#xai bau eventually succeeding in killing sokka is so sick & twisted tho. i kind of love that..

[comradekatara]

hi! apologies if you’ve answered this before, but what do you think of the theory that sokka was killed protecting korra from the red lotus??? i’ve always had mixed feelings about it - on the one hand, sokka Would. on the other, a) the in-text treatment of the red lotus was always questionable and b) the idea that sokka, the most self-sacrificing character, ending up dying for someone else is just so sad to me. what do you think? you consistently have the best ATLA takes on this app!

yeah. I think that theory comes from people valorizing sokka’s protectiveness without understanding why that trait is in fact harmful to him. like, dying a martyr to protect someone important against evil forces that wish to harm them and/or the world has always been sokka’s top #1 fantasy. I don’t really think that’s the kind of thing we need to be encouraging. if anything I think the nicest death sokka could ever possibly get is to die peacefully in his sleep as an old man, because by contradicting his internalized notion that his body is a vessel to used rather than the subject of his own experience, this signifies that he has innate meaning as an individual even when he is not serving another, which is a crucial facet of his arc. that said I also love sokka’s misery and suffering, so I think the idea that sokka does ultimately die a martyr kind of rules in a gruesome, morbid, sick & twisted way.

and then there’s the other element to unpack here, which is the red lotus. it's no secret that the red lotus is one of my favorite elements (no pun intended) of lok, and i spend way more time thinking about them than i do most aspects of that show (not including korrasami. i have clocked so many hours at the obsessing over korrasami factory you don't even know). so in the xai bau spy novel that (mostly) lives in my head, the notion that sokka one day dies at the hands of the organization that was formed through xai bau's ideology is very thematically satisfying to me. but also you really have to share my very specific brand of brainrot regarding who xai bau was, what his relationship to sokka is, the poetic injustice of that particular resolution, etc etc. and obviously none of that is remotely canon, so like. that's clearly not what you're asking here.

on one hand, the red lotus could've killed sokka in their mission to eradicate all world leaders (they do call sokka the chief in that one scene, which i resent, but according to the text, that does make him a world leader. ew), but also sokka could've easily just died in a bunch of other situations, it's really left ambiguous in the show. i don't think that the characters who would have been close to sokka who also fight the red lotus (zuko, katara's kids, lin beifong, etc etc.) seem vengeful enough for them to have been the cause of his death, though, but it's also been a while since i've seen the show, so maybe i'm wrong about that. it is beautifully tragic though. if you're some kind of fucked up sicko (which i'm NOT!!!!!!!!)