#but they are that sort of... their relationship goes beyond structure. can't really talk about it otherwise I'll spoil too much

[tagidearte-spam-sb]

My space scrapper dca fic, which originally was reader x sun x moon... is slowly starting to turn into platonic reader & sun/moon, where the romantic part is trying to get these stupid robots to admit their feelings for each other.

I am really just slowly turning this story into "please someone intervene so that these space jesters stop behaving like a divorced couple". And I am loving it.

I mean. I still want us to have a romance with them... but this dynamic is sounding really fun now. A full platonic fic with a ship bonus of sun and moon being the romantic endgame, but reader still being their super important bestie? We'll see.

[primus-why]

Jazzwave anon, I know I want to know how you I interpret the relationship sorry for being too vague lol

OH! Lol that's makes more sense adfjghkwl

See, what I love about shipping is that you can take a crumb and mold characters into however you see fit. There are soooo many continuities across Transformers, each with their own interpretation of characters. Sometimes I get specific, but sometimes I operate in continuity soup...

With that in mind, I generally like to see them as master spies. To me, they are experts in their field, which makes every interaction-- both with each other and with other characters-- dubious. You end up having to ask yourself: how much of Jazz's smile is genuine? What is Soundwave omitting from his recollection of an event? That sort of thing.

So as a fan of the pairing I get to play with those interactions depending on my mood... are they lying to each other all the time and I have to read what's between the lines to understand their true intentions? Or could the other mech be one of the very few people that sees through the facade, a mech who offers security and honesty? Perhaps it's a mixture of both...

I imagine the inability to trust is pretty inherent to their nature, deep down. They have to be skeptical of everything, their job never really ends, so to entertain a story where they grow to rely on one another is just *muah* 👌 Plus there's the added layer of interfactional angst! Like aaaaaa there goes the one other person who could possibly understand what it's like to be in your position, only they're on the other side of the war.

I generally see Soundwave as pretty reserved with a bit of dry snark here and there, while Jazz is definitely more outgoing and talkative but even less predictable. On the surface Soundwave is measured, Jazz is paradoxical, yet both are ten steps ahead of everyone else (and always keep some contingencies in their subspace.)

You can create stories where these seemingly polar opposites actually find some understanding and get along rather well. But you could also go full angst and make it so they feel they are unable to trust others and properly exist in peacetimes, so they end up being in each other's lives out of convenience-- because at least then they won't be alone. You can make it so they briefly crossed paths pre-war! Or maybe you'd like to see them try to one-up each other like rivals.

Something else I can appreciate due to their lines of work-- the fact that over time they're able to see all sorts of sides to their leaders, making them more disillusioned than some of the other hardcore fanatics/loyal soldiers. Like they still care about their respective causes, but they don't view Megatron or Optimus as perfect. Meaning they're more than happy to bend a few rules to do whatever they personally want to do-- stuff whatever the leader says.

I'll sum up cuz this is getting super long (sorry!) but literally the characterizations are wildly different, so you can create all kinds of arrangements. In my mind there's a basic structure, but beyond that anyone could take it from there lol!

Also! We can't forget... music. Personally I like to imagine they have very different tastes but are able to find appreciation in many musical expressions. Jazz definitely plays an instrument or five, and I am kind of torn on whether Soundwave might. He definitely would have the discipline for it, but perhaps his playing style is stilted? Or maybe he's excellent, and shockingly good at improvising to mix things up! Or maybe actually he doesn't like music much at all. And honestly however you interpret music in their relationship is likely to be a metaphor for the relationship itself...

TLDR: I love seeing them flirt like in those classic spy movies where the main concern was to have some thrill while solving an investigation/finishing a mission, and to look cool and get some while doing it. 😂

[firelxdykatara]

So I was at work thinking about Zutara (as you do) and my mind drifted to a kat@@ng argument I tend to see a lot of. About how Aang would be so sad if Katara never returned his feelings and therefore Zutara 100% //can't// be endgame which... a) homeboy is literally 12 and would get over it, and b) BUT WHAT ABOUT KATARA THO. But it got me thinking. Is there even any evidence in canon that Air Nomads believed in wholesale monogamy or marriage? I mean, Aang never knew his parents (1/2)

(2/2) -and Aang was raised communally by the Air Nomad monks and nuns. So like, why would being with Katara (specifically JUST Katara) //forever// be something he'd hyper focus on so badly? Also, Aang is shown wanting to adhere pretty strictly to Air Nomadic teachings but in this instance he gets a pass? It just boggles me tbh. Anyway, your meta and responses are just plain amazing and would love to hear your thoughts on this.

I’ve actually talked a lot about Aang’s willful disregard for his people’s culture and customs when it clashes with something he wants, but I think most of these discussions have happened in private server spaces and I haven’t actually spoken much about it here, so let’s remedy that!

You are absolutely right--Aang’s lifelong monogamous relationship and Katara being his ‘forever girl’ clash with literally everything we actually know about Air Nomad culture. And it’s actually kind of frustrating, because this would have been an excellent chance for some worldbuilding--speak about how the Air Nomads did not hold with typical family structures, that monogamy simply wasn’t done because they practiced detachment and while that doesn’t mean they couldn’t love one another (Gyatso loved Aang a great deal, for example) it means they most likely would not have practiced relationship exclusivity.

Honestly, it would have been really cool to see a culture where monogamy was not the norm, and we get hints of it--Aang never knew his parents, and he wouldn’t have been discovered as the Avatar until years after his birth (I believe they do the toy test when the kids are toddlers or older), which means he was likely removed to the Air Temple shortly after being born. His parents most likely lived at separate temples--nuns had their own, as the temples were separated by gender--and its not a stretch to believe they didn’t have any sort of monogamous relationship. One theory I’ve seen proposted is that the AN practiced something like a yearly or bi-yearly fertility festival, where adults from the temples came together in celebration--of life, of love, of their people, of the element they breathed that informed every aspect of their lives--and I’m not suggesting wild orgies, but that many would pair off, have their own smaller celebrations, and return to the group, and this is where most pregnancies would happen.

That is, of course, pure speculation, but it would be a lot more in keeping with what we do know of the AIr Nomads than Aang deciding, at the ripe old age of twelve, that he’d found his ‘forever girl’ and he would be with her, and only her, for the rest of his life, no matter what.

It’s also very... odd, though, that Aang would even come up with this idea on his own. It’s not like there are tons of examples, as the gaang travel the world, of aggressively heterosexual couples pairing off and spending Forever together, because, well, they’re in the middle of a war and everyone has more important things to think about. And Aang’s crush, while cute and seeming more like puppy-love than anything else book 1 and most of book 2 (he literally imprinted on the first girl he saw when he hatched from the iceberg ok), becomes almost disturbingly possessive in book 3, and it really comes out of nowhere. When did Aang decide, without ever once asking, that Katara must return his feelings? And why? Because, as established, it makes absolutely no sense given what (admittedly little) we know about his own culture and how he was raised.

I realize that the Doyalist explanation is that Bryke are, themselves, aggressively heterosexual, and had decided from the jump that they wanted Aang to Get the Girl in the end, and so were determined to Make It Happen even when, given the story and how the characters had developed, it no longer made any narrative sense. (And yet they never thought to make Katara’s feelings a focus when trying to force Kataang to happen. Odd, that. Or maybe not so odd, considering their treatment of Katara in LoK. But I’m stopping myself here cause that’s a whole other rant.) But the Watsonian one paints a very unpleasant picture, especially given Aang’s actions towards Katara in book 3--during EIP in particular.

And it’s funny how Aang’s complete and total disregard for his people’s beliefs and culture, when it would deny him something he wants, is never mentioned in those ‘but Aang couldn’t kill Ozai, it goes against his culture’ posts. If Aang had demonstrated any willingness to uphold his people’s beliefs before this--like, say, following through on letting go of his attachment to Katara and understanding that if she didn’t feel the same way he did, he was not entitled to her affections and would be able to move on--then I’d be much more inclined to give those arguments credit.

As it is, however, the only reason I agree that Aang shouldn’t have had to kill Ozai is because he was just a child, and he should have been able to preserve the innocence of childhood as long as possible--but I still dislike the way his battle with Ozai ended, because he had disregarded his people’s beliefs over the entire book, he had done nothing to regain the Avatar State except get slammed against a pointy rock, and energybending was handed to him on a silver platter by a lionturtle who literally came out of nowhere to give it to him.

Not only that, but the discussion about what he would do once he actually faced the Firelord came much too late--the subject wasn’t even broached until The Southern Raiders, and thus Aang’s insistence that he can’t possibly take a life seems to come out of left field because a) he never felt any guilt over the lives he took while in the Avatar State at the end of book 1 (and this isn’t to say he was at fault for what Koizilla did while he was fused with it, but he has felt guilt over his actions in the Avatar State that were just as uncontrolled before this, and you’re telling me that he wouldn’t have seen any of that as blood on his hands? that if he killed Katara, or Sokka, or Toph, in one of those rages, he’d have just shrugged his shoulders and blamed it on the Avatar State? no), and b) there was absolutely no discussion of this before the eclipse, leaving one to wonder what, exactly, Aang was planning to do in that eight minute window where Ozai would be powerless. I don’t think it was a dance-off in the cards, that’s all I’m saying.

I’m sorry, I got incredibly off-topic. but the bottom line (TL;DR:) is: I absolutely agree with you. And it’s suspect, from both a character arc and a worldbuilding perspective, that Aang is only committed to his people’s beliefs and his culture in the one instance where he might have been asked to do something he didn’t want to, but not at all when following his own culture might have meant losing something he wanted. This not only paints him as incredibly selfish (something that is hard to dispute when looking at his behavior in book 3, though I would point out that if his arc actually followed a natural progression from books 1 and 2 he would have grown up rather than... that), but puts his culture in an incredibly simplistic light. We never get any deeper insight into what his people believed or how they lived, because Aang latches onto the first girl he sees and is determined to make her his ‘forever girl’, and there’s never any talk of how he was raised or what his people actually believed.

And even when he meets the Guru--someone much more well-versed in Air Nomad culture than Aang is, because Aang went into the ice at twelve years old and never had an opportunity to understand his culture--he almost immediately disregards what the Guru told him when it conflicts with his own desires. Sure, he says ‘I’m sorry, Katara’ when letting her go at the end of the finale (although....why he’s apologizing to her, when he’s had no indication she has feelings for him, and he certainly never asked, is beyond me), but come book 3 he’s right back to wanting to have her, and assuming he will just because he kisses her--without preamble, without any discussion of feelings, without even asking if she wants to be kissed--and flies off before the invasion.

Any way you slice it, it really doesn’t make sense, unless they wanted Aang to come across as selfish and pigheaded throughout the entirety of book 3. But I suspect that isn’t actually the image they wanted to project, and it makes me really sad when I think of what his arc could have been if it weren’t for Bryke’s insistence that he get the girl at the end of the story.