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seyaryminamoto · 4 months

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hello! I really like your meta about Zuko, and I'm so glad that I finally found a person who also thinks that Zuko in book 3 is a much worse person than he was in the book 1. I always thought that something was wrong with me, since literally no one sees this obvious fact for me! But I would like to ask you: What do you think about Katara in book 3? the fact is that she was my favorite character in books 1 and 2, and the way she was written in book 3 upset me a lot. it seems to me that they spoiled her character, but I can't explain why. Please share your thoughts!

Glad you've enjoyed my extensive meta on the fandom's fave, haha. I did write a lot about him, always nice to know my thoughts on the subject are still deemed relevant.

As for Katara... well, I have thoughts on her, too. My experience with her character is quite similar to yours, I'd say, because I too felt a lot better about her character in the first two seasons of the show compared with the third. I don't usually give this a ton of thought, but after your ask, I figured I'd try and figure out what exactly went down with her that made people like us feel so uncomfortable with Katara's portrayal at multiple points of Book 3...

For starters, I'll say I vibed with Katara a lot when I started the show for reasons beyond her being a great character or being written wonderfully: she could very well have been written mediocrely and I would have loved her anyway simply because I ran away from anime to ATLA in an era where anime kept shoehorning incest undertones into every sibling relationship, even in shows that didn't have that as a core subject. It happened at least twice that I can remember, I kept seeing people raving about shows where it WAS the core of it (I still do not understand the Oreimo deal, like, the minute I read that show's title I puked in my mouth and knew I'd never watch it), and I just needed... safety from that concept, I guess?

So when I went into ATLA, and the first sibling relationship you're exposed to is Sokka and Katara, two siblings who very much act like siblings? I was thriving. It was thrilling. I felt so refreshed that I think I didn't care much about the flaws of Book 1, despite my inability to sense direction for most of it, because thank the universe, it was a sibling relationship that made sense to me!

With that as an opening, I'd say that, initially, I thought Katara was fine for most of Book 1. In Book 2? She fell off the radar for me a bit simply because other characters are introduced that just appeal to me so much more than she does. I vibe better with characters like Azula, who tend to be the type of female character I just LOVE, and with characters like Toph, she's a tomboy, I was a tomboy (... was? x'D maybe I shouldn't use past tense...), so I gravitated much more towards those two by no real fault of Katara's core personality traits. Back in Book 1, there aren't as many main characters, so you don't have a lot of variety to choose faves from. It's not that strange, I think, that once the cast broadens, people's interest in certain characters can scatter too.

But then Book 3 happened, and I just couldn't enjoy Katara outside of episodes where she wasn't that important. The Katara-centric episode of Book 3 stand among my least favorite episodes of ATLA altogether, and among the least likely episodes I'd ever want to rewatch. I literally skipped over The Painted Lady in my first rewatches of the show, every bit as much as I skipped The Great Divide or Avatar Day, both of which annoy me a lot in the first two seasons. The Puppetmaster? Not even close to being an episode I could enjoy. Even the Runaway, that's supposed to be Toph-centric, ends up making me count down the minutes for it to end and I'm not even going to get started on The Southern Raiders and the absolute can of worms that episode is...

So, with all this being said, if we peel this particular cabbage open little by little...

After mulling it over, I've grown to suspect that Katara has major inconsistency issues since day one that most people don't particularly like to acknowledge, and that flew over most of our heads from the beginning of the show. She's pretty much portrayed to us as an empath, someone who has so much heart that she can't help but feel everyone's pain and suffer with them all the time. The fandom 100% acts like that's who she is (while also obsessively adultifying her unnecessarily, and forcing her into the mom!friend role, which... we'll talk about that later)

But this is also the same character who, when her brother banished Aang from the Southern Water Tribe as early as in episode 2, protested in a very particular way once Aang was gone. Which one of these statements sound more accurate to Katara's character, and a suitable protest for her to proclaim upon witnessing this injustice against Aang?

"Aang is alone! How could you send him away on his own? He could be in danger, Sokka! He's just a kid!"

"The Air Nomads are gone, Sokka! Where do you think he'll go? He doesn't have a home to go back to and you just sent him away!"

"You happy now? There goes my one chance at becoming a waterbender!"

If you ask the fandom? They'll most likely think that her reaction was either #1 or #2.

Surprise surprise: it was actually #3

I'm not saying she didn't show empathy towards Aang while Sokka was ranting at him, because she did. I'm not saying she wasn't willing to be banished along with Aang until Sokka asks if she'd choose pretty much a total stranger over their family and tribe, because she was. She absolutely did all those things.

... So why would she focus only on how he represented her one chance at becoming a waterbender once Aang is gone?

This feels off to me. I've never particularly liked that line. And you could absolutely say that Katara has every right to be mad at losing her chance to reclaim an aspect of her culture that she cannot connect to, but the way it was framed here? It absolutely makes Katara look more selfish than she actually was. The wording is not good. The show doesn't emphasize, at this point, that bending is such a core and crucial part of their culture and that Katara feels a major responsibility in being the ONLY person in the South Pole that can keep it alive. So it just comes off as a child's tantrum. Sokka's concerns were 100% valid too, even if he went about them while being a jerk (he is, indeed, an older brother...). He wasn't even wrong in the end about how dangerous Aang was to their tribe, since Aang's mishap with Katara on the ship gives away his position to Zuko, and it results in Zuko ramming a huge ship into their home and nearly killing people in the process. But you DON'T see the show fully framing it as though Katara and Aang did something wrong -- it was an honest mistake. We know it was. Sokka is framed as unreasonable for being so paranoid even though later events in the very episode prove he wasn't.

And that's... the crux of the issue with Katara's writing. If you ask me.

There are far too many instances where Katara makes mistakes that she's not held accountable for, that she doesn't apologize for, that run against the core logic and principles of her character and they either get shrugged off or overlooked. There are far too many situations where she acts out, and is a jerk at her jerk of a brother, even unprompted on occasion, and it's supposed to just be funny. One particularly stood out to me when I revisited it a few years ago, I can't really remember what for (maybe when I was writing Jeong Jeong's arc in Gladiator and I had a look at the fishing village...?), but it's the famous flashback episode in Book 1: The Storm.

The scene in question is... humorous. Supposedly. Katara is trying to buy fruit in the market but then realizes they have no money to pay for it. Not only does Katara piss off the vendor, but the vendor actually takes her rage out on Sokka once she realizes these kids won't give her any business: he gets kicked in the rear, as the transcript's description says. No one protests the woman's violent reaction, not even Sokka. Katara most certainly doesn't do it. But that's not all there is to it: Sokka doesn't hold what happened with the fruit vendor against Katara, they have a conversation on how they have no money and no food... and Katara offers him the golden ticket solution to their problems:

"You could get a job, smart guy."

Am I too feminist for thinking it's insane that Katara expects her brother alone to get the job? That she's not saying the THREE of them should get jobs? She and Aang are BENDERS! That's an asset most people aren't likely to find in any would-be employees in the central Earth Kingdom! So... wouldn't it be logical for all of them to do it? But no, instead, Sokka alone has to get the job?

And yes, I know, Sokka is the provider, Sokka is the protector, Sokka would do ANYTHING for his sister and the people he loves: you ask the fandom, though, and that's Katara instead of him. Moments like these simply do not exist in the fandom's eyes and, if they do, they're just excusable because Sokka is boring/weird/annoying/insert-demeaning-nonsense-here and Katara is a queen who can do whatever she wants.

Then, the consequences arrive once Sokka gets a dangerous job on a fishing boat and nearly gets killed in a storm. Aang is the one who shows concern about the potential storm when the fisherman's wife brings it up: from all I can see in the transcript, there's nothing from Katara. Sokka says they told him to get a job, so that's what he's doing, and there's no manifestation of concern from either of them about maybe joining him on this fishing trip to ensure he's safe. Instead, Aang is haunted by his past and Katara goes with him when he leaves, which, yes, is very important for context on the Air Nomads and Aang's life... and yet we don't really NEED for this scene to be Katara and Aang only. It could've included Sokka too. The plot of the second half of the episode would change? Likely. They could've come up with another idea, and not shown us a Katara who doesn't show concern for her brother's safety or any remorse when her unfair demands or expectations from him could result in catastrophic outcomes :') yes, she worries about Sokka's safety once the storm hits, but there's no sign of her feeling responsible for Sokka being out in the storm at all. No apology. Which is ironic, because Zuko apologizes to Iroh in that very same episode, hence, an apology from Katara to her brother could have mirrored that side of the story well, and they REALLY loved doing Zuko-Gaang parallel scenes like that, so it would have fit perfectly! Didn't happen, though.

Point being... Katara's compassion and empathy are not absolute. It's important to keep in mind is that they don't need to be! But precisely because she falters with them in moments where she REALLY shouldn't, with people as important to her as her own brother? It becomes very difficult to believe that she's the empath the fandom is convinced she is, and that the show's narrative tries to push her as.

The real reason why her failure to show compassion to Sokka in "humorous" situations feels so unnerving isn't because she's a typical little sister who takes her brother for granted (which is a perfectly logical/believable behavior!): it's because there are no consequences for it. Maybe at some point or another there were? But I for one can't remember many instances where Katara failed Sokka and it was framed as her fault and her responsibility. Let's look at other Book 1 instances that exemplify what I mean:

She freezes him to the deck of Zuko's ship, which puts Sokka in MAJOR danger, and she just tells him to hurry up as if it weren't her fault that he's frozen in the first place. We don't even see her making efforts to thaw him out of there when she IS the waterbender so it seems logical that she should be able to help with that (and if she's too inexperienced to do it? The least she can do to help her brother out of a dangerous situation is to TRY???). But apparently it's funny that she doesn't help him when it's her fault! So this is fine!

She endangers the entire group over the waterbending scroll, which, of course, the pirates had no right to have anyway and it's reasonable that she'd want it for herself... but she antagonized a group of fully adult, dangerous, potential murderous pirates, against Sokka's constant warnings that they shouldn't pick that particular fight. As far as I can remember? Her apologies on that episode are exclusively about how she hurt Aang's feelings by being jealous over his greater talents as a bender. Basically, nothing for Sokka, no apology for not listening to him about danger, making it worse when the very final moment features Katara proudly telling her brother that she won't steal things... unless it's from pirates. So lesson not learned because it's funny, again, to never acknowledge that Sokka has a point.

She actually cares about Sokka's fate in Jet! But the thing is... the narrative doesn't frame that as Katara's fault. Because it's not. Jet made his choices and he did awful things and he captured Sokka, lied and gaslit everyone, because he had a goal to fulfill and he used Katara to make that happen. As angry and upset as Katara is, it's not exactly shown that Katara is sorry for having trusted Jet when Sokka could have ended up paying a deadly price for it. She's angry at the betrayal, even in Book 2 it's constantly framed as though Katara is upset at him as an ex-girlfriend would be upset at her ex-boyfriend for lying to her rather than, you know, being pissed at him for nearly killing her brother + an entire village. My point is, the narrative framing never holds her responsible for Jet's choices. Which, again, she's not. But she IS responsible for her own choices... and one of those choices was disregarding Sokka's warnings about Jet. THAT was her fault, and her responsibility. She jumped to conclusions and assumed that Sokka was bitter and jealous that Jet was the charming cool leader Sokka could never be. There were no apologies to Sokka over that, either.

I could go on, and on, and on. The truth is, I bring all this up to show with solid evidence that Katara's writing was always a little... unstable. Weird. Disconnected from logic in many regards, I'd say. It's not logical/compatible to tell us that this character has the BIGGEST heart of the entire cast when she fails to show that heart to none other than her own brother, who is inarguably the person who she knows best and with whom she should share the closest relationship, even as her friendship with Aang grows and thrives. That makes no sense, thematically speaking.

Is it meant to be comedic? Yes, every bit as much as Iroh sexually harassing June was done for comedy's sake. That's not an excuse for characters behaving in ways that are thematically contrary to what they're supposed to be portraying... and along with that? No excuse for them facing zero consequences for that behavior. Which is, in fact, my main issue with these flaws from Katara: I have no issue with the writing choices in the scenes I listed just now! I take issue, however, with the lack of follow-up and consequences that you can BET, 100%, would have befallen Sokka if it had been him instead of Katara acting that way. He faced consequences even for things he didn't do, for comedy's sake: he wouldn't have gotten away with disregarding Katara's safety as often as Katara did with him, no chance at all.

Ultimately, these scenes in Book 1 are kind of ignorable in the larger scheme of things (or at least, that's how the fandom has always acted). Not a lot of people take any of this as major proof of characterization for Katara. You won't see a lot of fic writers showing her acting like this. Canon, though, often would go down this route for funsies, and the comics certainly did it plenty too, that I can remember. Part of the issue here is that, as funny as it is, it also makes Katara feel stale as a character, as does the Sokka-Katara dynamic, at large, because there's no progression for it. That's probably my greatest gripe with the Great Divide, believe it or not: it fakes being an episode where Sokka and Katara are going to be confronted over their conflictive tendencies, and the ONLY potential development in that basically-filler episode SHOULD HAVE BEEN Sokka and Katara learning to be a bit more harmonious and respectful of each other? ... And that's just not what happened at all. The status quo remains exactly the same after that episode, and it continues to be like that until the end of the show.

The real reason why Sokka and Katara are deemed the healthy siblings is because, of course, compared with the other main set of siblings in the show, these two appear to get along wonderfully. But the truth is, their relationship is not as dynamic as it deserved to be. And that's part of why Book 3 ends up failing in ways Book 1 might not have, while having similar flaws: Book 1 is when you're still getting to know these kids, and that's why I find its flaws far more forgivable than anything that comes later. When there's basically no development for that connection at all, Book 3 winds up falling flat with characters like Sokka and Katara and the bond between them.

All this being said... I'm not saying that Katara is terrible in Book 1. I still stand by the fact that I really enjoyed her character in many instances of this season, there absolutely are situations where she sasses Sokka that still make me crack a smile, and genuinely humorous situations that don't paint her in a questionable light over her lack of concern for her brother's safety. Her fight to earn the right to be trained as a waterbender is deeeeeply flawed but it's not her fault, it's more the misogyny of the writers/creators that decided that a betrothal necklace from his past would make Pakku unlearn all his sexism and get over his bullshit right after beating up a girl who was fighting tooth and nail to make him acknowledge her. That he only acknowledges her because he wanted to marry her grandmother is... uh... fuckboi behavior even when he's well over 70 years of age? XD

So, yeah, Book 1 still has my favorite Katara of the entire show even though I REALLY wish she wouldn't get away with things that other characters wouldn't get a pass for (... well... other than Zuko...). I can't enjoy her as much as I enjoy other characters because I really don't like it when characters aren't held accountable for serious mistakes they made.

Moving on to Book 2, though, and leaving behind my greatest gripe with Katara's Book 1 writing (lack of direct consequences/self-reflection on her part), Book 2's biggest sin when it comes to Katara is the beginning of the "mothering" trope. I honestly did not feel motherly vibes from Katara towards anyone in Book 1. Sokka is very often the one playing the responsible role, while Aang and Katara are seeing the world, practicing their bending, doing reckless and fun things. The entire thing about Katara being the mom friend started in Book 2 when she suddenly becomes the epitome of responsibility (well... kinda) when Toph joins the group. She still does sketchy stuff with zero consequences (I'll forever complain about how ice is not cold in this show, the kids she froze to the wall may have been dicks, but freezing someone alive that way should have resulted in serious health repercussions, just as ANY case of freezing someone alive should have, ffs, be it Zuko in Book 1's finale or Azula + Katara in Book 3's...), but once Toph is part of the group, she becomes the cool girl who's "one of the boys", and now Katara is "the mom". This dynamic gets forced into the story pretty much right after Toph joins the group. And after that? It doesn't really change for the better often. There are only a handful of instances where Katara wasn't acting wholesome and comforting and kind and compassionate in Book 2 (... particularly with Sokka, ofc), but the point where her dynamics, even with Aang, start to feel motherly is definitely Book 2.

And this adds to the issue, in the end: Katara's appeal as the main girl in the show is suddenly gone because Toph is here, and she's a way more unique character that the writers definitely were having fun working with, probably more fun than they had with Katara. So they had to find a new niche for her, I'd dare guess. Thus, instead of actually building up an awesome and solid friendship between Katara and Toph, they mostly just clash and collide. Toph is basically the ONLY character who gives Katara grief and isn't framed as in the wrong for it, which is its own set of issues (namely, Toph not being challenged enough by the narrative, which stunts her character growth), but among many things, we suddenly get shown that Katara is a girly girl who likes makeup and she ropes Toph into this when nothing we've seen so far suggests that Toph would be comfortable with that. Katara pushes her into doing things because they're the "girls of the group"... and it doesn't often look like Toph's feelings on anything are important when Katara is pushing her around for whatever purpose. I'm not saying Toph hated the spa day, she certainly had fun eventually, but even when the comics made a "Katara and Toph's day out" story, where Toph got to choose what to do for once, the story devolved into Katara's show anyway, and things concluded with Toph deciding they're better off doing girly things together when they want to hang out because Katara is just too intense for the things Toph would like to do.

This isn't even in the show, but it's basically a response to Tales of Ba Sing Se to try and even out Katara and Toph's one-sided dynamic, where Katara calls the shots of their entertainment... and even then, Toph doesn't really get what she's looking for. But Katara does get that out of Toph because all she wants is a girl to do girly things with and Toph provides that in the end, no matter how much of a tomboy she may be. Toph might just want a friend who loves the things she loves, and who knows, Katara could be that person! But the story never leads her in that direction so we never see that happen. And that's why that particular friendship never really... clicked for me. Their dynamics don't really feel enjoyable to me as they were written in the show, even though they very much could have been.

That's one thing I'll always give ATLA: the character potential and synergy they captured with that cast could be absolutely incredible. Team Avatar is so iconic because they really could work well off each other. A lot of teams in other media just aren't this good (... one of my main reasons to not enjoy Voltron and drop it in season 1 was my absolute failure to find any synergy between those characters, it felt like they all hated each other and I honestly did not enjoy their dynamics in the least), but Aang, Katara and Sokka have great synergy due to their different personalities in Book 1. Same when Toph joins them in Book 2. Zuko ABSOLUTELY could have been better in the group than he was if Book 3 hadn't devolved into the Zuko Woobifying Show by the second half, where the only writing priority was making him friends with everyone, and making them all feel sorry for him and have compassion towards him. But, broken down to his core traits, Zuko's personality would have resulted in solid chemistry with everyone else's if they'd gotten off that agenda anyway! So ultimately, ATLA has a big win in this respect that a lot of TV shows would LOVE to recreate but they simply haven't struck the right kind of balance in character traits.

Hence why the way they wrote Toph and Katara's dynamics kind of feels like a betrayal to me. Those two could have been a lot of fun, they have EVERYTHING it takes to be entertaining characters with not a ton of things in common and yet building a solid friendship that hinges on their differences. I've seen a fair few examples of that kind of dynamic in other media, and it absolutely would be possible with Toph and Katara. It's really unfair that they couldn't capture their dynamics in such a way that both characters would SHINE, rather than constantly resorting to conflicts between them that never seemed to truly be resolved.

So: Toph should not be a problem for Katara. She should enhance her character and doesn't because of writing failures. One of the core failures is "mom friend Katara", of course: there's nothing inherently wrong with Katara stepping up and taking care of people she loves, but there's something very wrong with it when she's suddenly portrayed as this motherly figure when she's doing things that Sokka had been doing just fine in Book 1. Main reason why this is the case? Sokka got dumbed down to full-time class clown for whatever reason in Book 2. While he has good moments, a lot of times they went WAY overboard with making him a source of comedy this season and that, too, contributes to mom friend Katara. Since Sokka is being so meh? We even feel relieved that Katara is there to keep things together because nobody can expect the other three to do it, right? But... Sokka was doing it in Book 1. And there's no real development to explain him NOT doing it anymore once Toph joins in besides "Katara is now the mom friend and Sokka is just here to be funny". It's not organic development: it's forcing tropes that just don't fit. And while Katara's mothering doesn't feel as unpleasant as it could here, it ultimately forces a new interpretation and portrayal of her character that honestly isn't all that interesting, most of all when the other characters are constantly portrayed as "more fun" while she's just here to keep them in line.

It just isn't the same Katara we met in Book 1, and it shows in spades. Book 1 Katara would have been hyped to join Aang and Toph in chaos while Sokka screams at them to behave themselves. Book 2 Katara is the one trying to keep the other three in line, and there's genuinely zero development that led things to that stage. It's not organic storytelling. There's no growth that leads to that, and so, it feels off.

But the core problem of all these flaws in Book 1 and Book 2 is that they roll together and snowball into something far greater that then proceeds to just... disrupt everything we thought we knew or understood about Katara. We've been told she's a kind person above all else, someone who cares about people close to her, someone who embodies hope and strength and love...!

... And then Book 3 starts, and we're actually facing a Katara who shifts into a wholly different person with the speed of a whiplash that we're left not knowing who tf this is anymore.

"Mom friend Katara" absolutely comes back in Book 3, why lie? She takes care of people, she tries to provide, she tries to be nice and sweet and then also enforces discipline on Toph (particularly) when she's being irresponsible!

But the reason why The Runaway is such an unpleasant episode is because Katara's behavior is dialed up to a thousand, and the conflict between her and Toph feels WAY too similar to what it was when they were barely getting to know each other in The Chase. Why are they STILL clashing over such things? There are occasional glimpses of friendliness there in The Runaway, sure! But they're not so strong that you actually feel like that friendship supersedes their conflicts and their propensity to bicker and argue and hurt each other. Toph blatantly calls her out on her mothering and fully canonically confirms that Katara is The Mom Friend™. Where Toph is annoyed but eventually complies with doing what Katara wants to do in Tales of Ba Sing Se, this time Katara makes a huuuuuge fuss over Toph's misbehavior and her scamming Fire Nation people. And you could argue that Toph has every right to do it, or that Katara is right to be worried, just like Sokka used to worry about such things in Book 1...

But what we get is a stale dynamic that repeats the same problems we saw in Book 2, as well as Katara coming off as rather hypocritical because she, too, did dangerous shit and picked dangerous fights where she shouldn't have, and ignored everyone who told her not to do it: she gave Toph that kind of grief over things Katara was willing to do back when Toph wasn't in the group (see the pirates thing), and she will try to stop Toph from having fun on her own terms when nobody has ever tried to stop Katara from doing that in hers. Of course, any Katara advocate would read this and go "you're missing the point: Katara was sad and upset that she was being LEFT OUT! That's why she was so mad about this!" Then the irony of the matter is that this argument STILL reflects poorly on Katara. She gave her friend a tough time, called her a wild child and a crazy person, went through her personal belongings because "she could tell Toph was hiding something from her", so she fully disregarded Toph's privacy... all because she couldn't say "Wait, you guys went scamming Fire Nation people? Damn, why didn't you wait for me! I would've gone too!", and there you go, problem solved! Katara's not left out anymore!

Yes, of course, that's not how it WORKS, people can struggle to identify what they feel...!

... And now it's my turn to say that that's not the point.

The point is that Katara said and did hurtful things to her friend. Things she eventually regrets, yes, but that she didn't have to do at all. This is the same person who fed Appa a bunch of food that made it look like he was sick, all be it to keep the group from leaving the Jang Hui river village so she could go out of her way to heal the injured and sick without telling anyone what she was doing. That, too, was a choice she made with no concern regarding how the rest of her team might feel about it: was she doing something nice? Sure! But it's not fundamentally different from Toph doing whatever she wants with zero regard as to Katara's feelings on the matter. Katara KNEW she was stalling their journey and that Sokka wanted them to move on: she didn't care about his feelings or priorities, and the story eventually frames Katara as being in the right for feeling that way. Here, she's in the inverse scenario, only it's with Toph rather than Sokka, and instead of realizing that she, too, has made choices that were irresponsible/dangerous/risky and STILL went all out with them, down to fighting whoever opposed her choices? Katara just doubles down until she, again, breaches boundaries and overhears Toph and Sokka's conversation, WHICH IS ANOTHER CAN OF WORMS DUE TO THE SOUTHERN RAIDERS FOLLOW-UP...

The thing is, Katara as a mom friend is not even a good thing. It's not conducive to fun or interesting storytelling, not in Book 2, not now. It doesn't make Katara a more interesting and dynamic character. The way she's portrayed isn't so she looks tragic for taking this role, it's all about forcing these kids into tropes that don't necessarily add up to who they have been so far. Katara's mom friend status is NOT treated with any compassion. It's not handled as a sore, difficult subject outside of the ONE conversation Sokka has with Toph that Katara overhears. And it's not centered on Katara's tragedy, on how she overcompensates for her mother's absence, it's centered on Sokka accepting her as a motherly person and encouraging Toph to do the same thing. The people who saw further depth in it probably haven't looked at the script itself in a long time: you CAN see more to it, but that's not the point of the scene. That's not where it's going. And the fact that such a tragic situation is what conduces Katara to take up the mom friend role actively makes it look like... she shouldn't have it. Why would she be the mom friend if she's just overcompensating for Kya's death? If she's taking up responsibility by thinking that no one else will (a blatant lie because, again, in Book 1 there's NO SIGN of this behavior and it's Sokka who's in a role of responsibility compared to her), it suggests that EVERYONE ELSE ought to step up and stop "relying" (and Sokka very much uses that word) on Katara being the mom friend. It's not a healthy thing. It's a coping mechanism that seems to be actively damaging Katara: and the story doesn't acknowledge it that way.

So... "mom friend Katara", dialed up to a thousand in Book 3, absolutely has a connection with why her character loses its sheen by this point in the story. There's no attempt to deconstruct this coping mechanism by Katara. No indication from the rest of the team that maybe Katara should get to be a kid just like them and stop being so uptight (even though VERY often she's not that uptight but the show very much tries to pretend she is). It's Katara's initiative to do a scam, it's not Toph or Sokka or Aang who think she needs to join in on the fun, she basically inserts herself in it. So basically, those three take the route of saying "that's what she's like, we just gotta bear with it", instead of actually helping her. If we'd seen that? Mom friend Katara would actually be a fun element to witness deconstructed by the story. And I'm not blaming either Katara or the other three for this:

This is EMINENTLY a writing problem.

Mom friend Katara is not a good trope. It could be if the point was to help her break free from it. It's not. It's simply weak writing that can't handle two girls with proactive, aggressive personalities and a ton of agency, a lack of creativity in realizing how much potential there could be in making Toph and Katara the absolute best of friends. It's seriously a disservice to the two of them that this trope literally blooms over Toph joining the show and then NEVER gets resolved or chased away. And when you have characters like Sokka or Aang kind of joining the bandwagon of "yeah, Katara's a mom!" when the two of them traveled with her in Book 1 and she WASN'T that at all? It makes matters infinitely worse.

So, if you ask me? This is the first thing that makes Katara feel more unpleasant than ever before in Book 3.

The second thing is even worse.

We return to accountability, as well as to illogical flow of thought when it comes to the writing of Katara: in Book 1, we see a hopeful girl who never speaks ill of her father or betrays any manner of displeasure or distrust towards him. No sign of her being conflicted by what Hakoda is doing: the focus is entirely on Sokka's feelings on the matter once it finally comes up in Bato of the Water Tribe, and Katara is a secondary matter, if even that.

This would be fine if Hakoda hadn't come up at all as a subject throughout Books 1 and 2. If Katara had never had the potential opportunity to see her father in any of these instances and had backed out from them for bigger reasons than... plot reasons.

For reference: she's excited, just as Sokka is, when Bato says he can bring the kids to meet their dad again. They're HYPED. We see no sign of Katara being upset at Hakoda for leaving at this point. The only portrayed reason why she and Sokka decide not to go see Hakoda is because they think Aang needs them more and they decide to forgive him for hiding the map. Katara, from the get-go, is not as angry at Aang for hiding the map as Sokka is. Clearly, Sokka wants to see Hakoda far more intensely than Katara does: even so, there's no sign anywhere here that implies that Katara harbors resentment or dissatisfaction towards Hakoda.

Book 2 gives us a similar situation: Katara declines going to see Hakoda and offers to be the one who stays in Ba Sing Se so Sokka can go see Hakoda himself. Sokka is soooo thrilled and thanks her and calls her the best sister ever and Katara very much says she is, indeed, the best. Which she's allowed to, worth noting, I'm not saying her reaction to Sokka's praises was bad, it's actually funny: but what I AM saying is that she knows how much this matters to Sokka and that's why she makes the offer she does. It's also VERY convenient! Because logic dictates that, if Sokka stays behind, he realizes the Kyoshi Warriors aren't themselves far faster than Katara does (even though, to be fair, Katara didn't really have much time to realize it at all), and we wouldn't have Aang suffering over Katara's imprisonment because the one in chains would be Sokka and then Aang might just go "oh okay it's just Sokka, I can go cosmic if it's not Katara"

... yeah I'm being sarcastic I actually don't think Aang wouldn't have saved Sokka, but they very clearly had Katara stay behind first and foremost for this specific purpose...

But Katara's acknowledgement that this is a good thing for her brother makes you REALLY wonder how much of a secret grudge she was supposed to feel towards her father at this stage of the story. The truth, in my opinion? She wasn't actually supposed to resent Hakoda as she did, let alone quite so harshly.

My sister personally told me that she thought Katara's anger at Hakoda was a fine storytelling choice when I told her I didn't like it. She told me Katara herself most likely didn't realize how hurt she had been by her father's leaving, that it wasn't until she was around Hakoda again that she understood she resented him at all, and that she had a lot more pent-up rage and frustrations than she had EVER acknowledged, and they burst out frequently in Book 3. Which, you know, is one possible explanation that tries to make this whole thing more palatable. From a human standpoint? This is valid.

... From a writing point? Not so much.

A Katara who struggles to understand her heart (which... is odd, tbh. As far as they portray her, Katara tends to know exactly what she's feeling, why she's feeling it, and she acts on her emotions rather than brains more often than not) would be portrayed as confused over her own rage at Hakoda. She would not have been written as a snappy teenager who hates her dad. She would have snapped at him and then apologized by reflex, unsure of what's come over her. We would see Sokka trying to mediate between them too, probably asking Katara what's her deal, and she would have no idea how to explain it. Katara would be avoiding Hakoda, knowing she loves him, not knowing why she seems to hate him now, afraid of saying things she shouldn't. Every time she snaps at him, she should worry about what she did, she should fear for Hakoda's feelings, she should reflect on what's going on inside her heart...!

... But that doesn't happen. And that knocks SO HARD on the concept of empath/compassionate Katara that it basically turns her into a whole different person.

As I've said countless times so far: it's not about Katara being perfect. I don't WANT her to be perfect. But I DO want the show to acknowledge that she's not. I want the flaws to REALLY read as flaws. I want other characters to react to those mishaps on Katara's part, and I want HER to reflect on what she's doing and realize she's messing up, just as she does when she hurts Aang's feelings in the Waterbending Scroll, which is most likely the best situation where Katara actually owns up to the exact mistake she made and feels genuine, palpable, obvious remorse for it. But when you feature Katara lashing out at Hakoda, and everyone just staying quiet because "uuuuh, awkwaaaard...", it feels off. Aang asks Katara, outright, what's her problem with her dad! And Katara goes "What? What problem?" She's acting like she's not even aware of the fact that her behavior is out of place, basically gaslighting Aang into pretending that she didn't do anything rude or mean to Hakoda. Aang literally saw it with his own eyes and is the ONLY person to bring it up.

To make matters worse? Katara has been with Hakoda for WEEKS. It's not like they just crossed paths two seconds before Aang opened his eyes. The implication is that she's been behaving like this, or her behavior has been deteriorating towards Hakoda with no one worrying about it or trying to make her reason with it. for that long. Sokka didn't do anything. Hakoda just took the teenage rants and left her alone because that's what she wants. And when the one person brings up that she's not acting like herself? Katara pretends nothing's wrong and acts like everything's fine and she's not acting any differently from herself. Whether she actually is just lying to Aang or ALSO lying to herself is a matter of debate... but what it suggests is she's unwilling to confront the gravity of her choices and how she can be hurting her father with them.

This is NOT to say that Katara has no right to be angry about Hakoda abandoning her in the Tribe. She has every right to be upset and feel forsaken. Their mother died, and Hakoda left with all the men of the tribe, and Sokka was left behind, tasked to protect everyone, and Katara apparently felt responsible for the whole village too: as valid as Hakoda's quest to fight in the war might be, it's not out of this world for Katara to harbor frustrations and resentment over what happened.

What IS out of this world, and particularly, not appropriate to her character, is that her way to convey those feelings was something she gave herself to, completely, only to reason with it once Aang was missing so that the episode would conflagrate her problems with Aang and Hakoda into the same thing.

This is basically a dark expansion of what we've seen in Katara's treatment of Sokka since Book 1: where it was typically "humorous" when she was a jerk to him and paid no price for it, this time it's not humorous. This time, you're supposed to see her being a jerk and then go "aaaaw, poor dear," even if you're not supposed to get mad at Hakoda because he is very much a decent dad. The show was trying to have its cake and eat it too with this situation, because Katara DOESN'T apologize to Hakoda for being unfair to him: HAKODA APOLOGIZES TO HER. Hakoda acknowledges the pain he caused Katara and the damage his leaving has wrought upon his children by apologizing and explaining how much he missed them... but Katara does not acknowledge the pain she inflicted on her father by acting out when he wasn't doing anything wrong. Is this teenager behavior? You could chalk it down to that, but that's precisely why teenagers can be a pain in the ass! And that's very much how Katara is being portrayed if she's unwilling to acknowledge she acted out and hurt someone she loves!

Her problems and resentment towards Hakoda magically go away after that single conversation. After this? She loves him. No hard feelings left. If her problems with Hakoda were this deep and difficult to navigate and work through, either she bottled them up in the rest of the show and stopped them from affecting her father... or she just got over it that quickly. Which would be very unrealistic because Hakoda apologizing for leaving doesn't change the damage Katara suffered through because he was gone. A single apology doesn't fix everything that people read into Katara's deep anguish in this scene and episode. And yet that's very much how the show portrays it: Katara is 100% fine in every single other interaction with Hakoda she gets past the first episode of Book 3. Does that make sense? Is that good writing? No, actually: it's literally digging up a problem, making it up last minute with zero lead-up to it, where the ONLY way to read "lead-up" is to pretend that Katara always had ulterior motives to avoid going to see Hakoda, even though we NEVER were shown that she was hiding anything, something that could be VERY easily shown in the story if they'd always had this in mind. The truth is that they didn't. They made it up for this episode, forced it in there, didn't even write it right because nobody reacts to Katara's behavior reasonably except Aang, and she gets away with it without even having to apologize. That's... not good form for any character, let alone Miss Responsibility and Empathy, is it?

This is why it's such a problem that Katara acted as she did towards her father. It's not because this is an unthinkable flaw: it's because there's very much no lead-up to it, kind of like there's none with Korrasami's big reveal in LOK's finale. It's because there's no follow-up to it either. It's because we don't see Katara living up to her supposed core character traits, where she should have a realization that her choices and actions and behavior have hurt someone else, someone she cares about. None of that happens.

And I will say: it's different when it comes to her clashes with Zuko and her reactions to him in the second half of Book 3. This is basically the MAIN thing the fandom gives her grief for and I hate them for it: she has every right and reason and justification to show no empathy or compassion towards a person who, as far as she could tell, took advantage of her compassion in Ba Sing Se, of Aang's compassion frequently across Book 1, and paid them back for all of it by joining forces with Azula and showing no concern to help Aang when Azula almost killed him. I am no fan of Iroh's... but Iroh jumped in to help Katara and Aang escape, at risk of being captured. Zuko stood beside Azula and did NOTHING to help those two leave. He showed zero concern for Aang's survival. He saw his sister potentially murder someone and had ZERO REACTION. So, no offense but full offense: Katara's unwillingness to trust Zuko is JUSTIFIED. Not only is it justified? It's CORRECT. It's the only writing choice that makes sense. Sokka getting over it relatively quickly feels off to me, no matter if the Boiling Rock adventure isn't as bad as others might be. Aang not holding a grudge for too long kind of fits because it is Aang... but Katara being that mad at Zuko? That's 100% fine. It fits. It works. And anyone pretending that what I said about Hakoda applies to how she treated Zuko is just completely biased in Zuko's favor.

Katara and Zuko do not have a secret magical powerful soulmates bond in canon. Their one instance of bonding comes after multiple instances of the exact opposite thing. Katara and Sokka were 100% down for leaving Zuko to freeze to death in the North Pole, and the ONLY reason why Zuko survives is because Aang can't let that happen to him. It's AANG'S compassion that saved Zuko. Katara felt none, AND SHE DIDN'T HAVE TO FEEL ANY. Let's not forget that!

Moving on to Book 2, Katara actually makes her first offer of kindness to Zuko and Iroh in the Chase when she offers to heal Iroh after Azula's attack. Zuko's reaction is to lash out violently and yell at her to leave: who, exactly, would feel inclined to think this poor beautiful sad boy just needs love when you OFFER HIM kindness and his reaction is, in a manner of speaking "go fuck yourself I'll handle this on my own"? And it's worth bringing it up because it feels like the fandom is hilariously misled into thinking the Gaang magically knows what Zuko is up to and how he's growing and evolving, as if they were part of the audience: they're not. The last time Katara saw Zuko before Ba Sing Se is literally when Zuko refuses her help. We're also talking about Fire Nation people: Katara has every right and every reason to believe that Zuko is refusing her help, not out of personal, internal strife he's dealing with and has no idea how to handle... she very much can read this as "inferior Water Tribe peasant, you will not heal my uncle with your wretched waterbending!" Because... let's be real, that's what Zuko looked like to Katara across Book 1. She has no real reason to think he's any better or different from that until their catacombs scene...

... And he stabs her in the back and joins Azula there. Right after "bonding" with her.

So let's be VERY clear on that respect: Katara has no real reason to forgive Zuko. She has no real reason to feel empathy outside of the show constantly trying to push that she's kind and compassionate with no boundaries, even if she forsakes that kindness and compassion at random whenever the plot requires it. But her death threats to Zuko? They're completely fine by me. I'd be pissed if she had acted any differently, and if anything I hate how easy Zuko had it to befriend everyone but Katara.

... Not to say I'm happy with how he befriended Katara either, but anyway...

As this isn't Zuko meta, we're not going to get into the true core glaring issues in The Southern Raiders, because ultimately, that episode paints Zuko in a disgusting light that his fans are constantly gaslighting themselves about. He was not beinga heroic good dude helping someone he connected profoundly with. His behavior leaves so much to be desired and proves he hasn't unlearned a lot of toxic things he had internalized. He didn't unlearn them in this episode, either. But the GREATEST sin Zuko commits in this episode, without a doubt, is bringing Katara on a journey that ultimately did NOTHING for her. The only person benefitting from it was Zuko himself. I've seen people pretend that Katara finally found closure: she did not do such thing. She learned what kind of scum killed her mother, but she did not forgive him nor did she kill him. Closure would mean peace. Katara did not find peace with the situation. She's shown troubled, sitting at that pier, miserable, when Aang talks with her, she's STILL angry. That's not closure. It never was.

What it was, however, was the journey where Katara thanked Zuko and forgave him because..! Uh... because...

... Why, exactly, did Katara forgive Zuko here?

He brought her to her mother's killer: she found no closure from it. In fact, she learned the VERY disturbing truth that she hadn't realized so far: HER MOTHER DIED SPECIFICALLY TO SAVE HER. Her mother sacrificed herself for Katara's sake. She CANNOT find peace with this reality in a single afternoon because holy shit, who would? Katara KNEW her mother had died. It's not until Yon Rha tells her what happened that she understands what happened in the igloo. Katara herself, her waterbending skills, and the target she painted on her own back because of something 100% out of her control, something that is NOT evil and that the Fire Nation was hellbent on destroying, are the reasons why Kya was murdered. This is DISTURBING SHIT to deal with. And the show completely sidelines this revelation and the dark impact it could have on Katara, which, seriously, is HUGE, way worse than what happened with Hakoda, because it very much could have triggered a profound self-hatred by Katara towards her own skills because how tf could her bending cause her mother's death?! Not to mention the obvious: who was that source? Who told the Southern Raiders that there was a waterbender? Who the hell is responsible, beyond the Fire Nation, for her mother's death?

There's A LOT to unpack here.

And none of it matters because Katara is just supposed to forgive Zuko for exacerbating and worsening her trauma regarding her mother's death :') funny how that works.

This IS the point where Katara should make a display of darker sides of herself that she didn't know or understand. THIS is where Katara turning dark like Aang did after Appa vanished would make PERFECT sense. With this revelation about Kya that's beyond disturbing: not with Hakoda... and certainly not with Sokka.

The cusp of Katara's worst is, by far, her behavior with her brother in the Southern Raiders. I know a million excuses have been made for this moment: my problem is NOT the fact that she lashed out at him as she did and said something DEEPLY hurtful. It's the fact that KNOWING, SEEING HE'S IN PAIN...

... does not matter to her one bit.

Instead of a trite scene with Zuko spouting shit he does NOT mean (aka "violence wasn't the answer... but lol go kill my father okay??"), we deserved a scene with Katara and Sokka talking this out. People pretend it's fine as it is: it's not. Katara has spent the ENTIRE show disregarding her brother's feelings in a myriad of ways: this time, it was way more painful and way more hurtful and SHE KNOWS IT. It's not funny. She's not amused. She's not being a shithead little sister. She's ANGRY. She's UPSET. She has every right to be! What she DOESN'T have a right to do is hurt her brother DELIBERATELY and then escape every consequence from doing that.

There's very much no way to spin that moment into making Katara a decent sister. There's no way she remains true to her core values of being empathetic, kind and wholesome when she will insidiously, vindictively hurt her brother this way. And what I said earlier about her overhearing Toph and Sokka in the Runaway? It actually gets a follow-up in this scene: Katara telling Sokka that he didn't love Kya as she did is basically her WEAPONIZING the information that was NOT meant for her as her alleged evidence that Sokka didn't care about Kya as much as she did. As if his inability to retrieve Kya's memory was NOT a manifestation of trauma, as if it were something he's FINE with! He's not! How guilty must he feel for that? Does that matter to Katara at all? Why... nope. Because all that matters at that point is her own rage, her own feelings, her own fury. Which is, then, entirely against the character we've been told she is.

The lack of apology or follow-up to this horrible moment will never stop being one of the absolute biggest misfires in one of the WORST written episodes of this show. Yes, I said it. The more I ponder The Southern Raiders, the more I realize it's an immensely flawed speedrun to establish a friendship that simply doesn't add up. Katara and Zuko becoming friends after this journey requires some wild, absurd leaps of imagination that, boiled down to basics, don't make any sense. There's no reason for Katara to decide she'll forgive Zuko after she regains enough clarity. Why does she forgive him? Because he proved he'd rather make her happy than defend his nation anymore? Ironically, at no point does Katara show any appreciation of the fact that Zuko is setting aside his firebending supremacist attitude completely for her sake. So maybe that's not it.

Ah... is it because of how he, and he alone, was ready to help her go on this journey of revenge...?! Why, ironically, the only reason why ONLY Zuko goes on this journey is incredibly artificial and fake: this IS intended as Katara's "field trip" with Zuko. None of the field trips make sense, from a logical standpoint, as duo journeys. I've mentioned it to a few people: Sokka and Zuko could have brought Toph with them to the Boiling Rock, a metal location where her abilities would be VERY useful, used her as a false prisoner and turned her in as a captured ally of the Avatar's, who 100% will bait him into coming here to rescue her so that the Fire Nation can get him next! A cover as strong as that one might actually get them further along on that rescue attempt than what they did in canon. But this CANNOT BE... because it was Sokka's field trip with Zuko so nobody else is invited, even if they're very much not doing anything else (as is the case with Toph). Aang? Why didn't everyone join the firebending discovery with Zuko and Aang? They weren't doing ANYTHING in the Western Air Temple at the time. They very much could have gone with them too. But they don't. And that's exactly why Katara's trip works exactly as it does: it's the solo journey with Katara and Zuko, and the ONLY way to make it work is to show Sokka and Aang completely opposed to the concept of finding Yon Rha. I'm not saying I think Sokka and Aang would have been on board if they're allowed to remain IC... but they could have wanted to go on this trip with Katara regardless of not agreeing with what she wanted to do. Hell, as is OBVIOUS: Kya is Sokka's mom too. His opinions, his feelings on this subject, should matter just as much as Katara's do, and fuck anyone who pretends otherwise. These two are NOT supposed to be the well-known unhealthy siblings Zuko and Azula, who each got one parent in their corner and therefore the other parent treated them like they were worthless or a monster. Hakoda and Kya were parents to BOTH their children, and any narrative or interpretation that attempts to say that ONLY Katara's opinion on Kya matters is immediately ruled out, for me, as absolute bullshit spouted by someone not worth listening to. Point blank.

Also, the fact that Zuko USES Sokka to gain this information about the southern raiders, and then doesn't even extend the chance to Sokka to join them? When Sokka is basically his new best buddy? That... does not make sense. It basically portrays Zuko as a disloyal asshole who takes advantage of his friends for his purposes and tosses them aside, disregarding their feelings whenever it suits him.

So Sokka's treatment at the hands of this episode is just deplorable. Both Zuko and Katara are HORRIBLE to him... but Katara is our focus here, she's actively hurts Sokka and then proceeds to not care. Because that's how she has operated so far, and that's how she always will.

Hence: we have a long, long tradition of Katara not treating Sokka fairly all across the show. The reasons why it's not a fair or balanced relationship at all is because Sokka typically pays the price for being a dick to Katara: either she inflicts the punishment herself, such as when he's disrespectful in the Drill and she smacks him with the slurry, or the narrative inflicts some magical punishment instead that CONSTANTLY proves that Sokka is not allowed to be a dick without facing consequences for it. Does he ALWAYS learn the lesson? Sure he doesn't! But the consequences for it NEVER stop. He doesn't get away with being a jerk to his sister. That's forbidden. But Katara? She's allowed to get away with it every single time! And the reason why it gets worse and worse is because we went from relatively silly/comedic things, in which Katara did not apologize because "it's funny that she didn't apologize", to NOT funny things at all, such as this scene in Southern Raiders. Even just a troubled glance at Sokka, or a slight hesitation after seeing how hurt he is, would be enough for me: there's NOTHING. She doubles down and keeps charging ahead. Zero thoughts or concerns given to her brother.

If this isn't why you have issues with Katara, well, I don't know why it might be the case in your case x'D But I absolutely attest that the combination of "mom friend", "selective compassion particularly when it comes to her brother" and "absolute imperviousness to consequences for her mistakes" are the things that fully caused my initial appreciation of her character to shift into ambivalence and then into full blown dislike once I reached Book 3.

Worth noting: THIS IS A COMPLAINT ABOUT THE SHOW'S WRITING. Boiled down to basics, written by any more competent hands, I don't think Katara would have acted the way she did often, ESPECIALLY in episodes like The Awakening or The Southern Raiders. I categorically refuse to write Katara in my stories as someone who gets free passes for EVERYTHING she does. I also refuse to portray her as the mom friend, particularly in Gladiator. There's a lot of depth you can give this character! So much you can do, so much worth exploring... and canon just settled for stunting her and then only bringing her out to play in ways that make her unpleasant, not particularly bright and extremely resistant to character development even after allegedly learning lessons (see how her initial behavior around Hama, who shows red flags often, isn't all that different from how it was with Jet? There's only a handful of moments where it looks like Katara MIGHT be wary, and yet they're quickly overcome by her excitement, which Hama manipulates in her favor until she does the bloodbending reveal). So I'm NOT saying Katara had no potential... but I am saying the show itself failed her, big time, because of how she was written. A quick glance through the transcript of the Puppetmaster to confirm my memories that Katara shows no sign of concern over Hama when Sokka finds her suspicious reveals that, after Hama shows them her comb and that she's from the Southern Water Tribe, Sokka, and Sokka alone, apologizes for suspecting her of being sketchy. Nothing from Aang, even though he was part of it too. Nothing from Toph, either. And certainly nothing from Katara. Only Sokka apologizes. As usual.

So... what does this tell you? What does this tell any of us? That Katara's development is... erratic, at best. That it's not linear isn't a bad thing, but that it contradicts itself non-stop, that her core traits come and go willy-nilly as the plot demands it, that her motivations to do things (like forgiving Zuko) don't add up to her experiences or to any lead-up we've witnessed, is most certainly not good.

If I were to rewrite ATLA, the main characters I'd want to rewrite into making a lot more sense than they do, and making their arcs actually logical, are Zuko and Katara. I'd definitely add a few rewrites for Iroh, particularly to make him WAY more accountable for shit than he ever was, and to show he's not universally loved and shouldn't be, since people would have very reasonable grievances with him. I'd also rewrite a handful of things with Aang, too. Toph, full-stop, deserves a growth arc of her own beyond getting stronger and getting used to having friends. Girl has the range. They just never let her explore it. And of course, I'd change a fair few elements of Azula's writing as well. But I feel like no characters would warrant a deeper intervention than Zuko and Katara, precisely because they constantly fail to live up to all the stuff people keep pretending they're flawless exhibits of.

And this is one more issue we've got going on with Katara:

The fandom ABSOLUTELY has been unfair to Katara. A lot of people hate her for no reason. A lot of people who potentially have unexamined racism making their hearts' choices for them and they despise her just because she dared not have fully-white skin. A lot of people pick completely ridiculous things to get angry at her, such as people who HATE HER because she's "rude to Zuko". Just, fuck off. That's about the stupidest reason to hate this character and stupid reasons for that have been heard plenty.

But Katara's fans have become... reactionary. They appear think that any criticism to her character NEEDS to be fought off with "she was right tho" or "she has every reason to act this way" or "she's HUMAN she's allowed to make mistakes you heathen!! That's what a flawed character is like!"

Here's the kicker, though: if you have justifications and excuses for every little unpleasant thing Katara EVER does? You're basically taking a dump on her character yourself and saying she IS flawless.

Flaws in characters are bad things that cannot be justified. They can be funny! They can be annoying. They can be infuriating. But they're things that inconvenience other characters, that hurt them, that show they're not above or beyond doing harmful things! All of what I listed in this crazy long post are Katara's flaws. The reason why I don't like the way these flaws were handled are all the things I already have talked about: no accountability for flaws is basically saying that these flaws don't matter. No follow-up, no lead-up, means Katara is allowed to be as much of an ass as she wants to be and nobody cares: THIS IS NOT FAIR. This is not how ANY character should be written. This is the core reason why I've spent years feuding with Zuko and Iroh: they get away with shit they should NOT get away with, EVER. They're not held accountable for so much they should be. This happens to Katara too. particularly in her dynamcis with her brother. And when people see those flaws and just start listing reasons why it's actually okay? All you're doing is dehumanizing these characters to pretend everything they EVER do is fine.

Also worth noting... character flaws are the way characters grow. If a character is DEEPLY flawed, you know what kind of work you have cut out for you as a writer. If you're writing a story heavily steeped on character development? Then those flaws are VITAL to the work you have to do in order to develop these characters!

But when Zuko is unnecessarily violent and you're told "it's because his culture and family are!", you rightfully assume that as he drifts away from Fire Nation ideology, Zuko WILL grow less violent. Then, you watch how he picks an unnecessary fight with Aang in the finale because everyone's being lazy, an EXTREMELY violent fight at that, and you contrast his earlier behavior with it and... where's the difference, exactly? How did he grow or learn better if violence is STILL his immediate reaction to anything he doesn't like?

Thus, when Katara's flaws get overlooked, ignored, disregarded? What kind of development does Katara get, if none of her flaws are addressed in a way that makes it look like she's genuinely learned any lessons? At least, none of the worst, biggest, glaring flaws were addressed. None of the things that she SHOULD be troubled by and that she shouldn't be happy with herself over, especially after seeing how she hurts people with her actions. This isn't cool. This isn't a fun way to write a character. And it's so glaringly unpleasant when you can so very easily contrast this with the well-known terrible flaw Sokka displays early on: sexism! And then he gets his ass kicked by Suki and he learns to respect the Kyoshi Warriors... and we never see him displaying that particular flaw again. THAT is what growth looks like! What can we point to with Katara that remotely compares to this? That she accepted Zuko? Yeah, no, that sincerely could not count any less. Her personal arc CANNOT be about Zuko. That she got over her mom's death? She didn't. So that's not it either. That she helped Aang save the world? So her personal arc was about Aang and not herself? Was her whole role in the story to play Aang's cheerleader, then? Because if that's it... she was doing that just fine at it since day one. She's the only person who faithfully believed the Avatar would return well before Aang turned up in her life, if the first episode's introduction is to be believed.

So... what, exactly, was Katara's arc? If it's just her waterbending skills, then she's as stunted as Toph, unexplored and underdeveloped and left to just strengthen her fighting skills while Aang and Zuko and Sokka are getting full character arcs, even if very lowkey but very much effective in Sokka's case, where they develop and grow (or they should) into the men they're supposed to be to end the war! Why don't Katara and Toph get similar arcs? Why aren't they challenged on a level that actually provides them with lasting, solid, provable growth, where you can look at them where they started out and see how they ended up and conclude their journey was beautiful?

I insist... writing. Weak writing. Failures to understand/develop characters properly. And of course, lack of accountability in storytelling. I wrote that one focusing mostly on Zuko... but it's very much applicable to every character who fails to own up to the things they should and deserve to face consequences for.

Anyway... this is what I'd say about Katara atm. I'm not 100% sure this is everything because I might have overlooked some stuff that also made Katara's character kind of backfire (while I'm no Kataang hater, I 100% agree that the ship should have been written better too, and after writing them whenever I have, it's honestly kind of ridiculous how such an easy ship could get fucked over so badly by weird writing choices...). Whether you agree with these assessments or not, ultimately, there are valid reasons to feel offput by Katara and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Most of all when you DID appreciate and cherish the character once before, but her fans just jump to the conclusion that you must be a mindless hater to think she's anything but flawless (this, while claiming they love that she's flawed, then they proceed to reveal they have no idea what a flaw is...).

(final note: SORRY IT TOOK ME FOREVER TO ANSWER! Super lengthy answer to make up for it, I hope :((( sorry)

#anon #I am not tagging the character directly but I bet this is gonna show up in her tag anyway because Tumblr gonna Tumbl #look #if you're the kind of katara fan who cannot stand a single word against her #just don't read this for your sanity of mind #... but if you go ahead and do it anyway?#don't come back at me with a million arguments to prove your fave is indeed flawless #because you're basically just spitting upwards at that point #and further proving that you do not understand character growth or development in the least #she's not a goddamn religious figure she's a fictional character #every fictional character that's worth something is flawed #and flaws are not always going to be cutesy pretty things #such is the case with Katara #the writing of this show is a mess in many regards #but they fucked up in particular with some characters the fandom adores #and I hate how the fandom acts like that's not the case at all #just to take trips into delululand and absolve them of every single thing they did wrong #and all the very deserved consequences for their worst actions #because the show itself dropped the ball hard enough in that respect for the fandom to do the same #you do you #but no argument will change my mind #and if none will change yours?#... skip past this post :')#it's a free world

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hell-heron · 1 year

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Love Interests and TWOW/ADOS speculation - Why Tyrion And Sansa Make Sense To Me

I've been wanting to make a contribution to the Sanrion fandom for so long, but I can't do anything artistically and only write once in a blue moon, my only real fandom skill is rambling. So, rambling time!

1) The Original Outline

Yeah, I know. I know, sorry. In the original outline, Tyrion is controversially involved in a love triangle with Arya and Jon. I'm not interested in the notion that GRRM repartitioned this love triangle amongst the Stark sisters or anything of that kind, nor in the idea that nothing actually changed from it. I think it's most likely that Jon and Daenerys will be romantically involved, and that Bran and Arya will see the completion of their relationships with their secondary love interests in the epilogues/ADOS, though that obv can only be a theory. What do I find relevant, then? That

1) Tyrion is said to befriend Sansa. While their nonconsensual marriage has its sweetness and they think comparatively fondly of one another considering the terrible situation, they can't be said to be developing a friendship in canon. That might be for the future! Still, it is very interesting to think how that may have happened. It Is possible that Sansa died in the original outline (no, its never actually mentioned, contrary to popular opinion, its only implied her baby is killed) but clearly she lives long enough to bitterly rue her choices, and it seems to be implied Tyrion befriends Sansa before he does Arya by the wording. Was this friendship developed in facing the horrors of the court and the issue of their conflicting loyalties together? Was it an important part of Tyrion's choice to defect, after having gone so far for his family as to burn Winterfell? There's so much room for speculation.

2) On a meta level, GRRM explicitely parallels them here as his grayest protagonists, the most conflicted and hardest to love. They both have sweeter journeys in the finished canon, but I think the intention was the same, and for me, the execution sealed the deal splendidly.

2) Fondness

Tyrion and Sansa have every reason in the world not to be fond of one another, but they are. Supposing that their marriage did not happen just because GRRM didn't know how to occupy valuable writing space in ASOS, the purpose must be to make them hate one another or to grow closer: they very clearly do not hate one another.

Tyrion is protective of Sansa over and over before and after they are wed, he's kind to her at Joffrey's nameday tourney, is interested in her wellbeing after the dissolution of her betrothal to Joffrey, protects her when Joffrey has her beaten for Robb's victory, puts himself at risk to avoid her a bedding ceremony, and does his best over and over to ease her suffering during their marriage, independently of whether he succeeeds. Often, though not always, he's also quite self aware and understanding of the fact Sansa is mistrustful and not overtly appreciative of his kindness, in a world where people are always wanting Sansa to be "grateful and obedient". Even at his bitterest and more pissed at Sansa, he protects her in his testimony about Joffrey's murder. These repeated instances are not needed for us to know that Tyrion is kind and fond of children, we've already been shown that very well. This is so obvious it hardly bears repeating, and this is a Sansa Month meta, so let's see Sansa's more subtle fondness.

We see in Sansa's thoughts once she's free and able to collect herself that she is, in fact, grateful to Tyrion's actions. He was kind to her. He protected her from Joffrey, not Littlefinger. She immediately protests his innocence of Joffrey's murder to Littlefinger. She finds herself wanting to tell Lysa that he was kind, but having to say he "had whores" instead, much like she was forced over and over again to dissimulate her loyalty to her traitor mother and brother.

We even have this pretty damning quote

Moreover, even when Sansa is desperately trying to be as unengaged as possible in the marriage and not attract attention in any way as she waits her chance to escape, she does have an interest in caring for Tyrion as a wife. She tried to curb his drinking on their wedding night in a way I don't think is out of self-preservation, because I don't think she would consider him being slightly drunker while he's already sloshed to be a greater danger to her than him being pissed because she dared contradict him, based on her experience. She is apprehensive about him confronting Joffrey again, she wishes to dance with him at their wedding, and she shows an interest in what he'll wear to Joffrey's wedding even though she knows she'll be peacing out right after it! It doesn't really reflect on her in anyway! Yet it's a role that comes quite instinctive to her. It's painful to see a 12 year old feel the need to do that, but it is how she as a very traditional person expressed her feelings.

Obviously these are sweet nuggets in a very bitter sea. Sansa and Tyrion in the books are sadly two people who don't trust each other, who hit on each other's negative baggage quite heavily, who have no wish to hurt one another, yet they do basically everytime they talk because of a situation they have more or less been forced in. Yet it's a dynamic GRRM thrives on and it's something that works as extremely shippy for me.

3) Endgame Desires

I'm someone who doesn't give that much thought to TWOW/ADOS, as someone who's bad at predictions and doesn't have too much hope for them to ever come. However I've developed the idea that Sansa's ultimate return will be to a rebuilt King's Landing. For Arya and Sansa to me the most significant place will be the one where they started their journey, where they quite literally poured their blood and tears and knew intimately in the darkest details and that shaped them as people before they even had agency enough to enbark on their developmental journeys in Braavos and the Vale. So I'm enamored with the idea that both will return to Winterfell, but ultimately Arya shall be lady of Harrenhal or anyhow have an important role in the Riverlands, and Sansa will come back to court not as a pawn but as a player once she has been given back the sense of home and safety and belonging she lost.

It's very widely theorized and foreshadowed that Tyrion will be Dany's hand and that Dany may be the endgame ruler, there's no need of my rambling for that. What struck me recently is how Sansa has been in the later books given an arc heavily antiparallel to the tragic story of her aunt Lysa, who before she was the lady of the Eyrie was the Hand's wife. Sansa's journey is paralleled-with-a-twist to hers in many ways (notably her making many of the mistakes Lysa made as a child and seemingly going towards mending them as an adult) and it would be satisfying to me to see her take up this role in a way that allows her to reach, unlike Lysa, real political and cultural agency in the environment of court intrigue that is to her most natural.

This would be a role of particular responsibility and influence, of course, in a court that lacks a Queen consort, perhaps because there is, you know a queen regnant instead 🤭 Dany and Sansa are Cersei's closest foils, and it would be so satisfying to see two "younger and beautiful queens" take up the role which she despised and the role which she failed at, that of chief lady and patroness of the court and that of ruling queen, and be so much better at them than she was.

4) Small things in common and foreshadowings

We know from Tyrion's bitter memories of Tysha that he enjoys

1) a girl who sings

2) blue eyes in which you can drown

3) this banter about the need or lack thereof of highborn people to be able to make their own fire, which i suppose there's a different attitude to in the North but it struck me

During their wedding, Sansa stands in defiance when Tyrion attempts to cloak her, but does kneel for the kiss, maybe foreshadowing refusal of him as a Lannister but acceptance as a person.

They both have their actions uncredited during the Battle of Blackwater, but they also both have a moment of not underestimating the other where everyone else does:

I think they genuinely just want similar things in life? In ASOS, they both have some of the loveliest passages about yearning for children and domesticity of the whole series. They enjoy city life and luxury and books and the pleasures of the table. Though Sansa is so new to it, they're both energized and intellectually gratified by feeling they get people's motivation and are on the top of the intrigue. They also get some parallel descriptions of their skill:

Sansa would have known who he was, and the fat one too, but Arya had never taken much interest in titles and sigils.

"The Boltons skin their enemies." Jaime remembered that much about the northman. Tyrion would have known all there was to know about the Lord of the Dreadfort, but Tyrion was a thousand leagues away, with Cersei.

They both have very complex ways of processing trauma that it would be very long to write about, but it breaks my heart how they both describe it in similar ways:

Finally, I think its very interesting that Seasons of My Love is given to us as the leitmotive of Tyrion's love life, yet the verse about sunset-colored hair never happens in his chapters... Yet? 🤭

#sansamonth2023 #sanrion #op #i def forgot some things lol. ive just been rotating this for months and its so self indulgent in all the little details. it was nice to #embrace that fandom tradition

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storm-and-starlight · 6 months

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Narrative Absence in Gravity Falls

Or, the reason why Ford's introduction DIDN'T go down like the Stan Balloon

(you know the one)

Lets talk about narrative absence, character introductions, and plot twists in Gravity Falls, because honestly? There's some really fascinating things to talk about. Spoiler warning for a show that's ten years old at this point, I guess? and essay below the cut

Ford's introduction is one of those plot twists that, mishandled, would have fallen flatter than the second dimension -- a new character introduced barely a handful of episodes before the massive finale, with massive backstory that changes everything we think we know about the setting, the backstory, and one of the lead characters? It sounds like a recipe for flubbing the landing and yet it's one of the best character reveals of, imo, all time. Like... the kind of reveal I want to write an essay about. Which I'm doing!

Part of the tricky thing with last-minute reveals is not only not having the time to let the audience get to know the new person the way they know the old cast, but also getting the character's place in the narrative to feel earned. A piece of writing advice I've heard is to never introduce a new character more than three-quarters of the way through a story, and two-thirds is better if you can manage it. Ford shows up at literally the last possible second, according to that (seriously, episode thirty out of forty total, and three of those are the finale), and yet he meshes so well it's like he was always there! And it's because he kind of always was. We never saw Ford, but we saw the holes he left behind, and in seeing those holes we could see what kind of person he would be, and so he's not really a new character at all -- he's Stan's version of what Dipper is to Mabel, and he was all along.

(A really quite obvious example of the whole "Stan's version of what Dipper is to Mabel". Just look at that sweater!) (Which, incidentally, is relevant to another point from later in the meta.)

Part of why it worked is, admittedly, the textual foreshadowing, but there are already enough discussions of that (right down to the DVD commentaries) that I don't really feel the need to go into it here, and also it's totally possible for a plot twist to be foreshadowed and STILL come off as stupid, like, the stupidity doesn't rely on the fact that the audience could have picked up on it beforehand. So we'll leave the foreshadowing out for now, and talk about the other major element why the Ford reveal works so well: the space in the narrative. We never saw Ford, but we saw the giant gaping hole he left behind, and we could see the shape of him in it. He's not really a new character -- his outline was there all along.

Okay, "giant gaping hole" might not be the best way to describe it. Narrative absence might be better -- there's a... gap in the story, a place where a character should be and yet isn't. In Gravity Falls, there are three of these -- the big honking WHO'S THE AUTHOR? that's the main mystery of the entire show, and two others that are... subtler. Because WHO'S THE AUTHOR is 1.) explicitly discussed in text and 2.) a driving element of story structure, rather than a negative space in story structure, and therefore something that doesn't need to be explained like the other one does, I'm not really gonna bring it up until much later.

The other major absences -- the ones that only come about because of the way Gravity Falls is built as a story -- are a lot more interesting.

Gravity Falls as a story is structured a lot around the idea of narrative foils and counterparts. There are a lot of these in the show -- pretty much every character who has a consistent speaking role in multiple episodes comes in a duo -- Wendy and Soos, Candy and Grenda, the tall teens vs the goth teens, Manly Dan and Tyler Cutebiker -- it's not something that was meant to be an explicit symbolic element (at least to my interpretation), but it is something that was on the writers and character designers minds.

The most prominent of these opposing pairs is Dipper and Mabel, who are outright narrative foils -- they are markedly different in every way, and their differences are complimentary, meant to help make the other character shine, or to fill narrative roles that the other one cannot. It's a very balanced way of making a pair of main characters, and it's really noticeable. Very neat, very symmetrical, very clean.

(Yeah, I know it's just a screenshot of the first episode, but it's a nice example of how their characters are opposites. First episodes are good at that.)

This is where the first absence comes in: Stan Pines has no opposite.

He's just straight up not given a foil in the show, and for someone so important to the entire narrative, that's... noticeable. Soos and Wendy aren't his direct opposites, and he and Dipper are very different people but are never arranged as opposing counterparts that fill in the holes of the other's narrative the way a proper foil does (this actually comes in later, like, Dipper is sort of set up to be opposite to Stan but it's a really weak sort of opposite -- the basics are there but the narrative never focuses on them the way it does on how Dipper and Mabel actively complement each other), and Stan and Mabel are set up not as a contrasting pair, but as a complementary pair. This goes beyond simply the fact that she's textually his favorite twin (though that is an element of it! That's a pretty darn big element of it!) -- she's shown to be basically a younger, nicer version of him. The clashes he has with her aren't about being different, they're about being too similar, or aimed at the same goals. Boss Mabel is the best example of this, with Mabel taking over Stan's job and having to become like him, but Land Before Swine also reinforces that connection with their fight being the main conflict of the episode and Dipper getting the B-plot with Soos.(Hence part of where the Dipper thing comes in -- Mabel is foil to Dipper, and Stan is similar to Mabel, and so Stan and Dipper have elements of foil-dom but aren't actually foils.)

Hell, from Not What She Seems she even gets the famous "Grunkle Stan, I trust you" line, while Dipper is placed as being the one to not trust Stan.

Stan Pines stands alone as the only character without a contrast in an entire cast full of pairs, and it leaves things unbalanced. Like, once again, the Dipper thing comes back in, because if they wanted to make a balanced set of relationships it would be set up like a triangle, with the similarities and differences between Stan and Dipper and Stan and Mabel focused on in the story itself, but instead it's just Mabel who gets the plotlines emphasizing her thematic connections with Stan, and Dipper just gets plotlines dealing with their relationship as people, which is a very different experience.

And this is the source of the second absence: Dipper Pines has no complement.

This one is less dramatic than the foil relationship, because "contrasting pairs" are just straight up a fundamental design aspect of the show as a whole, but it's still very much there. Mabel is shown as being strongly similar to Stan, but Dipper doesn't have anyone who shares his interests at the level they matter to him. There's no one with whom he clicks. It's a negative space in the story, and it makes the whole thing lopsided. Dipper should have a similar counterpart, and Stan should have a foil, and the way the rest of the relationships are structured and the characters are designed it's kind of glaringly obvious that they were designed and written with those roles in mind, and yet... there's nothing.

It leaves two very big holes in the story -- subtle ones, yes, that you probably aren't even going to pick up on at all your first time through the show (I certainly didn't, it took me a long time to pick out all the little story-structure-and-themes related stuff that generates this) -- but they're very, very much there. And, really, the place they intersect is... interesting. "Stan's foil, who is complement to Dipper, whose relationship with Stan is the same as Mabel's relationship to Dipper" (except different, because there's a whole nother essay I could write on how Stan&Ford and Dipper&Mabel are themselves a contrasting pair, in that one set of twins "got it right" when the other set "got it wrong", but that's only semi-relevant here and really requires Ford to be part of the analysis) ends up in really only one place -- "Stan's nerdy twin sibling who is connected and deeply involved in the mysteries of Gravity Falls".

And whaddaya know, that's exactly what we got. There's a big honking hole in the narrative, and Ford fits it perfectly, because he was the reason the hole was there in the first place.

It dovetails so nicely with WHO'S THE AUTHOR because that's also a big honking hole in the narrative, it's just one that's talked about in the text because, well, the characters can see it, so they can talk about it. (Gravity Fall is, alas, not meta enough to have the characters discuss the thematic implications of their own narrative arcs and character relationships.) It's the biggest absence in the story, and it gives Ford a textual place to fit in, and that gives him just that extra little bit of thematic consistency with the rest of the show, which makes his reveal that magic combination of unexpected (because holy shit Stan has a twin????) and expected the whole time (because holy shit of course Stan has a twin, it all makes sense now!), and that in turn leads to it being one of the best character reveals ever.

---

(There's one more thing I'd like to talk about here, and it's "how did Hirsch manage to write something so subtle into the story in the first place"? Because Gravity Falls, for how good and tight of a mystery it is, is surprisingly unplanned (seriously, watch the episode commentaries, it's honestly really cool how they managed to take random elements they tossed in for flavor and build up on it to enhance the mystery). I think the answer is "because he knew there was supposed to be a character there in the first place", which -- that'll do a LOT of surprising things to your ability to foreshadow and make room in a story. Knowing how it's going to end means even subconsciously, an author knows what needs to happen in that story to make room for that ending, and knowing that there was going to be a character who'd be Stan's foil and Dipper's thematic parallel, and that the most important thematic parallel in the entire show would be the one reflecting Dipper and Mabel's relationship in the older generation that didn't quite get it right. And Hirsch and the writers, obviously, have an incredibly strong grasp of the characters in the show, like I could write another entire essay on how well Gravity Falls manages to pull off "character as fate" and "character as plot driver".

Anyways, all of this really boils down to OH MY GOD LOOK HOW GOOD THE CHARACTER WRITING IS IN THIS SHOW IT FULLY FORESHADOWED FORD'S EXISTENCE EVEN WITHOUT ACTUAL PLOT SUPPORT and like. that's basically just my entire opinion on Gravity Falls anyways.)

#gravity falls #stan pines #ford pines #stan and ford #gravity falls meta #meta #why yes I AM writing meta for gravity falls #a show that is over ten years old and had one of the most active analytic fandoms ever #and I'm having a fucking amazing time doing it

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marypsue · 8 months

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hi mary! do you have any book recommendations for fans of the indian lake trilogy and/or horror books in general? i love your writing (followed way back for your gf fics lol) and would love to hear if theres anything in particular you'd recommend ^^

Oh hello hello hello! You've activated my trap card.

Honestly, I read less horror than I let on, and have started reading it more recently than not, so this may be a rather short list. But yeah I absolutely have some recommendations! If you enjoyed My Heart Is A Chainsaw (I really have to read the sequel) and you like my writing, I think our aesthetic and narrative sensibilities should be pretty similar, so hopefully these will be books you'll also enjoy.

First on the list and most obvious is of course My Best Friend's Exorcism, by Grady Hendrix. It's perfect companion reading for My Heart Is A Chainsaw, also being about two teenage girls navigating a difficult period in their friendship, complicated by the fact that something supernatural may or may not be trying to kill them and everyone around them, and may or may not, in fact, exist. Abby and Gretchen and their friendship are so wonderfully drawn, the absurd humour only underlines the helpless horror of their situation, and the climax made me bawl like a fucking infant. 11/10 no notes.

I'd also recommend We Sold Our Souls, also by Grady Hendrix, for some of the same and some slightly different reasons. If you were drawn in by Jade's girl-alone-against-the-world situation and her punky, horror-movie-obsessed alternative vibe, you'll like Kris Pulaski and her heavy metal quest to get her life and her music back. Another one that made me cry, and it's only getting more timely and relevant with every passing year.

I really liked Nick Medina's Sisters of the Lost Nation, about an older sister looking for her younger sister after the latter disappears from their reservation after a secret rendezvous at the recently-constructed casino. Anna and Jade share a certain 'nobody else is going to fix this, so it's up to me' sensibility, the way the author pulls together ancient mythology and modern horrors is well-crafted and spooky, and there's a deeply intentional queer thread running through this one from start to finish. Warning, though, this is a deeply, deeply sad book.

In terms of meta horror about horror, Riley Sager's Final Girls surprised me with how good and gripping it was. I picked it up expecting easy-reading paperback fluff, and got sucked right in. If you crossed over Halloween: H20 with Twin Peaks, you might get something like this book. I never see anybody talking about it anywhere ever and I have to strongly recommend it. (Unfortunately, it didn't focus as closely on the relationships between the 'final girls' as I wanted it to, but I still wasn't disappointed.)

Joe Hill's N0S48U kicked my ass and made me say 'thank you'. This one's pretty tragic, so maybe give it a miss if you don't want to read about bad things happening to characters you like, but, well, this is horror. Notable because the antagonist is Christmas-themed, and honestly, I've never seen anyone else so effectively harness the crawling feeling of Wrongness that seeing Christmas shit in July gives me.

And, going wayyyy back, one of the first horror novels I actually read all the way through (on the advice of a friend), Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. If you were a My Side Of The Mountain / Hatchet kind of kid, this is the book for you. And if for some obscure reason you haven't read Carrie yet, what are you waiting for.

I also read Paul Tremblay's The Pallbearers' Club, which somehow didn't quite manage to deliver on what I was hoping for, but which you might enjoy if you liked some of the other books on this list. If you like punk music and/or characters who like punk music, meta conceits, and New England folklore, give it a shot. (I think I knew a little too much about the subject matter going in for some of the big ~surprises~ to actually surprise me.)

I've also got on my TBR list Edgar Cantero's Meddling Kids, Stephen Graham Jones' The Only Good Indians, Jessica Johns' Bad Cree, and Riley Sager's The House Across The Lake and Survive the Night. I can't speak for any of them yet, though.

(And tossing a movie onto this list, you might really enjoy Netflix's The Final Girls. It's a lot fluffier than My Heart Is A Chainsaw, but for a fun meta slasher horror-mostly-comedy, it was a solid good time. With an ambush sequence that was pretty clearly inspired by Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys!)

#to read #chatter #grady hendrix is the terry pratchett of horror. to me.#also did I say thank you for the compliment to my writing? because I don't think I said thank you for the compliment to my writing #thank you!!!

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deathdxnces · 8 months

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💭 + riven (i know u hate the ruination stuff but i wanna hear about how u think irelia should have handled it)

SEND 💭 + A TOPIC/WORD/QUESTION AND I'LL WRITE A META ABOUT IT

— @couturiere (this is so old but. hi. also sorry i wrote a complete essay--)

uahsishdis listen i don't think all of the ruination stuff is necessarily terrible. i actually just particularly dislike what was done with irelia, and the stuff with riven is a major part of it. but i think the thing is it needed time an event like that was never going to be able to give it.

irelia's hatred towards noxians runs quite deep after everything she endured because of them, and it is pretty generalized. i said it a bunch of times before but she doesn't see in them enemies who are also people; her views are very harsh and dehumanizing. and that's towards any noxian; but riven isn't any noxian. she was actively part of the invasion.

a fact that, according to their interaction during the ruination, irelia is aware of. so you put her with a noxian who was military and part of this specific invasion, one of those who actually did cut down her people, and who changed her mind only when she saw what noxus was doing to all of them (noxians included) with the chembombs... well. don't expect irelia to be civil in the slightest. she couldn't care less riven feels guilty now. her single redeeming quality is that she doesn't serve the empire anymore, and even then, irelia would think it rings hollow if she's not actively opposing them.

i went back to steadfast heart because although irelia appears very briefly, i remembered i didn't hate what was there, and i do stand by it! i think her initial reaction as portrayed in the comic is very in character.

she is, from the start, very aggressive. ready to attack, really, her blades already pointed at riven. and even when senna tries to intervene and calm her down, irelia is still angry. as she should be! like i said, from her point of view, knowing riven had a role in the invasion, she shouldn't be able to just let go of that anger immediately.

and i think it makes sense a world-ending threat works to force irelia to not try to kill her immediately! it is what stops her in the comic, even though it's made obvious her hatred hasn't diminished in the slightest. she actually makes a point to ensure riven she hasn't forgotten and ionia will not forget — the truce is temporary, because saving the world matters most and she can't do it alone, and the sentinels won't help if she kills riven.

so in that regard, i think the comic does a good job. but because i really want to take this opportunity and run with it to talk about everything ruination related and what i like and dislike about it, i went back to watch the visual novel stuff. it starts well! irelia does outright attack which is even better than threatening to.

and although she stops when it's said they're sentinels, her first reaction is still to question riven's presence (and the sentinels' legitimacy, as a result). she questions why they'd be working with a known war criminal, and when it's obvious her issue is with riven, senna questions what's the matter with riven (which. valid i suppose, i don't think she's bothered to catch up with the noxus-ionia situation uashuhsa). and it's actually!! really good that irelia also makes a point to say some may have forgiven riven, but she didn't.

riven says irelia is right, she did many things she regrets, etc etc, irelia isn't moved. and then after that i don't like how it goes aisudhfiu but i won't get in details not riven related, since that was the question. when she does agree to work with the sentinels, she still refuses to address riven directly and tells senna to 'keep that one' away from her because she doesn't trust her. she also makes a point of riven having to stay outside when they meet karma, because it is a sacred place she won't let riven defile with her presence c:

lots of things that aren't relevant to this discussion happen, and they interact after irelia joins the sentinels. during the fight with karma, she hits irelia pretty bad and riven is the one to step up and save her, a fact riven is eager to point out. irelia is not impressed. she actually doesn't hesitate to be pretty brutal in her reply.

riven doesn't reply, irelia says even though they're both sentinels they're not allies. riven says she was 'trying to be polite' and storms off. in other chapters they sometimes have little interactions (irelia continues to be as unfriendly as she can and riven answers with sarcasm). interesting to note that in the p&z part irelia says she's seen what the chemicals can do, and points out so does riven c:

i do like when she's being mean. i still think it's what makes the most sense. i also think it makes a lot of sense that when she does that, she clearly hits a sore spot (and it is! this is such an important part of riven's story!) so riven immediately argues, for once seriously instead of being sarcastic. it doesn't go further than that because senna steps in.

when they go to ixtal, senna sends them to scout a part of the forest together, which irelia immediately protests, and riven agrees. senna's commentary is really tone-deaf imo, because she says they need to stop fighting like school children when this. is literally two people from two opposite sides of a war that shaped so much of what they both are now, and who have plenty of reason to be antagonistic.

i especially take issue with it looking at the situation from irelia's side. not getting along with a war criminal who led armies that decimated your land and killed your people is at least to be expected. she's not being petty or childish, and i think this is where i start to have an issue with the story — because it's not just senna's point of view, it's how the story itself starts to treat the entire situation, and it's absurd to me to reduce it like that (and it's because they don't take the situation seriously enough that riven and irelia ultimately end up on good terms, but i'll get there).

it doesn't really change things immediately. in bilgewater's part irelia makes a little speech to convince mf to work with them, and riven comments it was really good and even she felt inspired and irelia just answers do not speak to me sdkfjn so yeah. nothing seems to have changed. let's keep that in mind for now. but also, again, the story tries to make the not getting along seem childish, to the point when irelia says don't talk to me, riven's reply is fine (... didn't want to talk to you anyway) which. tell me this isn't purposefully making it seem petty and childish. and it's not! it shouldn't be! that's not how you deal with the relationship between a person who lost all her loved ones and saw her land and her people slaughtered by another nation trying to conquer them and a second person who was! part! of! the! invading! army! a leader, even. there's nothing trivial about that.

anyway. in the next chapter they're on speaking terms ausdahfsifh it's a jarring development considering how they had interacted so far. because from the start it's obvious riven has no issue with irelia, and that even when her answer is to be sarcastic, that's a bit of self-defense. irelia, on the other hand, continues to have every reason to not be nice to riven, and nothing happens to change that. but suddenly, right at the beginning of the chapter, riven approaches her again (which, also.... not a good look, imo, knowing irelia has every reason to resent her and how she keeps going after her and trying to interact even though irelia made it clear she's not comfortable with that. and it could easily be solved with them having to interact more due to circumstance, but that's not how it's written, it's riven repeatedly trying to get irelia to talk to her).

anyway. back to what i was saying. riven approaches irelia again, and this time irelia doesn't outright shun her. she answers, and they just make small talk about the previous mission. irelia actually keeps the conversation going when riven hesitates. it doesn't make sense. but it doesn't last long either, cut short by awkward silence and irelia saying she's going to sharpen her blades, except riven uses that to continue talking and asks how did irelia break hers. irelia only replies noxians (screams in i didn't remember that but i said that's how she'd talk about it to most people most of the time just the other day), riven apologizes, irelia returns the question, riven says also noxians? (...guess that's kinda true). which. okay. i guess.

and then. there's the last chapter. and they're only really relevant again post final battle. where this exchange happens

by the actual end, when irelia says she has to go back to ionia, riven is already saying she hopes she'll see her again very soon.

which is followed by irelia thinking she's being sarcastic, riven saying it's sincere, and although irelia says nothing in return they did change the sprite to the happy one so.

this is already long af and i've just been reviewing how things are portrayed. you asked how i think irelia should've handled it. i think, for the most part, in both versions her initial reaction is accurate. she's angry, distrustful, reluctant to cooperate. she still accepts, because it's the world at stake.

but she wouldn't at any point be nice, there'd be no effort made to get along with riven, i don't think she'd care that senna or whoever calls it petty and childish. irelia is very certain she is in the right. she has no reason to make any effort. why would she? she wouldn't think riven earned it in any way.

i do think the 'you saved my life' trope could work to get them beyond that, otherwise irelia would just be endlessly antagonistic. but it'd have to be played differently. it'd have to be a meaningful gesture to get irelia to somewhat start to be anything other than aggressive or cold. and after that, i still don't think she'd be receptive to riven generally speaking, even less so if riven insisted on trying to talk to her when she's already established she doesn't want riven anywhere near her. and it'd be even worse with how riven comes across as trying really hard to say she's not the monster irelia accuses her of being. she had a change of heart? what difference does it make to the thousands she was involved in killing? what difference does it make when she only changed her mind when it was noxians being hit by the chembombs too?

i think it'd be far more accurate to her as a character to not have that change easily, and certainly not before riven did something that would, in irelia's eyes, have earned her some respect. even then, it'd take a lot of time and development to get irelia anywhere near the way they are by the end of the event. which, honestly, only makes it seem like she didn't bother with remembering all that much in the end lmao reluctant allies is fine. slowly (very slowly) getting irelia to let down her defenses and tolerate her? yeah i can see it, in a story written better than that. but actual friendship? to casually joke around, to be happy riven wants to see her again soon? that wouldn't be reached easily. it's possible (i do like the idea, actually, i'm not at all opposed to it) but it'd take a lot of time. it'd be a slow process. it'd take effort on riven's part, too, well beyond trying to talk to her and being upset when she's not receptive.

looking at it the way the story is developed, i just think irelia has no real reason to change her mind about riven. nothing happens that justifies that (even the life saving situation is right at the beginning and irelia is just like yeah whatever at best). so, to me, it'd make more sense for them to stay reluctant allies throughout all the ruination (it doesn't last that long, iirc? even though they go to a bunch of regions but anyway). irelia becoming more tolerant of her presence, maybe. the way she'd handle it, to me, really is to just accept there are greater threats to fight now and they're both some of the few people in the world capable of doing it. i can totally see irelia by the end of it no longer immediately going for murder as she did at the start (and that's progress! she's not at all tolerant towards other noxians like that, much less the ones that actively took part in the invasion). but i think that's the best irelia would be able to offer.

because, ultimately, there's some really heavy stuff between them. the event establishes irelia knows very well who riven is and what she was up to, that she was a commander, that she was around when noxus started using the chembombs, that irelia witnessed their impact firsthand. how do you get over all that? and especially for a character like irelia, to whom the war was extremely defining when it comes to who she is, what she fights for, how she views the world and of course how she views noxus, i don't see her being capable of really forgiving riven for all that. irelia isn't someone who lets things go easily. and she still has so much hate and anger and resentment and hurt especially where noxus is concerned. i wouldn't say it's outright impossible for her to have a positive relationship with riven eventually but when i say i think it'd take time i mean a long time, as well as a reason to believe riven has truly changed. and leaving noxus isn't enough for that.

so when it comes to the ruination specifically and how i think irelia should've acted, i think it starts very well and true to her character. my real issue is with how it goes as the story progresses, and that there is a change that isn't justified. i think it'd make more sense for her to remain closer to how she was at first, albeit less aggressive and antagonistic, but definitely not friendly either. that, or the story would have to be significantly different to justify her behavior changing.

#if anyone reads all this you're the real one #ksjdnfjkasnf #i assume you love me lots #because it's way too long and incoherent #i don't expect even mythe to read all of this lmao #i wrote sm #but. well #i guess that's my detailed take on what is good and what isn't when it comes to irelia and riven in the ruination #» out of character — ⌜main sup irl.⌟#» character study — ⌜both the tranquil sea and the tempest.⌟

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borntolurk · 9 months

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I didn't like S2: a meta about metas

I didn't like S2, and I think there are a bunch of reasons why, which come down to three main bullet points of

pacing (oh god, the pacing)

plot decisions (including the decision not to really have much of a plot)

minisodes (except the Job one which I thought was mostly amazing)

But that's not really the point of this, though I might get into those at another time.

The point is that since I finished the show yesterday, I've been reading metas that make a bunch of the choices that I disliked make more sense retroactively, and there's a part of my brain that keeps making me think "oh okay so you obviously judged the season too harshly, and these other people Got It."

And, like, that's totally possible? But the fact that I didn't Get It, I think, is relevant too. Call me a philistine, and I'm sure some will, but I do think that some stuff DOES need to work as read. Like, I can, and will, analyze like the worst of them, but if you need someone else to explain to you why a particular thing works by going back and collecting random details, when it's something that felt like it came out of nowhere when you were watching the actual thing itself... it's not your fault.

(Or rather, it's not my fault lol.)

Like, for example, I did NOT particularly enjoy the ending. I thought it came out of nowhere, I thought it seemed unnatural and contrived while it was happening, and I thought that the entire rest of the season spectacularly failed to set it up.

But then, I started reading metas about out, very good ones, and I was like, hmmm, these make quite a lot of sense! And there was one meta that actually really kind of punched me in the gut on a personal level, because it really touched on some personal issues I'm working on when it comes to the religious environment in which I was raised. By the end of reading some of these metas I was like ok well what Aziraphale did TOTALLY make sense because it's what I'd have done if I had been in his situation and it's totally psychologically consistent based on these details.

I do agree, seeding in some kinds of clues, and psychological plausibility, are both very important. But they're only a part of the story. You also have to be able to make the story work rhythmically. You plant the third act in the first, if you can manage it (and while I see the arguments people make about how the first episode includes a bunch of clues, they're more retroactive ones, the kinds that make for good metas where you're like "ahhh that's what that [might have] meant). You have to progress the story and the characters such that the ending is something that flows naturally from the rest of the story. You can have a shock ending, but it has to be a shock ending that takes what you already know and have been mentally logging from the rest of what you've seen and follows consistently from there.

It's very probable that a lot of people think that GO2 managed to do all of these things. I didn't. To me, the ending was all kind of jammed in, I found the Gabriel ending completely underwhelming, the bookshop standoff was resolved through two very nearly literal deus ex machinas, I had no idea what to expect... and suddenly all that happened and I didn't feel like anything previously in the season had prepared me for it.

A bunch of metas have explained to me that I was wrong, but I guess my point here is- storytelling is about more than the bunch of data points that get turned into metas. It's about the pacing, the writing, the directing, the editing, the acting... and I think that there were multiple points of failure this season that made any logic of the ending really hard to see without going into the weeds and writing metas, or reading other people's.

If you need someone to explain to you why you should like something, it may just mean that you don't like the thing, or how the thing was done, and that's okay! Not only are all opinions subjective, but metas are layered on top of the narrative- they aren't a part of it, and just because you find a compelling one that makes you feel like you don't trust your first impressions, that doesn't necessarily mean you were wrong to have them. The story itself and its storytelling have to convince you too.

(In the meantime, I'll probably go on reading, and eventually writing, metas lol)

#good omens #good omens 2 #good omens season 2 #good omens spoilers #good omens 2 spoilers #gos2 spoilers #for the record #while i did not in fact like S2 #i did ENJOY a lot of it #but the totality of it disappointed me

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matan4il · 2 years

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Hi! How are you? Sending you a lot of positive energy!!! I saw the big post you made and I was touched, you are totally adorable. I was traveling and the internet was horrible, so I couldn't write to you as soon as you got Buddie's goal, but I'm back and I can only tell you that he loved reading you, as always! It was a surprise to learn that everyone Eddie saved is dead, and I can't help but think that both Buck and Chris helped Eddie in some way. and kept him from harming himself, (part 1)

I have a feeling Buck will be , or it will have to be, a great support for Eddie, so that he endures with everything he has inside and that he does not let out. On the subject of Taylor and Buck I was surprised that they didn't let him, and I wonder if Buck will ever tell him that he went with Lucy or will he let it go, which is how Taylor seems to prefer, I also wonder what will make him they two break up, or if they will. I send you many kisses and hugs!!!! (part 2)

Hi darling! *loves you so much* You sent these two asks and I had so many to answer this week (and so little time, sadly) that before I managed to reply, you also send these, so if it’s okay, I will reply to all of them together:

Hi! How are you? I wanted to congratulate you for your meta, it's absolutely amazing! After seeing how Buck supports Eddie, what I wrote you in the last chapter gains more strength (I think you missed it among so many comments :-p) Lucy doesn't quite fit me in the team, just like Taylor doesn't quite fit me with Buck. (part 1)

Seeing what they say is going to happen in the last episode, I have a theory that Eddie will be the first to admit that he's attracted to boys. I send you a lot of positive energy!!! Hugs and kisses! (part 2)

Awwwww, hon! Thank you so much for the kind words, for reading everything that I write, even the personal stuff, and for always reaching out in the loveliest of ways! I’m so glad you enjoyed the meta, too! *huuugs*

Regarding Buck, he’s def caught between two women, neither of which is suited for him as a partner, while his real emotional energy is centered on helping Eddie and Chris, his true family. So what’s going to happen? I imagine that those two women are set on a collision course and when they do crash into each other, that’s when Buck’s r/s with Taylor will come to an end, when she finds out about the kiss. Meanwhile, I have to admit I always used to think Buck would be the first to realize his feelings/attraction to Eddie, because he always seemed like he would be more able to admit the possibility that he’s into men as well as women (maybe he even knows already, just that he’s not talking about it because currently it doesn’t seem relevant to him). But the way they’ve been progressing Eddie’s arc, who knows? Maybe precisely because it seems like it would be a bigger crisis for him to realize he might be into Buck, he’ll end up being less oblivious about the true nature of his feelings for his best friend. Plus, the way Buck shows up for Eddie this season is just undeniable, isn’t it? I mean, they’ve both always been there for each other, but Buck in 513 and 514 has taken it to new levels... so how long can Eddie remain repressed about what it all means?

*hugs you some more* Thank you again, my love, hope you’re having a fantastic day! xoxox

(I got an influx of asks, I WILL answer all of them, but it might take a sec. If anyone wants to check whether I've already answered theirs or to read my replies, here's my ask tag. Thank you! xoxox)

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captlok · 3 years

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Pacifism Isn’t A Character Trait

Or: MLK Day is Upon Us so Let Me Do You a Learn

Or: As An Aang Stan I Got a Bit Over-Zealous But Lemme Explain Why For A Hot Minute

Plus some History and Tumblr commentary that even non-ATLA fans can chew on

And by ‘hot minute’ I do mean this is going to be a long meta, so strap in. For those of you who just might be tuning into this debacle, I, a person who has not used Tumblr, much at all, except for the last half year, ran into some trouble.

If you wanna skip the whole TLDNR interpersonal stuffs and get straight to Why Aang is the Best Thing Since Sliced Bread, I will embolden the relevant parts, and italicize the crit of Korra, if you want that alongside.

I was excited that ATLA was seeing a resurgence due to the Netflix remake. I wasn’t even trying to apply any steep expectations for it. (learned not to do that the hard way with the last live action adaption, and to a much lesser extent, ATLOK, since it had good . . . elements, *ba dum tsshh*)

So, these are a couple aspects of the issue: (1) Even on the internet, I am extremely introverted and until recently mostly came for content, not socializing. My main online interactions thus far have been in forums and artist-to-artist on DA. Tumblr is still very strange to me because it splits up its ‘threads’ so you can’t see all the replies if a certain pattern of users responds in their own space. I’m not even 100% sure it’s in chronological order, and replies are not nested next to each other so you can look in the comments and someone will be replying to something you can’t see in that window. And also since it is a bizarre hybrid of a blogging system, posts are somehow considered ‘owned by’ or an ‘extension of’ OP in a way forum threads are not. (2) ATLOK was good in a cinematic and musical way, to be sure. It also had some good concepts. I can go into it just appreciating it for the worldbuilding and be somewhat satisfied. But the execution was terrible. I was on AvatarSpirit.Net for years, and If I had maintained my presence on ASN to current day and had gotten around to downloading their archive now that the forum is dead, I would include some links to other peoples’ detailed analyses on just how flawed both the plotting and Korra’s frustratingly flat learning curve was especially in the first two seasons. But, that is a task for another day, and only if people are interested.

No, what I’m addressing today, on the issue of Korra as a writing exercise, is how Mike and Bryan said specifically they wanted to make her ‘as opposite to Aang as possible’ and in so doing, muddied the central theme of the original ATLA series.

Now, again, I was mainly an art consumer for my first major round of ATLA fandom. Tumblr is an alien beast to me. But, after I write my first major Aang meta, talking about how amazing it is that he has the attitude he does, and how being content in the face of this overwhelming pain and suffering is an ONGOING PROCESS and an INTENTIONAL DECISION and not a simple PERSONALITY TRAIT, I start hearing that Aang gets a lot of hate from the fandom. Now this would be bad enough if it were merely people not liking his crowning moment of pacifism because they don’t understand the potential utility (I’ll elaborate on that in another post) or the ethics involved.

Aang is easily the most adult member of the Gaang. But he apparently gets hate for his few moments where he actually acts his age, a preteen, and maybe kisses a girl in a historical timeframe in which ‘consent’ discussions were probably nonexistent. Even in the present day, we are still practically drowned in movies that reinforce this kissing without asking trope. And even some female bodied people complain that asking kills the mood! But somehow he is responsible and reprehensible for this, even though the first time she kissed him back. I’m only going to get into the pacifism discussion today, but that was just another layer of annoyance bouncing around in the back of my head. Other peoples’ crit of Korra that was stewing in my subconscious, plus this Aang bashing, which thankfully I had not directly read much of, made up the backdrop of gasoline for the match that set it off. Even that seems a pretty melodramatic way to phrase what I actually said, which was: Aang, on the other hand, lost dozens of father figures and was being steamrolled by Ozai who was gloating about genocide TO HIS FACE, yet he still reigned in all that quote, ‘unbelievable rage and pain’ (The Southern Raiders). We Stan Aang, the Superior Avatar. No I did not f**king stutter. #AangSupremacy In another meta, someone complained that I was too defensive of Aang as a character and didn’t apply literary analysis enough, which I quickly rectified.

What set this off? Someone was kind of indirectly praising the line from Korra, “When I get out of here, none of you will survive” To them it was emotionally resonant or whatever, and I have to point out that no, it was a martial artist not having control of their state of mind, as is the bedrock of the practice. It was never addressed by the narrative, which is a severe oversight. I had a conversation with someone in the chats, making this distinction between Korra’s character traits and life philosophy. If she were to kill people while enraged and she was fine with that, that’s one thing. But if she regretted it, that’s a whole other kettle of fish. People argue that she comes from a warrior culture, unlike Aang.

Never mind that warrior monks are a thing. That’s what Shaolin monks are. You can be a pacifist and skilled at fighting. Those things are not mutually exclusive, which is the whole point of Bagua, Aang’s style. And also, Katara’s style.

That’s one reason I like Kataang so much- their congruent styles. Both of their real world martial arts are dedicated to pacifism, even though ATLA specifically doesn’t spell that out for Katara and her learning arc.

There was a meta where someone briefly tried to argue that knowing “martial arts” is against pacifism. No. Quite the opposite. I’d argue that you are not a true pacifist unless you know exactly how to handle yourself if someone attacks you. If you are not in a position to make conscious decisions about how much force to use, rather than merely operating on survival instincts, that is not pacifism. Or at least, not any energy or effort towards pacifism as a practical everyday tool. I’ve made a few attempts to learn some tai chi and aikido, and it’s improved my physical and mental health, but some other things have gotten in the way. #lifegoals

I’m not going to tag the unfortunate soul whom I was replying to, because they’re probably tired of all this, but I’ll be sending them a PM to say that I’ve made this into a different post, because as I mentioned before, threads are somehow considered “owned” by OP, so it’s been pointed out to me that I should separate it. I also said, I have basically ZERO respect for Korra uttering violent threats when the writers already minted a far more emotionally devastated and yet still resilient and centered character earlier in their franchise. People always try to excuse away people who genuinely like Aang more. As if it’s just nostalgia or whatever. For me, no, it’s absolutely not. It is respect for a character who stands toe to toe with real people who are kind in the face of overwhelming injustice. (I have another meta on that).

Both OP and people in the chats try to make excuses that she wasn’t raised as a pacifist, and that would be fine if they had addressed it with Tenzin and she had stated outright that she was rejecting pacifism and mind training. As it is, we are left with this nebulous affair where the lines between ideology and personality traits are blurred.

We are told she “has trouble with spirituality” but what does that even mean? Does she have trouble with focus? Does she have trouble relating to the canonically real spirits? And pacifism specifically nor inner peace that it flows from is never even talked about as an extension of spirituality, which is canonically tied to airbending.

“Aang didn't have to deal once with the loss of his autonomy in atla” OP claims.

This was after I had noted that Aang was getting kicked around by Ozai and was most likely going to die. Similarly, someone in the chat rejected the idea that a 12 year old trapped in a stone sphere that is heating up under a cyclone-sized blowtorch feels powerless.

Sorry but that’s flat out ridiculous.

No one wants to admit that both of these people were faced with similar situations, and when push came to shove, one showed his LIFE PHILOSOPHY through conscious effort, and the other was abandoning the basis of martial arts, which is, no matter what the situation, keep thinking. Hold the panic at bay. Non-attachment would have served her well in this situation. Tenzin should have told her this. Before, or afterwards. It should have been addressed in the writing.

People see this as “bashing” Korra, and oh well, can’t help that. If I think the writers didn’t follow through on their themes, that is my concern. OP said I was “offended.” No, not really.

I wasn’t offended by the post itself, or its commentary. Thought I made that pretty clear.

This is not dramatics. Let me be blunt.

As a ideological pacifist, and an actual practitioner of meditation, based on Buddhism, NOT just the fan of some show, I am for calling out writers who write one way from the survivor of genocide, and then stray from that ‘thoughtless aggression is immoral no matter HOW hurt I am’ to ‘let’s not address this character’s aggression in the narrative whatsoever.’ OP attempted to derail by accusing me of being racist or sexist against Korra. Also ridiculous. It honestly should have set me off more, but it didn’t.

Meditation is about reigning in your emotions. Managing your anger when it gets out of hand, and digging down to the roots of it. Being responsible for your own behavoir. Acknowledging ownership of your own actions. Not blaming anything YOU DO on anyone else or any circumstances in your life. Like an adult, or should I say, an enlightened adult.

Or at the very least, that is the ideal ypu strive towards while being imperfect in the present.

. . .

Now.

I’m going to quote a passage in a Google Doc of mine, even though I’d really prefer if you asked to read the whole thing, with context.

“What do humans do when it is necessary to, or greed makes a nation want to recruit?

They go to the army to get trained, right?

Granted, having someone scream and get spittle on your face is, in the grand scheme of things, poor preparation for having bullets whiz past your chest and grenades shatter your ears. And, what do you do to prepare you for the pain of getting your leg blown off? Hopefully, nothing. Like taking a test where you only got half the study guide. But, it’s about the most ethical way to go about it, right?

Not everyone even sees action. So any more more extensive mental preparation for physical pain than that, and you’d have people definitely protesting.

Well, as it turns out, pacifistic protestors themselves, if they were in the right time and place, also very intentionally do this type of mind training. Except, when they did it, they actually did sit still and took turns roughly grabbing each other and throwing each other down and in some cases, even kicking and bruising each other.

Turns out, those pacifists are, in some ways, more hardcore than the army.

Why is this?

Because a pacifist’s aim, unlike a unit, who wants to gain the upper hand in a situation, is to grit their teeth and grind their way through all those survival instincts, and totally submit.

In this, they aim to get the sympathy of the public, who clearly sees they are not aggressive, or a danger, no matter how much the footage is manipulated or suppressed.

In this, they hope to appeal to their attacker’s better nature.

Make them stop and think, wait a second, are these people a threat like we’re told they are? I’m attacking someone who’s letting me beat them up. Or a bunch of people. All forming a line, and letting us peel them off. Or sitting, and bowing their heads. If I’m on the ‘right’ side of things, the law, why am I doing this?

It’s not like a bully, who’s just a kid.” They’re more self-aware.

And might I add the situation influences a pacifist’s actions too. There’s no reason to let a single or a few random attackers beat you up if you can evade or disable without permanent damage.

Pacifism is a dynamic set of responsive actions informed by values. Not a proscribed set or a checklist.

But in terms of organizing against state power, and recording wrongdoing, which unlike during the Civil Rights can happen from all angles from smart phones nowadays, these are the motivations.

“So, the pacifist knows this, and that’s why they go through all that trouble of training themselves to, not only submit, but not turn tail and run, either.”

See, a character trait is something like being a morning person, or ways of handing information, or a given set of emotions a character feels. Once you cross over into actions, you must make the distinction of whether an impulsive character agrees with their own uncontrolled actions, or is embarrassed or remorseful. Those are life philosophy. Now sure, one type of person or character may be more likely to subscribe to pacifism, but there is no gatekeeping on what you have to feel or how you look at things. You can be easygoing, or feel all the rage in the world, but as long as you at least attempt to have a handle on those desires and feelings to where they do not cross into actions, you are still doing the work of metacognition, which is what martial arts and its accompanying mind training are for.

It’s what we see Aang do.

He’s informed us, during the Southern Raiders, on how much rage and pain he feels.

Pain points, TRIGGERS, that were directly struck at when Ozai gloated over him.

He joins with all the past Avatars for several moments, and just like every other time he is in the Avatar State, he is enraged. He wants to exact revenge on the unrepentant grandson of a baby murderer.

We see it when he turns his head away, face still screwed up in anger.

For another example, I could cite my difficulties in being aware and reining in my tongue sometimes. I know the roots of these issues and I seek to let them go.

It’s just that process takes way longer than Guru Pathik would have us assume.

In fact, I would even say that Aang’s portrayal throughout the three seasons is not strictly a realistic representation of at least the sad side of grief. I addressed that a little when I talked about real life figures. But what it IS, is a metaphor that cuts very deep to the heart of pacifism. As I showed in that Doc . . . There is no limit of suffering a pacifist is willing to go through, internal or external, for the preservation of peace.

This was demonstrated during the Civil Rights, and with Gandhi and all his followers beforehand, inspiring them. The pacifists’ method of swaying hearts is probably the reason BLM exists in such numbers as it does today. Will the types of narratives that correspond with their full stories of the way they collectively planned and trained for and approached conflict make it into fantasy media? I’d say, probably not. For a host of reasons.

It could be hoped for, I guess.

But we DO have Aang.

As for myself, whether speaking sharply is an “action,” per se is up for debate- certainly it doesn’t seem to violate the non-aggression principle put forth by the vision of a “stateless society.”

For another example, let’s take my explanation at the beginning. I am examining how circumstances affected my actions, and now am attempting to fix it, if indeed it needs to be fixed.

At least one person said that it not so much what I said, but how and when I said it. I don’t actually think I’ve said anything “wrong” per se. So I have to figure it out.

[I’m considering splitting up this next part into a second post, as it only slightly relates to pacifism itself and is just kinda some more commentary on Tumblr itself- Tumblr discourse, as it were]

[I’ll put more brackets when I’m done in case you want to skip this part as well]

An interesting social difference between Tumblr and other places is this command you often get, “don’t chat/reblog/message me back.”

This is interesting for several reasons. For chats and reblogs, other people may be following the “conversation,” so it’s actually pretty rude and presumptuous to tell a person not to respond to whatever you said, because other people watching still may be interested in your take.

In a forum setting, if someone involved in a conversation doesn’t have anything left to say, usually they just don’t respond.

This method would work perfectly fine for Tumblr, but for some reason, maybe its super odd format, probably due to the “ownership”/“extension of self” I mentioned at the beginning of the essay, people don’t tend to do this.

Now, in comment sections, sometimes you’ll run across an amusing sort of “mutually assured destruction” where two people both say this to each other. You’d better stop responding. Omg just give up. Why are you still arguing. Etc.

But see, no matter where this behavoir pops up, and no matter who starts in on it, those who do this usually want to have the last say on the matter.

Instead of merely not replying, they want to assert verbal control over the conversation.

Tumblr, in its weirdness, is also sort of like a mutant comments section. You can post comment section threads as your own post.

Which is one reason why I’m puzzled when people say ‘don’t read the comment sections’ when Tumblr is so popular.

I’m an oddball in that I browse comment sections for fun.

Probably due to alexithymia, I didn’t really comprehend the emotional toll it takes on many people, so the warnings to “stay out of comment sections” read to me like “hey don’t eat that dessert.” After I’m done with the ‘meal’ of an article or art, I like to see what lots of different people have to say about it. The fluff. Anything vitriolic I either blip over, or extract anything useful, or if I judge the person is reasonable enough, I might engage.

Sometimes I mis-judge on how reasonable someone is, and I shrug and move on after being cussed out or whatever.

In this, I suppose I succeed much of the time in being a verbal pacifist.

[But let’s get back to the more serious stuff.]

We’re talking about what is done in life or death situations, here.

For myself, I may in the near future be working more with dangerously mentally ill people. I’ve had a little exposure to it through various means. Nurses are obligated not to retaliate against patients, and those who have, have been fired in some situations. Again oddly, this is not primarily what triggers my anxiety. Unfortunately enough, this requirement has also resulted in nurses getting seriously injured and violated. I hope to influence whether “no harm” techniques such as tai chi and aikido and arm locks may be allowed. The voluntary philosophy I was luckily already on board with is enforced by bureauacracy, directly relevant to my potential profession.

Were someone to get involved in a dangerous profession, such as a police officer, their moral duty would also be to own up to any spur of the moment anger or fear they acted on.

It’s just that their bureaucracy acts differently, in excusing their actions.

Ideally, they would be taking steps far in advance, to avoid this often-cited fear of death reaction. As training pacifists like Aang do.

And yes, army people are trained differently than police officers because the army, often, even when threatened, is supposed to avoid engagement or deploy deterrents that are non-lethal almost all costs, unless ordered otherwise. Whereas American police are given pretty much complete discretion and often not taught de-escalation techniques. Even police from other nations are better trained in that regard.

Enter the ironically named @avatarfandompolice whose account description should really speak for itself. Combative, dismissive, and their attention-hungry bread and butter is to find people they think it’s acceptable to ridicule. They basically tried to say trauma was a valid excuse to take out your anger on other people, and in this situation, potentially kill.

Now, does this hold up in the real world? Yeah, sometimes. Especially if some law breaker or law keeper has not been given the anger management tools, they perhaps could be excused, or better yet, rehabilitated.

But especially if anyone finds themselves in dangerous situations, or intends to put themselves in such, it falls to them to do this preparation.

As an aphant, I am at a bit of a disadvantage, compared to an average martial artist, being unable to visualize an attacker. But I still attempt it.

As the main “police officer” of the world- the coincidentally blue clad figurehead that is supposed to keep order, it is apparently fine for Korra to not do the work Aang did to keep level. To blow it off as too much trouble: clearing the First Chakra of fear. For herself or others. And its resultant anger. Had she had access to the Avatar State, the authority figure pretty much would have killed people. This is what the “fandom police” and a certain chat goer ultimately support. Maybe they didn’t understand it that way, and since the second had blocked me, they will also never see this explanation. Unless I were to share it in Google Doc form I suppose.

So, I responded. “Remember kids, you are not responsible for your own behavior if you have the excuse that someone else did something bad to you.” A frighteningly common sentiment on this site.

When it’s low stakes like CAPSLOCKING or internet fights, that’s not such a big deal. But what happens if this attitude leaks into the real world? This isn’t even about Korra or Aang anymore, it’s about toxic mindsets. I didn’t know fans taking pro-Korra posts as anti-Aang was a common in the fandom. I’ll say again I’ve only just gotten really active on Tumblr like the past few months. This is about pacifism itself. MLK and his hardworking, training followers (yes some of them sixteen and POC and not super-powered like Korra) facing down firehoses and staging sit-ins long trained for would shake their heads at this defense of reactionism.

Pacifism is not a Personality Trait.

It is deliberate actions and preparation taken over a period of time.

Then the “fandom police” tried more of this, and these two conversations ensued, the comments with another user resulting in the title and main thesis of this essay:

https://captlok.tumblr.com/post/638777472806273024/avatarfandompolice-response-to-my-independent

https://captlok.tumblr.com/post/638806142933467136/the-plight-was-not-what-i-was-getting-at-it-was

#atla #lok #atlok #atla meta #pacifism #martin luther king #civil rights era #history #blm #mlk #mlkday2021

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toflyandfall · 4 years

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YAY :D! OK, I wanted to please ask what your thoughts were on Dick and Shawn's relationship. Did you feel it was in character? Did you feel it made sense? Did you want them to last or did you feel it came out of left field and didn't make any sense? How did you feel about the pregnancy scare and how they broke up ("I know what I said/did was shitty but we can fix this. We can make this work!") - does it sound like Dick? I'm also happy ur still here. I'm so used to asking you & Shelly so thank u!

I'll be honest with you, anon--DC burnt me hard with the Spyral travesty and then putting Tom King on Batman and keeping Seeley on Nightwing, so I don't keep up with current DC comics. I don’t enjoy them and nearly without exception I don’t find them to be written well or in character. However, you're very sweet and I want to help fill the meta void in your life, so I read through Dick and Shawn's arc together and here's my analysis.

I’m dividing this into two parts. The first half will be as objective as possible and analyze your questions on whether Dick seems in character, what he says during the break up, etc. It’s roughly chronological, starting when we first meet Shawn and continuing through to the break up itself.

The second half I’ll put under a readmore, as it’ll answer your questions about my more subjective opinions about the arc.

Let’s start by looking at Dick’s previous and most happy relationships to see what good indicators for an in-character relationship would be.

Getting physically involved with someone -before- having a secure emotional connection with them is not in character for him. All of Dick's major relationships have been preceded by extended periods of mutual flirtation and bonding before physical overtures. His most significant and longest lasting romantic connections began by building emotional and romantic attachment before sexual intimacy, frequently paired with a shared history together that precedes even the flirtation.

There’s significant canon evidence that he’s demi sexual: a comprehensive, though hardly exhaustive, collection of it can be found here and here (the latter half of the second link relates to the Grayson series specifically, but overall it offers a nice long view on his relationship history since character creation and also addresses beyond-canon factors at DC that impacted some relevant canon writings.) Whether you use the label demi for him or not, it’s canon that he’s not comfortable jumping into bed without a secure emotional connection.

So let’s look at Shawn’s relationship with Dick through the lens of relationships in which he was the happiest and most comfortable. Those relationships have these things in common:

He has a stable, safe emotional connection to the individual.

He is willing and comfortable engaging in banter and flirtation.

Relationship is based on mutual respect and affection, often paired with shared history together.

Now, let’s look at Shawn’s relationship.

Their ‘history’ together (as Defacer and Robin) is antagonistic, and their interaction in the past leave Dick feeling uneasy. Sure, he seems to think about her situation, but as this panel reads, the kindest that can be said of any emotional connection there seems to be here is one-sided pity.

Nightwing #10 (Nightwing: Back to Bludhaven)

Once they meet again, she’s his boss. Even or perhaps especially in the world of #MeToo, it’s important to address workplace relationships, particularly boss/employee scenarios, with care and sensitivity. Seeley sidesteps this by just…having her later quit the non-profit she founded and giving Dick her position for a while. However, even if she’d just worked in HR at an equal level with him when they met instead of being his boss, let’s look at the amount of participation he shows in their first meeting:

Nightwing #10 (Nightwing: Back to Bludhaven)

There is a lot of her talking and almost none of him. He’s not engaged in their interaction here. Where he tries later as Nightwing to engage more personally, he’s immediately shut down. The most dialogue we hear from him is in his own head—in their first meeting, the ratio of her dialogue to his is literally 22 sentences to 9. Of those 9 sentences, one is a lie he gives to avoid establishing an emotional connection with her, another she interrupts, and three of which were less than five words long: “Sorry.” “You can call me Dick” and “Thanks, Ms Chang”. Even taking the workplace environment into account as best we can, this is not meeting any of the three criteria for Dick to be feeling emotionally attachment or attraction. No one would look at those 9 almost-sentences and that flashback and say, “Ah yes, this man is deeply infatuated with her.”

This is made even more jarring by the fact that the internal narration frequently doesn’t match the actual scenes we’ve witnessed.

Nightwing #11 (Nightwing: Back to Bludhaven)

Nothing about the few sentences Dick has managed to finish around Shawn when this narration comes up has said ‘attraction’, physical or otherwise, but the dialogue here reads like Dick was laying the flirtations on thick every time he saw her. Same with when they talk about the flashback scene later. There’s a lot of cognitive disconnect between what Seeley wants to tell us happened and what we actually see and hear and have evidence of between the characters.

If you’re wondering why I’m examining these initial interactions with particular depth, it is because frankly, these are the most interactions the two have together for roughly the first five issues of their ‘getting to know each other’ phase...and when they reunite at the end of those issues, we are supposed to believe they are already heavily, life-changingly in love. So, for all intents and purposes, this scattered handful of conversations is all we have to analyze to examine whether this fits the qualifications for whether Dick would feel comfortable and emotionally attached enough to approach a physical relationship.

We have three chances in their various guises for Dick and Shawn to meet and start developing that all-important rapport. This is our first initiation to their relationship and it certainly doesn’t read as a positive one. The next one, she yells at him and kicks him out—again, a whole page of her dialogue to a fragmented sentence of his. The third one, the flashback panel posted above, they don’t even speak to each other. Two of them are actively red-flags of being unable to establish a closer connection with that person; the third is a neutral connection. This is not the kind of two-way interaction we see where he’s comfortable and interested in someone, and this is not an emotionally secure connection.

Shawn disappears for three issues or so, during which they have, obviously, no interactions.

The very next after that, by the end of it, she lunges into him to kiss him.

The next issue after that, they’re evidently in honeymoon heaven and already shacking up.

Trust me, we’ll be going over that under the readmore later.

Back in the area of the objective, if you ever need to know the number of days Tim Seeley thinks is needed for two people with self-admitted enormous trust issues to form the ideal Hollywood manic pixie dream girl relationship, we were given a careful timeline.

68 days—first date

Nightwing #15 (Nightwing: Back to Bludhaven)

62 days—first intercourse.

Nightwing #15 (Nightwing: Back to Bludhaven)

Six days. Not even a week.

They’ve met each other, then met each other’s parents and are living together and are one baby scare away from the suburbs in less time than it takes for someone to finish a semester at college. It took literally longer for the issues of Nightwing where Shawn was an absent character in her own arc to get published in our real lives than it did for their on-panel romance to go from not even knowing each other to Nightwing (not Dick, but Nightwing) kissing Shawn (not Defacer, but Shawn) upside down in the middle of the city.

Trust issues, amirite?

Nightwing #15 (Nightwing: Back to Bludhaven)

Meanwhile during that mostly off-panel ‘dating’ period we have these wildly out of character moments. In particular, there are two noteworthy things.

Shawn says she never would have pinned Dick for being a traditionalist.

That directly contradicts…well…most of the statements people close to him have made of his dating views, and also his own self-stated views of them, whose top tracks include things like “…this might sound unhip, but I feel strange about living with someone I’m not married to”, “I gotta be honest, Roy—I couldn’t make love to someone I didn’t really love”, and “Love should be between two people”.

We have a direct parallel of an in-character Dick moment walking someone home after an early date to use for comparison.

Nightwing #31

Things Dick does in this panel: reassures his date there is no pressure for sex and the night will not be ending that way, plan out just about the most traditional date experience, and engage in light-hearted mutual bantering.

Additional relevant context around this panel: Dick and Clancy have known each other for months and have a friendly, mutually respectful connection. Dick’s turned down a sizable number of invitations from her because despite living in the same building, the vigilante life made it difficult for him to make and keep plans. This is their second date because Dick had to bail in the middle of their first. It took months both in comics-time and in real-time of developing a mutual interest to lead up to that first real date. And by then, the reader is invested in the status of that relationship, too.

To contrast the then vs now, we also have in that same moment with Shawn Dick, of all people, ignores a phone call without a second thought in favor of trying for a booty call. On the first date. Let’s take a look at Dick and Clancy’s first date, 9 issues earlier than the one we just saw.

Nightwing #22

Dick is a chronic workaholic, with all the associated inability to disconnect from his work while in relationships even during date night or intimate moments. It’s perfectly reasonable, considering that with his lifestyle choice, that phone call could be life or death for someone he loves, a stranger, or many, many someones, and it’s put significant strain on his past relationships when dating those not actively in the superhero lifestyle. Clancy is, again, a great example of this--despite genuine interest on both sides, he blew her off at least half a dozen times because of vigilante emergencies before they even got to their first date. And then despite their great rapport and a genuine interest in being there, he still ditched her in the middle of it when his phone rang.

What we see in Seeley’s Nightwing #15 not only runs directly contrary to significant chunks of his history and personality, it also tells a deeply upsetting story of a world where exists a horndog Dick Grayson who would risk other people’s lives to get laid with a chick he’s known less than a week.

They handle vigilante interruptions more in character in later issues once the relationship is established, but...yikes.

Not in character.

We’re going to take a little jump here to move from discussing whether their relationship is in character for Dick to whether their breakup was in character.

In general, it actually is pretty in character for Dick to panic himself into commitment in a romantic relationship even if he’s not really sure about it. Dick is very interesting that way: he runs away from platonic relationships under tension, either by throwing himself into casework or by literally setting up in a new location. If his romantic relationship is undergoing trauma, however, he's very capable of reacting the opposite, like in this example with Kory.

Team Titans #2

There’s even an awkward Devin Grayson incident where he thinks a woman is serial-murdering her husbands, fake-marries her to solve the case, uncovers the real killer who wasn’t her, and feels bad enough afterward that he offers to date her for real. (An interesting side-note: this makes Devin Grayson responsible for not one but two of Dick’s emotionally compromised almost-marriages. This one, at least, came before she jumped the shark with the dreaded Catalina Flores arc.)

Nightwing Annual #1

So let’s take a look at where Shawn’s exact circumstance falls in against those.

To me, the lines that sound the most like Dick are actually the lines he says that cause their break-up.

Nightwing #23 (Nightwing: Back to Bludhaven)

Dick has a lot of darkness and anger in him. He’s a lot like Bruce and he’s a lot scared of how much he’s like Bruce. We’ve seen several timelines where Dick’s had biological children and we’ve also seen how he tempered Damian’s darkness when Bruce was lost in the timestream. Though this arc and timeline does not show it well (and that’s a whole different meta), we have the advantage of having known how Dick behaves as a father in a way this particular Dick has never had to experience. And we know that when kids are in the picture he does work hard at repressing or concealing his anger and darkness to be a good role model, often in a way he isn’t sure he has the capacity to do when there are no children involved. Despite some of the specific phrasings being iffy, the general sentiments here do feel like legitimate concerns Dick would have.

With this knowledge, that moment felt significantly more honest to Dick Grayson’s character than most of the rest of their relationship.

Nightwing #25 (Nightwing: Back to Bludhaven)

The actual break-up dialogue itself is…well, it’s not out of character, exactly, because as shown, Dick has been known to clutch onto potential romances hardest when he feels they’re about to slip away. But the delivery of it isn’t in character. Yes, in general, Dick has a temper and he lashes out. However, he’s clearly aggressive and angry in this panel, where previous experience has showed us he should be at his most emotionally vulnerable and pleading. Dick, who is a generally emotionally closed-off person despite his extroverted demeanor, reacts to these kind of romance scares by showing emotional vulnerability in ways he frequently is unable to do during the relationship itself. And the panel that he’s apologizing for as being a crappy thing to have said, is…as mentioned, the panel that comes closest to a consistent Dick Grayson.

And the thing they’re fighting about is that Dick missed a job interview because he was doing Nightwing things. Shawn fell in love with Dick knowing he was Nightwing (somehow), he’s been Nightwing the whole time they dated, constant interruptions and all, but she breaks up with him because somehow 'the thing I always loved most…you.’ apparently wasn’t one that included the Nightwing schedule. She also seems to be both blaming him for wanting the baby and also accusing him of not wanting it. At the risk of getting off-topic and subjective, I’ll be honest and say Shawn’s dialogue here makes no sense to me at all.

Dick’s tried not being Nightwing, in both pre-52 and new-52. Dick spends a fair amount of pre-52 time either bouncing from job to job or lacking a day job entirely. In both pre-52 and new-52, the Dick she’s claiming is the one she’s always loved the most…doesn’t exist anywhere I can think of. Certainly not anywhere during their on-panel relationship.

Now that we’ve looked at what we see of Dick and Shawn on-panel, it’s time to talk about the impact this has off-panel.

I happen to have been re-reading a lot of Chuck Dixon’s original Nightwing’s run lately. And here’s the thing. Clancy’s been showing up consistently in that run as someone Dick could be attracted to for for oh, about...two full graphic novels now (that’s 17 single-issues) and they haven’t so much as gone on a date, let alone shared a smooch. It takes 20 issues before they make it to the first date we saw from Nightwing #22. I don’t remember if she’s in every single issue of that period, so I’m going to round down by probably a lot and say that’s a minimum of a year when this was getting published for us as readers to get to know her and how she interacts with Dick, to get interested and invested in a potential relationship. In comics-time, it’s weeks before Dick actually sees her face, not just hears her voice. Even if you’re reading post-publication like me, that’s hours and hours where we watch she and Dick bond and banter and develop a mutual interest.

That’s build up. That’s emotional investment developed over time.

I’m not saying every single relationship has to take more than a year’s worth of issues on-panel to develop. However, she does summarize one of the single biggest struggles for DC’s cadre of writers over the last few years. Basically, the problem I have with this beyond just the characterizations is the same that made me stop reading from New 52 onward: DC constantly trying to skip out on the process of creating meaningful emotional build-up or connections but still expecting to cash in on an emotional payoff.

You can’t go from ‘kissed once’ to ‘been together for years like an old married couple couple vibes’ off-pages like Nightwing #15 tries to do. Even if you expect the readers to believe the protagonist now feels that connection (which, frankly, I don’t), we don’t have that connection to the relationship. It’s a cheap paper cutout with no actual emotional content behind it--why should we care if it tears under pressure? We have no stake in it; we don’t know why the protagonist has a stake in it. It’s meaningless.

As a reader, my experience with Shawn and Dick’s relationship is as follows: a) they meet in a scenario where she is his boss (strong do not date vibes) b) they meet as vigilante and paroled ex-villain and she doesn’t even let him finish a sentence (would not date) c) they show a flashback where they don’t even speak to each other (Robin pities her; no ‘date/no date’ vibe data gathered), d) they share a confusingly out of nowhere ‘emotional’ moment that didn’t match up with my prior understanding of either what I extrapolated from the flashback or what I saw in their on-panel interactions (vibe check, please??) then she disappears for several issues into police custody (no ‘date/no date’ vibe data gathered) The very next time she sees him, she betrays him (STRONG do not/would not date). Then all of a sudden at the end of that issue she kisses him.

My context for their relationship is based on two ‘emotional’ conversations of dubious quality and consistency, one ‘look’ where their dialogue contradicts my own understanding of the on-panel events, a shouting match or two, and a very major betrayal that just happened to work out alright for everybody but is never actually addressed. Most of her introductory arc where we’d be piecing out how she fits in with Dick and how they interact together, she isn’t even there for. They’ve known each other for less than a week. I the reader have known them for, in my case, maybe an hour of read-time.

And the very next time I see them, I’m supposed to believe, and more importantly, feel emotionally attached to the fact that They Are The Most In Love Couple To Ever Be In Love.

Trying to put a timeline on intimacy as a gimmick instead of establishing genuine emotional connection never works. Yes, maybe we knew that one person in high school or know someone in college who falls hard and often and met and married someone within two months, but Dick Grayson has never been that person. Maybe this style of flashback manic pixie romance would be more believable if they’d tried it on a different character with a different history and personality, but it especially never works on a character like Dick Grayson with a strong history of being slow to decide his feelings and even slower to jump into bed.

In order to work, the entire arc that follows with the kidnapping by Pyg is predicated on the fact that I, the reader, am supposed to already care about Shawn’s relationship with Dick, and that I, the reader, believe in the validity of Shawn’s relationship with Dick and in Dick’s commitment to it. But I haven’t been given time or reason to do either of those things by the time that arc starts.

You cannot shortcut relationships and expect them to be meaningful to the reader.

So they threw in a baby. Because even if you don’t care about a relationship, everyone cares about babies.

Throwing in a baby to up the emotional stakes is just a further step up that same problematic cheap-shortcuts ladder I was talking about: like in a stereotyped failing marriage, if you feel like you have to add a kid just to put meaning into your relationship again, maybe what you actually need to do is take time and consider what that relationship is built on.

#dick grayson #dc #nightwing #meta #tim seeley #panels #o.c.#relationships #asks #anonymous #analysis #shawn tsang #character analysis #relationship analysis #long post #love and relationships #I realized toward the end I hadn't addressed the pregnancy itself very much but I covered the jyst of my thoughts on it in the readmore #Dick's reaction to it felt like it was separate from his relationship to Shawn so I stuck to what it seemed like you were more interested in

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