#shalloora

[klam0]

Just wanna say that I love your art style SO MUCH!! The characters look so expressive ahhhh!! I'm not a Maiko shipper but I adore how you draw them :') Was wondering if you would ever consider drawing Mailee I love this ship

omG thank you so much!!<33 and YES OFC MAILEE IS SO CUTE!!

[firelxdykatara]

I'm really happy to see Zukka shippers enjoying their ship but when they attack Zutara it really gets me down. They act like Zuko and Katara had nothing significant happening between them and completely disregard their relationship development. I know I shouldn't care, but it bums me out. Esp since their ship has overtaken Zutara in popularity :(

HONESTLY, like, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but the fact that I’ve seen so many Zukka shippers be explicitly anti-zutara for reasons that apply just as much to zukka’ with absolutely zero self-awareness is incredibly telling. The whole ‘it’s ok if it’s gay’ mentality bothers me because not only is it bullshit (I’m sorry but if you hate zutara because ‘it’s racist’, but you ship zukka, then you don’t actually think zutara is racist you’re just searching for reasons to dunk on it and if your ship can’t stand on its own without doing that I think that speaks for itself), but it’s incredibly fetishistic, and I really, really hate how it leads to so many people now claiming that ‘if you ship zutara you’re straight’ or, worse, ‘zutara is comphet’ because apparently words don’t mean things anymore and you can just sling buzzwords around to make the ships you don’t like sound bad without any consideration for whether or not they actually apply lmfao.

That said, I really, truly would NOT worry about zukka ‘overtaking’ zutara in any respect.

Yes, zukka might seem more popular now, mostly because if you go into the atla tag it seems a lot more common--however, there has not been any sort of explosive growth in fanworks (zutara still dominates on ao3 and ff.net [at least insofar as can be surmised given ff.net’s lackluster filters]), and, frankly, zukka just does not have the staying power. There’s a reason zutara has been, and remains, the most popular ship of the show for nearly fifteen years, and it’s not just because ‘they’re a boy and a girl in close proximity’, because if that were the case then Maiko and Kataang would be the dominant ships and that has never been true.

Zukka is cute, they have a fun dynamic, The Boiling Rock was a great adventure, and I definitely get why people ship it. But the fact is, Zuko and Sokka just do not have the same intense narrative journey that Zuko and Katara have. There’s a reason why the only shippy scenes you see people talking about re: zukka come from those same two episodes, whereas scenes setting the stage for zutara’s ensuing popularity range all the way from ‘I’ll save you from the pirates’ to ‘you rise with the moon, i rise with the sun’, to the cave of two lovers and the tale of Oma and Shu, to the crystal catacombs beneath ba sing se, to the southern raiders and then their dynamic all throughout the four finale episodes.

Zutara began ship weeks. Zutara was the focal point of some of the most intense shipping wars fandom has ever seen. (Which, incidentally, is part of why I think it seems like zutara isn’t as popular right now--given all the discourse that’s been picking up steam, the main tags just aren’t very welcoming, and it’s easier to avoid fandom in-fighting if we just stick to our own spaces.) Zutara was so popular that not only did the showrunners feel incredibly threatened (to the point of taking fanart sent to them by fans of their show and manipulating it to shit on them), but for years afterward they stewed in their bitterness and did things like destroyed the gaang’s relationships in LoK just to keep from having to show that Zuko and Katara were still friends.

Zukka is a fun ship with relatively little drama, and I can absolutely understand the appeal. But at the end of the day, it’s just not in the same league.

[catie-does-things]

shalloora replied to your post: It seems like the Zutara ship was so huge even up...

I will defend Zutara to my dying breath!! It makes me sad to see thr hate its getting, mainly due to people misunderstanding the ship, but i will PROTECC IT

Honestly the hate is annoying but yeah, it’s all so shallow. Like pretty much any substantive criticism of the ship itself I’ve seen (as in, reasons why the ship is supposedly bad, rather than just saying the shippers are dumb or annoying) just...ignores all of Zuko’s character development and infantilizes Katara.

[silver-sphere]

Hi, I just wanted to say your Zutara art is rlly soft and ur very talented 💙

That’s so nice of you! Honestly drawing Zutara is what keeps me sane right now so I’m glad I can spread some joy with it. Thank you so much <3

[yumedarling]

Hi! Your Zutara art is beautiful, I would love to get the art book! Do you have any left? And do you ship to australia? Thanks :)

Thank you! <3 I currently am out of stock but may do another print run if enough people are interested! Yes, I ship worldwide!

[firelxdykatara]

So I'm pretty active on twitter and recently someone reposted a really old zutara fanart which was a crossover with Pocahontas....... now zk shippers are getting attacked really badly all over again and I am so tired like... thats sum OLD fanart?? Most zutara shippers I know are well aware of how problematic pocahontas is and it is frustrating to see people compare the two! It's also unfair to call zks problematic when the art was from YEARS ago when people were less aware of issues like that.

Oi vey...

How many times are we gonna have to do this whole song and dance? Like, it may not be the same art/artist idek, but I do remember, a long ass time ago (gods, how long have I been here) some zutara/pocahontas art which provoked a pretty loud outcry at the time, and from what I recall, the artist apologized. They hadn’t realized the implications at the time (and I believe they were pretty young, but I could be wrong) which, considering the popularity of Disney’s Pocahontas, honestly isn’t that much of a stretch??? Like yes, the story is incredibly distorted and, beyond that, other issues abound with the film’s portrayal of colonizer/native interactions--it’s very simplified to distill things down to a ‘we’re all human, we shouldn’t hate each other for being different’ message, and it’s understandable why that would provoke discomfort in today’s climate.

However, the movie is still incredibly popular, and, particularly if you aren’t Native, unless you specifically know where to look and that you should (particularly with the way public education is in the states [there are still history books which say that the Trail of Tears was voluntary relocation], and even outside it, since I don’t know how deeply primary education in foreign countries goes into the politics and history of colonization in the US), it’s probably going to be one of the most prominent impressions you have of Pocahontas and her story.

It also probably won’t be immediately obvious just what is wrong with drawing ship art placing the characters in your ship (whatever it is--and believe me, zutara isn’t the only ship where it’s been done) as Pocahontas/John Smith. Especially if all you know of her story is that one Disney movie. My personal issue with trying to draw a parallel between them and zutara is that it implies a similarity between the two relationships that simply doesn’t exist. Katara may be indigenous-coded, and her people absolutely suffered a slow cultural genocide during the war, but the Water Tribes were not colonized, and also, Zuko isn’t white or white-coded, so the implicit relationship dynamic that people somehow see when they look at them just doesn’t exist.

But I’m also not about to drag some years-old fanart from the depths of cyberspace just to lose my mind over someone drawing that kind of art! I certainly wouldn’t use it to try and imply anything about the ship itself, since one person drawing some rather dodgy art literal years ago doesn’t really say anything about the ship as a whole, nor about the people who ship it. I don’t know who drew the art, if they received backlash for it and whether or not they apologized, and frankly, I don’t really care? It’s old art. The statute of limitations on being pissy about problematic art has long-since passed.

And frankly, there’s much worse shit on deviantart even right now. Ever tried to look up even a vaguely anime-adjacent character’s art on there? Trying to dodge the super weird fetish art is honestly an exercise in futility, so I do what regular people do and just. Scroll past the shit that I don’t wanna see (or at least try desperately not to let my eyes focus on it while looking for art that I do want). It’s really not that hard.