Bi-babe-y

I wouldn’t call myself quirky but there is definitely something wrong with me

Please go watch Netflix's Teenage Bounty Hunters so it gets renewed for a second season. You want twin bounty hunters and a wlw enemies to lovers subplot in your life.

Zuko finds out Katara was parentified from the age of eight and was a single mom friend of three until he stumbled into the position of gaang dad friend. So when she visits the Fire Nation Zuko dotes on her, making sure her every need is anticipated and catered to. He even goes as far as - to the horror of his council - kneeling to remove her shoes.

Because of this she earns the nickname Lady Katara among the palace staff which she finds amusing but a little confusing. So one day over tea she asks Iroh why they call her that and he explains:

"They're just practicing."

"Why would you need to practice a nickname?"

"Well my dear, they expect that within a few years Fire will preceed it."

And that's about when Katara chokes on her tea.

“Although I’ve never announced it publicly before, I am a proud bisexual woman.” - Lili Reinhart.

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.

You know what proves the creators knew nothing about the ATLA fandom? Cause it’s so easy to understand us, truly, if only they tried.

One of the most popular episodes in the fandom, and one of the highest rated, is - Tales of Ba Sing Se. An episode where absolutely nothing happens to progress the story (except Appa’s footprint at the very last second). That episode is nothing but characters. No plot points, no tension, no fight scenes - nothing! Just our favorite characters going about their day.

While the live action is the opposite of that, it’s all plot and no character. So if you really want to make a good adaptation you should listen to your audience, cause it’s not that hard to figure out what we like.

THIS is why SexEd is so important!

so today was my first day back at camp and this years basically my first year where im like being a full on girl at camp and so like i was with my group today which is mostly kids whove known me for like 3 years at this point and one kid who knows me less well and like this kids 9 right so he asks me if im a boy or a girl like right off the bat cuz well, hes 9. I tell him im a girl and one of the other kids is like What!? no youre not. and im like i sure am. Another kid asks “then why were you a boy last year?” im like getting ready to figure out how the hell im gonna explain this to a kid in like 4 seconds. and then another kid asks “omg was you pretending to be a boy just an elaborate joke you and the other counselors were playing on us?!??” i just kinda stand there and im like………………………… yes. they all get cracked up because they think me pretending to be a boy was like, the funniest, most long term prank that has ever been committed to them and like i gotta say, i wholeheartedly agree that being amab is just a fucking joke.

No Question

Every time I think about Zuko and Katara doing the fake dating trope in canon. I always laugh because no one would question it. In fact, it would be the most believable thing in the world. The only question people would have is, “What took you so long?”

But Zuko and Katara are so oblivious to each other's feelings that they don’t recognize that the only ones acting weird are themselves. They constantly try to overcompensate and make things more “believable.”

~0~

Zuko holding Katara’s hand: Does this look authentic? Oh, Agni, we must look so awkward. She’s so pretty, and she’s so out of my league. This is never going to work. Dont panic. Dont panic…

Katara: His hands are so warm. Don’t blush—wait, maybe that would be a good thing. It would make things more believable. But what if he figures out my feelings?

Meanwhile

Iroh: I knew they were soulmates when he sacrificed himself and took a lightning bolt directly to his heart for her.

June: I knew they were perfect together when I saw how he wore her necklace on his wrist. It was obvious he was holding a torch for her.

Sokka: I knew they were meant to be when they teased each other during the Elember Island players' performance. Everyone knows playful teasing is an act of love.

Toph who can feel their heartbeats: These bitches dumb.

god gives his wettest pussies to his most mentally ill soldiers