artanisansa

[artanisansa]

So apparently, my great-great-great-great-grandfather was a victim of hostilities, murdered by Arabs in 1904 in Israel.

Talk about 'it didn't start on 1948', heh.

[artanisansa]

魔女の宅急便 | Kiki’s Delivery Service

1989, dir. Hayao Miyazaki

[artanisansa]

According to zionist it would have been extremly racist against germans to hate nazism and nazi germany in the 30/40's.

They say this shit without any awarness.

@islamicantisemitism

[artanisansa]

If Zionists act in "defense" of a Palestinian peace activist, then you know that it's a Palestinian they can tokenize in order to serve their Hasbara narrative, since Zionists refuse to acknowledge the vast majority of Palestinian activist that is hostile towards the settler state. Hell, it's no surprise they're frequently targeted.

[artanisansa]

greta thunberg, liam cunningham, rima hassan, and everyone else on that ship, thank you, and i hope you succeed. i really hope you succeed. you know what you are risking, and i wish for you to come back safely, having done what you set out to do.

[artanisansa]

THE VAMPIRE DIARIES — 4.21 "She's Come Undone" THE RINGS OF POWER — 2.08 "Shadow and Flame"

[artanisansa]

My jaw dropped

[artanisansa]

Alex Browning, Final Destination (2000) Kimberly Corman, Final Destination 2 (2003) Wendy Christensen, Final Destination 3 (2006) Nick O'Bannon, The Final Destination (2009) Sam Lawton, Final Destination 5 (2011) Iris Campbell, Final Destination Bloodlines (2025)

[artanisansa]

The Silver Prince and his daughter, Rhaenys Targaryen 🩶

— commission done by the wonderful @adelikashere

[artanisansa]

[artanisansa]

Happy pride month to the tiny cowboy and tiny Trojan man from Night at the Museum

[artanisansa]

meta list + blog nav

turns out most of my metas are just me being salty about the way Bryan and Mike wrote Katara...more news at 11...

Katara’s parentification

the tragedy of Katara’s parentification & (context: parentified children as maladjusted children)

Katara’s crush on Jet

Toph brings out Katara’s inner child & Toph and Suki as people Katara didn't have to take care of

Katara’s post-ATLA arc

Katara didn’t want a quiet life after the war

Katara was a role model and her post-ATLA arc is a failure in representation

Katara being the Chief of the SWT wouldn't conflict with LOK's plot or her relationship

Katara would’ve been an amazing diplomat

Why Katara’s specific healer career didn’t fit her character

bloodbending & why Katara banning it could be in character in a sad way

Zutara & Zutara discourse

Zutara, romance novels, & the female gaze

“Zutara is a self-insert ship” is not a burn, it’s just misogyny

Is Zutara colonizer x colonized: my serious take, my less serious take

the crystal catacombs & how Katara sees Zuko’s pain

Zutara's two distinct ship dynamics

Why I think the way Ka/taang is written is male gaze-y

(KA is just one of those "bitch eating crackers" ships for me...block the #anti kataang tag if you don't want to see it)

Ka/taang: friends-to-lovers or the friend zone?

How Ka/taang is written to be one-sided

Aang’s not a “feminist icon�� because the only stereotypically masculine part of his arc is his romance

Misc. character stuff (not just ATLA)

Aang's nuances beyond "sunshine boy"

Rethinking Hama's storyline + some thoughts on the symbolism of bloodbending

Some thoughts on Hermione being autistic coded & her flaws

Blog housekeeping/tags navigation under the cut

Tag Navigation

asks are tagged #can i ask you a question (yeah that's a TSwift ref even though there's minimal Tayposting on this blog); all my metas are tagged #my meta; Zutara fic recs are tagged #zutara fic recs. #zutara and other ship tags (e.g. #azutara) usually contain art, misc ship things, and metas

frequently used salty tags include #anti kataang, #anti bryke, and #katara deserved better

Original posts that involve analysis of Harry Potter are tagged #ref: hp for blocking purposes. I don’t financially support JKR or her harmful rhetoric & actions against trans people, but I choose to engage with parts of the HP fandom that reject her views. In the HP context, I am most likely to talk about #hermione granger. I like Dramione, but I also like Ron quite a lot. I'm very into Wolfstar.

Fundraisers

I post fundraisers that have been verified by third parties. Unfortunately I don't have the bandwidth to verify fundraisers myself.

Fandom Housekeeping

I don't make callout posts of specific users, even if I decide to block them myself, so please don’t use my ask box for that purpose!

[artanisansa]

The tragedy of Katara’s parentification

Sokka and Katara were both parentified, and it’s a profoundly life-changing thing for both of them. One of the saddest things in ATLA, though, is how Sokka sort of got to outgrow parentification, but Katara never did.

Sokka’s told to be the man. The provider, the protector. He’s not so good at the former (his hunting failures are a consistent source of comic relief), and he takes failures of the latter very, very hard. He doesn’t manage to save Yue, and that wrecks him. After Yue, he becomes extremely protective of Suki in a way that’s borderline offensive to her. He’s willing to do anything to protect his friends and his family, including something as irresponsible as breaking into the Boiling Rock. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Sokka is the only one of the Gaang who unambiguously kills. The rest of them may technically have clean hands because of cartoon logic, but Combustion Man is very dead, and Sokka is the one who killed him. We don’t know how he feels about it, because the show never goes there, but I have a pet theory that Sokka is so uncharacteristically (remember he was team “leave Zuko to freeze to death”) against Katara confronting Yon Rha in The Southern Raiders because he’s the only who knows what killing feels like and wants to protect Katara from it.

But by the end of the show, Sokka’s in a place where he can start to let go of his need to protect. Objectively, all his friends are unbelievably powerful and can take care of themselves, including his sister and his girlfriend. Suki is the one who saves him in the final battle, representing not only a reversal of his initial cartoonish misogyny, but also demonstrating that he is worthy of protection. And of course, he and his friends saved the world, so there isn’t really an enemy that he has to protect them from anymore. Sokka’s loved ones create the conditions under which his parentified behaviour is no longer necessary. Sokka would still have to take the first step to stop seeing himself as the one who has to lay his life on the line, but at least it’s possible for him.

But not Katara.

Katara had to take on the mom role after their mother was murdered, which meant she was responsible for domestic labour and emotional support. Sokka says in The Runaway that her role was to keep the family together. Unlike protection, that’s always a full time job regardless of the war. We see Katara spending more screen time than anybody cooking, getting food, mending, and generally doing women’s work. We see Katara giving everyone emotional support, including strangers and her enemy. We see Katara putting aside her own discomfort and her own hurt in The Desert because if she falls apart, they all die. Nobody ever showed her that she doesn’t need to be the only one who cooks, or that somebody else can be responsible for the emotional wellbeing of her friends, or that — god forbid — someone else can actually be responsible for her emotional wellbeing.

That’s why I never cared for the Ka/taang argument of “he teaches her to be a kid again!” Putting aside the fact that Katara ends up taking care of Aang a lot more as the series goes on, the whole tragedy of parentification is that you can never again be a child. That part of your childhood, your god-given right, is robbed from you. It is extremely precious and important to still be able to be a kid, but breaking free of parentification is not about seeing yourself as a kid. It’s about breaking free of being responsible for everyone’s feelings and behaviours.

For Katara, that responsibility is not problem of perception, but of reality. Unlike Sokka, who was told and shown that his loved ones are capable of protecting themselves, Katara has zero reason to believe that her loved ones are able to feed and clothe themselves and not fall apart emotionally. Between Toph and Sokka who emphatically don’t want to do this work, it all falls on Katara. Telling a parentified child that they just need to loosen up is akin to telling an overworked mother that she needs to just relax (“happy Mother’s Day! You get a break from chores, which you will catch up on tomorrow because nobody else is doing them”). It doesn’t accomplish anything if nobody creates the circumstances under which it’s possible to let go of responsibilities. A lot of Zutara fans, spanning all the way back to the early days of the fandom, like the “Momtara and Dadko” trope where Zuko also does chores. Why? Because even without the concept and language of parentification, many fans recognized that Katara’s performance of domestic and emotional labour is inequitable and probably very taxing.

Growing out of parentification is about more than just letting go of old expectations: it’s also about finding a new way to value yourself beyond the role you grew up with. I’ve said this before, but it’s very important to acknowledge that just because a kid is parentified doesn’t mean they’re actually good at being a parent. In fact, it’s probably a given that they’re not, because they’re kids performing roles that are developmentally inappropriate! Sokka remains a shit hunter; he becomes a decent fighter but he’s still miles behind his friends. A big part of healing from his parentification is finding another area — strategy, engineering, project management (what else do you call that schedule) — where he actually excels, to which he can dedicate his time and from which he can derive satisfaction and a sense of identity. For Katara, fighting for the oppressed and combat waterbending give her that. Crucially, however, Katara does not stop being a girl when she becomes a warrior. She’s still responsible for domestic and emotional labour. Unlike Sokka, whose protector duties were more or less relieved as the series went on and he found new ways to contribute to the group, Katara continued to perform her old role in addition to her new one (which is depressingly realistic btw, look up feminist theory around the concept of the second shift). Still, it’s important that she found these new ways to value herself and her contributions…

…which disappear in her adult life. Where’s adult Katara fighting for the oppressed? Where’s adult Katara enjoying her status as a master waterbender? Where’s Mighty Katara? Where’s the Painted Lady? Where’s the person who vanquished a whole Fire Lord?

What do we know about adult Katara? She’s no longer a rabblerouser or an ecoterrorist. She did not translate her desire to help the downtrodden into a political role, like being Chief or on the United Republic Council. She’s not known as the best waterbender in the world, only the best healer, even though her combat abilities are what she took the most pride in. Even as a healer, she established no hospitals, trained no widespread acolytes (except Korra, I guess?), and made no known contributions to the field.

What Katara is known for…is being a wife and a mother. The same role she was forced to take on at age 8. One which she performed for the next 80+ years.

[artanisansa]

[artanisansa]

everything, everywhere, all at once

[artanisansa]

@staff

[artanisansa]