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when Katara and Aang are represented as water and air, the two elements crucial for sustaining life, both survivors of genocides that were carried out to kill them, who finally end up together after being the two characters that ultimately end the war that could have ended the world as they knew it. poetic cinema

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old old stuff i never posted

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Happy 20th anniversary to Avatar

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Avatar: The Last Airbender - 20th Anniversary

(commissions open, nerds)

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korra my girl tough times are ahead but they could NEVER make us hate you. the Real Ones

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20 years ago today the first episode of Avatar The Last Airbender aired, and my life was changed forever. I can’t begin to say how much this show means to me

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enjoy some unhinged and possibly horrible TLOK valentines cards 🫶

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dont even get me started on how they reduced mai and ty lee as blind followers of azula that showered her with praise. or how they made zuko look like her example to follow when it was his banishment that made azula look down on him. or how they randomly tried to show ozai's care for zuko and a bit of a soft spot or care for his family. or how they made zuko fight him when the point of the scar scene was that he got it because he refused to fight his own father.

better yet, i could begin talking of how they took away katara's maternal attitude because it wasn't “fitting” for a girl her age and instead gave the role to sokka, who angrily tells her to grow up at one point, when it originally showcased the effects of the loss of her mother by trying to assume the position she left empty, while in the original show sokka did the same trying to fill hakoda's absence.

let's also talk about how they made hakoda look horrible when he criticised sokka's actions behind his back instead of supporting him with the idea of improvement to instead make ozai look like a better father. Or hey, wait, the scenes where everyone keeps blaming aang for having “abandoned” (even kyoshi) the world for some freaking reason???

suki head over heels for sokka right off the bat and stalking him around. june incessantly flirting with iroh. the whole cave of two lovers lore completely butchered. the omission of plot points to give priority to unnecessary scenes. the avatars being a bunch of a*holes that bully aang instead of guiding him. that random miniplot of roku with the small replica of the mother of faces????

what a ride

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two survivors of genocide

two heroes who defeated the two main villains on the same day

💙 🧡

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Kataang + Maiko but tiny

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Day 3: Parenthood 🎏

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So I have no stake in ships in Avatar the Last Airbender, I do not have any real ships for the show. But when I was looking in Katara's tag for art and stuff, I saw this reoccuring claim that Katara always supported Aang with his problems and feelings, but that Aang never supported her back with hers.

And I don't care about the ships, but I do really like the friendships in Avatar, and that bothers me. It's a slight on Aang, but also on Katara (implying she wouldn't stand up for herself and break it off if a friend was all take and no give, which doesn't fit her personality at all.)

Aang does support Katara whenever he gets the chance, which is unfortunately few and far between because Katara seems to have a hard time leaning on the people she cares about and talking in depth about her own trauma and feelings about it, though she will do so when she literally doesn't care what the person thinks about her (and both times she opened up to Zuko about her Mom initially were her lashing out at him and not caring what he thought about her in return).

This would be something that would need to be addressed for a romantic relationship between them to truly work, and I imagine it would be part of the journey of finding a way to stay together, but it's very much not Aang's fault. And as I said, when he gets a chance to support her she does. Since I just recently rewatched most of the series, have a list of those times!

-His first time being supportive of her is literally a half hour after they first meet. As soon as she tells him about wanting more waterbending experience, he enthusiastically offers to fly all the way to the north pole so they can find her a master. And this very clearly means a lot to her.

-I don't think Aang knew how supportive of her he was being here, but there's the "I haven't done this since I was a kid" "You still are a kid!' exchange. As much as people accuse Aang of seeing Katara as his Mom (he's literally the one character who doesn't express that he does in The Runaway btw and I think that's for a reason) their first interaction establishes that he sees her as a kid, just like him, and think she should have fun like a kid does. This must have been huge for Katara, who'd been forced to take on adult responsibilities at a young age, who resented having to hold the family together, who thought her childhood was over. Aang helped her have fun and be the kid she is, and he'll continue to do so.

-When she lost her mother's necklace (And Zuko subsequently stole it) he was very concerned for her feelings and seemed to immediately understand the weight of that loss, due to his own experiences with loss. Not only did he make her a new necklace to wear as a way to comfort her, as soon as he saw Zuko had it he said "you're giving that back to me" and risked being hit by Zuko in his attempts to grab it. Then he gave it back to her and she was ecstatic!

-He was so supportive of her during the waterbending scroll episode it's actually ridiculous, despite how she lashed out at him. It's unclear if he actually understood she was upset or if this was just his unwavering respect for her coming out, but when she was upset that he learned the first move faster than her he said "well you didn't have such a great teacher!" and it clearly makes her feel better for a bit. He immediately forgives her for lashing out at him, doesn't judge her at all for stealing the waterbending scroll, or for accidentally dragging them into trouble. He, in fact, goes out of the way to reassure her, looking happy at the chance to work together and reminding her they need two waterbenders. And he appreciates her joke at the end (he's just straight up being simp (affectionate) there, and I get it).

-When Pakku won't teach her he immediately denounces him as wrong and unfair and is willing to sacrifice his own education (which he needs to save the world) because he won't stand for it. He remains upset about it even after Katara persuades him, tries to secretly show her what Pakku taught him, and cheers her on when she fights him.

-When she's crying over Jet's death, he's the first one to notice and reach out to her, putting his hand gently on her shoulder and drawing her into a hug (that becomes a group hug). She smiles and clearly feels comforted. They probably talked about it offscreen too (but this cannot be shown as they would need to directly acknowledge his death to do so)

-He's pretty much always praising her as a teacher, and when she grumbles about him not calling her Sifu, he goes out of his way to call her that.

-He notices that she's mad at her Dad and asks her about it, but she deflects

-He looks really sad when he has to remind her she has to take off her mother's necklace for their Fire Nation disguises, again it's something he very much seems to empathize with her about, he understands the weight of what it means to her.

-He not only doesn't judge her for lying during the Painted Lady saga, but praises her and enthusiastically helps her commit ecoterrorism.

-Both he and Sokka move to comfort her when she's crying after the bloodbending fiasco. Most of the comforting of her happens offscreen, which I do think is a shame, and a contrast to how Aang is handled- but it's more of a "he's the main character" thing, since the same happens for Sokka as well (I'm sure Katara and Aang talked to him about Yue's death and at least tried to comfort him, but we don't get to see that).

-He was trying to support her during the Southern Raiders ep, whether you believe he did it well or not, both according to his beliefs and cultural values and by trying to emulate the ways she's talked HIM down from revenge and hatred in the past. He specifically brings up those two incidents- losing his people and losing Appa- where she stepped in to keep him from losing himself to rage. As this post notes, he also specifically echoes her phrasing from when she was urging him not to lose himself to the Avatar state (she says "watching you be in that much rage and pain is really scary" and he echoes "you're feeling unbelievable pain and rage" while talking to her in this ep.)

It's not just the air nomads he's trying to emulate here, but her. Just like Katara doesn't want to see him consumed by hatred and pain, he wants the same for her. His concern is not for her mother's killer, but for her, he fears this will hurt her, just like her concern was always for him and how this would hurt him in those times he was raging.

He wants to do for her what she did for him. But, Katara is not him. She is not someone who will be talked down by someone else when she is grieving, angry, and looking for revenge. Nobody can stop her when she sets her mind to it. She needs to wrestle with whether to kill him and she needs to come to her own conclusions, because she's the only one that can stop her. And Aang realizes that. He says it's a journey she'll have to take on her own, that she needs to face him doesn't stand in her way.

(I wonder if it kind of hurt, deep down, that he couldn't reach her the way she always reached him. I wonder if he felt upset that he couldn't find the right words like she did for him. But I don't think there were any right words. She needed him to step back. It was her choice to make. So he did.)

And in the end, he was correct that she didn't want to do it. She did choose that based on her own feelings and values.

His assumption Katara not killing the guy = forgiveness is definitely him just kind of applying his assumptions and values, but when she says she doesn't forgive him, he doesn't like, judge her or anything that we can see.

So yeah, quite a few examples! It can feel lopsided because more attention is paid to Aang and Katara's personality affects things.

Katara is both open about her emotions and not. She's someone who will look after other's feelings but not really discuss her own pain with people she cares about, until it all builds up and bursts out.

And it's not surprising she's most concerned about Aang, if my friend had recently (from his perspective) survived a genocide where he lost everyone he loved and was now tasked with saving the world at twelve years old, I'd be pretty worried about him and want to support him too! Aang goes through a lot by virtue of being the protagonist, he has the most pressure on him, he's routinely in the most danger, he literally dies for a few minutes. It's not surprising Katara has more opportunities to comfort him, but he unfailingly supports her in any of her problems of goals (when they're not murder) when he can.

I do think there's some missed opportunities to explore Katara and develop their relationship, but it doesn't make Aang a bad, unsupportive friend, or Katara his Mom and not his peer.

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sick of kyoshi mischaracterization i think

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People keep saying "katara doesn't want to be an healer" when actually this is not what she said or implied at all sigh

in general i think ppl need to stop taking every single thing katara says at face value when she’s angry. she is a fourteen year old girl with a very sharp temper, and she is consistently prone to saying things she doesn’t truly mean or that are actually straight up false when she is too blinded by rage to actually consider all the nuances of her words. pretty much every single human being says things they don’t really mean when they’re angry, so i wouldn’t even call this a personal failing as much as it is a symptom of actually being written realistically.

even when she’s unequivocally in the right, such as during her fight with pakku, when she said “i don’t want to heal, i want to fight!” what she clearly meant was that she doesn’t want to be denied access to opportunities due to arbitrary patriarchal standards. this is obviously the issue at hand, far more so than any disdain she may have for the practice of healing, which she clearly does also see great value in. if katara had no desire to heal, then it would not be such a huge plot point in the show that is crucial not only to her arc as a developing waterbender, but also to aang and zuko’s arcs interfacing with hers.

i do agree with the criticism that relegating her to “only a healer” after the events of the show would be deeply sexist, but even in lok (which i also maintain did her dirty) she’s not just a healer. she’s also a teacher, a lawmaker, and a leader in her own right. do i wish she had more to do, more personality and ambition, and was portrayed more powerfully within the show? of course. but it’s insane to supposedly claim that she has no desire to heal when she clearly takes great pride in her ability to heal the sick and injured (such as delaying their entire schedule in “the painted lady” to do just that) as if helping people isn’t one of her primary motivations at all times.

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i love the notion that the reason zuko hates iroh's tea so much is because iroh is giving him medicinal tea that tastes fucking nasty for his chronic pain and then like. borderline gaslighting him about it by being like "what...???? no........ this is just jasmine........ your favorite" and zuko, who is even more susceptible to being manipulated than the average person, is just like "omg wow jasmine tea tastes way worse than it did when i was a kid..... maybe tea is really gross and i am simply misremembering having a fondness for it as a child???" and then they go work in a tea shop and zuko starts drinking normal tea again so that he can recommend different blends to customers and he’s just like "holy shit why does this hot leaf juice actually taste good." and he somehow never figures out what his uncle was doing he simply thinks that he is going crazy. which is also true

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Aang literally raising the ocean after he defeats ozai is so insane. like just the thought of it. He literally lifted the ocean wtf, this feat>>>>

Gifs by avatarparallels :)

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One of the best Kataang parallels, this is so good