Hi!! I love your work so much and want to thank you for sharing it 🫶 I saw you reblogged a Avatar The last Airbender artwork - do you like any fanfiction from that AU? Would you also ship Zutara? I read a lot of Zutara
Also apologies for the unhinged ask I sent a while back When I first discovered Lionheart I read it all in one go and was sort of shook by your amazing story/characters/writing prowess etc and well I think I went a bit overboard with my flailing on here when i sent that ask 😅 please know I did not mean to be so overwhelming - I was just excited about your story (and I still a Lionheart is amazing!)
they were one of my OGs! I shipped them before I was into Dramione. It was the fateful moment at which I decided canon meant nothing to me, because in my head, the agni kai is the kind of balls to the wall soulmate-level scene that's — no joke — more intimate to me than a vow of marriage. like.
pairing zuko and katara for a 2v1 in the final battle is already a Choice because katara's last adventure with zuko in s3 is also one of the biggest moments of character development we get from her in the show and definitely the episode that grapples most seriously with katara's trauma over her mother, which is something she and zuko have in common — and obviously you can have platonic character growth adventures, having dead/missing moms is not a foundation for romance, other strawmen etc., but more seriously. that episode is the most substantive Katara Grief Episode we get ever. and it's with zuko, who's known her for about five minutes, and not like. the man she marries. and it culminates in a dark catharsis of violence and forgiveness and katara embracing zuko and forgiving him for being part of the imperial war machine that hunted her down and tried to kill her multiple times. and that's the setup that the finale is choosing to mirror.
i think what the creators were going for is that zuko and katara both help each other heal from the trauma that empire has done to their respective families, but it's also a relationship of trust and understanding and respect for each other's experiences, as represented by the fact that both of them defer to the other on how to deal with their respective antagonists. namely, zuko appears willing to let her straight up kill a dude for growth! (love!) and basically defers to her about the level of violence that's appropriate to use against the soldiers of the country that destroyed her homeland. (aang has good reasons for acting the way he does about this and but it also does not help that so many of his conversations with katara in book 3 are arguments, and not just spurious bickering but intractable arguments about major philosophical differences between the characters about the nature of aang's moral duty to the world and the adequacy of violence as a response to injustice; arguments in which zuko and katara often agree anyway moving on)
forgot where i was going with this. the mere concept of these two going on quasi-suicide missions to avenge each other's familial trauma is by itself so romantic that i almost blacked out just now. so. there's one problem;
in parallel, katara hangs back from the agni kai, apparently just for the sake of zuko's honor? the two of them could probably clock azula, and it's not like anyone else is there to dispute the legitimacy of the agni kai if she intervenes. so the irony of her coming to respect/acknowledge zuko's philosophy of combat, especially when she has very good practical reasons not to, charges the emotions of their fight.
the last scene we have of her and zuko is an identical parallel to her and aang at the end of b2, a dynamic which then was explicitly romantic at least on aang's end, but the show flips the contexts, because while aang gets injured trying to release his attachment to katara (a valid plot and character choice) zuko gets injured doing the opposite of that, i.e. choosing katara over his own safety and the future of the Fire Nation.
like. not sure how much we were supposed to read into this subtext but I definitely think zuko contemplates dying in that scene, and the consequences for the Fire Nation if he did die would have been like. disastrous. even assuming katara took out azula 1v1, which zuko cannot know ex ante that she will, if zuko had died before she could manage then the fire nation throne is empty, and maybe iroh survives the battle but that's still a succession crisis waiting to happen. anyway this whole scene is staged as if zuko and katara are completely in-sync and makes clear that zuko, at least, is amazingly devoted to her. and also it makes katara the lightning-rod (ha) manifestation of zuko's growth over the entire series. nothing romantic to see here obviously!!
on a doylist level, the pairing of zuko and katara in book 3 happens because aang becomes increasingly isolated on his quest to find a solution that doesn't require killing. which is philosophically interesting and engages with his culture as a real facet of his character, but i think the spirit-bending answer was regarded by a lot of people at the time (and now) as a sort of cheat-out answer, because he never actually wins one of those arguments with katara or the gaang about why you shouldn't kill this dictator. and i get that it's presented as a victory for aang, not a moral advertisement of the solution itself — the show's careful to illustrate that this is aang trying to protect the culture the fire nation took from him, and prevent them/the Avatar role from finally stripping him of even the basic tenets of being an Air Nomad, of whom he is now the last — but idk, there should have been a cost to that! There should be some consequence to letting the most dangerous man in the world, whose primary vector of danger is actually NOT BENDING but his MASSIVE POLITICAL POWER, escape with the actual reservoir of his power intact! The fact that the fire lord cannot bend never felt significant to me except that it makes him easier to put in prison, which, fine, avatar is not going to do a nuremburg episode i get that. i do. but like zuko and katara get these fully realized arcs that impose costs and challenges and sacrifices and make it feel like they've fought their way to their ending, and aang gets a lion-turtle shipped in from the Deus Ex depot two episodes out from the finale so he doesn't have to make a choice with costs. which is honestly the show's fault for not engaging sooner with the fact that aang has this aversion to killing, and for not framing the moral conflict as a little more two-sided than "aang vs. literally every sane person with a stake in this, including, and i shit you not, the ghosts of airbenders past."
i got a little lost in the sauce but the tldr is the end of ATLA kind of declared two characters to be narrative soulmates. and then informed us in 5-second kiss shots that they ended up with other people. and this is JUST about the finale. this doesn't even cover the rest of what all happens between them in the show.
vaporwave
baratheonpilled
dailybridgerton
annaxmalina
jacobvanloon
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