wait dude i want to hear more about how sokka's forgetting hurts katara (if you want to share obv)
(reference to my tags in this post)
so basically!!! i wouldn’t say it hurts her as in, it traumatizes her or whatever, but it certainly is the source of an existent strife between the two of them. just a disclaimer that i don’t mean to drag any of the siblings, but merely analyze how their respective minds work, which includes their respective flaws and all that stuff that makes a character good. that said;
katara emotes in a very open and expressive and honest way, she wears her heart on her sleeve and she’s never shy when it comes to asserting herself, the traumatic experiences she went through and calling out the people who wronged her. she is a compassionate and loving person at her core, and she’s also in possession of a rage accumulated through the years — basically, katara feels things, all kinds of things in a very intense way, and she often doesn’t understand why or how sokka... doesn’t.
sokka is the opposite of katara in that sense. he only opens up about his grief and traumatic experiences when it’s entirely for the sake of someone else (often involving katara), seen as such during “the runaway” and “the southern raiders”. particularly during “the runaway” sokka mentions he can’t remember how their mother looked like. which is very likely! repressed memories because of trauma as a concept it’s not unheard of certainly. but as this is specifically about how kya looked like, not the day kya died itself (he remembers that one perfectly), and how sokka deals with grieving yue (see: he doesn’t) i don’t think it’s far-fetched to believe he often represses his own memories until he eventually forgets.
the reasons why he does this are very extensive and complex and that is not the point of the post so i’m mostly gonna leave it for another time, but the most relevant to this analysis is that sokka will never do something that he believes could cause katara distress, physical or emotional, at least not on purpose. his self-repression is to cope as much as it is to protect (and isn’t that a good summary of sokka’s emotional depth). anyhow, sokka copes by repressing and therefore of course he ends up forgetting some stuff. and sokka forgetting is the reason why katara remembering is a thing at all. it’s about the contrast.
seen during tsr: katara also remembers the day kya died perfectly; she talks about losing her mother quite a bit more than sokka, often to empathize with other people but it’s also useful to assure herself in her grief. i imagine she thinks about kya a lot, she’s always moving, always remembering. the pain of the loss is fresh to her, an open wound, while to sokka is the loss of something he can barely remember. point here is that katara wants to talk about it, but sokka straight up doesn’t talk about his struggles at all (understandably, of course. you can’t just vent to your younger siblings, which is why suki and zuko are such important additions to the gaang for sokka).
and then there’s the way katara could possibly experience sokka's emotional repression. i believe it’s very evident how, although she makes an important effort with sokka, she can never quite understand his way of feeling, like, at all. it makes katara really defensive, angry, hurt and often act impulsively (one might even say out of spite?) whenever sokka doesn’t share the intense emotions she’s currently experiencing, see: the boy in the iceberg/the avatar returns, the painted lady, the southern raiders, etc etc. and i think that this is the core of the most important aspect in their relationship, which is that sokka and katara don't quite understand each other, but they know each other.
so it goes like this: sokka takes care of katara's feelings at the expense of his own enourmous emotional distress, which he represses constantly. katara grew up with the guy, she knows he has feelings, so she probably understands this as sokka just plain closing off, feeling no compassion, empathy, or grief at all, maybe going as far as believing sokka is somehow pushing her away. the same way sokka thinks katara is overemotional and naive because he doesn't understand how she cannot just turn off her feelings when necessary, a part of katara unconsiously believes sokka to be emotionless and cold and “heartless”; she even tells him so a couple of times, such as in the painted lady, however relatively casual, or during the southern raiders, where she straight up tells sokka he didn’t love their mother as much as she did. i do not believe she genuinely thinks like this, but even if she was wrong and it was way out of line, she said it for a reason. she had considered it before, and she probably feels something like this, too.
this defensiveness/aggressiveness ties to katara's compassion and empathy coming from the same place as her rage: she feels so much so intensely, and she doesn't understand how anyone could react different than her to painful experiences. katara’s her frustrations towards sokka come from the fact that she loves him, and that she’s afraid he doesn’t care for her as much or for their mother or at all, because she doesn’t understand the fierce though discreet way sokka cares for her. katara is pretty much sokka’s top priority, but as sokka never talks and he forgets, katara, ever the storyteller, has no way of knowing that. how sokka deals with grief seems practiced, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it had started with kya. and i wonder if katara felt alone in her grief before they found aang because sokka just didn’t talk about his grief at all, and if she never quite got over that feeling, or that fear that sokka had simply stopped caring.
so by repressing everything obviously sokka hurts firstly and mostly himself, but it’s possible that he hurts katara, too. this is something eldest children often go through a lot; there’s the need to be a parent, or an unwavering support system for your younger siblings, when in reality what your younger siblings need is... well, a sibling.
