The Weekly Discourse

Confronting the actual problems the show has would conflict with the extremely rose-tinted view many fans have of the original show. So, focusing their energy on a non-canon ship (that, by nature, tends to be linked to criticism of the show,) is more comforting and lets them enjoy the nostalgia guilt-free.

These days, people are very defensive of stories that connect them to a happier, more uncritical time, and when you factor in the way that people intertwine their identities with these types of nostalgic media, you get a recipe for vitriol. The politics of ATLA are worthy of critique, and to avoid this uncomfortable truth, people become overly generous in their interpretations of the show’s politics and themes, and treating the white writers as if they were the second coming of Edward Said. I don’t want to stifle textual analysis, but at a certain point, fans need to accept that ATLA has not aged perfectly and that people are allowed to point that out.

It’s an interesting little case study in fandom behaviour. Essentially, that Twitter user has made a name for themselves through a pattern of antagonism towards Zutara shippers, and have gotten embroiled in several controversies as a result. Critical to this matter, is their popularity. They’ve amassed a number of followers who like to orbit around them, and this has led to more than a few instances of them implicitly sending their followers after smaller accounts.

One such incident involved them spurring on hate towards an Iranian Zutara and making fun of them, only to later learn that this shipper was living in an active war zone and was indeed a victim of a violent conflict. They backtracked and apologized, to the ends of: “I didn’t know, I didn’t know…but—“ which satisfied their followers, but confirmed what Zutara shippers already knew: that this anti flippantly and performatively used progressive rhetoric to advance their own amusement, and likely cared little for the substance of the principles they claimed to believe in.

There are other controversies, but the last straw was a very recent incident where they invoked the KKK to create some joking “slander material” tags that were a play on words of Zuko’s name with that group. Recognizing instantly that such jokes were racist and offensive given the KKK’s lasting legacy of violence in America, they were quickly called out by Zutara shippers and their followers alike, which led them to backtrack and apologize for their actions. BUT…once again, they relied on the defence of ignorance, claiming that they didn’t know very much about American politics and weren’t familiar with the mechanics of Tumblr’s tagging system.

Many of their followers condemned them and claimed that they could no longer support them, but I want to ask them: what was it that you were supporting up until this point? They were more than happy to bond through dogpiling and deride Zutara shippers for supposed fascist and colonial apologia, all while actively poking the bear and inviting more conflict through deliberate antagonism.

Essentially, a particularly popular Zutara anti account made some extremely distasteful, edgy and racist jokes in service of disparaging the ship, and is now being turned on by their followers who are busy fretting over the optics this incident created for their corner of the fandom. Colour me shocked, lol. I need people to understand that this is not just some one-off incident, but is the natural consequence of the culture this kind of fandom behaviour creates.

This nostalgia ties into the pattern we’ve seen since 2020, where people will unknowingly allow their headcanons to supplant their memories of the actual show, and proceed to get angry at anyone who contradicts their specific take. Overly generous readings of the text, and the insistence that ATLA can do no wrong on a messaging level, leads people to vehemently deny any critiques of the show that engage with its orientalism. This is not even mentioning how feminist critics get raked over the coals for questioning the way certain female characters were handled.