#my memory is so shoddy atp ajkfjgsldfhgf

[roobylavender]

i was going thru old posts & found where you said you only like zootara in the specific context of like... zuko dissolving the monarchy + devoting himself to reparations & it's an unrequited love think and lost my mind bc it was exactly what i felt but had never seen anyone say! i HATE any kind of firelady katara content but still find zootara’s dynamic fascinating. anyways from this i was wondering on if you had wider thoughts on katara, on both how she exists in canon and anything you'd change

i think re-watching avatar when they dropped it on netflix a few years ago was eye-opening for me in a lot of ways like sooo many of my opinions radically changed and not even necessarily in a way where it was an outright polarized switch but more like.. added depth to how i felt. which makes sense bc i mean i was seven years old when i watched the show and i'm twenty five now lmao. but with katara i kind of found myself on the fence between the two camps that were so vehement about justifying why katara worked better with either boy that i think they more or less forgot about her. like i don't entirely disagree with zootara shippers that katara's role being so diminished in post-canon was irritating but at the same time that's not something it makes sense to blame kataang being canon on. kataang is probably one of the most obv ships ever in retrospect like the buildup was so palpably there and katara was never going to choose anyone else but aang. but i also think it can be admitted that her post-canon storylines were just.. super boring? and that it had to do a lot with bryke being resistant to radicalism in their material in general. keeping the gaang together or taking them on group adventures for marketability purposes was obv impt but i feel like katara was one of the members who like really needed to do her own thing after the war was over. like there were so many times in the series where it seemed like she was having her moment to shine and there would always be some caveat or wedge to throw so she could move on with the gaang and for central narrative purposes i get that but why did that have to apply to whatever she did after (also this doesn't even get into the fact that bryke's liberal politics affected her individual storylines so much like the jet and hama stuff. very bad vibes). like i already said i think kataang was pretty much inevitable and the build up in seasons one and two and even the confusion of feelings between them at the start of season three were great but i also don't think they needed to be in a relationship by the end of the series personally like it felt so rushed and honestly very corny. like they're thirteen and fourteen years old they have so much time. i like the gaang a lot as a concept but the overwhelming feeling i was left with when the series was over was that the fallout of the war would be so significant it wouldn't realistically make sense to have them all in one place like there are so many things each of them would need or want to do. and ig bryke kinda acknowledged that like the gaang did have some individual gigs. but it all felt so tame. katara was potentially the most radical member of the gaang i really do not think she would have ended the war being in some honeymoon phase she would have been ready to get working on uprooting all of the bad and where they'd found it and aggressively reconstructing the society she worked so hard to try to save. but also on the most simplest note i could leave here i genuinely think every avatar character needed therapy / soul searching more than they did romance by the end of the series so ig this is my very roundabout way of saying that..