The irony of these new antis barking about 'lack of media literacy within the Zutara fandom' while using chatgpt to write term papers is not lost on me.
In most cases media literacy is being used as a buzzword without a full understanding of its actual definition and purpose. Media literacy today, is about being able to receive, interpret and analyze messages from a multitude of sources that are both print like books, newspapers, magazines, digital like this post and visual like videos and art - with a heavier emphasis on identifying bias due, in part, to the current political and social climate - and the ability to use that information to create your own.
All of the content you consume - and we consume what feels like 100 fold more than we used to twenty years ago - is trying to influence you. What you buy, what you trust, how you vote and how you think. Having media literacy means you can receive a message, understand what it says, analyze what it means, discern the creators intent and bias and create your own based on what you took away from that message - whether or not you agreed with it.
Unfortunately media literacy is now being vomited up as way to say 'You aren't interpreting the media the way I think you should, I have no arguments of my own so I'm just gonna call you stupid'
I was an engineering major not a communications major so I'll stop my overview here and leave the deep dive of what media literacy truly is to someone more qualified. The part of media literacy I do have background in and I will talk about is the ability to create. The ability to take in a work, understand, analyze and then synthesize it.
Science is the discovery of what is, engineering is the discovery of what can be - or whatever that quote was.
Synthesis is a huge part of engineering, memorizing and regurgitating what's in the textbook isn't enough because in the field you need to take all of that theory, apply it and come up with something new, something that doesn’t exist yet.
Great what does any of this have to do with Zutara and antis?
Well Zutara is a synthesis of Katara and Zuko's friendship. It's taking atla, understanding Zuko and Katara' story and then recombining into an inference of what could have been.
The Katara that staged a prison break and empathized with other victims of war was synthesized into Ambassador Katara.
The presence of Blue Spirit in Ba Sing Se at the same time as the gaang was synthesized into Blutara and is being synthesized into Painted Spirit.
Katara's forgiveness and Zuko’s pursuit of friendship and care for Katara - "Your sister, she hates me, and I don't know why but I do care what she thinks of me." - is synthesized into a romance.
It's the ability to synthesize is what gives us fics+fanart - it's a fan's synthesis of what they knew of waterbending that gave us bloodbending.
The irony in accusing zks of not having media literacy is that Zutara requires it to exist. All headcanons and alt ships require some level of it to exist. The tens of thousands of fics, art and metas that have been produced by the Zutara fandom all required the creator to watch, understand and analyze atla, and then synthesize what they got from it in order for those works to be produced.
To be angry that we produce metas and fan works is being angry at us for possessing media literacy. Meanwhile the desperate clinging to the letter of canon with a complete inability to diverge from said canon - something that we often see from antis - reveals a deep lack of it.
