of-muppets-and-men

[of-muppets-and-men]

I feel like Toph would be able to use her seismic sense as a proto ultrasound.

Hey, I got a question how do you think katara and zuko’s reactions would be if they discovered they’re having triplets?

[of-muppets-and-men]

The idea that zutara is unhealthy because of it being based on shared trauma is just fundamentally wrong.

There is something very ugly in pathologizing shared trauma and trying to label it as bad. Shared trauma allows victims to name their experiences, to say "it happened to me, too."

It allows us to say "this shouldn't have happened."

It allows us to say "maybe you can heal. Maybe we both can."

This is what the scene between Zuko and Katara in the crossroads of destiny does. It allows both Katara and Zuko to speak about their trauma in ways they never have before. In ways they haven't been allowed to before. Zuko because abuse conditioned him to believe it was normal, and Katara because she believed she had to replace her mother, so had no time to grieve her.

They have a moment of connection that is powerful and intense, and perhaps you could say that it gives them both a false impression of closeness. Katara ends up getting hurt because she felt close to Zuko and put her faith in him, and he betrayed that faith. Because he wasn't really in a position to promise her anything to begin with.

However, the story doesn't end there.

Katara tries to tell herself that the closeness she felt with Zuko wasn't real. She literally tries to say he was only "pretending," although the real reason for her anger is that she knows he wasn't. That moment was real, and powerful. And it's what brings them together again. It's what causes Zuko to seek her out, to make amends.

It's also scary. Katara is angry at Zuko because he KNOWS he's a human being capable of mistakes. It's not how bad he is that worries her, it's his capacity for goodness. Because that means it was actually there all along, but he still chose wrong. That's made clear when she confronts him when they're alone.

It was real, and that's what's scary about it.

"And I don't know why, but I do care what she thinks of me."

If that moment in the caves really meant nothing, why does Zuko take it to heart when Katara says he betrayed her?

Because it meant more to them than both of them realized.

That's why the resolution between them at the end of the Southern Raiders means more than forgiveness. It means the recognition of yourself in someone else. The ability to name what happened to you and say that it can be defeated.

Of course anything can be unhealthy if you subject it to the most bad faith potential scenarios, but the thing about zutara is that it actually addresses the initial false bond created by trauma and then has both characters come out the stronger for it, both in their relationship to each other, and themselves. What happens in canon is the most healthy outcome for both characters in that kind of situation. It could be used as the quintessential example of two people bonding over shared trauma in the most healthy way.

But even if it wasn't, it's still shitty to try and pathologize the idea of shared trauma because of some vague fear that it might be imposing on someone. That's such a puritanical and harmful view of trauma and psychology, let alone a ridiculous thing to say about shipping discourse.

In fact, I seem to remember tumblr having the "is it wrong to romanticize trauma" discourse years ago. It was stupid then, and it still is. Especially in a context which is all about the healing power of shared trauma. Both figuratively and literally.

[of-muppets-and-men]

In Kataang, we never get to see Katara hint that she might return Aang's romantic feelings if there isn’t some external factor pushing her to consider him as a potential partner.

Katara only recognizes Aang as a 'powerful bender' after Sokka explicitly mentions it.

Katara only suggests that she and Aang kiss because that's what they must do to escape the cave. And, since this scene and the cave scene between Zuko and Katara are clearly parallels, I've gotta say something I noticed: after she and Aang (probably) kiss, Katara runs off without looking back, but after she and Zuko share that intimate moment, she looks back over her shoulder (which is clear romance coding)

It's Aang who insists that the two of them dance.

In the final scene, Katara is proudly presented to Aang as his prize for saving the world thanks to good ol' deus ex machina.

The two of them don't have a single conversation, Katara never mentions WHY she still chose Aang despite his previous toxic behaviors and unhealthy attachment/possessiveness. In TSR, Aang forced his own ideology onto Katara even though she needed to explore her dark side and find closure (which Zuko understood perfectly, and some people think ZK is "toxic"... sigh). I get that Aang had good intentions, but he never took the time to understand Katara.

Maiko also has this problem; Mai does care about Zuko, but she’s never been on the same page as him. Even if you care about someone, that doesn't mean you fit together romantically.

Mai never cared about doing the right thing, Zuko grew into a person who did.

Mai's apathy clashes with Zuko's passion and emotion. She doesn't understand him or know how to comfort him, unlike Katara.

Kataang and Maiko shouldn't have been endgame

[of-muppets-and-men]

Discord has added generative AI features to servers.

Here are THREE THINGS you need to do today.

1️⃣ YOUR SERVER

Go into server settings -> roles -> Default permissions

Search for "external apps" and disable it

2️⃣ YOUR FEEDBACK

Access Discord support -> https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

Go into Help & Support > Feedback/New Feature Request

Denounce generative AI and request the feature be removed. Bring up privacy concerns for yourself, your data, and for minors.

You will get an automatic reply to this request- PLEASE REPLY TO THE EMAIL TO PUSH IT TO THE TEAM or else it will get discarded.

3️⃣ ON MOBILE

Access your app store

Leave a 1 star review and publicly denounce generative AI and Discord's use of it

Reblog this to spread the word, I'm tired of the enshittification of the things I use in my day to day life.

[of-muppets-and-men]

[of-muppets-and-men]

Happy Zutara Week 2024!!

Here's my drawing for day 2: Dusk!

I'm so glad for Zutara Week and the lovely stream of Zutara works that it brings, especially after the last couple weeks.

For this one, I originally drew a completely different idea and got all the way to the rendering stage before I accepted that it just wasn't working for me. I'm glad I allowed myself to explore new ideas cause I'm pretty happy with how this came out. Hope you all like it too! <3

[of-muppets-and-men]

Katara isn't a Fire Lady. She's a Water Lord, thank you very much. Show some fucking respect. Anyway there's her husband, Zuko or something.

[of-muppets-and-men]

Interesting talk about how Arab Americans are one of the most ignored social categories in America. Apparently hate crime stats for Arab Americans were not even collected from the period of early 90's to 2015 (meaning not even during 9/11 and the Gulf War!).

This talk provides a good insight to the status of Arab Americans legally and how they're often some of the most targeted groups within legal framework (like with anti-terrorism laws).

[of-muppets-and-men]

the reason why i love the ‘zuko falls first and yearns for katara in silence’ trope so much it’s because there’s something so beautiful about zuko loving katara so deeply and selflessly without expecting anything in return. he just does and that’s simply all there is to it 🥺

[of-muppets-and-men]

I will never stop drawing imaginary scenes post-agni kai

[of-muppets-and-men]

Adna/tifasrce/misadnary/dreamgirlyuri being racist, disrespecting fan artists, and having inappropriate relationships with minors

Adna is a white 23-year-old woman.

She has consistently called women of colour she disagrees with on shipping or characterizations "ugly".

Adna also has a pattern of telling people to harm themselves or kill themselves over fictional characters and ships, as seen here.

Here Adna is su!c!de baiting someone with highly inappropriate, graphic language that disrespects victims of su!cide and self harm and their loved ones. Adna's account was previously suspended by Twitter for her incessant harassment and su!cide baiting, so now she is resulting to using disguised acronyms to tell people to self-harm.

Adna has a pattern of being close with minors. She encourages them openly to participate in harassing people. This is an example of Adna's conditioning of a 15-year-old to speak about people harming themselves because of Adna, a 23-year-old adult.

Here are multiple examples of Adna, a white woman, calling different women of colour ugly and speaking pejoratively about a Black woman's Black features. She is doing this over ship wars, keep that in mind.

Adna, a white woman, consistently has been seen speaking over women of colour and their experiences. She uses performative activism buzzwords and contorts things from fandom as justification for her harassment and pattern of speaking over WOC. Adna insists she knows better than WOC and talks down to them, insisting that it is harmful for them to ship something.

Adna also has a pattern of calling WOC "mentally ill" and making light of mental illness in an ableist way.

Adna also obsessively posts about bullying people who ship Zutara. In the first image, the person retweeting that post is, again, a minor.

These are only a few examples. Since Adna's original account was taken down, many of her harassment posts have been lost.

Adna additionally has posted Zutara art and fanfiction to mock repeatedly. Tumblr limits how many images a post can include, so I couldn't add all the examples, but she did it three times recently to artists and to a fanfic writer. She takes their work, when it says explicitly no posting, puts it on twitter with a degrading caption, and then mocks it with others. She then further insults the work and artist when called out about it.

Recently, Adna has been harassing Makorra shippers, Zutara shippers, Azula stans, and others. She passionately defends the supposed rights of fictional characters at the expense of harming real people, who are often marginalised. She pretends to champion these people, but in her real life interactions, perpetuates harm, ableism, and racism.

[of-muppets-and-men]

Well, well, well...looks like we have another racist zutara anti calling people "uppity" for calling the kataang fandom out for their sock puppet problem.

The funny thing is, that I don't think this person is the same as that katerina-q person, but they do have multiple sock puppets, have been doing this for years, and it's pretty easy to spot them since all their posts follow the same patterns and sentence structure. Here is a list of some of their other accounts, although they've been doing this for years so I can't even name them all:

idontneedcalmingtea

weneedtobeafandomofpeace

iwantyoutodancewithme

masterkatarabanishedprince

ididgettomeetyou

iminaworldofpureimagination

They also have a bunch of South Park themed blogs whose urls I don't remember, but they post the same passive aggressive stuff claiming to be a "multishipper," yet somehow all of their posts are about defending Aang from the mean old zutara shippers.

I don't think I have to explain that uppity is a racist term, but some of these people seriously lack self awareness, and this is the third time in the past month that a kataanger with multiple sock puppet accounts has been caught using racial slurs.

[of-muppets-and-men]

It All Comes Down

He hadn't meant it. He hadn't. Katara looked around the disaster zone that had once been one of King Bumi's finest stone gardens. The statues were all smashed to bits, and the earth torn violently in several patches, but that was no problem for a master earthbender like Bumi. The trees were a lost cause, though. Several dozen koi flopped helplessly in the mud that had once been their pond, but the palace gardeners were too frightened to come out and try to save them. Katara lifted her hand slightly, absently thinking she should pull as much water as she could back into the empty basin, but she barely felt the water around her.

"I'm sorry," Aang said, looking at his feet, shamefully. "I didn't mean it." Katara's eyes drifted from the dying fish, to her boyfriend. She nodded stiffly, feeling numb. Of course he hadn't meant it.

"Katara!" Sokka's shouting sounded like it was coming through water, but that couldn't be. The fish wouldn't be dying if there was that much water.

Sokka, Zuko and Toph were running towards them from inside Bumi's castle. There was worry on all of their faces, but Katara didn't know why. They should be as used to this as she was. After all, Aang was the Avatar. Things like this happened when he got upset.

"What's going on?" Zuko demanded. "Are you okay?" Katara started to say yes, but then Zuko grabbed her arm and held it up. There was an ugly gash on her arm- from an errant stone, she guessed. It was shallow, but it was wide, and blood was trickling down her arm, making her torn sleeve stick to her skin. Zuko tore the fabric away from the rest of her shirt and held it to the wound to stop the bleeding. He didn't ask why Katara wasn't healing it herself.

"What happened?" Sokka asked. He looked around at the wreckage in confusion, as if expecting to see signs of an attack. Aang's face had gone beet red with embarrassment.

"I-I got upset," he said.

"Yeah, Aang," Toph snorted. "We gathered that when a bunch of servants ran screaming that the Avatar was destroying the garden. What we want to know is why."

"I-I don't know," Aang shook his head helplessly. "I just...Katara was saying that she agreed to help her father work on some trade deals with Bumi and King Kuei, and she's going to have to spend more time in the Southern Tribe." A look of confusion passed through the group.

"And?" Zuko pressed. He looked up from where he was tending to Katara's injury.

"I got upset!" Aang said, as if that explained everything. His friends started at him blankly. Uncomprehendingly. He took a breath and tried again. "I've barely seen her at all this year. She's been in the Southern Tribe so long working on the school, and all these projects that keep popping up. I thought she was going to be done, and we could get back to helping the rest of the world. When she said she would have to go back for even longer, I just..."

Aang held his hands up and gestured weakly around the ruins. There was a long silence as his friends tried to process what he was saying. Sokka caught up first. He looked from the broken statues, torn up trees and the dying fish, to his shell-shocked and bleeding sister.

"You had a tantrum because my sister wants to stay home for a couple more months?" Rage rolled off of Sokka in almost tangible waves. "You did all of this- you hurt my sister because she wants to help our home?"

"I'm so sorry," Aang stepped forward, his hands opened in supplication, but Zuko stepped between them.

"Stay away from her." He glowered at Aang. Katara watched her boyfriend flinch away. Zuko hadn't used that tone with Aang in years. Not since they'd been on opposing sides of a war. Katara thought she should scold him for it, but her tongue felt so heavy. Then everyone else had joined in on shouting at Aang.

Katara's gaze drifted back to the fish. Their movements were slowing. A few of them had stopped altogether. She should have saved them. That was how this always worked. She would get Aang out of of the Avatar State, and then she would help him clean up. That's how it always worked.

But she was the reason he was upset this time. She had anticipated his disappointment, after all, he had been dropping hints for a while that he wanted to move forward. He had marriage on his mind. He wanted her by his side always. That had sounded romantic once. Now, surrounded by broken earth and dying fish, it sounded like a threat.

"I can't do it," she said quietly.

"What did you say?" Zuko asked, whirling back around to Katara

"I can't do this anymore," she said a bit louder. She stepped forward, pushing past Sokka, Zuko and Toph, who all seemed about ready to throw blows, and stood in front of Aang.

"Katara, I'm so-"

"Stop," Katara cut him off. She swallowed hard past a lump in her throat. "I can't do this anymore, Aang."

"I know," Aang said. "I'm sorry. I promise, I am working on controlling the Avatar State, but it's so hard-"

"Aang," Katara's voice was sharp, and it echoed against the walls surrounding the courtyard. "Stop. I can't do this anymore. I'm not talking about pulling you out of the Avatar State. I mean, this. Us. I can't do this anymore."

"You don't mean that." Aang moved forward again, reaching out for Katara, but Zuko and Sokka stepped up to flank her. The ground shook slightly, only just enough to feel it, but Toph's threat was clear. Aang shrank back, but kept up his pleading silently.

"I mean it Aang," Katara said stonily. "Look what you've done. And it's not the first time. When we were kids, I could understand it. You were still learning. But this? Aang, you've had seven years to get this under control. What happens the next time I upset you? Are you going to blow up something in my face again? Are you going to accidentally hit me with rocks? I can't live like that." Katara shook her head, trembling with dread at what her life with Aang would look like.

She could imagine spending the rest of her life walking on eggshells, trying to avoid setting him off. Her ambitions would be set aside for fear that they might take her away from Aang's side for too long. What if her children were waterbenders instead of airbenders? Would she have to protect them from setting Aang off too? Would the rest of her life be spent cleaning up Aang's messes?

"You don't mean that." Aang's eyes had filled with tears. He tried to step towards Katara again, but his feet were suddenly cased in stone to his knees. He turned to Toph, his eyes wide with betrayal.

"I mean it, Aang." The finality of Katara's words settled over the group like a heavy blanket. She sighed, suddenly exhausted, and pulled as much water as she could to put back in the pond. A few of the koi began swimming sluggishly. Many stayed at the bottom. Katara had done what she could.

One last mess, she thought.

[of-muppets-and-men]

Whoops

I've shared this little nugget in a couple atla fandom circles but somehow never made an actual post about it.

In a LoK universe where Taang happens instead, everything proceeds mostly as normal save for this scene.

Korra meets Toph in the swamp but she's weirdly silent. She walks over to the young Avatar and before Korra can ask what's going on, Toph gently caresses her cheek.

With a smile, The old earthbender says "Yup... that's you alright, Twinkletoes."

[of-muppets-and-men]

You ever think Katara has been stunned by how strong Zuko is?

Like the gaang is unloading all their gear to camp for the night and Katara sees him one-trip most of it.

Or she's sick/injured and Zuko just picks her up like she's made feathers.

No? Just me?

[of-muppets-and-men]

Please donate or share 😓

It's been almost 5 months and we haven't reached 50% of the goal⁉️

We're less than €2500 away from reaching it!

Who can help push my family's campaign now? 🫶🩷🇵🇸

‼️Even if you can't donate, please at least share‼️

Posting for reach. Donate if you can, reblog if you can't.

[of-muppets-and-men]

Please save what's left of my family

Hello dear

I am from the Baalousha family from Gaza.. 🇵🇸🍉

I hope you are well .

I write to you with a heart full of hope and faith, and I ask for your urgent help. My family is in great danger due to the war, and I am running a fundraising campaign to save them. My father and mother suffer from diabetes and high blood pressure. Help me secure them

Please, can you reblog my campaign post on my account? Every contribution can make a difference in my family's life and any donation, even a small one, makes a difference.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for any help you can provide. 🇵🇸🇵🇸

The campaign was documented by @90-ghost 🍉🍉..

Posting this for reach. If you have anything you can give, here is someone who is asking for help