Pica Pica ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Except...when it comes to A.ang. Everything about how she ends up with A.ang is her being passively pushed in that direction, whether by the plot or other characters, or worse, A.ang making choices for her.

Them getting stuck in the Cave of Two Lovers? Plot contrivance. They just happen to get separated from the group by that cave-in.

The Fortune Teller episode? Aunt Wu telling her she'll marry a "powerful bender" coupled with Sokka telling her that A.ang is a powerful bender. She doesn't even have the thought of viewing A.ang as a potential romantic interest herself, it's planted in her mind by others.

Plus, in a double-whammy, you have A.ang eavesdropping on her session with Aunt Wu. As an aside, how that doesn't get called out more often I don't know, it seems akin to eavesdropping on someone's therapy session to try and use what they say in private to get with them. Such a huge red flag. But anyway, that's what I mean by A.ang making choices for her. Her decision of who to tell about that prophecy if anyone, and how much of it, has been taken from her and she doesn't even know it. It started well before he ever kissed her without her permission.

Then you have them dancing together in the Headband episode, which is A.ang enticing her to dance with him several times before she finally capitulates. I don't think that really falls under the category of him not taking no for an answer like certain later non-consensual actions of his, but it is an interaction that is all about him pursuing her and her sitting there being pursued. Passively. His courtship is something that is happening to her, not something that she's an equal participant in.

And then you have him kissing her without her permission before the invasion (not great) and him kissing her against her will at the Ember Island Players (super not great). And then out of nowhere they kiss at the end and live happily ever after, I guess </s>

Now, a character whose default mode is "active" having to learn to sit and wait and listen can be a great arc (see: Run Lola Run and frickin' A.ang in his search for Toph!!!) but there's no awareness in the narrative that this is a lesson Katara needs to learn...I don't think there's any awareness at all within the story that Katara's main character arc and A.ang's pursuit of her are in conflict with each other, it's something you only see by taking a 10,000 foot view of the entire show as an audience member. I think it arose on accident.

Plus, the message of "That girl does too much, she needs to calm down and stop playing hard-to-get, she needs to let the boy chase her" is just awful. I don't think it's an intentional message. Unfortunately, it still ends up being an unintentional message.

Now, I can't possibly be the first person to be aware of this but I haven't come across anything pointing this out yet so I guess I'll toss it out there.

I've read many interesting things about what happened or may have happened in the writing room of the original ATLA series, as I'm sure we all have. That show was, as far as I know, put together with a traditional writing room. They wrote and produced a pilot episode, it got the greenlight. Then they had a set budget to pay for writers for a season of 20 or so episodes. The main (most senior, experienced) writers are in charge of several episodes (probably the ones most important to the story). Newer writers are given the opportunity to get some experience with less important episodes. Because the budget for so many episodes is set in advance, they can plan to bring in bigger writers, or guest writers, and fill out the rest of the season with work by the less experienced writers.

It's a system that worked for basically all of TV history up to now. It gave steady work to writers, it gave the next crop of writers the experience they need to cut their teeth, it gave the writer's room...room to be flexible and plan things out and decide their priorities well in advance.

What Netflix does differently is this: Because they're dropping all the episodes at once, they don't want to overcommit to a series that's a dud. There is no cutting your losses and cancelling a show midseason here.

So instead of investing money in filming pilot episodes, they use the mini room. This is exactly what it sounds like: a small version of the writer's room, with fewer writers. In place of a pilot, the job of the mini-room is to crank out the first few scripts of the season, and probably develop the rest of the season while you're at it. Netflix decides based on that whether your show is worth spending money to film.

(And because getting greenlit depends on this, they'll probably spend the whole writing budget only bringing in proven talent and experienced writers...Plus once you're greenlit, you've already got most of the writing team put together so you're unlikely to add many people to it, so this system is actively killing chances for young writers, but that's a different problem).

Now, notice, if you will, whose names are given writing credits on the first and sixth episode of S1 of NATLA:

I haven't come across any hot goss about what precisely went down behind closed doors to make them leave (if you've got any, hmu!). And what I'm about to say is pure speculation:

Considering NATLA, by its nature, was always going to be a big monetary investment for Netflix, they probably used the mini-room system to make sure the show wasn't dead in the water before they cut the check. This is exactly the use case mini-rooms exist for.

If Bryke were involved in writing the first teleplay, my guess is they were in the mini-room and very involved in writing not just the first episode, but in writing the first several episodes and probably the general development of the season. And there were probably comparatively few people in that mini-room. Apparently there's usually only two or three writers, so however many writers there were let's presume that Bryke had an outsized influence as a bloc.

This is pretty good circumstantial evidence that those two are in fact probably responsible for a lot of the changes/character assassination that I've heard people complain about with regards to the first season of NATLA.

Then once Netflix had the first handful of scripts and greenlit the show, they bring in a few more writers for the second half of the season. My spidey sense is going off--that is when things started turning. Bryke no longer outnumbered the other writers in the room when they wanted to push bad writing decisions.

That episode 6 has more writers involved than any other S1 episode of NATLA, and none of them are splitting up story and teleplay except this one. It reminds me of how a Hollywood script that has a half dozen writers credited is code for "This was in development hell, everyone had conflicting agendas and it was constantly getting rewritten."

But it also means that they were still active in the writer's room once they got past the mini-room stage, so we should assume that their fingerprints are all over S1.

Anyway, the gist of it is: there's some circumstantial evidence that all the problems with NATLA S1 can still be blamed on Bryke. They would have had an unusually large amount of creative control over the first few scripts, and there is a nonzero possibility they left once they got in a real writing room and experienced creative pushback. It sucks that the rest of the show has to build from that foundation even after they left the production.

Because he's a 12-year-old pacifist monk who's pretty darn good at airbending and waterbending but mid at earthbending (according to Toph later in the season), and knows no firebending? And even if he can do multiple bending styles, he can still only do one move at a time...so how is that actually that formidable on its own? Are they really banking everything on this child's tactical advantage as a jack-of-some-trades?

Are they that confident that the eight minutes of no firebending will be enough for this child to accomplish something no one else has accomplished in 100 years, and that the child will not be in mortal danger before the eclipse on the way there? Or even during the eclipse from, say, the Yuyan archers who have already gotten A.ang at least once?

Wouldn't a team of a few battle-hardened earth and waterbenders be better to send in for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? If A.ang's lacking his biggest advantage in battle, surely a team of warriors would be a better option than one child. They can even launch more than one attack at a time! The lone child can be incapacitated with one hit. At least a team would take several, you know?

I suspect they treat his loss of the Avatar state like no big deal because they tell the audience directly at the end of Season 2 that if he held on to his attachment to Katara, it would block his chakra and lock him out of the Avatar state. And in the end he did hold on to that attachment, then he lied to Sokka and Toph about mastering the Avatar state, Azula shot him with lightning, and A.ang declares that the lightning strike is responsible for blocking his chakra and locking him out of the Avatar state.

I'm on the fence about whether A.ang is really telling the truth this time about the lightning blocking his chakra or just spinning another convenient lie. On one hand, he's lied about this before for his own ends and we never actually see how exactly he knows this to be true so he could be making it up. On the other hand that scene of Katara healing him in the first episode of the season does make it sound a little plausible.

In any case, he gets away with his first lie, hiding the truth of what happened with the guru, scot-free. This narrative sleight of hand lets him make a serious mistake in the season 2 finale--choosing his crush on the girl over saving the world (which the girl lives in, btw)--and then they walk back the seriousness of this in season 3.

The story bends over backwards to make sure A.ang doesn't have to deal with the consequences of his actions. Unfortunately, by trying to unwrite the significance of A.ang's unforced error in the S2 finale, they end up downplaying the importance of him losing the Avatar state, and they send a frickin' 12 year old alone, lacking his main battle advantage, onto the front lines to confront the main villain!!!

And none of the other characters bat an eye at how ridiculous that is!

That's what I mean when I say they made bad, weird decisions (mostly in S3) in service of making sure kata.ang happens.

Bringing A.ang's choices in the S2 finale into the open and treating his choices like they actually mattered would result in driving a wedge between Katara and A.ang. Not necessarily forever, but at least for a time. And that's why I think this plotline was undone so aggressively (and shoddily).

A.ang's not actually a load-bearing character during the invasion (especially the first episode). He mostly just flies around looking for Ozai, only to discover that Ozai is out-of-office. It's a little off to me considering how important this moment is supposed to be for him as the hero of the story, even if it was always supposed to end in disappointment.

I wouldn't be shocked if, perhaps, instead of the nothingburger filler episode that was Nightmares and Daydreams the original rough plan was for A.ang to reveal that he was locked out of the Avatar state because he picked his crush on Katara instead, and the other characters take that revelation seriously.

Maybe he gets taken to the woodshed (perhaps even by Katara?) about how selfish that was, he gets shut out of the invasion plans because he's now much less useful as a combatant and also they're mad at him for lying and being selfish and keeping secrets that could put the entire war effort in danger...he has to do some soul searching and perhaps grow as a character...and then it's a much more significant moment when he decides to help his friends during the invasion anyways even though they're mad at him and he has no power-ups...maybe they decide to go for the invasion without him because they can't waste the eclipse and A.ang swoops in to try find Ozai on his own (it's some good redemptive bravery but still not smart, see above), then ends up helping his friends get away when the tide turns...and thus him popping up to save them is still a Big Damn Hero moment for him.