For the love of my life, I cannot understand why zutara is so popular! They were enemies up until the end of the show, they had no buildup, showed no interest in each other, And were already in relationships/had interests in other people long before they became allies. Is abusive pairings just the latest fad now in pop culture? Cuz i’m seeing a lot of it with Reylo as well.
Y’all really don’t know what words mean, do you?
First of all, enemies-to-lovers pairings are not inherently abusive. Fullstop. Hero/Villain and enemies-to-lovers dynamics (though please note that these are not the same things, when will antis learn media literacy for the love of carbs) can be toxic and abusive, but it is entirely dependent on their dynamic after they begin a romantic relationship. You cannot call a pairing abusive just because they tried to hurt or kill each other when they were enemies on opposite sides of a violent conflict, that’s not how it works.
Secondly, if you can’t understand why Zutara is so popular, then I can only conclude that there are three possibilities: one, you haven’t even seen the show (or you slept through every zuko and katara scene that built up their dynamic from enemies to friends in canon); two, you lack reading comprehension and media literacy skills and do not understand how to spot romantic tropes or foreshadowing; or, three, you’re lying, because you know that there is a whole lot of basis for enjoying the potential Zuko and Katara could have had, and you know their canon relationships were terribly written and not particularly healthy (especially on Zuko’s end), and it annoys you because whatever you do ship isn’t nearly as popular and probably doesn’t have the same basis in canon.
(Unless you’re a Zukka shipper, which means that the first two possibilities are most likely, on top of which you’re a hypocrite.)
I suspect, however, given the fallacious comparison to Reylo, that it’s some combination of the second two possibilities, because only people who lack basic media literacy would think that there are any similarities between the two relationships that aren’t based on superficial aesthetics and the basic enemies-to-lovers trope. Now, I don’t care if people ship Reylo--I personally don’t, and never have, but what does annoy me is the comparison to Zutara, because there’s no basis for it. Zuko and Katara had a relationship arc that spanned the entire series. They did not try to kill each other (Zuko was never trying to kill any of the gaang, he was trying to capture Aang and that was only in the first season; hiring an assassin was a) a one-time fluke, and b) a horribly ooc writing decision that made no sense to begin with), and Zuko was never as fully-fledged a villain as Kylo.
He also had a completely different backstory, didn’t kill Iroh even when he turned on him, and didn’t have the blood of entire planets on his hands. This doesn’t mean that Kylo couldn’t have had a believable redemption arc, but it would have taken a lot more work, rather than being shoved into the last hour of the third movie. Zuko’s arc, on the other hand, spanned all three seasons of his show, beginning with the fact that he was narratively positioned as the deuteragonist from the start. He wasn’t even the primary antagonist at any point in the series--in book 1, that position went to Zhao, in book 2 it was Azula, and in book 3 it was Ozai.
None of which is particularly important to the fact that Zuko and Katara had a relationship arc. You don’t have to like it, you don’t even have to admit it’s there, but it’s canon and you can’t rewrite reality to remove it, much as I know you wish you could. By the end of the series, Zuko and Katara are friends with a deep, close bond, which can be interpreted platonically, sure, but there’s nothing stopping us from interpreting it as romantic, particularly when you couple it with the romantic tropes that littered their arc, along with the parallels and the symbolism and the potential they have as a couple to reshape the world.
You don’t have to like it. You can even keep pretending you don’t understand it. But we’re not going anywhere, like it or not, so you’ll just have to learn to deal with it.
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