You Rise with the Moon, I Rise with the Sun.

we are lovers of zutara, oshamir, and media analysis. we are well-studied marxists and feminists. we are legion. NSFW (MDNI!)

[childofoakandwillow]

Don't Make Me Tap the Sign

[childofoakandwillow]

sdcc26 part 2 electric boogaloo

what's eren yeager doing in their character sheets? oh, is it because bryke don't have a single creative bone in their body and are exactly the kind of losers that would use AI to make their movies? 😭💀😂

[zarahartist]

Katara from ATLA

This is a prize piece for a ATLA stamp rally taking place in MCM London.

[magpieallegations]

Can someone who has read/watched more of the post-ATLA canon tell me if I'm right about something? I'm vaguely aware of these Air Acolytes, and from the sound of it they're all or mostly female...but uh...I'm thinking about this to myself and can't get past the fact that if this is true then A.ang grows up to be:

-an adult man in a position of significant power

-who's not really beholden to any regulatory oversight or higher authority

-who starts a religious community

-and recruits mostly (entirely?) women

-but hasn't taken a vow of celibacy

(and, y'know, as a bonus there's the whole "thought it was okay to kiss Katara against her will and never apologizes" thing in the mix).

I...I feel like I've read about so many cults that sound like this...and it never works out very well for the women involved.

Even if you're not starting the cult with bad intentions, the power dynamics at play in that situation are soooo ripe for exploitation.

This can't have been done on purpose, right? Like surely it must have been a cascading series of convenient, hacky writing choices no one put a ton of thought into and then in the end you step back and are like, "Ohhhhhh noooooo, this is starting to look a little bit like the Manson Family :("

[childofoakandwillow]

as someone new to the fandom (who is a feminist and studied evangelical cults and colonization for years, and who believes "the purpose of a system is what it does"), this HAD to have been on purpose. let's remember what kind of creeps we're dealing with. volpe, bryke, etc.

[childofoakandwillow]

bryke's pregnant katara concept art at san diego comiccon 2026

the first fucking concept art they displayed of katara shows her pregnant. 🤢 and once again, i'm correct; the most important part of katara's design to them is her stupid fucking leather belt that we now know acts as a prengnancy band (that she has to wear even when she's not pregnant?). what better visual symbol of her womb belonging to aang is there? there's a goddamn yellow ribbon tied across it. (i would bet money that bryke have already paid someone to draw her barefoot and pregnant in any context.)

fuck this racist-babysitter-incest-mommy-breeding kink horseshit that is KA. bryke can NOT beat these allegations. i expected some creep shit from them, but it doesn't help that the NY and SD comiccons are owned by men from the 3pst31n files.

bryke, go rub one out and shut up for the rest of your life 🤮

[xabura]

Young Zuko in NATLA watching the blue-and-black Blue Spirit protect the red-and-white Painted Lady flowers in a bunraku play (a form of traditional Japanese puppet theater) made me think about how the Blue Spirit wearing black and the Painted Lady wearing white is not only a nice contrast, but those colors are also what a couple would wear at a Shinto wedding ceremony. The bride wears a white shiromuku, while the groom wears a black montsuki hakama. Katara wears red in her Painted Lady disguise instead of white, but it still works because the bride changes into a red iro-uchikake for the reception after the ceremony.

[redbelles]

ZUTARA + PARALLELS PART TWO:

You rise with the moon; I rise with the sun.

[magpieallegations]

I've seen a couple of comparisons of Obsession to A.ang's attitude towards Katara, but there's an older, more interesting comparison I keep thinking of in relation to kata.ang: 500 Days of Summer. The story itself (as interpreted by much of the audience, at least, but we'll get there) is, much like Obsession, about how unfair and unromantic the whole "guy meets girl, decides she's his Forever Girl in spite of knowing almost nothing about her, decides he's entitled to a relationship" trope actually is for the woman. It may be the most thorough deconstruction I've ever seen of the romance storyline of the Nice Guy with the soft romantic heart who deserves his dream girl, even though she plays hard to get, and so he's eventually rewarded for his relentless pursuit.

The more I think about it, the more I think that Tom and A.ang do have essentially the same dating strategy (I think more than A.ang and Bear, who really only acts on his crush with the assistance of a magic wish). Compare how Tom uses a combination of pity, erosion, lashing out, and outright cornering her to convince Summer to date him, with A.ang's pursuit of Katara in season 3. Compare Summer talking about how she can't give Tom the love and commitment that he's demanding to Katara telling A.ang that she's confused and now isn't the right time. Compare Tom and A.ang ignoring what Summer and Katara tell them because it's not what they want to hear. Compare Tom's rose-colored idealization of Summer, and the way he lashes out at her when she doesn't live up to that idealization, to A.ang's daydreams about Katara and the way a switch flips in his treatment of her when she says or does something that his Forever Girl wouldn't say or do.

Compare the scene where Summer is talking about herself while Tom zones out and starts daydreaming about how how he's totally gonna be the guy to win her love instead of actually getting to know her, with the fact that we see three solid seasons of A.ang pining after Katara but, in however many one-on-one scenes of them having meaningful private conversations (always about A.ang), not once does he actually ask her about her hopes or dreams or fears, or anything about herself, really. I still don't know what precisely A.ang liked about Katara other than...she's there.

Now, in the end, ATLA plays out like wish fulfillment: the girl finally stops playing hard to get, settles for the writer's self-insert Nice Guy hero, and they supposedly live happily ever after.

The really interesting difference that makes 500 Days of Summer a more intriguing comparison than Obsession (in my mind) is that it's semi-autobiographical, so Summer's response to Tom isn't dictated purely by the writer's wish fulfillment fantasies. In the real world, the guy got the girl, and then...the girl finally had enough of dating a guy that centered their relationship around his entitlement to his dream girl and fulfilling his fantasies of True Love with zero input from her. So she dumps his ass.

And then within a year, Summer is married to a guy who walked up to her and asked her about the book she was reading. Hmm. I wonder if there was anyone in ATLA who took time out of his schedule to seek out and learn about who Katara is and what's important to her?

Here's the best video breakdown I could find, both of the movie itself, and even more interestingly, the evidence that Tom is a blatant self-insert for the screenwriter. It takes you through the mechanics of the story, and then shows how the screenwriter of 500 Days of Summer wrote a semi-autobiographical screenplay based his own experience of his dream girl breaking his heart. He was then shocked that the director, actors, and audience interpreted it very differently than he intended.

I found the clip from the commentary where the director and actor are discussing Tom's selfish and possessive ideas of love, and the screenwriter pushes back and tries to position Tom as some noble romantic hero for trying to "win" the girl, to be particularly brutal.

It's truly a fascinating case study in how a writer can come up with a very compelling and meaningful story, filled with interesting and fleshed-out characters, and still fundamentally misunderstand what he's created. It's a case study in how the audience can see things in a story that the writer can't, that the writer didn't ever intend, that the writer rejects, and how the audience is right to see those things (especially if the writer is not being honest with himself about what he's writing and why).

Of course, it sounds like the writer of 500 Days of Summer eventually saw the light and stopped defending his self-insert as a Nice Guy who deserves his Forever Girl. If only Bryke could do the same :/

[nuinokata]

take zutara's pain, quadruple it, and split it between their canon "partners" 🙏

[blackcatobservatory]

Love is a Battlefield (the Katara/Aang pages) makes Aang’s incel/“nice guy” behavior so blatant, I actually don’t think kids should read it, from like a moral perspective.

I hadn’t seen the Going Home (Zuko/Jin/Mai) pages, but dang. Didn’t Zuko tackle Mai into the fountain when they were kids because she had a burning apple on her head? But now they’re “even”?

What awful, mean-spirited stories.

[childofoakandwillow]

@sokkastyles said "ah yes, the two genders. attack her until she becomes your girlfriend / humiliate him in front of his ex." YUP

[blossomsbandit]

the problem with complex, independent female characters who are loved and understood by girls and hated by boys is that, from the moment authors start treating them like trophies and end up pairing them with the main character who “deserves” everything, that complex, independent female character starts to be accepted; when otherwise wouldn't be the case if she wasn't an accessory to adorn the male protagonist’s arm. if said complex, independent female character is given the freedom to choose what she wants, given agency, or follow her own narrative arc that strides away from the predetermined fate, she becomes unlikable, because a female character must always follow the “hero gets the girl” trope, even if there's no chemistry or a compelling dynamic between them that hints at romance from her own perspective and not just the male desire.

because, sadly, female characters can't exist within the writing unless there's a deeper, more objectifying motive. if she won't serve the purpose of choosing the hero, what's there to be liked?

[snowygracetheriver]

We don't talk enough about Aang's answer to Katara during the intermission...

[archives468833]

Aang sees Katara as the preachy one?

[yourhighness6]

I was rewatching the Ember Island Players and I feel like it isn't an accident that Actress-Katara was portrayed as kind of "slutty". Like yes the play itself is a mockery of the character's fanon portrayals at the time to some degree, but the way it coincides with the non-con kataang kiss sits so weird with me. In the play we see that the fake Katara and Zuko have a thing in the Crystal Catacombs, which is played for laughs to make fun of shippers. But beyond that, Katara and Aang's relationship in the play is sibling like, as a way to rub salt in the wound to Katara's rejection of Aang. It's almost like the play is serving as a way to guilt trip Katara into wanting to be with Aang by implying that if she were to end up with Zuko, she would be exactly like Actress-Katara, and would therefore be a "slut", or a "tease" for not returning Aang's affections. Obviously there are other major differences to Actress-Katara and real Katara, but I just feel like it's interesting that the writers are basically saying "this character isn't a slut! ...But she would be if she ended up with that one character you all ship her with tho"

[sokkastyles]

It's almost like the play is serving as a way to guilt trip Katara into wanting to be with Aang by implying that if she were to end up with Zuko, she would be exactly like Actress-Katara, and would therefore be a "slut", or a "tease" for not returning Aang's affections.

Yeah, this is why I can never buy the anti zutara argument that the play is criticizing zutara as a "colonizer fantasy." It's not, it's criticizing female desire. Those scenes play right into Aang's fear that Katara will put out for everyone but him, and we are supposed to sympathize with him over it.

[mookimooks]

It's very Incel Nice Guy trope, even if we didn't have the incel term at the time. Just all sorts of fucked up to have grown ass men mocking the desire and attraction of young women (and girls). Girls bad if their desires do not align with how the nice guys think they should behave. Therefore those pesky girls need to be brought down a few notches so they know to make the RIGHT CHOICE or face the social consequences.

What's that word again? Beginning with m and ending in isogyny.

[childofoakandwillow]

every accusation is a confession with KAs

this is why they get mad when ZKs name the specific fetishes that bryke force KA into. i don't like using those intense words, but the gross, depressing treatment of katara is intense enough. we're just calling it what it is.

and for anyone who thinks they can "get me", no, i wouldn't somehow be happy if she had kids with zuko anyway. (my own HC: i could see Zuko not wanting Katara to go through pregnancy or birth because she grew up malnourished (pregnancy would be dangerous for her) - AND hating the FN legacy of pain and suffering and colonialism that he lets his bloodline end.)

[koolkid1303]

I’m surprised more people aren’t talking about how uncomfortable it is to see a character, not just based off of Buddhist monks, but is literally a monk in the show, be in a romantic and sexual relationship with a woman and have kids with her while still being a monk. And to talk about how hot and ripped he is and how people are thirsting over him? Bryke just love to pick and choose whatever parts of Buddhism they want to keep and what they want to bastardize for the benefit of aang. They make him preach about his monk lifestyle the entire show but when it comes to his crush there’s suddenly an exception. It’s so culturally insensitive and ignorant.

[childofoakandwillow]

i agree. this happens because he functions as a vessel for mike's ego; his asian cultural references are all flattened into an ignorant teenage white boy character. real monks do not hate or make fun of other cultures, but aang thinks everyone needs to behave like the air nomads because their way is the only way.

it's almost like the "but he's asian" exists to shield bryke from any criticism of how they write aang's character 🫩

[storynightlight]

Someone is never beating the self insert allegations...

[lilyinthevale]

Very telling that to make Aang “hot”in brykes eyes, they chose to change his facial features entirely and made him buff like a boxer.

This movie is catering to brykes wish fulfillment and whoever thinks just like them.

Stop projecting all these things you wish you had onto these characters. We’re your lives that miserable that you have to use Aang as a vessel to get everything you didn’t get when you were young.

[dragonfoxandfound]

Kataang shipper: Katara could never be Fire Lady because she'd be stripped of her culture and reduced looking pretty and making babies.

I find it so weird that ka's version of Katara is such a push over that she would just let her culture be taken away. You're telling me that the girl that forced an entire tribe to drop their culturally embedded misogyny for her, would just go 'oh, ok' when some idiot told her she couldn't wear furs or couldn't celebrate the solstice?

But we're the ones mischaracterizing her.

Pictured above: The Katara that would allow herself to be stripped of culture.

Who would take her right to participate in her culture?

Zuko?

The guy who became a traitor to his nation? Who chose to give up his chance at the crown, not once, but twice? The same guy who is canonically changing Fire Nation culture at the school level and canonically had a vested interest in rebuilding the SWT?

That Zuko would tell Katara she can't wear blue? The Zuko that had his life threatened by Katara and knows she could bloodbend him into a pretzel, would tell her fur isn't appropriate for court?

Pictured above: The Zuko that would tell Katara that she's not allowed any cultural forms of expression or wear blue.

Katara is one of the most powerful waterbenders in the world and the biggest advocate for justice in the series, but apparently Katara is too weak to defend her right to her culture and its practices.

She would be a representative of the SWT possibly the NWT, a friend of the avatar and King Kuei who owes her a debt for helping him get his kingdom back. A councilman would risk pissing off a woman with that many connections and influence over hair loopies?

Even if they did, the fact that they think Katara wouldn't be tenacious about fighting to display her culture or wouldn't possess the audacity to publicly wear her skins, beads and furs even after she was told not to, is an insult to her character. We haven't even gotten to how she happily and easily siezes power and control over situations at only 14, they think she'd do less as an adult? Some of them really do enjoy the cut down caged bird Bryke has made her into and it shows.

Zutara isn't canon, what happens in a Zutara storyline is completely up to the creator to choose and the fact that kataangers are constantly choosing for Katara being stripped of her cultural identity, her power and her autonomy is telling, maybe it's even projection.

[childofoakandwillow]

KAs say she'd lose herself in the FN bc she already loses herself in aang. every accusation is a confession.