Original Script Analysis, Part 2: The Southern Raiders, The Finale, and What I Think About it All
So folks, when it comes to literary analysis, there are two categories that textual interpretations typically fall under: the Doylist explanation, and the Watsonian explanation.
Watsonian explanations will contextualise an issue solely within the bounds of the story it is told in, so the answer to any question will be, essentially, “in-universe”. Imagine interviewing a character in the story, and asking them, “why did x happen” or, “why did y character decide to do z”. The answer you get will be a Watsonian answer.
Doylist explanations, on the other hand, are explanations that take into account things the characters themselves wouldn’t “have access to”, so to speak. These explanations often touch on writing concepts like theme, character arcs, tropes, setup and payoff etc, sometimes even referring to “real-world” motivations, intentions, or constraints that the creators were working with (or against). If an explanation or an answer to a question doesn’t sound like anything the characters themselves could have come up with, it’s probably a Doylist explanation.
I’m going to give an example from Titanic that I hope isn’t a spoiler to anybody at this point given how much this film has been memed to shit:
Jack dies at the end of Titanic. Now, why did he die?
The Watsonian says: He died because there was no room on the door.
The more intelligent Watsonian says: No there WAS room on the bloody door you smooth-brained koala did you even watch the fucking movie? They tried to get them both on there, the door just couldn’t hold the two of them because of something called BUOYANCY you fucking idiot-
The Doylist says: Jack died because it was the culmination of his character arc, and because he and Rose symbolise the class disparity of the victims of that tragedy; Jack is the poorer third class, and Rose is the rich upper class. Upper class women were the likeliest demographic to survive the sinking of the Titanic, and lower class men were the likeliest demographic to die. Jack had to die and Rose had to live; it’s symbolic.
Here’s another example: on the r/DeathNote subreddit, someone asked why L fell off his chair in such an exaggerated and dramatic fashion upon hearing that shinigami could be real. The top comment provides a detailed Watsonian answer, followed by a Doylist one:
Basically, Watsonian commentary is consistent with how the characters, in-universe, might explain/contextualise something. Doylism explains how a plot point or character decision serves a purpose beyond what the characters themselves would be able to conceptualise, whether that’s narrative payoff, authorial intent, or even marketing/executive decisions/budget constraints.
Why am I explaining all of this? Because I want to play a game with you guys.
The name of this game is: Why, in the original script of The Southern Raiders, is Katara somehow asleep while LITERAL BOMBS ARE GOING OFF AROUND HER(!!!)
A) Katara trained herself to sleep through Fire Nation raids and bombs from a young age
B) Katara is just generally that deep of a sleeper
C) Elizabeth Ehasz wanted an excuse (any excuse, really) to force Zuko and Katara to interact (because this is their episode, after all-)
Yeah, maybe I’m just unimaginative but I’m pretty sure it’s C. I’d love to hear your best Watsonian take for this one though (please, go nuts, lmao)
Like all the other changes we’ve seen, nothing has been done to the dialogue, which plays out how it does in the show:
I’m sorry I just can’t get over this 🤣🤣 “Character A and Character B hate each other/are not talking to each other/are currently in the process of biting each other’s heads off, now let’s come up with some ridiculous excuse to make Character A and Character B play nice and help and warm up to each other” is a pretty solid fanfic trope but I think this is the first time I’ve seen “MAKE CHARACTER A SLEEP THROUGH A FUCKING MISSILE ATTACK” utilised for this specific purpose.
Logically I understand why this was changed for the show, but I’m ngl, I’m slightly sad we didn’t get to see this version. 🤣🤣🤣
Interestingly, Katara doesn’t catch Zuko after he gets blasted off the war blimp - the script doesn’t specify anyone catching Zuko, it just says that he “lands safely on the bison” (sorry, I thought I wrote this one down in full but I only wrote down that quote, my bad 💀).
(It does make me wonder though, whether the storyboarders/animators looked at the “Katara sleeps through bombs” bit and were like…. “ok how about no, but we’ll give you ‘Katara catches a skydiving Zuko’ instead, fair trade?” 😂😂)
Continuing on from that, I have to say that even with the voice lines unchanged, Elizabeth Ehasz’s vision for Zuko and Katara’s deepening connection and understanding continues to trickle through this episode at various moments:
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Katara sobbing as she recounts her trauma? Zuko getting teary himself hearing about Katara’s grief and love for her mother? Katara visibly relaxing as a result of unburdening some of her feelings onto him? Zuko pulling Katara back and making sure she’s okay before she ploughs on ahead?
And then of course, there are times when Elizabeth’s subtlety is not so subtle at all (here you go, you guys have well and truly earned this one):
Welp. I can tell you I wasn’t expecting to see that - at all. I came to the WGF hoping, maybe, to find some small crumbs - tiny clues that might give a slight nudge to the rumours that Elizabeth Ehasz was a ZK shipper, and that shippy subtext viewers may have picked up in TSR maybe wasn’t entirely lacking in substance.
I wasn’t expecting to find a page where good ol’ Elizabeth had a zutara fangasm all over her own writing, lmfao
On the hug itself, Elizabeth’s notes were very brief:
I was a touch disappointed not to see any more fangirling, though after that serotonin boost up above I really couldn’t be too greedy. 🤣
Zuko and Katara’s scenes together in Sozin’s Comet and the Agni Kai are generally the same as what we see in the show, though I thought you guys might like to read the lightning scene anyway:
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This might be a good time to mention that I had the pleasure of working alongside @korranguyen on one of the two days that I visited the WGF. If you found the descriptions of Azula’s downward spiral in the Agni Kai uncomfortable to read, you might appreciate her essays here and here.
Unfortunately folks, we are indeed near the end now. And we know how the story ends:
Wins, eh? Interesting choice of words there. Almost makes it seem like there was a competition? Like there were, oh I don’t know, other contenders?
Now there’s something else which I think some of you may find very interesting about the script of Sozin’s Comet Part 4, and I will get to that in due course, but for now I want to discuss the way the ships were treated by the show writers and creators. As I summarised earlier and as you probably noticed yourself from reading these scripts:
From season 1 up until Day of Black Sun, the writing was heading towards a Kataang conclusion. And development-wise, it wasn’t too shabby! There was a clear and steady progression. Maybe a little subtle, from Katara’s side, but nowhere near as ambiguous as in the show. And again maybe this is just me, but I wouldn’t have been frustrated with it either, if it was shown like that.
After Day of Black Sun, the writing takes a weird turn. Kataang takes a nosedive while Zutara gets a ton of positive development (reconciliation, forgiveness, synchronicity and cooperation* anyone? lmao), which is canon in the show too but it’s… even more pronounced in the script? Aang is more aggro, Zuko and Katara are more tender/vulnerable with one another, they don’t scoot away at the suggestion that they like, like each other – and these are the final drafts? What the heck were y’all writing in the first drafts?? (No that’s not a joke actually, I wanna know 😭)
Kataang “wins”. Wins?!? I thought y’all said there was never even a contest!!**
Okay, time for some speculation/theorising on my part. To me, it seems like, at some point after writing the “Kataang” episodes but before actually animating and producing them, and before writing the later episodes in season 3, and perhaps even right up until the writing of Sozin’s Comet Part 4, there was a collective (if not unanimous) decision to “keep things open”. The question is: why?
Did the writers disagree, or was it just shipbaiting? Or was it some combination of both?
If no-one else, Elizabeth Ehasz is quite clearly a Zutara fangirl; I don’t think anyone can deny that after reading the way she writes these kids 🤣 That paragraph does not read to me like a writer casually (or grudgingly) obeying directions to shiptease because it’s what the producers wanted, it reads like a writer unable to stay professional about how much she loves this one fucking ship. (We feel you Lizzie. We feel you.)
So was there actually some discord in the writer’s room about which direction to take the romance arcs? @zutarawasrobbed pointed out that given the narrative decision to hinge Aang’s internal struggle and character arc around the need to “let go” of an “attachment” to Katara, (some?) writers may have seen a potential in deconstructing Kataang to fulfil this arc. This is especially possible if, after writing Crossroads of Destiny and/or seeing audience feedback to that episode, Zutara was increasingly beginning to appear as a viable alternative.
I mean, even by Sozin’s Comet, it doesn’t seem like they’d figured out how to resolve Aang’s whole “blocked chakra” situation –
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Aang “somehow” just happens to untangle what had previously been set up as an internal struggle, with the conveniently timed application of some “chi bending nonsense” (and reverse-glowing arrows and “such things”).
(To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Rick and Morty -)
Of course, the other possibility is that most of the way through writing the script, and maybe about halfway through animating it, the creators simply recognized a clear potential for shipbaiting, and this is at least somewhat to blame for the hot mess that is the romance arcs of ATLA.
My personal theory is that writer disagreement did happen, and is at least partially why we ended up getting what we got. The fact that both ships are specifically referenced and granted “approval” so to speak, by different writers, and one of them ends up explicitly “winning”, sort of cinches it for me. Either way, the show was clearly pulling in different directions at different parts and under different creators, and in my opinion the scripts support these rumours.
One thing is for certain: whether this was just shipteasing, or actual production hell in the writer’s room, it is my opinion that Zutara AND Kataang were both robbed.
Kataang had a decent romance arc written out for it, and even if there may have been issues reconciling it with Aang’s internal conflict set up in the Guru and/or with the over-arching themes of the show, it would have been all right in the end if they had just kept it the way they originally wrote it. I can’t really see any but the most die-hard anti-Kataangers being mad about it, and Kataangers themselves would have loved it. They had a fine romance written out and they ruined it. If they did so because Zutara was being seriously considered as a possible outcome, then it’s just all the more frustrating that Zutara never ended up happening in the end. They put a lot of effort into sinking a perfectly serviceable ship and ultimately it was all for nothing. (Or worse, purely for shipbaiting). Just sad.
So, that’s my thoughts on that. And that concludes this essay- oh wait.
Right… there was that thing I kept mentioning about Sozin’s Comet Part 4. 😈
So you know how I said all these scripts were final drafts?
That’s because they are - except for two episodes: Sozin’s Comet Part 4, and Jet.
Unlike the other scripts, which have all been labelled “As Broadcast Drafts”, these two scripts are ADR drafts.
According to @lady-of-bath, who works in the screenwriting industry, ADR stands for “Automated Dialogue Replacement” and is used when a script has gone through a process of re-recording or re-dubbing, because for whatever reason, the originally scripted and recorded lines are/were unsatisfactory.
(This is also something you can verify yourself actually, even if you don’t live in the LA area: when you search up ATLA in the WGF database***, even though you can’t access the scripts you can access basic details such as, the date the draft was finalised, the name of the writer, and - whether it was submitted as an “ADR” draft or an “As Broadcast Draft”.)
I even emailed the library to ask about this distinction as well:
So if I understand this correctly, all the ATLA scripts you can find in the guild were first submitted, and then lines were recorded, and then changes were made to the script that didn’t involve dialogue replacement, and then it went through animation and post-production and ended up being what you now see on screen. This is supported by the fact that A) I definitely found some changes, but B) the changes I did find were all in the action lines/shot descriptions etc.
All the scripts submitted to the guild went through this process - all of them, except these two scripts.
These two scripts were not final drafts; I guess they might be more accurately termed “final final drafts™”, because they were submitted after some(!) lines were re-recorded, (changed? added onto? cut?!?) and the script was then updated to reflect these changes that had been made in post-production.
Which just begs the question: what lines had to be re-recorded??
What did the final draft look like before this???
(Might it possibly contextualise why Dante Basco and Mae Whitman apparently both thought Zutara was going to be canon?)
This is conspiracy fodder galore, lmfao. Pardon the dramatics here for a moment, but with enough tinfoil-hatting this could easily turn into the Zutara fandom equivalent of 18½ missing minutes of Nixon tapes. 🤣
Anyway, that about sums up my detective effort on this whole thing. I did find some more tidbits which I’ll likely post in a Part 3/Epilogue type thing - mostly small changes (most of them not really zutara-related) that I found interesting or funny enough to jot down; I’ll be making a compilation of these for your reading pleasure as soon as I can. ^^
One last bonus for you guys: the “I’ll save you from the Pirates” scene:
I must confess, I never really read this scene as romantically framed or “shippy” when I first watched it. But the way it’s written here looks like it’s taken straight out of a fanfic. “Right into the arms of Zuko”? Oh no. (Oh yes.) Oh me oh my. 🤣
*Also, someone needs to write a Mr and Mrs Smith Zutara AU titled “Synchronicity and Cooperation”, I’m saying it now, this is my official decree. Write it, folks. We need it.
**Screenshot taken from: https://avatar.fandom.com/wiki/Avatar_Extras_(Book_One:_Water) (Under “Goofs”)
***I hope that link works, if it doesn’t, just navigate to their Library Catalogue and search up ATLA yourself.
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