heartless

god, this tweet is so stupid. the portrayal of katara by the actress playing her was more reflective of how many people on the crew viewed her. actress katara’s outfit didn’t include pants because it was inspired by bryke’s original design for her, and acting like her sexualized depiction was supposed to be some kind of critique when the episode was directed by giancarlo volpe is insane.

volpe’s role encompassed aspects like directing the storyboards, character designs, and backgrounds. he was notorious for his obsession with sexualizing katara, having drawn several now-deleted erotic images of her, including the infamous one of katara in a hooters uniform. he even compared katara’s virginity to her vial of spirit water, claiming she didn’t "give it to zuko" because she was "saving it for aang."

he is a huge kataang shipper who self-inserts onto aang ("i’m kataang because i relate to aang. i want the nice guy to get the girl, not the zuko types"), and he has admitted that his personal biases influenced how he directed episodes. it’s likely that he was responsible for adding the scene where zuko and katara scoot away from each other when their stage counterparts are depicted as lovers, since this moment didn’t exist in the actual screenplay created by the show’s writers.

here's another dogshit take disproven by the writers of the episode themselves. zuko and katara were not depicted as lovers in the play because the writers wanted make some social commentary about indigenous women being stereotyped as seductresses, but to provoke a negative reaction from aang ("how can we pile it on aang?"), so it could lead to the scene where katara rejects aang's romantic advances on the balcony.

the writing team wanted katara to tell aang that she was "confused" about her feelings because this was a plot device needed to keep their narrative options open. contrary to popular belief, aang and katara being endgame was never planned from the start. the question of whether they would get together was still undecided even this late into the series. katara could have very well rejected aang for good in the series finale, as the writers mentioned that aang remaining single was a possibility.

Tim Hedrick: I mean, I don't think it was really settled that Aang and Katara were going to get together at the end of the season. That's where it seemed like it was going, but it was not, you know… a foregone conclusion. Joshua Hamilton: Right, yeah. We had this conversation. Tim Hedrick: Aang could have just… He could have, you know, embraced his monk lifestyle and just wandered off to get into more adventures.

according to these tweets, katara’s sexualized depiction in the play is somehow a critique of the stereotypes surrounding indigenous women, despite the very episode's director having a long history of sexualizing katara for his own entertainment.

i've also seen people claim that aang and toph being portrayed by actors of the opposite sex was meant to be a critique of sexualized racism, with the air nomads being feminized and the earth kingdom being masculinized. but bryke confirmed that aang being played by a woman was actually a reference to how they rejected casting female voice actors for aang because they wanted him to be voiced by a boy close to his age. meanwhile, toph’s portrayal was a nod to her original concept as a muscular teenage boy before head writer aaron ehasz persuaded them to make toph a twelve year old girl.

what makes these tweets even more brainless is that the boy in the iceberg wasn’t actually a fire nation play—it was from the earth kingdom. team avatar is portrayed in unflattering ways not because this was how the fire nation saw them but simply because the episode’s writers wanted to make jokes about them. the in-universe explanation is that the earth kingdom playwright relied on inaccurate sources of information, like the cabbage merchant. in fact, the playwright actually had positive views of team avatar and believed that aang would defeat the fire lord until the cabbage merchant started telling him negative stories about them. if the intention of the play was to show how the fire nation public viewed team avatar, they simply would have made the playwright a fire nation citizen instead of having him hail from the earth kingdom, which was clearly done for humorous reasons.

even if you choose to interpret the play as an earth kingdom parody of fire nation propaganda, the playwright is insultingly named "pu-on tim." tim hedrick, the writer who pitched the idea for the episode, chose this name to mock the chinese language because it sounds like "poo on tim" in english. it references an inside joke among the crew about how the piandao is a real type of chinese sword, but the animatic editor of the series, dao le (who is vietnamese american), mistakenly thought "piandao" meant "pee on dao," and that tim hedrick had named sokka’s master this to make fun of her. these racist jokes about chinese names remind me of when bryke wanted the character of pong to have a counterpart named "ping," with both characters planned to serve major comedic roles throughout the second season.

lol, lmao even