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comradekatara · 3 years

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I know I’ve discussed this in the past, but I wanted to further interrogate the root of sokka’s incredibly low self-esteem, especially when contrasted with katara’s deeply inspiring & empowering self-assurance, and I think a lot of it stems from sokka’s formative traumas, and how he spent his entire adolescence considering himself the Protector, effectively sublimating his identity as an individual in favor of being the support others need, to the best of his ability.

obviously it’s not katara’s fault that she’s a waterbender and sokka isn’t. besides, being a waterbender is a great burden for katara, a source of trauma and guilt as she feels a sense of duty to fulfill the legacy of kya’s sacrifice and rebuild her tribe; being the last southern waterbender is an extremely difficult weight to carry. that said, everyone else in the tribe is aware that katara is special and must be protected, and none are more aware of this than sokka, whose primary objective at all times is to keep katara safe, to not let what happened to their mother, and countless others, happen to her.

similarly, while hakoda did not mean to spurn sokka when he denied him from leaving with the other warriors, and made the decision any reasonable adult would make in that situation, sokka took this as proof that his father did not think he was valuable. hakoda told sokka that his place was protecting the tribe, protecting katara, and sokka took this promise incredibly seriously, knowing that he was the first and last line of defense between the fire nation and his people (his little sister), waiting for the inevitable moment that he would stare down death, completely alone.

it does not matter how many times katara shows sokka that she loves and cares about sokka as much as sokka loves and cares about her, sokka will never see himself as valuable in his own right when compared to her. it does not matter how much hakoda tells sokka that he’s proud of him, that he’s always known him to be capable and strong, sokka will never stop striving for approval from his father, approval that he already has and could never truly lose.

sokka’s entire sense of self is wrapped up in his role as protector, and he defines his own value entirely in terms of what he can do for others. this is why throughout the show, whenever someone expresses to him that they think he’s good, smart, worthy, or that they like having him around, he consistently responds with complete bafflement. sokka is incapable of valuing himself as an individual, but rather recognizes himself to be the supporting character in someone else’s story. and even then, he does not even recognize how crucial that support truly is.

#i've heard of being an eldest sibling but this is ridiculous!!!#sokka #analysis #katara&sokka #katara #hakoda #hakoda&sokka #i mean if ANYONES to blame it was that bitch gran gran #she was clearly playing favorites #smh #(im kidding i love kanna & its completely valid of her to play favorites. as the favorite of my parents & my grandparents i see no problem #playing favorites is inevitable and of course kanna was going to prefer her 'spitting image' like katara IS baby kanna)#(with a bit of baby hama sprinkled in!)#(anyway. this is about sokka. i think)#that final sentence is a reference to the fact that they'd all be dead without him #and whenever he's not around they just sit there and talk about how much they miss him #try telling HIM that tho #rip </3 #also to be clear when i say formative trauma in relation to katara i mean the genocide and kya's murder not katara having bending sfdjhfkjfh #tho ngl if my sibling(s) could waterbend and i couldnt id be fucking PISSED #but no . thats not what i meant #but man what i would give to be able to waterbend....#sorry sokka :(

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pokotho · 3 years

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sooo is this girl who watched hama get taken away by the fire nation gran-gran or what? she's the spitting image of katara, which is how young kanna is described by yagoda. and she's wearing a northern water tribe betrothal necklace. so hama and kanna knew each other as kids? what can i do with this informatiom

#atla #the last airbender #southern water tribe #hama atla #katara

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zukoscomet · 3 years

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I realised recently that I never actually collated all the ideas I had about my Zutara kids so here, have some steambabies! Idk I just really like the idea of Katara and Zuko having a big family after all they’ve lost when they were young, and as an only child, I guess I kind of romanticise the idea of having siblings.

TW: I hc that Katara would have had a miscarriage, so if that is a trigger for you then maybe don’t read on.

Shameless plug but if you wanna read more about this, my series on AO3 is roots and wings.

Their firstborn is a boy who they name Kai after Kya. His full name is Kaito but nobody who knows him ever calls him that, not even when he’s in trouble. I’m not going to go into too much context about like the pregnancy bc you can already find that stuff here. He turns out very much like Zuko physically - tall, golden irises, straight black hair, narrow angular face - but he has mixed tawny skin and his eyes are shaped round and wide like Katara. He’s born on the last day of summer in 109 AG, so because of superstition that firebenders are born in peak summer, there’s some uncertainty about what he’ll bend - if at all - but then when he’s three and a half, he makes a flame. Iroh trains him to firebend until he’s about 16, then he goes off to the Sun Warriors for a year to finish off, and he ends up a very spiritual firebender. Kai is like the dream first child - the softest boy ever to live - and when Katara and Zuko go on to have more children, he’s a really great big brother, like wholeheartedly adores his little sibs even if they drive him completely nuts about 95% of the time. He’s quite a conflicted and confused kid growing up. He’s never quite sure of what he wants in life but finally, when he’s 17, he decides that he realises that he doesn’t want to be Fire Lord and passes along the heir status to his sister. After that he joins the Sun Warriors and eventually marries the chief’s daughter, Himari, and they have two firebender girls, Aiko and Sol.

Izumi arrives not long after her brother in 110 AG. Katara and Zuko planned to wait but it ends up that there’s barely a year between Kai and Izumi and it comes as an extra shock as Katara didn’t figure out she was pregnant again till like 18 weeks in. Katara goes into labour early at 35 weeks and Izumi is born really small - she never completely catches up either and it’s hilarious because after successive generations of tall male Fire Lords, they get Izumi who’s barely 5 feet - but she’s otherwise fine. She’s physically a mish-mash so overall she resembles nobody especially - Katara’s hair, complexion and big round eyes, Zuko’s irises, Azula’s heart-shaped face and highly arched brow line, Hakoda’s facial features. The superstition about summer births for firebenders peters out real quick when Izumi, born in the autumn, bends blue fire at two and a half and, taught by Jeong Jeong, she grows into a prodigal master. When she’s young, Izumi is the polar opposite of her brother - feisty, stubborn, determined and whip smart - and she’s a heathen teenager but by about 15 she mellows and matures, and part of Kai’s reasoning for abdicating is that Izumi seems a better fit for Fire Lord. Izumi was always kinda apathetic to kids but at 19, she accidentally gets pregnant and has her son, Kazuo, then her daughter, Kira, eleven years later. Izumi becomes Fire Lord at 37 but she only rules for about 14 years before retiring. Since she had Kaz so young, if she stayed on the throne much longer, Kaz would also be an older man when it came time for him to inherit, so she decides to step aside and Kaz is coronated just after his 33rd birthday.

(Kazuo takes after his Gran Gran in more ways than just his blue eyes; he’s a waterbender so Kaz is the first waterbender Fire Lord)

After a break, Katara and Zuko decide to try for a third addition and Katara gives birth - in the Southern Water Tribe, for the first time - to Bashira, four years after Izumi. Shira looks probably the most like Zuko out of all the children, even more than her elder brother does. They share the same tall and lean physique, the same long black hair, Shira is mixed but still the palest of all the steambabies and their faces are practically identical. They’re characteristically very similar, too - serious, intense and reserved. The only differences is that her hair is curly, her eyes are blue and finally, Katara gets her waterbending child. Both of them suspected that Shira was going to be a waterbender even at the early stages of the pregnancy, but it’s still super exciting when Shira tosses a wave at her elder siblings when she’s two. Katara is teaching her as soon as she possibly can but over time some tension develops between them when Shira turns out to be quite different from her mom in terms of natural bending style. Shira is very fight-oriented, she learns dao swords from Zuko and never shows as much of an interest in the healing arts, but when things blow up and eventually Shira is able to explain that she wants to be able fight like her mom did during the war, things straighten out and Katara guides Shira all the way through to mastery. She eventually moves to the South in her late teens to lead the tribe’s warriors. There, she has three children - waterbender twins Kenzo and Kenji, then a daughter named Kanna who’s a firebender like Grandpa - but the marriage to their father doesn’t last and in her 50s, she ends up in a relationship with Aang and Toph’s daughter, Lin.

Katara gets pregnant for a fourth time - planned - just after Shira turns two, but this time she has a miscarriage. Zuko was overseas when it happened so she went through it alone. Katara is devastated and resents Zuko for not being there. She knows it’s not his fault but she can’t help her emotions and that makes her feel even worse so she just shuts down - stops doing her Fire Lady work, stops spending any more time with Zuko and their children than necessary, won’t let the rest of the family visit them and spends most of the day lying in bed. Zuko doesn’t know how to help her so initially he decides to give her space to grieve however she feels she needs to, but it just deteriorates until one day Zuko suggests that maybe they should both go to therapy or marriage counselling or something because it can’t go on like this. Katara just completely loses it at that and ends up yelling at him all the things that she’d been bottling up over the last couple of months. Katara says some awful things and she’s expecting Zuko to take it poorly, hence why she kept it all inside up till now, but Zuko just accepts every bit of it and after that, she’s finally able to grieve properly and mend.

About six months after they come back together, they decide to try again and Katara eventually falls pregnant. The pregnancy itself goes smoothly but both of them are so stressed about something going wrong like last time and the effect that might have on both of them, then Gran Gran passes away when Katara is in her thirtieth week, so the full ten months were incredibly hard-going.

It’s a big relief when the baby is finally born on Ember Island, three years after Shira in 117 AG. They name her Lili in honour of their recent losses, since lilies can ease scars and Iroh once referred to them as lights in darkness. From the beginning, Lili is the image of Katara in every way physically and characteristically - kind, patient, gentle, but does have quite a temper if she’s pushed too far. She’s also a waterbender, though it takes her a little longer to manifest her abilities than any of her siblings, first gaining control of the water at the age of six. Lili is incredibly endearing, as both a child and an adult, and she becomes so particularly popular with the Fire Nation public that the firebending qualification to be considered an heir to the throne is reversed, so Shira and Lili are inducted into the succession. Born in the same year, Lili had a long-term relationship with Tenzin, Aang and Toph’s thirdborn, but as they grew older, Tenzin was concerned that if he married her, their children would have heritage of all four elements and degrade the chances of Tenzin producing airbenders and continuing the Air Nation. That concern resulted in a kind of on-again-off-again thing but eventually Lili sent him off with an "I don’t want to be with someone that isn’t even sure he wants me" and went travelling the world for a few years. When they’re both in their thirties though, Lili and Tenzin reconnect and get back together, eventually marrying and producing five children - Jinora, Aya, Hiro, Rohan and Kano, the elder four airbenders and the youngest a waterbender.

A few months after Lili is born, Sokka and Suki have a baby girl and when Katara and Zuko go to visit their new niece, they agree that night on a spur-of-the-moment that they want one more child. The morning after, they talk about it properly and decide it’d be better to wait till Lili was a bit older, but Katara found out six weeks later that that one time had been successful. About halfway through, they find out that they’re expecting a boy and Katara is especially excited since their son had always been more closely attached to her whereas their girls were very firmly Daddy’s girls. Sure enough, when Kallik arrives in 118 AG, he’s a big Mama’s boy and remains so his entire life. Apart from his curly black hair, Kallik is the spitting image of his uncle, to the point that Hakoda says that seeing Lili and Kallik together is like seeing young Katara and Sokka. Kallik is the hardest to handle out of their children - loud, playful, mischievous and an exhausting troublemaker. All of the siblings fight like cat and dog but Kallik and Izumi are by far the worst, on the level of one walks into a room and the other is like “And I took that personally” and they never seem to grow out of it even when they’re both old and grey. Kallik is the only nonbender in the family and initially he struggles with this a bit but he spends a lot of time hanging out with Uncle Sokka, learns dao swords with Shira and Zuko, and by the time he hits his teens, he comes to view it more as something that sets him apart from his siblings. When he’s 18, he goes to join the United Forces and he stays in service till his late thirties, when he meets Ren, another serviceman from the Northern Water Tribe. After beginning a relationship with him, the pair settle in Republic City and end up adopting two daughters, Kirima and Alasie.

About a decade after Kallik is born, it seems like things are kind of slowly drawing to a close as the kids are getting older - Kai is 19 and has left home, Izumi is 18 and living away in Republic City while she studies at university, Shira is 14 and already talking about moving South the first chance she gets, Lili is 11 and wanting to go Northern Water Tribe to train with the healers there, and Kallik is 10 and dreaming of being a great military commander like Grandpa Koda and Uncle Sokka - when suddenly Katara starts to get really, really sick. Zuko is absolutely terrified, thinking that there’s something seriously wrong with his wife, but after some deduction, it turns out that Katara is actually pregnant again. The relief at realising she’s not dying is short-lived and the reaction from both of them is basically holy shit holy fuck we are too old for this our other kids are practically all grown up now we are done with babies we can't seriously have six children what are we going to do. There’s a lot of discussion, especially since Katara is 43 by then and the risks for her to be carrying another child are higher, but they ultimately decide to go through with it. Ironically, it’s the easiest of all her pregnancies and when Katara delivers a baby girl in Republic City in 128 AG, there hadn’t been a single complication to speak of. Iroh had passed away two years earlier, devastating the whole family but Zuko in particular, but the baby is born with his irises - a darker gold - so they name her Ilah. Her eyes are big and round like Katara’s but other than that, Ilah resembles her Grandma Ursa most strongly, with her thick chestnut-coloured hair and slight, delicate facial features. Naturally, Katara and Zuko think all their babies were the cutest baby but Ilah is probably objectively the cutest, with her big honey-coloured eyes, chubby cheeks and soft little curls.

Inevitably, since Kai, Shira, Lili and Kallik had all either left home before she was born or did so when she was still a little girl, Ilah gets a lot more concentrated attention from Katara and Zuko. She’s completely spoiled and doted upon by the whole family, including her elder brothers and sisters who visit her as often as they can manage. Since Izumi still lives in the palace permanently as the Crown Princess, she and Ilah are close, but Ilah ultimately ends up being closest with Izumi’s son, Kaz, who is only a year younger than his aunt. Ilah was even in the room when Kaz was born, though it wasn't an intentional move. Zuko was supposed to be watching Ilah when things got intense with Izumi’s labour but things escalated from 0-100 real fast and Katara didn't have time to hand Ilah off, so she stayed tucked in a sling on her mother’s back as Katara helped her eldest daughter to deliver her own baby, somehow sleeping through all the noise and commotion. Ilah and Kaz end up more like a brother and sister or best friends than an aunt and nephew, though Kaz always calls her Auntie Ilah when he’s teasing her. Ilah is perhaps the shyest around strangers of her siblings, uninterested in celebrity and attention, but she’s the most adventurous, determined and creative, interested in science and invention from an early age. Growing up, Ilah felt a little pressured by the renown of her family, especially when her firebending turned out to be just about average in power, but when she’s 12, Ilah figures out that she can combustionbend. From there, she applies her bending abilities to science and when she leaves home for university, she invents the combustion engine at age 20. The rest of her adult life is spent travelling virtually non-stop, working on innovation projects for the different nations. She never has children, on the account that it would be unfair to expect a kid to move around as much as she does and she’s happy enough with her numerous nieces and nephews, but she eventually marries her long-time girlfriend Li-Mei, an Air Nomad tasked with searching the world for new airbenders.

#zutara #katara #zuko #katara x zuko #avatar: the last airbender #steambabies #momtara and dadko

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chitsangenthusiast · 3 years

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yuetara + either avere (italian verb that means to have) or amare (another italian verb that means to love)

after the war, katara starts making more frequent trips to the northern water tribe to spend time with yue. on one trip back home, she arrives in a parka that has a bit more purple than blue in it and there's a moment where kanna gets just a little misty-eyed over it

because katara looks like her father, is even more of a spitting image of her grandmother, and kanna adores seeing her little mini-me in love and looking so content in those purple shades <3

send me a ship+word and get a headcanon!

#i will never get over the fact that kanna still wears purple clothing even after all those years of leaving home <3 #sorry this went a little away from the ship but also:#i think katara would be happy to mix the colors and yue would be even happier to gift katara new clothing bc she is very pretty in them lol #katara #yue #kanna #ask

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soopersara · 5 years

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You know what I would have loved to see in ATLA (or the comics, though I’m not a fan of them in general)? A reunion between Kanna and Yugoda.

I never really bought the whole Pakku-reunited-with-Kanna-and-now-they’re-suddenly-married thing. I know I’m not the first person to talk about this, but hey, Kanna literally ran to the opposite end of the world to get out of her engagement (oh, and the story of Kanna’s journey would have been EPIC to see), had no communication with her former fiance for sixty years, married someone else, had a family of her own, and then... what? I’m supposed to believe that she wanted to leap into marriage with Pakku right away? Factoring in the voyage to the South Pole and then back to Ba Sing Se in time for the comet, he couldn’t have been in the South Pole for more than 2-3 months. And even if I ignore the inherent weirdness of Kanna suddenly accepting this man whose sexism drove her to the far end of the world (and whose attitudes toward women don’t change much on screen--accepting Katara’s talent is the only real change we see), that seems fast. I know that she was apparently the love of Pakku’s life and all, but it certainly doesn’t seem like he was the love of her life. If he had been, I’m inclined to believe that Kanna would have been more sentimental about the betrothal necklace and held onto it as long as possible rather than passing it down to her daughter-in-law, then her granddaughter. But that’s just me, and that’s not my point.

In my opinion, Yugoda was criminally underutilized as a character, but from what little we do see, I think it’s safe to say that she and Kanna were close friends. I mean, this is pretty much all the dialogue we get from her:

Yugoda: I recognize this carving! I don't know why I didn't realize sooner; you're the spitting image of Kanna! Katara: Wait, how do you know my Gran-Gran's name? Yugoda: When I was about your age, I was friends with Kanna. She was born here in the Northern Tribe. Katara: She never told me. Yugoda: Your grandmother had an arranged marriage with a young waterbender. He carved that necklace for her. Katara: If Gran-Gran was engaged, why did she leave? Yugoda: I don't know. That's always been a mystery to me. She left without saying goodbye.

And it’s not much to go on, but I do notice something: Yugoda notices how much Katara resembles her grandmother after she recognizes the betrothal necklace. Why does that matter? Well, the fact that Yugoda still remembers that particular carving after sixty years after seeing hundreds of similar necklaces around the tribe in the years since must mean that this one left a pretty deep impression on her. I’m not gonna lie--I have a pretty good visual memory, but if you asked me to describe my own sister’s engagement ring (and she’s only been married for two years, so the memory should be fresh), there’s about a 0% chance I could do it. I imagine that betrothal necklaces are the same--at some point you’ve just seen so many that the details start to blur together UNLESS you have very deep personal reasons for remembering the specifics. So Kanna and Yugoda must have been really close for that memory to have lasted for sixty years.

And as much as I REALLY wanted to see Yugoda being a mentor figure for Katara (and maybe I’ll write more about that someday), I’d also love to see those two old ladies rekindling their friendship after sixty years apart. ATLA always did friendship better than it did romance, and bringing these two back together would have played to the series’ strengths much better than the Pakku-Kanna romance did.

That whole “friendship transcends lifetimes” thing? Well, showing that a friendship can also outlast sixty years of separation would have been a nice tie-in.

The “illusion of separation”? Well, hey, that could have played into their relationship! Maybe their lives ended up running parallel to one another even though they spent most of their lives on opposite ends of the world. After all, Yugoda was the best healer in the Northern Tribe while Kanna was essentially a nonbending healer in the Southern Tribe.

The concept of forgiveness? I love “The Southern Raiders”, but saying that that episode is controversial is... a colossal understatement. Forgiveness could have been explored in a less divisive manner in a reunion story between Yugoda and Kanna. I’m sure there were plenty of bruised feelings to go around when Kanna left without a word to her friend, and some forgiveness would have been necessary for them to move on. Like I said, I love “The Southern Raiders”. It’s a beautiful episode with so many layers of nuance, but... ugh. Bryke have made it pretty clear that they saw Aang as the “angel on Katara’s shoulder”, and “violence is never the answer” was clearly the message they wanted to push. And y’know, as overarching messages in kids’ shows go, I’ve seen worse. I have problems with Aang-as-the-angel-on-Katara’s-shoulder, but advocating against violence in favor of forgiveness--I can get behind that. But I don’t think “The Southern Raiders” was the most appropriate place to put that message. Pushing forgiveness for the man who murdered Katara’s mother (even though the episode ended up being far more complex than that) was never a good decision. A story about two friends trying to rebuild their friendship after decades apart, on the other hand? That would be an appropriate place to push for forgiveness above all else.

Basically, though, I’d love to see some feisty-old-lady-shenanigans, and I think that Kanna and Yugoda could have delivered on that brilliantly. And it would have opened up possibilities for exploring Kanna’s backstory--and again, that would have been a truly epic story to tell. Like, what was Kanna’s life like before she left the North Pole? Did she have other motivations for fleeing? What was her journey like? Did she leave any family behind? Do Sokka and Katara have living relatives that they’ve never met?

Aughhhhh! I want all the answers. And at least one scene with Kanna and Yugoda giggling like teenagers (and making fun of Pakku) once they meet up again.

#atla #soopersara's scribbles

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