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comradekatara · 10 months

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hey

do u mind sharing with us some of your headcanons about sokka&katara relationship? 🧡🪸

okay these aren’t “headcanons” so much as assorted thoughts on their relationship as siblings, how i view them and what they mean to me. this is hardly news to anyone who knows me, but they are my all time favorite avatar characters and their relationship is so fascinating and meaningful to me. which means that there will be some headcanons sprinkled in just because they do take up so much real estate in my mind that i may as well share some of the (many) thoughts i have on them. but also some analysis, interpretations, hot takes, subjective opinions, etc. and, to be clear, if you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll probably notice that i have gone over a lot of these points before, at some point or another. like i said, they’re my favorite characters, so i think/talk about them a lot lol

– first things first, i do feel a need to add the disclaimer that when approaching their sibling relationship, i do empathize with sokka more just because i am also the eldest sibling and that is genuinely a huge part of my identity, so that’s my perspective when approaching these characters. i also know what it’s like to be the only sister among brothers, but if anything my experiences with that have always made me feel like katara could have it so much worse in the brothers department. which isn’t to say that the only reason i empathize with sokka is because “he could be worse,” obviously he would not be one of my favorite characters of all time if his only redeeming quality was “he could be worse.” but i do think we need to take a second and appreciate that this sixteen year old boy is a statistical anomaly (and not just because he’s a “genius” or whatever). he belongs to the worst demographic ever invented, and yet manages to not only not be an absolute terror, but be a genuinely good person. katara could also be so much worse, by the way. fourteen year old girls are, on average, almost as much of a nightmare as sixteen year old boys! (i would know, i was one.) so yes, while they are both deeply flawed, and as much as they both think the other is so annoying and unreasonable and mean sometimes, they could both have it so much worse. angel siblings fr!!!

also, and i think this is really important to acknowledge, you can separate sokka from katara when discussing her character, but you cannot separate katara from sokka. so when talking about their relationship, as characters, specifically, sokka is more impacted by katara than katara is by sokka, both narratively and emotionally.

– okay. something that i think is so important to realize about both katara and sokka is that they both have these (different) stories that they use as coping mechanisms for the very tragic world they find themselves in, and neither of these narratives is actually fully accurate. they have differing worldviews, but neither one is entirely “right.” sokka’s narrative is extremely joyless. he is the “last man” of the southern water tribe and being a man, in his case, is about preparing himself for the day that he will inevitably die for katara like their mother did. that is his life’s goal; his primary purpose is to be a sacrifice, because that’s what Real Men do. so he spends every day training for the opportunity to eventually die in war, and even when sees more of the world, he still assumes his job is just be like, a bodyguard with no interiority of his own. what challenges that assumption is twofold: a) he has so much interiority; he soaks up new information like a sponge and synthesizes it into his worldview immediately, and suddenly it is a lot harder to be a human shield who thinks of nothing but tragedy and your own inevitable premature death, because you are also thinking about science and culture and art and sex all these things that make the world a richer, more beautiful place to live, and that inform you, as a human being, and you are suddenly a person and dying is no longer your sole priority??? but also b) he meets people who want to protect him. which is crazy to him specifically because he always thought that he is just fodder and therefore not deserving of being protected in his own right. and accepting that people will take risks to keep him safe and make him happy is basically antithetical to his very grim belief of who he is and what he is For.

and then katara’s worldview hinges upon her being the last waterbender of the southern tribe, the survivor of kya’s sacrifice, and a nascent hero. so she has a much more romantic view of the world, where survival is integral to her story (obviously she is also taking for granted that sokka is prepared to die for her at any given moment, but mostly because she rejects the premise that sokka is allowed to die dammit!!!) and she is right all the time because she is a hero full of righteous fury and driven by self-determination and belief in her own ability to create a kinder, juster world, which means she cannot be wrong. the thing about katara is that her philosophy is very good and awesome, but also extremely unrefined and naive, to the point where anything she doesn’t like is an Injustice (sort of like how in our culture the term “problematic” spans “doesn’t have a fully coherent position on whether or not being intersex inherently qualifies someone as being part of the LGBT community” to “being a convicted rapist”, but in her case it’s like “being a fire nation soldier makes you deserving of being frozen in place by my waterbending, but so is being kind of rude to aang”).

and it’s really important to understand that both katara and sokka have flawed narratives about the world and their place in it that they have internalized, and a lot of their points that are opposite (katara thinking that she is at the center of the universe whereas sokka seeing himself as an object rather than a subject, as the main example) are eventually synthesized into a healthy middle, where katara realizes that she is just one person (despite the massive person that has been placed on her due to genocide) and so is everyone else (even the Bad ones), and sokka also realizes that he is a person deserving of humanity, just like everyone else. not that i really foresee either of them fully shedding their defining narratives, bc they have both internalized them so deeply due to their formative traumas, but “the boiling rock” and “the southern raiders” are huge for them respectively in their journeys towards seeing themselves as people instead of symbols. and that is just really important to understand about them, because i think a lot of people think “this sibling’s worldview is right, and this sibling’s worldview is wrong,” but that’s not true! they’re both right to an extent, but also both deeply flawed. and challenging and expanding those worldviews is the basis for their arcs over the course of the show.

– i think my main katara&sokka “headcanon” (ie, interpretation of the text) that rly informs how i view their entire relationship is one that sort of reframes what sokka says about “seeing katara’s face” in “the runaway” with the context of “the southern raiders” to inform it. because i think a lot of people interpret that to mean that he sees/treats katara like she is his mom, but nothing about their relationship and the way they behave around each other indicates that this is the case. like i think it can be easy to take what sokka says there at face value at first, but if you apply what we know about katara as revealed in “the southern raiders” to what sokka says here, it makes a lot more sense as a whole… like you have to remember the context in which sokka is saying this. he is explaining to toph why telling katara not to “act like a mom” is hurtful to her. toph associates motherhood with femininity, submissiveness, conformity – all things that she rejects due to being forced into that mold her whole life (and obviously katara is the furthest thing from being submissive, she is literally a revolutionary, but in this moment, toph thinks that katara criticizing their scams is indicative of that, when really katara is just lashing out because she wasn’t included in the first place). but katara associates motherhood with sacrifice. katara has to carry the guilt of knowing that her waterbending is what got her mother killed, and she has to prove to herself and her mother and her tribe that kya’s sacrifice meant something by becoming the strongest waterbender in the world.

so sokka is first and foremost trying to bridge that gap, that miscommunication between toph and katara wherein they are leveling their deepest formative traumas at each other all over a fundamentally petty fight: katara wants to be included so she lashes out, the fact that she is telling toph what to do makes toph lash out, and it spirals from there. sokka is trying to tell toph that katara has a complicated relationship to motherhood, that her image of “mother” is not the same image toph holds in her mind. if he were saying that katara is a mom and that he sees her as his mom, their relationship would reflect that! but he literally treats her as a little sister. the entire show. the cactus juice incident is like the one instance of sokka needing katara to guide him, and it’s because he’s tripping balls. sokka relies on her, and yes, he relies on her care and compassion and help in many ways, but, and this is crucial, he also relies on her because she is his identity. i don’t think that’s something sokka can even truly recognize in himself, but it’s clear that on a subconscious level katara is his raison d’être, that taking care of his sister (as hakoda tells him, as kanna tells him) is his primary goal at all times. and that’s why he sees katara’s face. because his relationship to his mother is now defined by her sacrifice, the sacrifice he has inherited in her death. katara is everything to him; not because he sees her as his protector, but because he sees himself as her’s.

– ok this one may be kind of controversial……… but to be honest I don’t even really think that sokka and katara had an unfair division of domestic labor due to gender roles. which isn’t to say that those gender roles don’t exist (both in the show, as they are clearly demonstrated, or in real life, since i experienced them in my own family dynamic) or that or that sokka didn’t internalize them, obviously he did (katara also internalized gender roles, she just expresses those beliefs in less overt ways). but based on the little we know about kanna (who is the one making katara do laundry, not sokka, fwiw), i think it’s just far more likely that she kept making katara do domestic chores with her because she needed to keep her inside the house where she could see her. she’s a single grandma, she’s tired as fuck, and she knows that if given any sort of unstructured free time, her hyperactive granddaughter will use her waterbending to accidentally destroy what’s left of their village. which is more or less what happened eventually. and yeah it does suck that katara had to spend her valuable tween years washing her family’s disgusting sweaty socks instead of causing a ruckus, dating a new cute commie boy every week, and fostering intense rivalries with other girljocks, but it’s not like sokka was having a remotely better time so it’s hardly fair to blame him for that! imo her real “enemy” (ie, person looking out for her who made her do laundry) was gran gran but sokka was aligned w/ gran gran so in her mind he was also making her do laundry (the injustice!!!) …plus she did get to do all of those things eventually :)

sidenote: can we talk about how gran gran was so twisted for making katara wash sokka’s socks. like we established she’s making katara do that “for her own good” or w/e, but literally no teenage boy in the history of the world had wanted his little sister to wash his dirty socks for him. frankly, i bet sokka already washed his socks and then gran gran just made katara wash them again because she needed a way to keep her busy. katara’d be like “why do I have to stay indoors all day doing laundry why can’t SOKKA do his OWN laundry” and gran gran, who was just looking for the easiest way to keep an eye on her reckless, hyperactive granddaughter, would be like “okay then if you don’t want to do laundry you could always do your math homework instead...” “okay FINE i’ll do laundry”

– i say this from experience (my brother is younger but also like a foot taller and freakishly strong), sokka’s extraordinarily high pain tolerance (often played to comedic effect) stems from katara beating the shit out of him every single day of their childhood, and him just. not being allowed to retaliate. (we see this throughout the show; she’ll often smack him while he just stands there and barely reacts.) as the older sibling u are simply not allowed to hit back. they can punch u, scratch u (i still have scars), push u over, and u just have to take it. even if they’re only like a year younger! and sokka doesn’t even consider this unfair, because that’s just how it is when you’re an older sibling. (zuko should take notes!) but he also knows how to get under her skin the exact right amount. just shitty enough that it’ll piss her off, but not enough to actually hurt her feelings (saying shit like “leave it to a girl to screw things up” or calling every guy she likes her boyfriend). he never actually crosses the line, but he does know exactly how to annoy her. katara, on the other hand, crosses the line to the point that she doesn’t seem to realize that there is a line?? (“the stars sure are beautiful tonight. too bad you can’t see them toph”) bc katara approaches everything from a righteous rage where she genuinely believes that she is justified in everything she does and says. classic baby of the family behavior, especially compounded by the fact that she was gassed up her whole life for being the special chosen one who brought hope back to their tribe. (she and aang have that to bond over, being Unique and Special and basking in that attention, but also the inherent grief of knowing that what makes them special is also what makes them alone, and knowing that if their people hadn’t been wiped out, they wouldn’t get to be the Hero, but they wouldn’t have to be, either.)

– you probably wouldn’t know it from following me now, but as a kid i did not really care for sokka. like, don’t get me wrong, i liked him fine, but if you asked me to list my top 5 atla characters, he would not be on there. but now he and katara are tied for #1 in equal measure. and a large part of my own journey from liking sokka fine but not particularly caring about him as a child to him becoming my favorite character alongside katara as an adult was my progression from “oh he’s just katara’s brother” to “no he is actually so much more than that he’s brilliant and an invaluable member of their group” to “actually he is just katara’s brother.” but his role as katara’s brother is what makes him so awesome. like katara was always my favorite character and i think it’s very obvious as to why a young girl would latch onto this very heroic and empowering fantasy. and the older i got the more i appreciated her depth, her flaws, the ways in which she is messy and imperfect and human. and i came to appreciate sokka as an extension of katara, as a character who is entirely devoted to her, who sublimates himself to protect her. their bond is so special and beautiful to me because it is so fraught and tenuous and filled with grief, but also so authentic and adorable and genuine.

i also think that getting older just necessitates appreciating sokka more. you go from being the baby who wants adventure to being the babysitter who is so fucking exhausted. i simply was not tired enough as a kid to See sokka and empathize with him. katara was far flashier and more exciting and easier to root for and enjoy. and i still do root for and enjoy her, and not just because she was formative for me, but because i will never stop finding nuances in her character that fascinate me, but i think sokka, as this depressed kid who feels fundamentally worthless and is far more morally grey than katara, is a character who is kind of an afterthought the first time you watch the show, especially as a child, even if you like his jokes or whatever (frankly i’ve always felt like toph is the funniest atla character overall). i think i’m in the unique position of having given this show so much real estate in my mind that i do genuinely believe that sokka is the most interesting and nuanced character in atla, but most people, even fans of sokka’s character, are just like, what the hell are you talking about. but he is! katara is the prototypical hero and narrator of this fantasy adventure quest narrative, and sokka is extremely not. which is why they play off each other so well, and why picking an Ultimate Favorite between them is actually impossible.

– obviously i’ve stated before that i think katara should be chief, and i will defend that belief to the death, but i also think people interpret that as me saying that she is given a massive responsibility that she is forced to bear alone, and that’s like. definitely not. no. first of all i don’t see katara becoming chief for at least a few decades (just because aang has to be the avatar at 12 and zuko has to be the firelord at 16 doesn’t mean that there’s a power vacuum in the southern water tribe in immediate need of filling). once she becomes chief she already has a huge support network in place, including her friends and family, but also spanning beyond them, across her entire community. katara loves bonding with people and making new friends, and i definitely think she has people to help her as chief, it’s not a role she would have to take on alone. and of course, sokka would be there. i think sokka would sub in and be chief when katara needed a break (so if anyone’s like “well in lok they say that sokka was chief” this is my explanation for that lol) and they would basically lead the southern water tribe together. but also sokka would not want to stay in one place all the time, whereas i think by the time katara is like in her 30s she pretty much lives there permanently, because all her students and patients and family and friends are there (zuko visits frequently). she’d still travel with aang and go on little adventures, but her whole life she has wanted to liberate her people and rebuild her culture and contribute to her community in a significant way, and so i can’t really see her living anywhere or doing anything else.

– finally: i like to think that after kya’s death, sokka was the one to braid katara’s hair every day, and it was this little ritual for them. (in the unaired pilot, katara teases sokka for braiding her doll’s hair when he was six, and i totally think that’s canon even if it didn’t make it into the show.) but then at some point or another, after all the men left the tribe, katara decided that she could braid her own hair and she stopped asking sokka to do it for her. and then a little while after that katara was in a bad mood because she was reminded of her mom or her dad or any of the other problems in her life, so she started yelling at sokka that he doesn’t even braid her hair anymore because he’s too busy trying to be their father to be her brother, and sokka just stood there and hoped that once she took her frustrations out on him she’d feel better. and then years later katara saw sokka braiding toph’s hair and she freaked out both because she’s offended that toph would ask sokka over her but also that sokka would braid toph’s hair but not her’s. and sokka’s just like “well… she asked me to…” and katara doesn’t want to ask sokka to braid her hair since she has been doing it by herself for years now, but she also does miss having her hair braided. one day sokka walks in on zuko braiding katara’s hair for her and he’s just like “ok well now this is unacceptable” but katara’s just like “you started it when you braided toph’s hair” and so sokka has to let zuko braid his sister’s hair as if sokka’s entire life does not revolve around being katara’s big brother. yeah it’s fine. he’s fine with it.

– as for all my other katara & sokka posts, featuring a whole assortment of analyses and headcanons, you can peruse this very full tag!

#sending this ask you may as well have unwittingly summoned a demon #only.... 3.6k words and 9 pages (on google docs) later......#and i still have so much more to say tbh #goats !!!#khrystyav #asks #katara #sokka #katara&sokka #kanna&katara #don't know how to tag this #analysis #but only partially #most of it is just random thoughts #about the most insane codependent siblings of all time

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