Aang as Bryke's Self-Insert, Katara as Their Punching Bag, and Their Racist Tradwife Fantasy of Kataang
Bryan and Michael pushed the Kataang ship in AtLA show to not only gratify their own fantasies, but also groom an audience of impressionable young children (i am in that demographic) into internalizing their misogynistic and racist fetishes.
The Kataang ship arc plays out, to the T, the white man’s fantasy of breaking an indigenous rebel woman into a submissive, whitewashed tradwife, cutting her off from her culture and connection to her land, forcing her to have children, - nevermind the fact that she had to deliver a baby ALONE, which is literally a bloodbath on its own, so much blood is lost - for a woman without any medicine, which would likely leave her with trauma surrounding pregnancy and childbirth - and finally, keeping her from public life, and then abandoning her after using her for labor for decades.
Katara is a perfect example of the parentified eldest daughter who grows into a woman that is forced to take on household and childrearing responsibilities; then, everyone acts like it's her choice, but if she doesn't, then nothing gets done and people will get sick and die.
We are already beginning to examine the harmful culture that was created in the early 2000s, the heyday of this show. It was still very much a man's world then, and I will continue to illustrate this starting with this document below:
It's 2026, aren't we calling out media that normalizes men/boys using weaponized competence to keep us drowning in our own homes? Her life is consumed by housework? And Aang just tries to distract her from the mess that he makes, while bothering her even more? When what would help is actually joining Katara and taking some of the work off her shoulders? Mothering younger boys is generally not seen as romantic by girls her age:
In another confirmation that this ship is nothing but salve for Bryke’s wounded egos, Michael has admitted that Aang is his self-insert and that Bryan based Katara off of an older girl he dated in high school:
And here's one more for good measure:
Their push for their babysitter fetish ship is clear when one sees that Bryke wrote "Kataang wins!" into the script notes of the final episode. This childish behavior only gets worse when you watch the full video of their behavior at the 2008 San Diego comic con, where they animated several fanarts without people's consent. The opening art is a creepy ember island style Kataang, where he says he "can't wait to have lots and lots of babies" with her, much to her dismay. So she replies "I'm breaking up with you." The audience cheers and laughs, then Zutara fanart is shown, and there are more cheers from what seem like fellow Zutara fans, until Katara is repeatedly made fun of by Zuko throughout their fanart, to even more cheers. Then, we see an animation of Sokka: "Anyone who thinks that Zuko and Katara should be together will forever have doomed relationships."
This is common behavior for conservative white men; every accusation is a confession (this is also why KAs frequently call Zuko a colonizer). After exposing their intentions behind Kataang, this becomes abundantly clear. Finally, at the end, a Kataang art shows Katara swooning, "I should have never doubted the will of Mike and Bryan."
Like, this cake topper at his wedding really seems like the nail in the coffin, guys. And see Mike's description of LoK Aang? But sure, he's not your self-insert at all...
Then we have Giancarlo Vulpe's reduction of the power of the spirit water to a metaphor for ""virginity"". Volpe claimed that Katara didn’t “waste it” on Zuko and “saved it up” for Aang. In fact, I was able to recognize Giancarlo as pro Kataang in a zoom call discussing this, without ever having seen a photo of him before! How, you ask? The obvious leering gaze of his eyes and a shit-eating-grin that several other survivors of SA have recognized and agreed is is unsettling. I asked my friend in horror if that was him in the top left, and my heart dropped into my stomach when she said yes:
These statements and references reveal Kataang's true function and place it in its real context: Bryan and Michael playing with dolls and shipping themselves - as adults - with Katara, a teenage girl character. She is repeatedly punished in the show for not reciprocating Aang’s feelings and abused by the narrative, which was fueled by Bryke’s anger and entitlement. She's repeatedly abandoned and blamed for things she has no control over: Jet, the scroll, the fortune teller, the whole thing with the solstice. She is shamed for her culture and mocked for trying to keep the group together. I will further explore these claims below.
Aang kisses her without consent twice (one is linked here), from the Ember Island Players episode. She looks rightfully horrified in this clip! Notice he chooses to move towards him when her eyes are closed. This is just sexual assault. Thus, she runs out of the area (and most likely back to the gaang). The next time we see them, Zuko is blocking Aang from sitting with her.
Making this worse, Katara is also continuously made to look younger in her body and face for scenes with Aang, making her body shorter and her eyes bigger.
In the 2nd episode of Book 3, The Headband, not only was her bust messed with, but she also was made to pretend to be Aang’s mother:
Katara when she's not a sex object for Bryke/Aang:
Katara when she is (of course with her chest heaving because she just did a backflip, great plausible deniability):
Her FN disguise also shows the most midriff in comparison to other FN garments we see that aren't swimwear.
Here's another side-by-side showing the shortening and rounding out of her face, and enlarging of her eyes.
They also messed with her bust in ep.13 of Book 2. Here's her, desexualized, being her normal self around Toph when Aang’s not around:
And here's her with a bigger chest after getting dressed up:
In this next suspicious shot, the camera pans up from her feet up to her face to show the new necklace Aang (ignorantly) made her (from the fishing line they need to survive that he stole from Sokka), before we later learn necklaces are a betrothal gift in the north:
This pile of evidence shows that Bryan and Michael are sexualizing Katara, a beloved teen character, for their own pleasure. AtLA was subjected to so many altered animations and revised scripts that the immense tension in the writing room caused several animators to create burner accounts online to blow the whistle on this information. This is also why so many unofficial Zutara animations have been made, with Dante himself voicing several quotes and scripts in them. Of course, the studio silenced him with an NDA shortly after.
In the episode where they're running recon on the FN, Katara is shown on her knees, alone in the background, cooking for everyone else.
Look at her face. She's lonely, dejected. It's all she's ever allowed to be. She goes penguin sledding with Aang ONCE, then it's back to waiting on everyone hand and foot.
This motherly dynamic is even more emphasized by their placing of Aang in Katara’s arms like La Pieta, an Italian Renaissance statue of Mary holding Jesus after the crucifixion.
Despite all that Katara has poured into him, her culture is erased from the beginning; their wedding was held at an Air Temple with no fur and no meat (so a Sokka is the meat joke could be made). Katara was barely seen as herself, something important to the Inuit culture she's based on.
Aang also crosses her boundaries and takes advantage of her: In B1E14, The Fortuneteller, he snuck off to eavesdrop on Katara's fortune of “A great romance with a powerful bender”, then got convinced it's about him (Nevermind the fact that Zuko breaks the fundamentals of firebending that have been reinforced over and over again - to successfully break his root and redirect lightning while in midair to save Katara in the final Agni Kai.
Regardless, in Katara’s relationship with Aang, he verbally abuses her, throwing tantrums when she voices her opinions and emotions, and consistently ignores her. An example of this withholding of affection and isolation is from The Promise comic: a panel where Aang is showing off to and flirting with a classroom full of enthralled girls, and Katara sits alone in a corner, her head buried in her arms as she cradles her knees to her chest.
In the comic Love Is a Battlefield - again, aimed at kids - he loses his temper and hides in a stone mountain he earthbent, after Katara jokes and tries to cajole Aang into training - and he's still angry that Katara won't talk about the kiss from the Invasion he forced on her. She tries to get him to firebend and he gets fed up with her - his monologue is very "how dare she not be with me". So he basically fireblasts his way out of the stone mountain like a volcano with burning stones everywhere including in her face and far too close.
When she tries to speak up in a council meeting in The Promise comic, Aang shuts her down, insinuating his voice is more important than hers. She's the only one standing against the North and she's shown to be wrong for this stance until Aang convinces her this is the right thing, to let the North take over (and Sokka agrees). The South broke from the North to find their own way, but there was oil, so suddenly they can't handle it themselves.
This is why it's crucial that we call Katara’s marriage to Aang what it is: domestic enslavement and emotional abuse. Besides constantly doing every single chore required to keep the house and raise Aang’s children, she was the one responsible for constantly holding him back from his avatar state:
In Book 2 Ep 11 The Desert, Aang has lost it and everyone backs away, except as usual, Katara is resigned to regulate him. So she takes over getting everyone out of the desert while they all basically fight her. Look at the sadness in her face here:
She was entirely a vessel for his emotions and his children. Her life didn't belong to her. Even more heartbreaking considering how important our long lifespan is as women for the purposes of supporting each other through giving birth, her grandchildren don't even know who she is. Her self-esteem has been so utterly destroyed she doesn't think she deserves basic respect from anyone, especially him.
Aang is not the last airbender once his son is born. Katara, however, remains the last Southern Waterbender until the day she dies. We don't meet any new Southern Waterbenders until after the North has taken over. And then they're trained in Northern Style, which is notoriously misogynistic: they only train men in combat, women are just healers.
Aang doesn't like being in the South. He hates their culture and mocks it regularly, openly warning people off the SWT sea prunes. (Ironically, Katara's favorite dish, ocean kumquats, has an almost identical version in the Fire Nation (The Puppet Master, B3). But that will be explored in my next post.) The little bit of Southern Water Tribe style bending Katara learns is heavily tied to her trauma of bloodbending, and Aang makes her swear never to do that again, which could mean all Southern bending. These are the mechanics of Aang’s purposeful destruction of every shred of her self-esteem.
Katara never trains any of them. Her style completely dies to the point that part of it is made illegal. Aang is the reason Southern Style is lost. This cultural genocide also continues beyond Katara; the narrative forces Kanna to marry Pakku, despite the fact that she originally fled the misogynistic North (wh refused to teach girls bending)to escape marriage with him.
To bring things back to the new movie for a second, this was her hugging Aang. If you cover her smile, it looks like she's in anguish and about to cry:
Katara’s normal waves/curls are unusually straight in this new movie as well:
And here are her waves, wet and loose in the original show:
Why is it so straight in the movie, you ask? Because Air Nomads tend to have straight hair. That's their preference from what we've seen. Just one more aspect of her original character that Bryan and Michael have whitewashed colonized through their self-insert of Aang.
I also think that while Katara is the one who outlaws bloodbending and swears to never do so again, Aang contributed to the culture of disapproval of that art, which likely would have included the little of the Southern style Hama taught her - the secret form that women and impoverished people used. Yet, after it was banned, the male benders to figure out how to use it during the day? Katara knew how to use it all the time, she just didn't advertise that. Funny how she is the only one of them who can't have a good mentor and must always give up more and more of her identity to boost his.
In the end of the original show, Katara ends up a tradwife. Toph is chief of police of a city made up of colonies. She lies to protect her daughters who we never know the fathers of. Then one of her daughters became a proper wife with I think maybe seven kids. And the other is childless and blamed for the drama around Aang's only airbending child. This is why Ambassador Katara exists. She's the only character able to throw off bloodbending, but she's not even at the trial of the famous bloodbending criminal? So instead they showed a colonizer stealing the last desperate bending form created by an imprisoned indigenous woman.
Of course, this disconnection from her history makes sense, Aang couldn't have the mother of his children - who he wants to repopulate the airbenders with - having any knowledge of bloodbending, because to him the air nation is superior. I also know that Bryke would seethe over her being more powerful than Aang in any context, at any moment. Ironically, the universe seemed to have gone "fuck this" and gave him a non bending child to address his prejudice, followed by a waterbending child to accept his "wife's" culture first.
Let's compare and contrast: Book 2 Aang made and wore flower crowns with nomads. Book 3 Aang throws a fit that a woman is playing him in a play - an extremely common practice with roles of young boys and a direct reference to Peter Pan. They made the player a "woman" to make fun of her. They were making fun of the women that enjoy the show - anything to belittle a woman in their eyes.
Katara can be easily removed or replaced in all of Book 3 as long as she heals Aang. In the original Painted Lady episode she doesn't have to be there. Aang can easily take her place working with the real Painted Lady. In TSR, Katara can be replaced by Sokka and the dialogue and exchanges still work. Katara could have remained in Ba Sing Se after healing Aang and very little would have to change. Even the Katara centric episodes can work without her present. How disgusting is that? Zuko's character is also very different by Book 3.
Bryan and Michael’s fetishes for rape and colonization, as well as their misogyny about bloodbending, shows up in LoK as well. There's no reason for the Northern men to know how to use it, if Hama invented it - I hold she used a Southern healing form - then how does a northern waterbender get it? Not when Katara is the only one left who knows how to use it. They made a superpowered female waterbender without realizing, then had to backtrack.
This post outlines every single aspect, many that I’ve mentioned here, of how Aang colonizes Katara’s body, mind, and soul, in the name of healing his own genocidal wound; he is reproducing that behavior on another vulnerable person who has already lost so much of her culture. I’ll repeat myself: he reproduces genocide onto someone more vulnerable under the guise of divine duty. Does this sound familiar? If it does, then you recognize the underlying z10n1st cultural rhetoric, that which already violently sexually degrades every woman that isn't in their ranks. And by the time of SDCC '08, George W. Bush was sweeping Epstein's z1on1st project under the rug.
(That post above also details the how Zuko, as a positive foil to Aang, heals with Uncle Iroh, learns that Katara doesn't owe him jack shit, and that he owes her the healed behavior: breaking her chains of domestic slavery, showing her warmth and patience, waiting for her consent before holding her hand, touching her arm, or even hesitating to make sure she wanted him to catch her as she fell into his arms at the end of TSR. The next section of this series will explore this in further detail.)
In conclusion, Katara is made to be the most powerful character in both shows we ever meet. She's more powerful than the avatar! But then that power is demonized, made illegal, and she's quietly shuffled off to being basically a single mom to the kids who didn't come out "the right way”.
My 13+ years of studying feminism, genocide, and colonialism for years has made the connections clear as day: the original AtLA was colonization fetish porn made specifically for Bryke. Their little boy selves are still taking out their misogynistic rage towards older girls that knew better than to be with them. This is Katara’s narrative purpose: to be the Brown Indigenous mommy that waits on their self-insert character hand and foot, lives only for them, takes all of their abuse as they flip the power dynamic whenever they want, and takes all the punishment they dole out to her the same way they wanted to their older girl crushes in school. This is why Zutara is such a threat to them.
It's been twenty years. We know that the media shapes culture - the U.S. military is one of the biggest investors in it. Racism and misogyny are literally going to get everyone killed if we don't stop it. So amongst other legitimate community activism in real life, we're calling this shit out online when we see it.
If you made it this far, have a bonus bigger-picture opinion! I think we shouldn't ignore Bryke's general proximity to Dan Schneider at Nickelodeon during the early 2000s. Gratuitous foot shots and suspicious rendering of the girl character’s bodies abound in AtLA, for too many reasons completely unrelated to the show (and I'm not talking about the fact that earthbenders' bare feet need to touch the ground either, that's already scientifically proven to ground us as humans).
As dialectical materialists, we understand that we all work together to produce and reproduce culture (which, at the time, was dangerous at Nickelodeon). Bryke were profitable creators at the time, as was Schneider. I don't know the exact numbers, and sure, the corporate execs still ruled over them, but tv show/movie creators/directors were some of the most powerful drivers of that dangerous cultural climate at the time.
I can't prove that they ever interacted, even indirectly, but Schneider was actively producing media that rightfully disturbed me as a child, and feet was one of his major issues. Our culture is inherently a web of connections, and I consider Bryke's behavior at ’08 SDCC to be an example of such contributions to the overall culture at Nickelodeon.
(Other comprehensive posts about the toxicity of Kataang can be found here and here. Goodnight folks.)
