jello-in-my-bello,tumblr,com/post/620391300270882816/i-see-a-lot-of-people-posting-that-now-that
i……buh????
Alright, normally I just ignore it when people send me links to other posts, largely because I don’t feel like starting shit–but @jello-in-my-bello please believe, from the bottom of my heart, that I want you to see this because the fact that you think Kataang and Maiko are healthy relationships is actually deeply concerning to me.
I mean that sincerely.
Now, I really, truly do not care if people ship Zutara. Enemies-to-lovers aren’t for everyone–I get that! But you can’t use the fact that they were enemies (although, please please stop rewriting canon to conform to your narrative???? Zuko never tried to kill any member of the gaang, the ONE exception being when he hired an assassin, which I’ve already written at length about how i found that decision to be wildly ooc and unnecessary; Zuko was trying to capture Aang, not kill him, and he wasn’t interested in spreading collateral damage either–the damage to Suki’s village was an unfortunate side-effect of fire bending around flammable material, but he left as soon as the gaang did) to assume that their romantic relationship after that was no longer the case would be unhealthy. There’s a brilliant post which points out that enemies-to-lovers is antithetical to abusive relationships–because abusers never announce themselves as anything but good and loving people. Abusers do not present themselves as enemies off the bat, because the entire point is to gain their victims trust before the abuse truly begins. (This is why, as that post posits, romcoms and sitcoms [you know the type] do a lot more to normalize unhealthy, toxic, and abusive behavior in romantic couples. Because those things are presented as healthy and romantic, rarely questioned, and the couples almost never address it.)
Falling in love with someone after you’ve seen their worst change and become their best is not unhealthy. It’s not at all the sort of message you seem to think it’s sending, because ‘it doesn’t matter if a guy treats you bad, if you love him enough he’ll change’ is about romantic relationships, not people who are fighting because they’re on opposite sides of a war. If a guy harasses a girl into agreeing to go out with him, that’s unhealthy. If a guy treats a girl he claims to love like shit, and she stays with him because she thinks she can change him, that’s unhealthy. (And frequently abusive.) But that’s not the same thing as two people fighting, even hurting each other, because they’re on opposite sides of the war, and then falling in love after one party realizes everything he did and believed was wrong and he changes sides and becomes a better person completely independently of their interpersonal relationship.
Zuko became a better person because he realized he and his nation were wrong, and he wanted to be better. It had nothing to do with Katara, and what baffles me is that for all that post’s insistence that their relationship would be unhealthy, it failed to indicate any point where their relationship after his redemption would even qualify as unhealthy. And considering what we know of their friendship in canon, I’m struggling to come up with anything that wouldn’t be conducive to a healthy romantic relationship. There’s a great post about the stark differences between a maiko and a post-redemption zutara scene that are otherwise quite parallel, and while it doesn’t necessarily mean Mai is a bad person, she is absolutely a bad person for Zuko to be in a relationship with. Their needs and desires as people are fundamentally opposed, they do not understand each other, and even when they are together they barely seem to tolerate each other except when they are making out.
Not exactly what I’d call a healthy dynamic.
And here’s where I get to the crux of my issue with that post–the idea that a) Aang treated Katara with respect, specifically in his romantic advances to her, and that he apologized if he ever hurt her or made her uncomfortable [both of which are factually inaccurate], and further, the idea that b) Zuko got into a relationship that was healthy for him, which is also factually inaccurate.
As far as point A is concerned–no, Aang did not treat Katara with respect. In fact, he pretty blatantly disrespected her on numerous occasions. And I say this as someone who loves him–he was not good for Katara romantically. Before you respond with ‘but he’s a child’–yes!!! that’s the point!!!!!! he’s a twelve-year-old, prepubescent child, who had no business entering into a serious romantic relationship, nevermind one that I’m supposed to believe lasted for the rest of his life. (But I’ll get into the mess that is LoK in a moment.) Aang kissed Katara without her consent, not once, but twice. The second time is even more galling than the first, because evidently he assumed that after kissing Katara without her consent and not sticking around to even see her reaction (which was not positive, and in fact was directed specifically to be negative–the storyboarding artist originally depicted Katara smiling, and was told to change it to what it is now, her frowning and looking away, seeming troubled and unsure), they would be together.
“But it’s true, isn’t it? We kissed at the invasion, and I thought we were gonna be together, but we’re not.”
Why, Aang? Why did you think the two of you were gonna ‘be together’ when you kissed Katara, with zero indication that she wanted you to (although note the way he phrases it as a mutual thing, despite the indisputable fact that it absolutely wasn’t, and Katara isn’t even allowed to dispute that because the narrative was overly invested in forcing them to be together; this little exchange, though, is deeply troubling when you consider the fact that it is never addressed, and he never apologizes for it, before he winds up in a relationship with his ‘forever girl’), and then you flew off. You never even told Katara that you liked her, and after the invasion, you never asked if she liked you that way–you never once even considered the possibility that she might not!
Then, of course, there’s the infamous I just said I was confused!, the moment where Aang kissed Katara without her consent again, this time in a moment where she had indicated with everything from her words to her body language that she was not open to considering a romantic relationship with him right now–and, again, Aang never apologizes for it. (No, saying ‘I’m such an idiot’ after she walked away and not saying another word about it for the entire rest of the series does not count.) This demonstrates the start to a deeply troubling pattern, especially considering the other things he did to Katara and to the others for which he never apologized.
Don’t believe me? Read through the Bato of the Water Tribe transcript–not a single apology. He never once says he’s sorry for hiding the map to their father, and he isn’t even truly taken to task for it, because Katara and Sokka decide he needs them more and go back without ever asking him to consider how he hurt them and why it wasn’t ok. Also, he never once apologized for the way he acted after Appa was kidnapped–his grief and pain in that moment was understandable, but that doesn’t make it ok that he lashed out at Toph the way he did and never apologized for it. He straight up accused her of letting Appa get kidnapped because she wanted him to be stolen, and… nothing. No apology. Ever.
Even more concerning is the fact that, when you take all of this together, it paints a very bleak future for Katara–one which we see painted more explicitly in the comics and in LoK. Because the fact is that Katara was stripped of her agency in her romantic relationship in atla, and this followed her through all post-canonical materials. She’s a sad old lady in LoK who never lifts her finger to do a single thing–not even when her entire family is in danger of being killed by zealots, which, in what universe would Katara just let someone murder her entire family?????–including not healing a single significant injury over the course of the series. (She can’t even reverse something done to Korra and other benders via bloodbending, despite ostensibly being the one to get bloodbending outlawed, and being the best healer on the planet. Make it make sense, I implore you.) Katara also allowed her husband to neglect two of his children to the point where they are bitter and angry about it well into their fifties and sixties. To all accounts, it looks like she had become a mediator and peacekeeper for her family, and was left alone to raise two of her children while her husband took the third off on adventures all over the world.
Not exactly what I’d call a healthy dynamic, particularly when Katara is the one with deep-seated abandonment issues in canon.
Now, as far as Maiko goes… I really shouldn’t have to explain how a relationship between two people whose deepest communication in canon is “I don’t hate you.”/”I don’t hate you, too.”, and who have fundamentally opposing ideologies by the end of the series which have no indication of being reconciled (Mai shows no signs of ever understanding why Zuko ‘betrayed’ his nation, and the fact that she sees it as a betrayal indicates that she bought the Fire Nation party line hook, line, and sinker) isn’t a healthy one, but here we are.
It’s actually kind of interesting, in a… deeply troubling way, that Maiko parallels Kataang in the fact that all of the romantic development on the part of at least one of the characters involved happens entirely off-screen. We see some signs that Mai had a crush on Zuko when they were children, absolutely none that those feelings were returned, and then they got together off-screen between books 2 and 3 and are suddenly kissing in the book 3 premier. There are signs throughout the series that Aang has a crush on Katara, very few (and those that exist are extremely debatable) signs that those feelings are returned, and then they get together in the epilogue despite the fact that their last few interactions were a) Katara telling Aang she was confused, and then getting pissed when he kissed her anyway and storming off, and b) Aang yelling at Katara for trying to help at the beginning of the Sozin’s Comet four-parter, and then flying off and having absolutely no contact with her before they’re kissing on the balcony. All of Katara’s confusion and the development of her romantic feelings for Aang happen off screen, and that was bad enough when it was a main character in a relationship with a secondary, but when the relationship is between two mains who are in close proximity to one another for almost the entirety of the series????
Big yikes.
Anyway, tl;dr: ‘That is the relationship little girls should be shown to choose’??????? A relationship where the girl’s thoughts and feelings are never taken into account, where the one time she talks about them on-screen is to say she’s confused and doesn’t know what she wants, where the boy never ONCE asks her if she wants to be in a relationship with him, and where the boy is shown to be pining after her and then ‘gets the girl’ in a scene that makes it look like he was presented a trophy he deserved for saving the world?????
I’m sorry, but I heavily disagree. The Fortuneteller should have been an episode foreshadowing that Aang would come to realize Katara loved him, but not the same way he loved her, and that’s ok–that’s a much healthier message to send to young girls than ‘you’re the avatar! she’ll come around eventually’. And I would much rather young girls seeing a healthy romantic relationship arise out of one that used to be adversarial, showing that people can change, that this change isn’t always prompted by romance, but that when change happens it’s ok to fall in love with someone unexpected and help them change the world.
But maybe that’s just me.
In addition, how both canon pairings were portrayed unintentionally sends the message that you know you’re with ‘the one’ because you just ‘understand’ each other even without actually communicating about things that plague your relationship. I know Kätaangers would say that “Aäng and Kätara are good friends and they talk!” Yes, they are. But good friends don’t automatically translate to being good romantic partners if as romantic partners, you don’t communicate and you’re not completely honest with each other. The same goes for Mäiko.
I believed that popular idea as a kid and that belief has translated to my behavior around romantic partners. I’ve been in a Kätaang type of relationship where the other guy just assumes he knows what I feel without actually asking me about it and putting me in awkward situations where I can’t just say no because I feel responsible for his feelings. I’ve also been in a Mäiko kind of relationship where we both grew up to be different people with different wants, and no matter how hard we tried, it just wouldn’t work and the fights got awful the longer we held on to nostalgia and what little ‘similarities’ we have left.
Being in a stable relationship is understanding that it’s okay if you don’t know your partner inside out as long as you know how to communicate, you give and receive equal support, and neither of you are afraid to put your issues out in the open in fear of losing each other.
I’m sure that OP in the subject of the ask meant well and I’d like to believe that that was probably the writers’ intention behind Kätaang and Mäiko, but we can’t credit them for it and twist the canon text to fit the intent when the execution and canon itself shows otherwise.
