Everything Happens For a Reason

Like girl the literal voice actors for both characters were Zutara shippers. The best writers on the show were pushing for Zutara endgame. Even some of the animators were in on the conspiracy to romantically code them in the subtleties of their body language and facial expressions.

They invented ship week. They inspired multiple book series. They are the most popular pairing on the world's largest fanfiction website by a wide margin (for ATLA specifically). Like 80% of the female fans prefer it over the canon pairing.

The creators are so insecure about it that they felt the need to nuke and retcon the canon of Katara and Zuko being best friends because their canon pairing is so weak that it would be blown out of the water by just platonic Zutara because of how much interpersonal chemistry they had in the show compared to their canon pairings. They have to be kept 5 feet apart at all times so that no one gets any ideas because they are THAT insecure over the continued popularity of Zutara.

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.

What Taga says is an insult, as he says that "the skies are no place for a water child," and Katara has an insulted reaction. I am sure that this is supposed to be another example of how Taga represents division vs unity, and how he doesn't trust benders of other elements.

But a couple of problems. One is the ongoing problem of Aang having no reaction whatsoever to Taga saying racist things about his friends, and especially Katara.

The second problem is that this particular insult is particularly offensive, considering that Katara and her people are indigenous coded. "Water child" not only is a diminutive to Katara, who is not a child in the movie, but it also implies that waterbenders in general are child-like, which is historically a common stereotype about indigenous peoples, used as both a backhanded insult (the idea that they are closer to the earth) and to justify oppressing them.

And like I said, Taga is the bad guy, but the problem is that Aang never comments on it. This should be a red flag for Aang, and indeed, seems to be one for the audience. But Aang will later side with Taga against Katara, eventually yelling at her when she calls him out for driving them into the storm. Which is also funny because Taga says the skies are no place for her, but without her control of water, they definitely would have died.

reblog it twice and force it

down everyone’s throats

this and also if you’re going to have people commission you for fics, if you’re going to link your ko-fi or ways for people to donate or give you money in any way, shape or form, make sure you talk about it outside of ao3. you can’t mention anything about money or donations on ao3, as it is against the site’s terms of service and yes, you absolutely can get reported for it.

there appears to be a surge of newly created tumblr blogs mass reaching out to people who post anything related to writing (under writing-related tags) and offering to "beta read their works" for them.

I don't know if they are bots trying to trick people into handing their works to them (so they can then use these works to train their ai machine), or if they have any other ill intentions. but the way they are approaching people (and how all of them are newly created blogs) makes me extremely wary.

as someone who prefers to work alone without a beta reader and someone who will only reach out to a trusted friend (whom I personally know) for beta reading, if I ever want one, I don't know if it's normal for people to reach out to random people and offer to beta read their works for them like this, but I've never seen it before until recently. and I've always been under the impression that a beta reader, especially for fanfics, is someone within the same fandom an author is in, and someone who's friends with an author (or at the very least online mutuals). these new "beta-reading blogs" are apparently reaching out to a lot of random people across various random fandoms, and if I'm being honest, they sound extremely sketchy.

The difference is shown below. Study it.

Yeah I said something similar yesterday but we can NOT let what happened to Renee Good cloud what happened to everyone else at the hands of these SS Demons!!!