the women of atla as yanderes.
featuring: katara, yue, toph, suki, azula, ty lee, mai.
content warnings: obsession, manipulation, and possessiveness. references to captivity, implied violence and physical harm. all characters intended to be read as of age (postwar, prior to tlok).
divider source: @uzmacchiato.
tlok edition.
KATARA is smothering.
she cares a lot. it’s a good quality, on its own, and a difficult one to complain about without sounding like a heartless, selfish, spoiled child. shouldn’t it please you to not be alone anymore? to have somebody out there who’d share your joys and sorrows, weathering with you the stillness and the storms? somebody who’d look out for you, provide for you, speak up for you? shouldn’t it please you to be so obviously loved? and sure. it should. it would have, if not for the feeling that you are getting smaller. whatever edge you might have had before meeting katara is eroded, restless tides lapping up at the borders, and it’s gentle—she always is—yet insistent, inescapable. you do not notice the change until it’s too late—until she’s everything, everywhere, all the time, as though by inviting her into your life you’d invited her into you, and now you can’t get one out without destroying the other. not that she’d let you try that either: her hands are soft; her temper isn’t. once the simmering reaches the boiling point, you might have to learn the hard way just how much she cares about you. it’s lucky, then, that there’s so little she cannot mend. that, like it or not, as long as you are in her arms, you’ll be taken care of.
YUE is selfish.
were she not so selfless a person, she wouldn’t have to be so selfish a lover. alas, yue is the dutiful daughter, the dutiful wife, and the dutiful mother, so there’s never been anything she wouldn’t share—any part of herself she wouldn’t give up for the greater good. and, to her credit, she wishes to be selfless with you, too, for selflessness is the virtue she’s been weaned on, the one thing she must nobly hold on to, but there’s only so much you can give away before there’s nothing left, and even she is not so self-sacrificial. even she knows better than to resign herself to the silence of solitude. all that this means, however, is that you are the one paying the price. you are the one who can’t be the daughter, the wife, or the mother, because what you must be first is her companion—a witness to the icy prison and the icy princess in it. don’t be fooled by the sweetness of her voice, the sincerity of the tears brimming in her startling eyes: if she pushes you away, it’s only to pull you back in. you are as close as anything has come to being hers, and so she cannot let go of you, however unkind of her that may be.
TOPH is ruthless.
it’s not that she is above sentimentality—she is plenty sentimental when it comes to you; it’s just that there’s very little she isn’t willing to give up for a good enough prize, and you happen to be a good enough prize that, should promises—or bones—need to be broken, then broken they will be. hers, yours, theirs. whatever. as long she gets what she needs, she loses no sleep over it. you might be tempted to write this off as cruelty, but cruelty it is not: toph doesn’t delight in hurting others. the taunting and the jabbing she enjoys quite a bit, sure. the lies and the theatrics? undeniably, yes. harm for the sake of harm, however, holds no appeal to her. pain, if caused by her, is the byproduct of her getting what she needs, and what she needs is love. the kind of love that’s vulnerable enough to satisfy the craving for it, yet not so vulnerable as to make her soft, and pliant, and weak; a tamed love and a safe love; a love she’d always have an upper hand in. that’s what she’s willing to give anything up for. unfortunately for you, that’s not something she can get without breaking you in.

















