the """nice guy""" to get the girl over the """bad boy""" has nothing to do with morals and everything to do with the incel rhetoric women go for men who treat them badly, their literally claimed on that stupid and immature video zutara shippers (mostly kids and tweens at the time may i add) will end up in disfuncional relationships, this is their vision on women.
katara for them is a prompt, she serves to set a message about aang and when he’s out of the picture, she doesn’t serve them anymore, that wouldn’t be the case if they really cared about indigenous women like people on the internet try to pretend they do, they wouldn’t dismiss her feelings about her mother’s death and act like aang was tHe aNgEl oN sHoUlDeR or whatever that bullshit was, they wouldn’t have aang scream to her face she doesn’t understand what is to be on his position in the new movie if they cared about genocide survivors.
stop using indigenous women as token, especially if you’re going to turn around and attack women of color you’re pretending to care about oven an orientalist kids cartoon you swear is the pinnacle of writing.
