The Circle Of Life

I haven’t seen anyone talk about this, but why is no one talking about the casual racism from Hope when she assumed Adam was Jackson?

We’ve all been there.

my mom says she’s not a hugger. but when i put my arms around her on a gloomy day or after bad news she’s the last to let go. my dad says he doesn’t want gifts on his birthday, but i see the way his face light up when i get him a card with a nice message and a box full of chocolate anyway. he’s just a kid inside, still. it makes him giddy. my brother never says i love you. but when i tell him “i just need to finish the dishes before i vacuum!” he wordlessly goes to vacuum the entire house before i can, and if he sees me struggle with a wrapper or a jar or a bottle he mutters ‘c’mere’ and opens it for me without even sparing me a glance. the thing is, people love you quietly, and you love them quietly, and the air is buzzing with tiny but grand gestures & once you look for them, you find them everywhere. i think that’s really beautiful.

is there a genre of TV called good people trying their best? coz i think thats my fav genre atm

idk what traumatized or mentally ill person needs to hear this but dreams (especially the really disturbing ones you dont want to talk about to anybody) arent some deep peek into your psyche or a sign of your True Desires or whatever theyre quite literally your brain making fruit salad with whatever it can find on the shelf. just putting all that shit in a blender and hitting obliterate. its fine, youre fine, youre not a weirdo for it

The groups at the finale

I'm to this day very confused why the groupings of the Gaang where what they were at the end of the series.

It's time for the ending Avatar, and the Gaang has almost always split up for the season finales. It would not have been surprising if in this case they did not, and this was even teased with the idea that the entire Gaang would roll up and defeat Ozai together. Then they split apart even more so than before. Aang departs (in his sleep lol), they remainder go together only to split apart to have each of their own big moments in their separate groups.

But, I'm left wondering, why are Katara and Zuko practically attached to the hip during this? From the southern raiders onwards, those two are practically always next to each other, and interacting. Ember Island they sit together, from the moment Aang walks away and Zuko holds Katara back they're together including sleeping next to each other (while Sokka and Suki sleep next to each other a bit away) and share their story climax together. This kind of closeness and consistency in being together must be taken as a sign of them having a close relationship as otherwise its unclear why they would be together so consistently. Zuko interacts with the others, but the majority of his emotional conversations and support, from his end and hers are with Katara.

So, why do the writers go so far to establish a close relationship like this between Katara and Zuko? They did not really need to, and in fact with regards to the pairings at the end of the series it even comes across weirdly. It all comes down to the age-old question. Why was it Katara that Zuko dramatically chanced sacrificing everything for? I think even if it's not shipped, Zutara very much has presence in the original work in the sense that once these two characters get along, they very much connect deeply and would spend a lot of time together when they can.

Katara's Story Is A Tragedy and It's Not An Accident

I was a teenaged girl when Avatar: The Last Airbender aired on Nickelodeon—the group that the show’s creators unintentionally hit while they were aiming for the younger, maler demographic. Nevermind that we’re the reason the show’s popularity caught fire and has endured for two decades; we weren’t the audience Mike and Bryan wanted. And by golly, were they going to make sure we knew it. They’ve been making sure we know it with every snide comment and addendum they’ve made to the story for the last twenty years.

For many of us girls who were raised in the nineties and aughts, Katara was a breath of fresh air—a rare opportunity in a media market saturated with boys having grand adventures to see a young woman having her own adventure and expressing the same fears and frustrations we were often made to feel. 

We were told that we could be anything we wanted to be. That we were strong and smart and brimming with potential. That we were just as capable as the boys. That we were our brothers’ equals. But we were also told to wash dishes and fold laundry and tidy around the house while our brothers played outside. We were ignored when our male classmates picked teams for kickball and told to go play with the girls on the swings—the same girls we were taught to deride if we wanted to be taken seriously. We were lectured for the same immaturity that was expected of boys our age and older, and we were told to do better while also being told, “Boys will be boys.” Despite all the platitudes about equality and power, we saw our mothers straining under the weight of carrying both full-time careers and unequally divided family responsibilities. We sensed that we were being groomed for the same future. 

And we saw ourselves in Katara. 

Katara begins as a parentified teenaged girl: forced to take on responsibility for the daily care of people around her—including male figures who are capable of looking after themselves but are allowed to be immature enough to foist such labor onto her. She does thankless work for people who take her contributions for granted. She’s belittled by people who love her, but don’t understand her. She’s isolated from the world and denied opportunities to improve her talents. She's told what emotions she's allowed to feel and when to feel them. In essence, she was living our real-world fear: being trapped in someone else’s narrow, stultifying definition of femininity and motherhood. 

Then we watched Katara go through an incredible journey of self-determination and empowerment. Katara goes from being a powerless, fearful victim to being a protector, healer, advocate, and liberator to others who can’t do those things for themselves (a much truer and more fulfilling definition of nurturing and motherhood). It’s necessary in Katara’s growth cycle that she does this for others first because that is the realm she knows. She is given increasingly significant opportunities to speak up and fight on behalf of others, and that allows her to build those advocacy muscles gradually. But she still holds back her own emotional pain because everyone that she attempts to express such things to proves they either don't want to deal with it or they only want to manipulate her feelings for their own purposes. 

Katara continues to do much of the work we think of as traditionally maternal on behalf of her friends and family over the course of the story, but we do see that scale gradually shift. Sokka takes on more responsibility for managing the group’s supplies, and everyone helps around camp, but Katara continues to be the manager of everyone else’s emotions while simultaneously punching down her own. The scales finally seem to tip when Zuko joins the group. With Zuko, we see someone working alongside Katara doing the same tasks she is doing around camp for the first time. Zuko is also the only person who never expects anything of her and whose emotions she never has to manage because he’s actually more emotionally stable and mature than she is by that point. And then, Katara’s arc culminates in her finally getting the chance to fully seize her power, rewrite the story of the traumatic event that cast her into the role of parentified child, be her own protector, and freely express everything she’s kept locked away for the sake of letting everyone else feel comfortable around her. Then she fights alongside an equal partner she knows she can trust and depend on through the story's climax. And for the first time since her mother’s death, the girl who gives and gives and gives while getting nothing back watches someone sacrifice everything for her. But this time, she’s able to change the ending because her power is fully realized. The cycle was officially broken.

Katara’s character arc was catharsis at every step. If Katara could break the mold and recreate the ideas of womanhood and motherhood in her own image, so could we. We could be powerful. We could care for ourselves AND others when they need us—instead of caring for everyone all the time at our own expense. We could have balanced partnerships with give and take going both ways (“Tui and La, push and pull”), rather than the, “I give, they take,” model we were conditioned to expect. We could fight for and determine our own destiny—after all, wasn’t destiny a core theme of the story?

Yes. Destiny was the theme. But the lesson was that Katara didn’t get to determine hers. 

After Katara achieves her victory and completes her arc, the narrative steps in and smacks her back down to where she started. For reasons that are never explained or justified, Katara rewards the hero by giving into his romantic advances even though he has invalidated her emotions, violated her boundaries, lashed out at her for slights against him she never committed, idealized a false idol of her then browbeat her when she deviated from his narrative, and forced her to carry his emotions and put herself in danger when he willingly fails to control himself—even though he never apologizes, never learns his lesson, and never shows any inclination to do better. 

And do better he does not.

The more we dared to voice our own opinions on a character that was clearly meant to represent us, the more Mike and Bryan punished Katara for it.

Throughout the comics, Katara makes herself smaller and smaller and forfeits all rights to personal actualization and satisfaction in her relationship. She punches her feelings down when her partner neglects her and cries alone as he shows more affection and concern for literally every other girl’s feelings than hers. She becomes cowed by his outbursts and threats of violence. Instead of rising with the moon or resting in the warmth of the sun, she learns to stay in his shadow. She gives up her silly childish dreams of rebuilding her own dying culture’s traditions and advocating for other oppressed groups so that she can fulfill his wishes to rebuild his culture instead—by being his babymaker. Katara gave up everything she cared about and everything she fought to become for the whims of a man-child who never saw her as a person, only a possession.

Then, in her old age, we get to watch the fallout of his neglect—both toward her and her children who did not meet his expectations. By that point, the girl who would never turn her back on anyone who needed her was too far gone to even advocate for her own children in her own home. And even after he’s gone, Katara never dares to define herself again. She remains, for the next twenty-plus years of her life, nothing more than her husband's grieving widow. She was never recognized for her accomplishments, the battles she won, or the people she liberated. Even her own children and grandchildren have all but forgotten her. She ends her story exactly where it began: trapped in someone else’s narrow, stultifying definition of femininity and motherhood.

The story’s theme was destiny, remember? But this story’s target audience was little boys. Zuko gets to determine his own destiny as long as he works hard and earns it. Aang gets his destiny no matter what he does or doesn’t do to earn it. And Katara cannot change the destiny she was assigned by gender at birth, no matter how hard she fights for it or how many times over she earns it. 

Katara is Winston Smith, and the year is 1984. It doesn’t matter how hard you fight or what you accomplish, little girl. Big Brother is too big, too strong, and too powerful. You will never escape. You will never be free. Your victories are meaningless. So stay in your place, do what you’re told, and cry quietly so your tears don’t bother people who matter.

I will never get over it. Because I am Katara. And so are my friends, sisters, daughters, and nieces. But I am not content to live in Bryke's world.

I will never turn my back on people who need me. Including me.

This made me bust out laughing

I am in no way excusing what Cassie did, but I think a lot of people are missing the point of her storyline. She was raised in a way that absolutely fucked her idea of love, with her father leaving and how she was treated at a young age because of her body. To her, male validation=love and she will do anything to get that. I think this is also why her character is nude so often; in some of these scenes you can tell Cassie isn’t completely comfortable. People say she is being sexualized too much, but I think that is literally the point. To show how disgusting and uncomfortable the sexualisation of young girls is and the shit we are expected to do for men. Cassie going out with Nate is absolutely fucked but it also shows the effect of being treated like an object your whole life.

To me the point of this storyline is glaringly obvious and it kinda sucks to see people shitting on cassie all the time.