People that say Katara and Aang don’t have romantic chemistry are flat out oblivious and wouldn’t know flirtation if it smacked them upside the head.
Just because they have an age appropriate relationship and nothing over pg13 is going on in show doesn’t mean they don’t have chemistry or function well together.
They are one another’s comfort. They trust each other. They understand each other. It isn’t shallow, it’s nuanced and layered with grief and pain despite the joy they might bring one another. It is through that grief they are able to find joy at all.
These two characters constantly parallel one another. There is so much sadness and angst to kataang canonically. They are anything but pure fluff and the show displays this over and over. They are both genocide survivors. Their mother and father were slaughtered in their place. But there is meaning in suffering, and theirs is having met.
Instead of repeating a cycle, Aang and Katara, by choosing one another, are breaking them. Aang himself is constantly defying Katara’s trauma over her mother and her father. And let’s not forget that Katara literally said she would murder Zuko over Aang, and I believe she absolutely would if she was forced to make that call. Because kataang isn’t just a boring stale and childish crush. They are the embodiment of things both have lost due to war and hatred. They are actively going against what fate would have made of them both had they never crossed paths with one another. Even in the show, the Fortuneteller echoes the idea that destiny might be an intrinsic aspect of life to a degree, but it alone is not enough. You have to choose! And they do!
And come on, a lack of emotional intensity? We had a whole dramatic kiss before an invasion with the looming angst of a great possibility of death, which was played up even more in the Ember Island Players. We had Aang saying Katara brought him back to life, so many small physical moments of intimacy to accompany those grander ones.
We had a whole episode of Katara and Aang shamelessly flirting, dancing and attracting an entire party’s attention and looking at each other like that which let’s be real, is as much as a Y7 kids cartoon can imply that these two characters are seriously into one another
And this isn’t even mentioning these parallels where Katara and Aang are used as weapons and lied to and lured into a false pretense of safety by adults who then use the other as a means to emotionally torture them.
Both Katara and Aang are forced to do something they don’t want to do, to save one another because like OP said, they are fucking obsessed with one another and have a truly insane level of emotional connection that is not replicated anywhere else in canon material lol. Like these two are literally ride or die for each other from the second they lay eyes on one another. They are NOT playing 😭🙏🏻 that is HER man that is HIS girl and don’t fuck w them bc they will go insane and mad if they lose each other etc
And instead of leaning into the toxicity that a lot of ships with this level of emotional connection do, kataang once again subverts by maintaining the truth that they are cycle breakers, and that they keep one another human, keep one another grounded, in the face of adversity. Absolutely peak to me, truly a straight ship I can root for
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