Wait, what’s going on with Embers???? That fic has been on my read later list since 2021, what’s happened with it???

Brief overview, then I'm likely never touching this topic again, because this is not a Drama Blog:

Context: Embers is a super old AtLA fic that was written during the early fandom days, read widely at the time, and was the origin of the widely-used fanon name of "Wani" for Zuko's ship (kind of by default that it was one of the first popular fics to give his ship a name, I think?), even though most fic writers don't seem to realize it's from there anymore.

"What's Going On": I used to include a link in all my stories to it, because I believe in crediting other writers for borrowed elements, and I was using "Wani" in all my fics. But BOY did I not want to be sending readers that way anymore, so I've adopted a new name for Zuko's ship, and removed all Embers links.

None of the criticisms about Embers itself are new; I'm assuming they date back to when the fic was being written, because this isn't an "it aged badly" thing, this is an "actually yeah this gets worse the longer you think about it and I shouldn't have ignored my bad feelings just because some of the worldbuilding was interesting" thing.

An Incomplete List of Why I Made the Change:

I don't actually like the story that much anymore, and don't want to rec it

I tried to re-read it recently to see if some things were as bad as I remembered and it turns out they were So Much Worse Oh Yikes. More specifically, the treatment of Katara and Aang and their respective cultures has... rather a lot going on. One example: The Fire Nation and Air Nomads are both given multiple backstory elements in an attempt to make the average Fire Nation soldier's participation in the genocide/war in large part the fault of the Avatar and the Air Nomads themselves, and also fully justified from the Fire Nation perspective. And I do mean fully. One of its core tenants is "People from the Fire Nation (and only people from the Fire Nation) who don't follow orders Literally Die, therefore murdering pacifists and babies and continuing the war (and their regularly scheduled war crimes) is the only thing it is physically possible for them to do". I cannot emphasize enough how literal that is.

Also the name "Wani" means "Alligator" and is... objectively a pretty lame name for Zuko's ship? Where's the personality, where's the deeper meaning, where's the resonance with Zuko's themes? @tuktukpodfics initially thought I was calling the ship "Wanyi", and that's what I've switched to, because it is Objectively So Much Better. In their words: “Wànyī (萬一): Literally ‘one in ten thousand,’ ‘perchance.’ Used grammatically in Chinese to mean ‘what if’ or ‘just in case.’ I think a ship called ‘The Perchance’ is perfect for a boy clinging to false hope.”

TL:DR; I don't rec Embers anymore, because I don't actually like the story anymore, and there are things about it that get worse the more I think on them. I've removed links to it and renamed Zuko's ship to "Wanyi" ("The Perchance") because our boy deserves a ship name that reflects his character arc.

One of the things I like about Avatar is that for the most part the characterization makes sense in the context of the character's culture, like how Zuko is concerned with honor and mixes that idea with his father's love in his head, which reminds me of Confucianism (fitting, since the Fire Nation has a lot of Chinese inspiration). Do you think that same idea applies to Sokka & Katara's characters and the water tribes?

This is a difficult question to answer as we don't actually see much of the Water Tribes' culture until near the end of Book One, where its entire purpose is to cause conflict, and then it's never really brought up again. Even then, that's specifically Northern Water Tribe culture. With the Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom we actually see a lot of different people raised in similar cultures. Iroh and Zhao are very different from each other and both have even less in common with Mai or the school kids we see or Jeong Jeong, and Suki is not the same as Toph and neither of them are the same as Long Feng or Jet. By sifting through their differences, we can find what they share and by that fully understand the values they were raised by. Water Tribe characters in the original series tend to be a fair bit more, I guess the right word is homogenous? Pakku is a smug chauvinist and Hahn's an asshole, but outside of that, they don't really get the same kind of driving force, goal, or direction that Zhao or Suki do. Hama has her whole bitter revenge thing, but that's just a single episode. So what is Water Tribe culture, anyway?

When Iroh describes the Water Tribes he says, "The people of the Water Tribe are capable of adapting to many things. They have a deep sense of community and love that holds them together through anything." This fits with both Katara and Sokka as both have been praised, and rightly so, for their resourcefulness and ability to adapt when the situation turns on them. Sokka is also very loyal to his friends and loved ones, and Katara will do anything to help a community she was welcomed into.

The people of the Water Tribe have also been shown to have a strong sense of duty to the community and justice. Sokka refers to it as regaining his honor to Zuko when he explains why he has to rescue his father from the Boiling Rock, Katara and Pakku's duel was entirely over the both of them insisting on what they believed was right rather than what was practical, and Hamma was trapping Fire Nation citizens in a cave because they had to pay for what she believed they allowed to happen to her people.

And to springboard off of what you said about Confucianism, they seem even more formed by Inuit/Inupiat culture, even though as far as I can tell that was mostly an accident. Sokka treats the animals he hunts respectfully without considering them inherently inferior if the one he named Fu Fu Cuddlypoops is any indication (failure to respect your kill is believed to anger the animals, causing them to avoid you and leave your family to starve). He also uses humor and sarcasm as a way of humbling himself and others while being able to handle most personal insults, which is considered a strength and important social skill. For Katara's part, she (mostly) respects elders and tradition, loves children, and tries to keep the group's conflict to a minimum, all of which are highly valued.

Though going by this, the Water Tribe character most shaped by their culture is Yue. Along with displaying all the canon Water Tribe cultural things, she also makes a point of choosing her duty to her community over her affection for Sokka (an Inupiaq teacher's aide from when I was in high school had to explain to the students that Inupiaq stories about romance aren't happy ones as romance is not prioritized at all and stories featuring it as a theme are usually cautionary tales about jealousy and possessiveness). And her sacrificing her life to become the moon actually echos an old Inupiaq story of a hunter who sacrifices his life to bring the caribou back so his people don't starve.