"Katara deserved better" is such a common talking point and like... Katara deserved better than getting everything she ever wanted and living a full life? 🤨

"Katara deserved better" just means "Katara deserved to want the same things I want, because wanting other things is bad."

She got to be with Aang? How awful! She should have wanted to be with Zuko.

She got to reunite with her family and was free spend time both in her tribe and going on the adventures every now and then? She should have wanted to permanetly move to the Fire Nation because that's where Zuko is!

She had kids with Aang? How misogynistic of the writers to reduce her to "breeder of airbenders", she should have been giving birth to firebenders for Zuko, with the ocasional waterbender to teach bloodbending to, even though she finds the concept of controlling someone like that morally apalling.

She got to BE a kid again and hang out with her buddy - when she's not being a badass fighter or great healer? She should have been Fire Lady and having political power - something she never asked for because she did not want that.

Book 2 au: sparring sessions and short hair katara

They like to have sparring sessions in order to keep their bending skills sharp. They allow themselves to go all out and not hold back at all cause they know if anyone got hurt, Katara could just heal them

But anyways, wouldn't it be kinda funny if Zuko accidentally burned Katara's hair tho? Aofkqldkkajfjd

The "I think we can save the hairloops" line is from @linnoya-writes thank you for that!! :>>

Me: Wow, the Netflix ATLA was better than what I expected. Indeed, it felt too rushed, probably because they were asked to do only 8 episodes like everything in the platform; but they were still able to capture the feeling of the original, and it was an enjoyable show. Not to mention the effects, those were so well done, especially Zuko fire kicks, I loved those.

Me: *checks internet opinions*

Me: Oh... I'm supposed to hate this adaptation.

"Aang is not empathetic. He doesn't help people unless it benefits him."

Zutara's stans, your precious Zuko would be dead in season 1 if Aang was what you think he is :)

Am I blatantly being zutarabaited by the new Netflix's Avatar The Last Airbender? Yes

Will I enjoy any crumb I'm being fed as if it were the most exquisite banquet? OF FUCKING COURSE, YES

azula: status report on katara?

zuko: target has been taken out

azula: father will be proud—

zuko: it was a lovely Earth Kingdom restaurant. candlelit dinner. she proposed at the end of it. we're getting married on friday if you want to come.

azula:

azula: FATHER WILL NOT BE PROUD—

Every day I think about how and why The Promise writers could have the gang agree so easily to Zuko asking Aang to kill him

Can you do more of the Lu Ten back from the dead AU?

That describes more than one AU of mine, so I have chosen the one where Zuko is brainwashed by the Dai Li, and while under Lake Laogai, finds his cousin. Continued from: [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], and [Link].

Aang wakes up, with, what must be said, is perfect, and perfectly awful, timing. Lu Ten is just about to make his escape, when the Avatar opens his eyes and starts having a freak out about being on a Fire Nation ship, and about how he failed to save Ba Sing Se from being conquered by Azula (Azula? His little cousin, Azula? That Azula? Conquered Ba Sing Se?) So of course Lu Ten does what all good little Fire Princes do, and tries to follow him, because that's the Avatar! He should capture him and take him home to the Fire Nation, and come out of his captivity covered in glory! His father and grandfather will be so proud.

So of course when Aang ends up stuck on some driftwood and washed ashore by the kindly Moon Spirit, Lu Ten ends up washed up, half drowned, on the beach with him. And he's still half drowned and wondering if he really saw the Moon Spirit, or just hallucinated that bit, when the Avatar's friends show up. After the hugs and reassurances, the question quickly becomes what to do with Lu Ten. The problem of course is several fold. 1) he is a danger, because he just tried to pull a Zuko and kidnap Aang. 2) He was pretty useless about it. Zuko could have done better in his sleep. This shows that Lu Ten is still kind if not fully with it, and kind of needs to be taken care of. 3) And Lu Ten's dad is in prison for helping them-

Wait what? His dad is in prison for helping the Avatar and a bunch of teenage enemies of the Fire Nation? His cousin Azula, who last he checked was eight, conquered Ba Sing Se? His cousin Zuko, who is ten, which is, he supposes, not much younger than the twelve year old Avatar, but still ("I'm pretty sure I'm thirteen now, actually, I mean dates are weird with the whole being frozen for a hundred years thing, but...") is not only trying to kidnap the Avatar on the regular, but is apparently doing pretty well at it ("uh, we wouldn't go that far... Also Zuko's sixteen, and Azula's like, fourteen, we think? It's not like she told us.") Oh okay, Zuko is sixteen. He was captive for six years? Six years? Oh. Oh okay. Okay. Wait, who had his dad imprisoned? What do you mean Firelord Ozai? How did Uncle Ozai become firelord if his dad is still alive?

What the Avatar and his companions tell him is confused and disjointed, but what what explaination he does get paints a bleak picture, especially when they tell him that both his father and his cousin said that Ozai, and/or Azula would probably kill him if they found out he was alive. Lu Ten has no idea what to do, and finds himself trailing along after a bunch of teenagers ("Toph's twelve") by default. And when one of those teenagers ends up being dragged off to school, and then getting in trouble at said school, and having to have a parent teacher conference, Lu Ten is the only adult in reach. He works out in his head how much older he would be than his supposed son. If the Avatar is thirteen, and Zuko is sixteen, and Zuko was born when LunTen was ten, he would have been a father at thirteen himself.

Fortunately for everyone involved, six (it's six, right? Wow.) years of captivity have aged Lu Ten beyond what is expected, and he looks far beyond his twenty-six years, old enough to pass as Aang's father. He does his best with stolen clothes and his reflection in a pool of water in the cave they've been hiding in. The Dai Li kept his head shaved, and it's only had a little time to grow out into a spiky fuzz all over his head. He looks like a disgrace, his topknot shorn, the delinquent father of a delinquent son. But it's the best he can do. He isn't exactly surprised when the principal threatens his "son" with being sent to the coal mines. He also doesn't believe a word of it.

After Aang holds his little dance party, amd they all have to run out of town, he finds himself on the road with a pack of children, and is baffled by how many "adventures they find themselves in, impersonating spirits (a Fire Nation town shouldn't be in this kind of squallor!), getting taught by Piandao (who Lu Ten stays well away from, since Piandao could recognize him), dodging assassins, and running into secret waterbending blood witches. That last one was horrifying in so many different ways. She wanted... She tried to kill him. She tried to force the others to kill him. She... Was, at least on some level, a captive like him.

And at the end of it all, when they meet up with the ragtag "army" heading to storm the Fire Nation capital, he hears about the eclipse. And he decides that while the rest of them are trying to take on Ozai, he's going to spring his father. So, he slips away during the fighting and heads for the capital prison tower. Hopefully that's where his father is being kept. And Lu Ten might not have Zuko's ability to break into and out of almost anything, but it hardly matters, because he has barely made it inside when his father, having broken himself out, runs into him, and they leave together.

All this means is that when Zuko (who never did tell anybody about his cousin being alive, which is going to make his tearful reunion with his uncle and cousin a little less awful) shows up to the Western Air Temple, the Gaang is short one Fire Prince. And now they have a new one. Yay! And once he starts to become friends with them, they've got a whole bunch of questions about just what exactly is going on with his family. And yeah, the answers he gives are, well, they are... Wow, Zuko, no wonder you're so messed up!

another bone i have to pick with atla fic writers, writing katara in a way that makes her out to be a totally unreasonable bitch who goes out of her way to hurt zuko or refusing to treat him is completely ooc. katara, no matter how much she hates someone, always tries to help, it is the core of her character, no matter how angry she is, no matter how much she can hate, she always, always, chooses compassion and forgiveness. This is a choice she makes even when confronting her mother's murderer. She could have killed him or done any number of things to him, but she didn't. In her own words, Katara will never, ever turn her back on someone in need. That is Katara's greatest strength and what makes her my favourite character.

In the beginning she, like Sokka, is helpless to the dangers her tribe faces. When she, Aang and Sokka travel to the North Pole, she is yet untrained, and if caught or attacked, she doesn't have much in the ways of defending herself, but despite this, she goes out of her way to try and help other victims of the war in any way she can. After being trained, she has the power to defend herself and others. She even gains the ability to blood bend. With all this power that she didn't have before, she could have gone the way of Jet and exacted her revenge in anyway she could, without considering how it hurt innocents. She could have done a lot with her bloodbending. But she didn't. She draws a line in the sand, she chooses "good", she chooses to be compassionate, even when it would be so much easier to hate, and hurt, even when it would make far more sense to turn someone away. Katara is the first person to give Zuko a chance, despite the fact that he has been chasing them from the moment Aang came out of that iceberg. Zuko had been pursuing the gaang the way Azula hunted them for far longer, even if he didn't deprive them of sleep. He at one point caught her and tied her to a tree. Katara had so many legitimate reasons to hate him and turn him away and not trust him. And we know she is capable of hate, we know she is capable of hurting. But she doesn't. That's the point. That is who she is.

So making her a petty bitch going out of her way to cause bodily harm to poor baby zuzu, is extremely disingenuous. We, as the audience, know Zuko's arc, we've seen his journey, we've watched him realize the harm the fire nation causes, the atrocities they've committed and resolve to no longer be a part of that and eventually accept that he has to actively make the world a better place. We know that his betrayal under Ba Sing Se was him backsliding, and was ultimately what sealed the deal in terms of him coming to realize the full extent of the fire nation's corruption. But their world didn't sit around "waiting for him to switch sides, and had to plan for a future where he didn’t" (quote from 'There Within' by Avataraccount on ao3). And a direct consequence of Zuko's betrayal was Aang's near death and destruction of the Avatar cycle. Katara was the one who worked tirelessly to keep Aang alive, to keep the world's last hope alive. She was the one who had to directly face the devastating consequence of her choice to trust Zuko in the caves. So when Zuko comes back and reiterates the spiel he gave her (albeit with stronger and firmer conviction but that makes no difference to someone who has heard a version of it before and watched him go back on it), Katara is well within her rights to not trust him. Making her distrust seem like it is childish or selfish is ridiculous. As is trying to justify it as her "character flaw". Katara is learning from what she deems as her mistake from before. In fact, she's making the smart decision!

zutara in the catacombs x circe - madeline miller

Just came across this argument under a post tagged “anti zutara” that talked about how Zuko would never leave his nation for Katara and Katara would never want to be fire lady.

Any thoughts?

"She doesn't have to be Fire Lady even though she's marrying the Fire Lord" Bruh. Do these people not know what words mean? The only ways Katara could NOT be Fire Lady despite being with Zuko would be if he created a new title for himself and, by consequence, changing his wife's title, or, like the conversation above points out, if she was just a concubine/mistress instead of a wife - and even then mistresses sometimes get their own titles, and sometimes mistress is itself a title.

And even if that nonsense was possible - that still wouldn't change the fact that Katara would never want to leave her tribe and family, would never want to spend the rest of her life in the Fire Nation, seeing her descendents rise to the throne that was built by the people that spent years making her tribe bleed until nearly all of them were dead. She'd never forsake her culture for the one that came dangerously close to destroying it. And she'd specially not do that over a guy that she never even had feelings for.

I still find it surprising how strong Aang is... And my Facebook feed reminded me, an ATLA page posted a promotional video for LA. See these height differences, and more between Aang and Zuko...

It just makes me realize how heavy they must be for a 12 year old to carry someone like that. However, Aang has been able to carry these three without problems (although I don't remember if he did it with Sokka... but he probably did too).

i like writing young fire lord zuko because he's still grappling with his identity and he's still in the trenches of his trauma and unlearning the harm done to him and the harm he's done. and something i think is so important for someone who is going through that is that it's not just BAM he's redeemed and he's changing everything for the better and it's perfect. i think it's just as important to highlight zuko's conflict with trying not to Be Like Ozai as it is for people to be wary of zuko because He Is Zuko. like i think he's struggling both with taking up his father's horrible mantle but also with the name he's created for himself. because not only is it "zuko is a victim and he's trying to heal" but it's also "zuko was horrible and he has to reconcile that side of himself with who he wants to be going forward" and that's not easy

Wip for a new fic, probably will just add it to my misc fic full of one chapter stories. Blue Spirit Zuko has gained some new spirit friends, and FN soldier Ren isn't having a good day. He would like to go home now.

The Southern Huntress Katara is from @muffinlance Salvage. I gave her the wolf paint like Sokka wears in battle and the face mask she wears in the Southern Raiders episode of the show. My OC Atka is the Wolf Lion Hunter spirit, while the twins Koji and Anja, whom I've mentioned in my other fics, are the Azure Dragon and Golden Dragon Spirits.

me, watching avatar the last airbender, buzzing with intense determination.

fire bending blind people with heat vision fire bending blind people with heat vision fire bending blind people with heat vision fire bending blind people with heat-

me defending katara: write an entire essay on why fandom treating her as an adult is missing the point of her character when she wants to be able to act like a kid. she wants to be playful and join in on the fun. she's barely the long-suffering "mom" who sighs at everyone else's shenanigans and ignoring her playful side is a huge disservice to her character. she isn't actually that mean to toph and honestly tried to extend her friendship to toph multiple times, it was toph who was being bullheaded and unhelpful towards katara. her being mad at zuko the longest was actually completely justified and it doesn't matter if sokka forgave him faster because katara isn't sokka and she isn't obligated to forgive someone just because her brother did. she actually didn't "talk non-stop" about her mom you guys just hate to see a female character focus on her trauma while writing a million essays on why zuko is the saddest boy to ever sad boy.

me defending aang: if you hate him you will die and go to hell.