Oma and Shu were not narrative parallels to Zuko and Katara
Yes yes I know it’s so very easy to make the whole “Opposite sides of a war!” “Forbidden lovers!” comparisons (even though Zuko and Katara objectively never had a Forbidden Love dynamic, if anything they would have been Enemies-To-Friends-To-Lovers), but hear me out.
The basic and essential narrative elements of the Oma-Shu story are:
The survivor unleashes hell.
(For the last two points we actually had a bit of pre-foreshadowing for the Oma-Shu story in the form of Tui and La. Remember Koizilla? The Water elemental getting pissed off and raging on the Fire Nation in grief is going to be important later.)
The only actual component Zuko and Katara had that was similar to Oma and Shu’s was the fact that they were on opposite sides of a war. This similarity might well satisfy some fans who are, let’s just say, a little overzealous to find narrative “proof” for Zuko/Katara in the text but going past that initial shallow archetypal surface reading into any kind of objective scrutiny reveals that the supposed “parallel” falls apart.
How does Oma and Shu’s love story start?
“They met on top of the mountain that divided their two villages.”
So. The two were basically strangers who encountered each other in “neutral territory”, had good first impressions of each other free of the bias of their villages’ enmity, and hit it off. We presume.
Right away the Zuko/Katara comparison dissolves, because Shu did not invade Oma’s village with a small military force to terrorize her and her people.
“The villages were enemies so they could not be together.”
As mentioned, this is the only part in which Zuko and Katara are similar to Oma and Shu, and even then it’s a thin comparison because while Oma and Shu were all, “We are in love but we’re supposed to be enemies!” Zuko and Katara were… well… Actually Enemies. The thing getting in the way of them being together was not merely the war, it was the fact that Katara genuinely loathed him and considered him the face of the enemy and Zuko barely paid attention to her except as a means of getting to Aang or as an obstacle in the way of his getting to Aang.
This is the bit where shippers get a little too excited because, “OMG! Red and blue! Color symbolism!” Ignoring of course that Oma was also wearing yellow just a few seconds earlier and wears gray just a few seconds after and also that if we’re taking the whole red/blue color symbolism legitimately that would make the Oma figure Zuko. This is too obviously false because Katara never “dies” during the war and Zuko doesn’t put on a rageful display of bending power in grief so most shippers just kind of… ignore that part and rely solely on the inaccurate broad surface read.
Well okay, but surely there must be other parts of the story that Zuko and Katara meet, right?
Nope. They don’t spend any time or effort trying to reach across the divide between their two sides to meet. Zuko gets hurt in the series finale and if we’re reeeaally reaching I guess we could claim that as his symbolic “death” but Katara’s reaction is hardly the emotional, grief-stricken lashing out that Oma did.
In fact the two times I can recall Katara unleashing some serious bending power because someone close to her “died” was her whole ninja mission to confront the man who killed her mother and before that–
Am I saying that the Oma-Shu story is really foreshadowing for Aang/Katara instead?
Obviously it’s not a note-for-note parallel, wouldn’t dream of claiming it is. But they hit more of the beats than Zuko/Katara, with the added bonus of also being echoed/foreshadowed in Tui and La–”push” and “pull” soulmates who work in harmony…
…and who experience an incident where their Sky elemental mate dies…
…and the Water elemental goes apeshit and drowns Fire Nation soldiers in large waves…
…before the beloved is reborn.
So really, think about it. Which ship is really the one where they meet and fall in love but can’t be together because of a war–
–which leads to one of them being killed–
–releasing a “powerful display of bending” from the devastated survivor?
Hint: It’s the one whose romance theme is the same music cue as the one for the story of the two lovers. XD
