#Zutara just has a majority of bad apples | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

avatarfandompolice · 24 days

Note

I know dunking on Zutarians is fun and all, but can we please talk about Tyzulaians? Cause they are almost as delusional, if not more than, Zutarians. Maybe they might have been friends when they were kids, but all of Ty Lee's interactions with Azula in the show are clearly that of someone deathly afraid of their superior snapping, and therefore kissing ass much as possible. For fucks sake, the advice Ty Lee gives to Azula during that Ember Island party in regards to getting boys is what she uses to placate her. And even though basically every single piece of post-Sozin's Comet media has all but said that she loathes Azula to the point that she eventually overcame her fear of her so she could hunt her down, Tyzulaians still cling to their ship.

And have you seen the ridiculous handwaving they do in regards to Azula's dream world showing her have a male love interest? I've even seen edits on TikTok where they blurred out Ruon-Jian.

Also, just like Zutarians like to call anyone who disagrees with their ship racist and sexist, among other things, Tyzulaians call anyone who disagrees with their ship lesbophobic, even if the person doing the criticism are queer themselves.

I know that Zutarians have engaged in mass delusion ever since Korra made their ship explicitly fanon, but I really wonder what is going to happen once we get hard confirmation that neither Ty Lee or Azula are queer, or if or both them are, Tyzula is not thing on one or both of their parts? Especially in regards to Azula stans that are also hard-core Tyzula shippers considering the current comics writer got death threats by a crazed Azula stan that made her wary of writing a comic involving Azula for quite sometime?

Sounds like a personal problem

#never really seen tyzula shippers be awful en masse #every ship fandom has a few bad apples #Zutara just has a majority of bad apples

8 notes · View notes

shewhotellsstories · 3 years

Note

i really dont wanna annoy you but you post about racism in fandom sometimes so i thought you'd be the right person to ask. i hope this doesnt come off as expecting u to be my teacher. yesterday someone said they didnt trust white zk shippers and i thought it was mean but then people started sending the them all these nasty messages and i started to worry maybe op was right. honestly a lot of this stuff is pretty new for me. i think our fandom is inclusive & unlike the rest of the atla fandom we actually like katara. but i'm trying to learn.

why would it be a problem that a lot of zk fics have katara looking after zuko? i always just felt like he needed it more bc he was abused and kataras better at dealing with feelings and she's good at taking care of people. is fire lady katara still ok? is there racism in our fandom? there are a lot of woc zks and i've seen them get hate for it. but the messages op got were pretty bad too. i know i'm asking a lot of questions i just hate the thinking that we might be as bad as the z*kka stans have been saying all year.

This is gonna get long so I’m just gonna jump right in. When I listened to fansplaining’s episode on fandom racism one of the guests said white fans who can acknowledge that fandom racism exists tend to frame it as “just a few bad apples” and get caught up in worrying about not looking like a “bad apple” instead of making fandoms spaces that aren’t hostile for BIPOC. Jag offs hiding behind anon to tell women of color who ship zutara that we have a creepy fetish for imperialism and colonialism suck, but your biggest concern really shouldn’t be the optics or if you can claim superiority over zukka stans.

Yeah the “katara’s a homophobe” nonsense didn’t come from our end of the fandom, but it feels naive at best or dishonest at worst to act like the zutara fandom is uniquely immune to fandom racism. A creator I follow made the excellent point that allyship conditional upon if a poc talks "nicely" about racism is still white supremacy. I believe poc need to be allowed to vent and be salty or angry without being tone-policed. I definitely have my days where I’m like “ugh white people,” or "why must white fans be like this," so I get where the OP was coming from. Ironically the folks that sent them anon hate proved their point. You can always count on hit dogs to hollar.

Fandom is only escapist for some people. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum so you’ll find racism in fandom because there’s racism in the world. Navigating that gets exhausting. There are certain things I enjoy, but for the sake of my sanity I'll only talk about it with friends in real life or only follow fans of color. Before I follow white fans I need to see first that they’re not the kind of person who inspires posts about fandom racism. A good friend of mine loves Star Wars, Kpop, and gaming but after years of attempts at calling in she decided that she’d only interact with woc in those spaces. Again, you get tired.

ATLA wasn’t on my radar until last year so I definitely haven’t read every zutara fic out there but I have noticed a lot of fics do tend to have Katara being the one comforting and supporting Zuko. It’s not inherently wrong of course, it’s just in the grand scheme of things in fiction woc are often cast as eternal caretakers and confidants in fiction:

“How characters of color are portrayed in fanworks, especially fanfiction, is worse than the actual films. They are portrayed as supportive, almost invisible understudies. Any characteristics which they possess in the [MCU] films are stripped and given to other white characters. It is not only erasure. It’s a theft of identity.

Characters of color are positioned within storylines to support the main, white characters. Even within the slash biracial pairings, the character of color is underdeveloped and in a position of servitude within the relationship.”

TheNavyLanguage, Fansplaining

As the quote above points out this honestly happens in a lot of fandoms. I’ve read fanfic for books, movies, tv shows, and comics and I can’t help but notice that in fics the writers often have the non-white character or-- if neither character is white--the darker skinned character being the care-taker, the bodyguard, or the person who is performing all the emotional labor. It’s not inherently wrong to have a character of color have a nurturing personality, you just have to remember that since Black and brown folks have been saddled with narrative after narrative where we exist to serve leaning into dynamics where the non-white or darker skinned character is providing all the emotional support and getting very little in return has some unfortunate implications.

It’s not better if instead of being defined as the avatar’s girl, Katara’s the fire lord’s girl. Part of the appeal of zutara for me is the idea that Katara could lay down some of her burdens and get some much needed support. I always imagine she’d have some major issues after the war.

"i always just felt like he needed it more bc he was abused and kataras better at dealing with feelings and she's good at taking care of people."

I’m going to push back against that statement. Yes, Katara didn't grow up in an abusive household but she has pain and trauma of her own. In fact I’d argue that her believing it’s her job to take care of everyone is rooted in her trauma. Katara needs support and care just as much as anyone else does.

Having read a lot of fics revolving around abuse victims in different fandoms I’ve observed that if fans feel a character’s trauma wasn’t properly addressed in canon, they’ll give them a lot of TLC in fics. But again, reducing the non-white or darker-skinned character to a glorified therapist has some implications.

I feel like the Fire Lady Katara headcanon's been talked to death so long-story short, it’s not inherently racist but it can problematic if it's not clear that Katara is Katara of the Water Tribe wherever she lives. Fics and art where her crown has a crescent moon, she wears blue, or Zuko wears blue when she's in red are the executions I'm fondest of.

When in doubt just listen when poc talk about uncomfortable trends in the fandom. Give fansplaining’s episodes on fandom racism a listen here, here, and here. And very loosely quoting my favorite professor just remember that if a marginalized person says they’re distrustful of a group of people or institution it usually happens after a lot of bad experiences. Don’t center your own comfort and hurt feelings.

“If we truly believe in fandom’s progressive credentials, then perhaps it is necessary for us to listen to critiques that make us uncomfortable rather than those that keep arguing that the status quo is perfectly acceptable—even as there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Perhaps then we will be able to come at these, yes, these very complex and nuanced discussions with the type of openness and good faith that is required for them to succeed, rather than approaching them with hostility.”

-Rukmini Pande, Fansplaining

#asked and answered #zutara #katara #atla fandom crit #fandom racism

251 notes · View notes

bellatrixobsessed1 · 3 years

Note

I think the bad reputation of Azula stans is an effect of the ones making her out to be an innocent angel and excusing her actions being the most visible,this is of course not exclusive to the Azula fandom the same is true of most villain fandoms. People find a villain fascinating get conflated with those who can't handle their fave being a villain which leads to annoying things in fandom

I can see that and how it’s annoying. I’ve seen this myself and it kind of bothers me when people take up the ‘Azula did nothing wrong’ mentality. To a degree it makes me wonder if these people like her for the character she is or if these people only like her for the character they have in their headcanons. However I do think that this is a little bit of a strawman as I feel like most of Azula’s fans don’t do this and actually say that they don’t like when stans try to make her out to be a cinnamon roll.

I also feel like ‘Azula did nothing wrong’ is very reactionary (at least for some people). I fell thrice as inclined to try to justify her actions when people are constantly dropping ‘sociopath’ as the hot new insult. People constantly demonize Azula and that puts her fans on the defensive. There’s so much ‘Azula is a sociopath’, ‘Azula was born evil’ that the opposite end of the spectrum was bound to come up eventually. People constantly post hate in the tag and make her out to be 100% irredeemable so people bend over backwards to defend her.

Tbh I feel like this is usually the case in fandoms. The way I see it is that fans with bad reps (usually these are fans of antagonists) are part of a cycle; people keep posting hate in the tags and antagonizing the fans, the fans feel inclined to swing to the very opposite end of the spectrum in an attempt to defend their character, and then they get slapped with the ‘bully fandom’/’annoying part of the fandom’ label.

Similarly I think that people feel like they have to try to justify her actions or downplay them so that they aren’t seen as abuse apologists. If that makes sense. It’s easier to say ‘Azula did nothing wrong’ than to acknowledge that she did but that she can still be redeemed. I think that most Azula fans just want to see her humanized. They don’t want to make her out to be a cinnamon roll, they want to make her out to be humanizing. They don’t want to justify, they want to sympathize.

All of this said, I feel like the Azula did nothing wrong crowd is a very small but vocal portion of the fandom. In my other ask I mentioned that Zukka fans tend to get really nasty in people’s inboxes and have a rep for sending hate. But I also stated that I think that these people are in the minority. Across every fandom I’ve been in people, for some reason, tend to look at the vocal minority and generalize the entire fanbase on those people when they should be looking at the more silent majority--the one’s whose voices are often buried under the screeching of the bad apples of the fandom.

It isn’t fair to write off every single Azula fan, Zukka fan, Zutara fan, etc. because of a handful of people. I just hate generalizations.

I also think that that’s no excuse to deliberately try to bully Azula fans out of the fandom/make them feel so uncomfortable and unwelcome that they just start leaving. And the fact that writers like Yang have enabled/encouraged this behavior is just mind blowing to me and not in a good way.

But yeah I think that Azula fans (like Zutara fans had been) are now caught in a cycle of people accusing them of being awful, so they get defensive or lash out, and then that is used to demonize and isolate them further.

And all because of a handful of people who seem to speak louder than the rest. Again, this goes for so many fandoms and so many parts of this fandom. The Zutarians got it first. The Zukka fans are starting to get a rep as the fandom bullies and so on.

The bottom line for me is that just because some fans are ‘annoying’ doesn’t mean that it’s okay to send hateful, patronizing, or antagonizing anons to members of the fandom who haven’t done anything wrong. Like I’ve seen some anons that @bezixx has gotten that are clearly trying to bait this user into saying something mean so that they can use it as an “AH HA GOTCHA!” I’ve gotten several of these asks myself that are clearly bait/someone trying to get a reaction.

EDIT: I’d also like to mention that it’s not okay for Azula fans to send people hate for no reason. And it 100% doesn’t help make things any better to give into the bait. My solution is to just delete the patronizing ask if you don’t think that you’ll respond well to it and to block people who post anti stuff in the tag. Even better, if you are able; try to respond to patronizing asks with kindness! Literally don’t give them the reaction they want and just explain why you disagree with said hate as though you are having a perfectly peaceful discussion lol. They can’t call you a bully if you literally don’t say anything mean back. For the most part that has been working for me.

EDIT 2: Another thing I noticed that doesn’t help is when Azula fans demonize Ursa, Zuko, and Iroh to uplift Azula. I actually see this one quite a lot and I can see why outsiders would get annoyed with it. They get annoyed with it for the same reason that it annoys me when Zuko fans demonize Azula to uplift Zuko. It’s very off putting to fans of x character when fans of y character constantly demonize character x to uplift character y.

#Avatar The Last Airbender #Azula #Azula Discourse #Fandom Discourse

20 notes · View notes