Learn It!

Instead of sending a fleet, the initial raids and abductions aim to learn how to wage war against waterbenders who are surrounded by water, ice, and snow at any given moment. Fire is quite vulnerable to water, after all, because water extinguishes fire.

So, the Fire Nation collects data from every raid, documents and analyzes exploitable weaknesses, and tests different strategies and timing to tailor warfare and training in iterations accordingly. The abducted waterbenders become vital because they are turned into living training material for the soldiers. In the version canon gives us through Hama's testimony, waterbenders are held in cages and kept from bending under all circumstances. The question is why? Why go to such lengths? The construction, maintenance, and staffing of these prisons (which apparently hold the entire waterbender population of the South Pole) must be expensive. The Fire Nation isn't shy about eliminating an entire nation in one campaign, as they demonstrated with the Air Nomads. So, why keep waterbenders alive?

For my Hama AU, I decided to integrate the prison into the compounds of military academies. Hama and her comrades are held under conditions that prevent all waterbending, but the guards regularly transfer them in rotation to a training arena, where they have to waterbend to survive fighting soldiers in training.

In the Boiling Rock episode, we see that the Fire Nation controls firebending prisoners by literally cooling them down, strongly indicating that lower temperatures weaken firebenders. I think it's reasonable that this cooling technique is quite old because before the war, the only benders the Fire Nation would've needed to imprison were firebenders. The training arenas are equipped with the same mechanisms that allow instructors to adjust the temperature: at first, the temperatures are comfortable, even favorable for the firebenders, so they can focus on studying how waterbenders fight. The better the firebenders get, the more the instructors lower the temperatures to push their bodies to generate heat and mobilize energy under conditions that weaken them while strengthening their opponents, simulating combat conditions at the South Pole. The Fire Nation forces the abducted waterbenders to teach its soldiers how to fight them better. Analysts observe and record the sessions in detail to catalog waterbending forms, adjust training doctrines for the drills, update manuals, and design firebending techniques specifically to counter commonly observed waterbending forms, test those inventions in subsequent combat simulation sessions, and refine them through iterations. The arenas are a training ground and a highly methodical firebending military laboratory.

At first, the purpose of the abducted waterbenders from the South is limited to optimizing warfare against the Water Tribes. However, after a few years, the instructors notice that waterbenders make firebenders better firebenders. They are invaluable assets.

As Iroh explains, water is the element of change. Even after years, the analysts notice that these waterbender subjects never seem to run out of new ideas. Their capacity to improvise is genuinely admired among officers and relentlessly exploited: since the waterbenders keep adapting, they, too, can keep innovating. Their primary interests shift from optimizing waterbending specifically to advancing military firebending in general, as the war increasingly produces its own branch of firebending.

To train as many soldiers as fast and as efficiently as possible, masters started to radically standardize and simplify forms. The pro was reduced training time and higher accessibility; art and style were sacrificed in favor of aggression and speed. The con was far less flexibility and a narrower range of attacks; the more automated the muscle memory, the lower the responsiveness and capacity to improvise, because highly standardized training focused on repeating sequences rather than learning to combine isolated forms and figures.

Fighting waterbenders mitigates these downsides, and continuing to study their adaptations keeps firebending adaptive and flexible, which makes it harder for earthbenders to fight the Fire Nation soldiers because the repertoire keeps growing and becoming unpredictable.

Many of these instances are people attacking ZK artists in bad faith, looking for reasons to insist that anything and everything they do is "problematic". Such as an artist drawing a husband and wife on a trip and the husband hogging the blankets as a response back to an anti's hate mail. They are insisting that this was wrong to depict, twisting it into a reference to a real life atrocity, and saying anyone who follows that artist deserves to be barred from the event.

They also pointed out an artist who clearly has always drawn Katara as a WOC, clearly a brown woman, for not having the precise right shade provided by Bryke. They said if you did not call this person out for this that you then, too, are subject to being banned from Katara Week.

It's a bizarre witch hunt with performative activist nonsense to the point of insanity. That's why this space exists. Not once did we claim to make these prompts, but the original organizer did not etiher. The community did, including people now banned for frivolous reasons.

They also said that if you follow someone who "sexualized the natla cast" then you are barred. Mind you, they were thirsting over a 23-year-old Dallas Liu.

They also apparently are banning people if they follow someone who made an "incest joke"… the joke in question? It's quite literally the plot of Star Wars. It's a joke to the story of Luke and Leia.

Some of them are things I do not even understand the context of because they are fandoms I know nothing about, and many others probably also know nothing about. But apparently, if you don't unfollow people because the almighty says they're bad, despite having 0 context, then you, too, by association, must be banned.

Some of them are about punishing people who made earnest mistakes and profusely apologized and vowed to do better, and if you dared to give that person another chance and you still follow them, then you are to be banned.

Some of them are about out of context screenshots from a group chat they weirdly made a fake account to infiltrate. So if you follow these people who talked about a fanfiction and laughed at its absurdity and then it was posted out of context with the insiduous intention from the get-go of creating a smear campaign, then you, too, should be ostracized.

(I am intentionally being vague about names and specifics here because I do not at all want to further publicize the artists and accounts that will likely soon be subject to harassment because of the original organizer's cruel, yet comical, post.)

A couple are legitimate, concerning issues being raised, but I still think it is bizarre to go through everyone's followers and damn them for association. Not everyone is chronically online as this organizer.

This is puritanical, anti-fandom, anti-creative expression, rigid witch hunt. This person has actively been harassing real people over pixels for many years now. I don't even go on twitter, there's another mod handling twitter because I could not handle that hellhole.

But their list is about 15 tweets long of bizarre accusations and claiming that if you follow people who did this stupid x, y, or z — you're out! As if that's not some insane level of gatekeeping. There is no equal measure for people who ship KA or just hate ZK, either, despite a myriad of questionable things coming from anti ZK camps. Yet, they keep claiming that they did nothing wrong and did not bring shipping into it. Which is comical.

The original organizer of the Katara Week 2026 event on twitter also follows someone who made multiple anti-Black jokes to a real life Black woman. Her mutual mocked this woman's hair, comparing it to ramen noodles, and her mutuals all still try to excuse and defend this behavior. They also made racist comments using slurs towards her and deragatory statements comparing her to a beast.

They also are not barring anyone who was mutuals with a user who made K** jokes and was antisemitic and anti-Black. Many of this person's mutuals have a history of being racist and prejudiced towards real people in the defense of imagined scenarios about ATLA characters. They use blanket statements that shipping ZK period is "racist", so it's justified to harass, demean, and use racist language to these very real people in the pixels' names.

Twitter is a website full of incels, neo Nazis, and an echo chamber from hell. It is no logner the town square. This type of weird, puritanical, policing behavior under a guise of leftism is hackneyed and the antithesis of fandom. The way they behave is extremely right wing, which is why it thrives on "X" and not on tumblr. They use "woke" language to cover it and make absurd claims with a veneer of being morally superior, but it's extreme right wing policies and evangelical attitudes being implemented here.

Folks who have been around the block see through this, but newer fandom people and younger folks do not and are susceptible to it. This was very blatantly exclusionary and done to be mean spirited and hateful. They are now playing victim while saying that this event is doing so, when they are the ones who instigated it all.

Any normal person running a character event, bare minimum, would just make a new account for it, and just reblog all the non-offensive content for the event. This account will always do that. Going out of the way to use your own petty grievances dressed up as activist issues is precisely why this is happening. This was a discourse of your own making.

It is no secret that these prompts are taken from the original event that myself and the co-mod did not organize. This is intentionally a space put together so people who voted on these prompts and submitted them can still partake in the event.

Many Zutara shippers submitted those prompt ideas, so you can stay it's "stolen" from you, but you did not come up with these ideas. These are not YOUR prompts. They are everyone's ideas. So I think everyone should be allowed to use them. Nothing is being "stolen" because none of it is your creative vision. It was a collaborative creative idea by people across the board who like Katara's character. It's unfair to box people out of that when they helped make it and the so-called rationale given is pathetic.

This event will solely focus on Katara and her character. The discourse has unfortunately overshadowed her character because the organizer decided to stoke the flames of shipping wars instead of remaining neutral and allowing everyone to partake. They made up about 25 tyrannical reasons to ban people and they all happen to have to do with Zutara, and nothing to do with any other ship and questionable instances they have had. Yet, they insist it's nothing to do with shipping. The track record says otherwise.

I am not the same person as the twitter/bluesky mod. I do not have a twitter because I value my mental health (no offense, y'all lol). But I do know about the insane harassment and vitriol that antis have created and made twitter an uninhabitable place for anyone who doesn't agree with their exact interpretation of ATLA. If you don't, then you should be harassed. You must perfectly adhere to their vision of the pixels, or they will cherry pick something to accuse you of and burn you at the stake for it. If you're on their team though, what you do to others on the "other side" in the name of pixels is totally fair game.

I know this is a lot of discussion in defense of ZK shippers, but this is absolutely not a ZK space or event. It is an anti-harassment, anti-bullying, anti-antis, anti-witch hunt, fully inclusive space so long as no real bigotry is present. This is for Katara fans. That's it. It doesn't matter what you ship or if you ship at all. This is just about celebrating Katara.