fundamentally a slayer is a human sacrifice. and a great deal of the conflict in the early seasons stems from buffy's rebellion against that reality. she doesn't just want to live, she wants to live like a person who has a future, who isn't fated to die before her brain finishes developing. and then the monks create dawn, this version of buffy who isn't the slayer, who actually has a life ahead of her. she is the living embodiment of everything buffy has ever fought for. the idea that dawn could also become a human sacrifice is unthinkable, so buffy chooses to finally accept her own death, the very thing she's been fighting against this whole time, in order to let this version of herself that has something to look forward to live. except it doesn't work! and she has to actually figure out how to live anyway, and how to coexist with the version of herself that she wishes she could be. insane shit. storyline of all time.
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Why I feel like Ka/taang is one-sided, despite textual evidence
ATLA does try to convince us that Katara has romantic feelings for Aang. For example: she seems thoughtful when she realizes that Aang is a powerful bender; she’s offended that he didn’t want to kiss her in the Cave of Two Lovers; she gets jealous when Sokka says On Ji and Aang look good together.
So…what’s wrong with anti-Kataangers? Do we just lack media comprehension?
To be clear, on their own, these gestures can indicate romantic interest. But at the same time, we have stuff like “Aang is a sweet little guy, like Momo.” We have her ambivalent facial expression after he kisses her before the eclipse, and her hedging during Ember Island Players, and her anger when he kisses her anyway. In the context of these conflicting cues, Katara’s possibly romantic reactions can absolutely be interpreted in a different way, because:
Acknowledging a friend as a potential romantic interest is not the same as actually being romantically interested in them. (Imo this is something young women struggle with, due to a combination of romance-centrism and heteronormativity that make women feel like they should be in romantic relationships, and that boys and girls who share intimate and deep feelings for one another must be romantically into each other)
Wanting someone to find you desirable is not the same as desiring that person. (Which is something a lot of women, especially young women, struggle with. Remember all the discourse around Cat Person back in 2017?)
Being jealous when someone flirts with your friend is not the same as wanting to be with your friend. (Especially when you see your friends as family, or if you’re accustomed to a specific type of devotion from that friend. It is jealousy, and it is possessiveness, but it doesn’t always arise from romantic feelings)
Growing up in a patriarchal society means that your desires are always filtered through what men want from you, sometimes in an abstract male gaze-y way, and sometimes in a very visceral and interpersonal way when a boy wants you specifically. And Katara’s reactions are just that — reactions. Reactions to what other people — including Aunt Wu, Sokka, Aang himself — have insinuated about her and Aang. She’s not really proactive in her interest in Aang: we don’t really see Aang, romantically, from Katara’s POV. Under the framework of “Katara is reacting to a romantic prospect she’s kind of uncertain about,” it is completely plausible — and indeed likely — that she would sometimes act in ways that indicate romantic interest, in addition to moments where she indicates the opposite.
Ka/taang shippers often bring up other evidence, like Katara’s despair when Azula hits Aang with lightning, or how protective she is of him when Zuko joins the Gaang. The thing is, these pieces of evidence aren’t necessarily indicative of romantic love. The fact that Katara genuinely loves Aang makes the whole thing more complicated, not less, because — especially at that age, especially when Aang is twelve years old and grew up in a sex-segregated society of monks — it is really difficult to tell the difference between platonic love and romantic love. Their mutual devotion is layered and complex yet straightforward in its sincerity. What was not straightforward, until the last five minutes of the show, is whether this devotion on Katara’s end is romantic. The romantic arc for Katara and Aang is not really an arc, as Sneezy discusses in this classic ZK video. Katara actually becomes more conflicted over time and we never see an event that clarifies her feelings. She seems more interested in him in The Headband than on the Day of the Black Sun, and she has never been more hostile to his romantic overtures than in the penultimate episode.
And in light of this, it’s pretty easy for fans to fill in the blanks with a different interpretation: maybe Katara’s weird expression after their kiss at the invasion means she didn’t enjoy it; maybe the kiss made her realize that she doesn’t actually feel that way about Aang; maybe against her will and her better judgement, she’s developing feelings for another person, a person who hurt her and whom she fervently tried to hate until he pulled off what is in my opinion the greatest grovel of all time in the form of a life-changing field trip. Maybe. Am I saying that Zutara has more romantic interactions than Ka/taang? Of course not. But ironically, the lack of romantic interactions means that it’s not inherently one-sided, the way Ka/taang became in the latter half of season 3.
I’m not arguing that Katara’s unequivocally not into Aang. Obviously the text declares that she is, because they get married and have kids. But I am saying that there’s a very good reason that so many people, especially women, see Katara’s interest in Aang as ambiguous. It’s not because we can’t pick up “subtle” hints of growing affection. It’s because we know not all affection is romantic, and it’s really easy for someone else’s insistent romantic intentions to muddle what you want.
P.S. I first started thinking about these topics (platonic vs romantic love, desiring someone vs wanting to be desired, etc) in the context of compulsory heterosexuality, a term describing how queer women contort themselves into relationships with men even if they’re not really into men. I saw a post a few days ago joking about why so many queer women seem to be into Zutara. I wonder if part of the reason is because as queer women, we are very sensitive to the ways in which we can talk ourselves into wanting things we don’t actually want, and Katara’s romantic interest in Aang can be easily seen that way.
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One of those "Jason becomes friends with Ghost King!Danny in the Zone after he dies" AUs but Jason just. Never leaves. He spends three years just hanging out in the Zone, partially amnesiac and everything. He gets a place in the King's Court (literally just the Official Friend Group of people Danny likes) and fully builds a new life in the Zone.
And then, one day, the Justice League has to travel to the Infinite Realms to meet with the Ghost King (their summoning portals wouldn't work). They travel all the way up to the castle and are told to enter the king's receiving chambers
Imagine their surprise when the king isn't the otherworldly eldrich monster they were expecting but a glowing ghost kid hanging out on a throne messing with his friends
And then the king and the ghosts+court notice the League and settle down, arranging themselves to look more Official(tm). The League approaches, and Superman is laying out the reasons the League wanted to meet with the Ghost King. And Batman, who has been looking around, cataloguing everything in the room, finally gets a good look at one of the Knights of the King's Court
"Jason?"
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thinking about how fucking resilient Jews are.
thinking about my great grandparents in romania, raised in a land colonized by the same empire that sent them to the balkans, still working as tailors and butchers like their ancestors had for generations.
thinking about them stowing away on ships to america so their children could live to see adulthood.
thinking about how many other five foot two bookworms have been in my family. i know i’m not the first, and i certainly hope i won’t be the last.
thinking about how many seders my family has held throughout history, how many “next year in jerusalem”s were shouted. it hasn’t happened yet, but maybe it will.
thinking about the women who passed down kabbalah to their children while witches burned in the next village over. how many mothers kept literal magic alive.
thinking about how every single person that lived before me, every branch of my family tree, had to choose to survive. living has always been in the present progressive for Jews; every breath they took was a choice to fight just a little longer.
i come from people who survived the spanish inquisition, the soviet union, the Shoah, the judeo-roman wars, ottoman imperialism, the rise and fall of so many empires i cannot name them all, and the only uniting factor is them. they taught their toddlers the sh’ma and lit candles and read books and sewed clothes and spun linen and cured meat and davened and smiled and laughed and they did that for two thousand years. ten years ago i became the first bat mitzvah in my family line. the first woman in my family to read from the torah.
i hope they’re proud. i hope i was worth it for them.
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it's so funny to me that caleb and veth really did just trade off the job of intensely pining for the other at like the halfway point of the campaign. like, imo, nott in the early days did not behave in any real romantic or even romance-adjacent ways toward him--I imagine it would be very hard to even think in that way when you hate what you look like so much, have such low self-esteem, and are actively lying about your entire past, including a secret husband. caleb, on the other hand, is kind of diving directly back into the sort of relationship he had with astrid and eadwulf. very close, very intimate, we-huddled-for-warmth-together-and-oops-it-led-to-something-else sort of thing. he is the one who expresses that he's fine with it if people think he and nott are romantically together when they're talking to keg. nott is the one who pushes back on that. he calls her his life partner. unknowingly, he compares his feelings for nott to nott's feelings for yeza. his behavior only really starts to change after he finds out about veth's husband because suddenly all of that other stuff is rendered inappropriate in retrospect. but even then he compliments her to yeza over dinner in the most awkward of ways, he admits to being jealous, he calls yeza "a lucky man" to have her, he stares at veth and yeza closed bedroom door for far too long, he creates an entire arcane tower with room for her family just so she'll stay with him. in general, his behavior is not, um, totally and completely platonic about it, you know?
like, veth's feelings for caleb are canonical and therefore indisputable in their existence, but caleb in the early days was not that dissimilar to how veth was acting near the end of the campaign. it really paints a picture of "right person, wrong time" in the way things just didn't line up for them. or, as veth would say: "in another world, maybe"
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