Rant time: the general atla fandom’s resistance to zukaang highlights a lot of problems in current fandom and fiction. The resistance is about a point around which we refuse imagination and connection. Specifically, we observe fiction as something to gaze at rather than to connect with. So, aang is denied desire because of his age, religiosity, and racially-linked gendered embodiment, which, this conservative portion of the fandom argues, should deny us to relating to or even considering his subjectivity.
“You’re Just A Child”: Aang’s Age
When it comes to shipping aang, suddenly the conversation becomes about the canon–the age gaps, the immaturity, the cultural ties. 12 years old is prime middle school age in the US, the very essence of sexual development. But many fandom members are not engaging with how they felt and experienced that age. Instead, they’re viewing Aang from a separate vantage point and expecting the same mental process from others. These are where the claims of p*do come from when talking about him within shipping. They suggest that engaging with his character is a desire to observe him voyeuristically since many in the fandom are not actually twelve (ignoring the fact that many fandom members are also significantly older than the other characters they adore and offer subjectivity). Their argument continues that it’s not possible to empathize with him. Only objectification is possible, especially in regards to sensuality, as if that is a category has a different process of psychological relating than all others.
But all this becomes most important for these fandom members when putting him in relationship to the other slightly older characters. These arguments must begin by ignoring the fact that most fanfics and art for the zukaang ship and most ships in the atla fandom are simply disengaged from the canonical ages of the characters. A ton of the works are aged up, and those that aren’t don’t discuss the ages because they are working on the assumption that everyone within their fic are at similar levels of maturity to engage with romantic feelings. At the end of the day, most artists and writers are more interested in exploring the dynamics between richly developed character traits that are pretty unrelated to the character’s ages. Still, ships with Aang, and especially Zukaang somehow receive the most attention for tensions due to the canonical ages (despite the creators disinterest in the topic). Even the Toph ships, which have a canonically younger character with bigger age gaps between her and her partners, don’t receive the same pervasive criticism as the Aang ships.
Avatar Aang: Aang’s Religion and Race
One reason is that he’s perceived as the “pure” cinnamon bun of the series; “pure” as in purile and “pure” as in puritanical. Plenty has been written about purity culture in the fandom, enough that I don’t feel a strong need to elaborate. However, I do want to point to Aang’s role as a religious figure, a monk, in the series. Perceptions crafted through the history of Christianity alongside the practices of many other religions associate religion and celibacy, which I think played into further discomfort with allowing Aang a sexuality. If this is your association, it would counteract Aang’s narrative development of wisdom and self-control to believe he might also be developing sexual maturity throughout the series. Of course, Zen Buddhist philosophies, which were majorly influential in developing the show’s themes and Aang’s character, allow for monks to have sex and get married, and they openly address issues of sex and sexuality. The deeply sexually conservative view held by purity culture then forces Aang, even moreso than other characters, into a de-sexualized pigeon hole.
A desexualized characterization is also a claim hefted onto East Asian men at a stupidly outrageous rate by Western culture. They’re allowed to be cute, mannered, wise, even cool, etc. but when it comes to a kind of subjective sexuality, East Asian men are emasculated (stemming from a deep history of Western colonialism/xenophobia and a specific kind of patriarchal ideology in Euro-America). The pacifistic Buddhist-inspired beliefs he practices especially render him as distinct from the rugged individualist of American masculinity and even the elitist intellectual masculinist of Western European cultures. Can masculinity exist without dominance? Can a relationship exist without antagonistic tension? Sure, we get the fluff ships, but where does that blur into and coexist with the erotic? Aang, as a character, forces the audience to consider the reality of his pain, desire, and strength, despite his refusal to demonstrate that in warfare and courtship. Among what manner would someone demonstrate these inner worlds if they won’t exert them on subjugated bodies? It’s a conflict of worldviews that took shape dramatically during the height of colonization, where the colonized were often blamed and maligned for their failures to resist colonization. These beliefs then developed into stereotypes about the masculinity of different races. The stereotypes that have held on from colonialism alongside of unique cultural ideas about masculinity make Aang a hard figure for people indoctrinated into these beliefs to appreciate.
The fandom is forced to contend with his age, his colonized subjectivity, and, on top of all that, he’s denied the authority socially ascribed to his gender. Toph is the ‘tough guy,’ which Western audiences equate with more maturity, when what it actually equates to in the Euro-American psyche is masculinity. This correlation between masculinity and maturity allows Toph to escape the claims that make Aang an especially dangerous object for fanworks. Aang’s softness and passivity correlate him to femininity in this traditional perspective. Essentially, for the atla fans wearing their purity culture lenses, Aang, if sexualized, is feminine and therefore immature and therefore defenseless to predators. What’s wild is the way the Ember Island Players episode evokes and predicts these kind of reactions with its virginal damsel-in-distress actress depiction of Aang (”My hero!”).
But the zukaang ship really lends a microscope to the matter, because, in every demographic way, Aang’s character is denied the structural trappings of power within the relationship.This means that even those inclined to appreciate softer ideas about masculinity and/or more empowered ideas of feminine and colonized subjectivities can feel reticent to engage with the ship. Within an identity politic framework, the zukaang ship dynamics render Aang submissive: he is the colonized subject in relation to a colonizer; he is the more traditionally feminine partner; he’s more pious; he’s more passive; he is canonically younger. One might go even farther to suggest all of these submissive qualities make him seductive to Zuko in the narrative as he abandons his own nation for Aang, placing Aang in a trope familiar to both gender narratives within Euro-Christian traditions (the Biblical seductresses, like Eve and Jezebel, or more recently, Lolita) and colonial narratives (see, “Indian Princesses” or “Dragon Ladies”). If we go deeper into the archives we’ll also find colonial p*derast narratives (if you have a strong stomach, you can look up Andre Gide, as an example). All these possible features make the relationship especially threatening to modern sensibilities.
Now, I want to emphasize that there are legitimate reasons for the connections that we draw which ignite this fear. The article, “A Modern History of Groomer Politics” by Jesse Walker, lays out some of these complicated and hard-to-read histories, which illustrate how gay and queer rights (especially on the side of those assigned male at birth) became associated with p*dophilia. The Homoerotics of Orientalism by Joseph A. Boone is another read that lays out why people are especially sensitive to age gaps within queer colonial contexts. Suffice it to say, to engage with the zukaang ship requires a deft touch not simply to avoid these histories and tropes but, as seen in many of the fandoms works, to challenge them. Still, the associations trigger reactions for people before they can process any of the actual content.
But even outside the zukaang ship, there is a sense that Aang’s gender expression and sexuality are so much more queer (even the Kataang ship, in its heterosexuality, is perceived as transgressive to the romance genre in comparison to the more traditional Z*tara ship because many people find it challenging to imagine Katara’s attraction to Aang and feel so much more drawn to relationships built around hierarchical colonial relationships rather than relationships that ignore the colonizer entirely). He’s inherently disruptive to the gender expressions that are considered acceptable in western tradition, especially by the hero of the story.
Within the context of the zukaang ship, Aang’s character becomes the most queered, though, and I think that’s deeply uncomfortable for a portion of fandom. They don’t know how to allow someone subjectivity who uses docility as his strength to grow and face the world rather than aggression. Instead, for them, Aang’s docility traps him within a perpetual childhood (or, at most, a eunuch-like domestic role for the queen, Katara). Even as they allow themselves to alter every other aspect of the fiction they love, they are at a loss to handle and develop his character in their works. His youth, his race, and his imperfect saintliness, are all upheld and braided together within the confines of purity culture to argue against the morality of rewarding him romantic and subsequently sexual relationships, and, at its worse, to depict him at all.
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