legendary lovers

open na noor

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I took a 10000 year break from tumblr and writing fanfiction because I hated the drama. Now I'm back and have no clue how to use tumblr and am only getting fic reviews about people wanting me to pay them for commission LOL

(and there's still dramaaaa)

So here is my old school plea to go read my fanfic that's basically a rewrite of the new Avatar Aang movie from Katara's perspective. It's not ENTIRELY canon. But my version of what should've happened. So just keep that in mind...

Been 20 years since I published kataang fanfiction so please be nice to me.

Will be reading your fic when I can! I’ll be sure to leave an *actual* comment lol

I'm a writer, so this thing is particularly hilarious to me.

If I create the characters and their story and their arcs, I will be the one deciding who they end up with lol. Not the animators, not the voice actors, no one but the person writing the damn script because I created the characters and I decide what happens to them.

This is like saying the MCs of a book ending up together was forced by the author. Like dude, it doesn't make any sense at all.

Also the claims of Aang being a self-insert of the creators. Like, dude, they created him. Obviously there will be some elements of them in him, that's how writing works. I bet you there's elements of the creators in other characters as well.

You people have no idea how writing works and it's honestly hilarious. Like, yes they'd end up together like the creators wanted, you big doofus, they CREATED the story where they end up together.

No one, NO ONE, has the right to tell bryke no when it comes to their own story. The staff writers were hired to help them bring their vision to life, not to try and hijack ATLA from the creators and force their own ideas and vision to override bryke’s. If they had tried to do so, this would make them terrible employees.

It’s not as if Mike and Bryan ran the writer’s room with an iron fist and never allowed anyone to bring up their own ideas. We can see they did, considering many things changed from what they were originally conceptualized to be. That’s just a normal writing process. Details change as a story gets fleshed out and as ideas are brainstormed and bounced off of other people. They clearly valued and listened to their staff writers. Zutara was something a couple of them brought up, and Mike and Bryan told them no. That wasn’t the story they wanted to tell. ATLA was never meant to be some dark romance enemies to lovers plot. It just wasn’t what the creators wanted or envisioned. It’s really that simple.

All of the staff writers knew that Katara and Aang were the planned romantic subplot of ATLA before production began. We can see clear evidence of this throughout the show, starting with episode 1.

Need I remind people that Toph was initially supposed to be a man before they changed it to make her a 12 year old girl? [This is even more funny because Toph being a jacked 16 y/o was Bryke's idea and it was another writer who suggested the change. So it isn't like they weren't accepting of suggestions. They were fine with it as long as it met their vision of how the story should be told].

It's the creative process to brainstorm and come up with ideas. It doesn't mean every idea tossed around needs to be incorporated. I know how many ideas I've thrown out of my current book that it's almost an entirely different story from what I initially started.

But well, I can't expect people from a fandom who uses gross stereotypes of indigenous women on Katara and reuses the same plotline of her somehow ending up being Zuko's slave, to understand creativity.

People forget that the production staff and creative team behind ATLA were well aware of the fandom and engaged with the fandom regularly. They knew full well about zutara in the ship fandom and made plenty of jokes about it. Even Nickelodeon itself was humoring zutara shippers. Everyone was laughing at them though… not with them.

Mike and Bryan have stated over and over for decades that Katara and Aang were planned before ATLA was written. They knew kataang would be the endgame ship before they even wrote the first episode of the show, which is apparent for anyone actually paying attention and watching it unbiased. There genuinely was no chance of zutara despite a couple of the writers entertaining the idea and engaging with fans about it, because not only was zutara never depicted within the show itself in a romantic manner, but it was never seriously considered by the cocreators.

There simply is nothing else to say about it. Zutara shippers continue to push this narrative because they have nothing else they can cling to. They even used to make up interviews for the staff writers back in the day to give this argument more credibility.

Anyway, I saw this on Twitter and it was genuinely frying me and sent me so bad 😭 it basically sums up everything about zutara and that ship fandom lol