I've recently seen a few blogs imply that Zuko confronting his father and escaping from his abusive household inherently has gay undertones. I can't fully explain why, especially since I can see how one can hc him as gay, but this assumption irks me. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Oof, I have a Lot Of Thoughts about this lmao
I talked a bit about it in my Zuko is Not Gay Coded post:
making [zuko’s confrontation of ozai] about zuko being gay and rejecting ozai’s homophobia, rather than zuko learning fundamental truths about the world and about his home and about how there was something deeply wrong with his nation that needed to be fixed in order for the world to heal (and, no, ‘homophobia’ is not the answer to ‘what is wrong with the fire nation’, i’m still fucking pissed at bryke about that), misses the entire point of his character arc. this is the culmination of zuko realizing that he should never have had to earn his father’s love, because that should have been unconditional from the start. this is zuko realizing that he was not at fault for his father’s abuse--that speaking out of turn in a war meeting in no way justified fighting a duel with a child.
is that first realization (that a parent’s love should be unconditional, and if it isn’t, then that is the parent’s fault and not the child’s) something that queer kids in homophobic households/families can relate to? of course it is. but it’s also something that every other abused kid, straight kids and even queer kids who were abused for other reasons before they even knew they were anything other than cishet, can relate to as well. in that respect, it is not a uniquely queer experience, nor is it a uniquely queer story, and zuko not being attracted to girls (which is what a lot of it seems to boil down to, at the end of the day--cutting down zuko’s potential ships so that only zukka and a few far more niche ships are left standing) is not necessary to his character arc. nor does it particularly make sense.
And it’s really the first bit of that second paragraph that people who make such claims don’t seem to understand--being able to relate to something because of your own experiences doesn’t necessarily mean that the thing you are relating to is inherently tied to those experiences.
What I mean by that is that we, as human beings, can relate to a lot of experiences which don’t necessarily exactly parallel our own, because we thrive on pattern recognition and can easily find elements of our own experiences in things which look familiar, even if they ultimately have a different source. In that way, abuse narratives are fairly universal--it doesn’t matter why someone was abused (or, rather, what the justifications were on the part of the abuser), abuse victims will see themselves in abuse narratives, even if the fictional victim doesn’t actually suffer from the exact same abuse. A queer kid who was kicked out of their home for being gay could easily see themselves in Zuko being forced into exile, but that does not mean that Zuko was exiled for being gay, and it does not mean that being kicked out of the house by an abusive parent is an inherently gay experience.
I have been, with varying frequency, threatened again and again with being kicked out of my home since I was sixteen years old. It has nothing to do with me being queer--since I’m not out to my family and didn’t even realize I wasn’t straight until my early twenties--and everything to do with the fact that my father likes things he can control, and I have been increasingly difficult to control since I started standing up to him. I can intensely relate to Zuko’s experiences as an abused child (once, my father punched me so hard in my shoulder that it bruised my bone--the bruise didn’t fade for three weeks, and he didn’t talk to me for four months; it felt a lot like being exiled, frankly, and he may have gone back to pretending it never happened after that but I’ve never been able to forget), particularly since the only reason I’m not either dead or homeless is because my mom won’t actually let him kick me out.
And I think that’s why it bothers me so much that people claim this is an inherently gay narrative, or that it makes Zuko gay coded (and it’s always gay, because the whole point has been erasing his attraction to girls, not positing that it’s possible he could be attracted to guys), because it feels incredibly invalidating to me--a bi woman whose experience with abuse is so closely echoed in Zuko’s narrative, and whose experience with abuse has nothing whatsoever to do with sexuality.
Like I said in that post, none of this is to say that seeing yourself in Zuko or even projecting onto Zuko and headcanoning him as gay because your experience with abuse is tied to sexuality is wrong or bad or whatever. But claiming that this is coded into his character and that any other reading of him requires ignoring this coding which is practically canon IS wrong, and it’s invalidating to a whole lot of people who see themselves in Zuko, and in Zuko’s experiences, and either aren’t gay or didn’t experience their abuse because of their sexuality. It’s also, frankly, invalidating to other queer people whose experience of abuse is tied to their sexuality or gender identity, but who still aren’t gay.
There’s nothing in Zuko’s narrative that is exclusive or inherent to being gay, specifically. There is nothing that hints at a lack of attraction to women, even if (like me) you interpret certain scenes (-cough- his swordfight with jet -cough-) as indicating the presence of an attraction to men. And Zuko’s abuse narrative will speak to people who were abused for being gay, yes, but it also speaks to people who were abused for being queer in any other respect and to people who were abused for reasons that had nothing to do with being queer, and to cishet abuse victims as well! And I think that trying to erase or invalidate that is insulting on a number of levels.
