avatar: the last airbenders characters in american high school au
sokka -> katara -> aang -> toph -> zuko
sokka
-senior
-class clown
-sometimes studies for class but he naturally understands everything in this nice smooth flow so school comes very easy to him
-sokka surprises everyone thinking he'd become a jock in high school (he was the class clown, a little bit sexist, a little rude as all young teenage boys are) by becoming a theater kid instead
-its there he meets his girlfriend suki
-the first time he meets her is in all her makeup and dress
-he says she did good in her auditions, for a girl
-he teases her for it until she tells him all the kids who want in to the club have to perform the same audition script, in the same dress and makeup
-he protested at first but gave in anyway
-and then sokka was casted as the girl love interest to suki
-and the rest is history
-not even a week later sokka is the defintion of a feminist
-and he still never shuts up about his girlfriend suki
-he's very popular, and not just in the theatre kid clique
-he makes friends with everybody
-one time he sees this small freshman standing up for a kid being bullied by a senior and it looks like the freshmans about to be eaten alive
-sokka watches not sure what to do but gets confused as the three seniors back down after the freshman makes a speech about love and acceptance for everybody
-sokka is insanely impressed until he realizes they backed down because a teacher was coming down the hall
-it was mr. jeong jeong
-and nobody wants to deal with jeong jeong, not even the scariest kids in the school
-after the almost fight sokka calls aang young grasshopper and they become friends
-for the rest of the year sokka and aang (and eventually toph) keep getting into weird schemes together
-one night they pull all the chairs out of the entire school and put them into the football field
-nobody ever finds out they were the ones who did it
-sokka plans the entire senior prank by himself and its flawless until aang tells him hes not going big enough
-they keep planning and eventually its so extreme katara comes in and tells them guys you cant set 100 wild geese free in the school
katara
-junior
-when shes a freshman she gets really mad when other people are talking over the teacher
-gets near perfect grades on everything she does but still never stops studying
-she wasnt that popular as a freshman, she was that kid for a while who showed up with 50 notecards for a 10 question vocab quiz
-but she joins the swimming team and calms down just a little and all of a sudden she has more friends than anybody else in the school
-she meets aang in swim
-hes a really fast swimmer and at first thats the only thing about him that catches her attention is how impressive his speed is as a freshman
-but then sokka and aang become friends and katara cant keep her eyes off of him
-she finds him funny and his calm and peace of mind comforting
-he has a way of handling situations that seem wise beyond his years, but then he also sometimes acts just like the kid he is
-she knows he likes her immediately and she likes him back too
-but she wont ever admit it
-until they later start dating when theyre both in college
-katara meets toph through aang and after she sees someone bully toph for being blind she becomes furious
-toph doesn't care, at all
-but katara wont let it go
-and toph secretly loves katara for that
-she starts becoming more active in caring about other people
-she joins student council and eventually becomes student council president, winning by actually caring about her school and not just a popularity contest (although it was a little bit, everyone loved her)
-but zuko ran against her in her junior year for president under irohs suggestion
-she hated him competitively for a while
-she constantly threw it in zukos face that he was a rich kid so he cant just buy his way into anything
-she hated him on principle
-zuko never taunted her back though
-one day as she went in to study at a tea shop, she saw zuko in the backroom serving tea
-she learned zuko didn't have any of his familys money anymore and worked for everything he owned, including his heart and temperament
-he was a good person
-katara stopped hating him, but she didnt give up running either
-when he lost presidency to her, he accepted graciously
-and thats when she asked him to be her vice president, and the entire class voted zuko in
-they were the most powerful duo in the school after that day
aang
-freshman
-respectfully but constantly arguing with the teacher
-he's not doing it to be funny, he just knows more than the teachers do
-but everyone thinks hes funny for it anyway
-he never has to study but always does great on the tests
-he was very popular immediately
-by the time he reaches physics sophomore year he meets mr. bumi
-aang starts eating lunch in bumi's room and slowly all of the class joins him for lunch
-bumi only eats a singular lettuce leaf for lunch and 5 packets of pop rocks everyday
-during tests he gives everyone a packet of pop rocks for when youre finished taking it and promises you a 100 if you figure out what he wants you to do with them
-people try everything from putting it in coke, to stealing their classmates, to pouring it on the ground and stomping on them
-aang figures out his last day of class when theyre supposed to take their final
-he notices on test days bumi never has pop rocks
-he always assumed it was so he didnt distract the students during the test but he knows now
-he walks into bumis room and when the test begins he hands bumi his own pop rocks and says he can have them
-bumi annouces aang was the first person in his 43 years of teaching who got it and he will get a 100 on his final
-slowly the entire class turns in their pop rocks to bumi
-but bumi makes them take the test anyway and he has all 29 packets during the test, distracting the entire class
-the highest score on the test was a 35
-but they all passed with 100s anyway
-parents were mad at bumi's teaching style thinking the kids learned nothing from his nonsense and that his grades were meaningless
-but when the ap test scores came back every single student recieved a 5/5 on their score
toph
-freshman
-she doesnt care about school at all when she starts but becomes famous later on
-class clown but not like sokka
-she does it in a disrespectful way at first
-she always puts her feet on the desk claiming they "need to see"
-shes mad the teachers dont get mad at her for it
-they pity her for being blind instead
-so that makes her act out even more
-she doesnt get to have bumi for physics, she has mr. yu
-yu was a horrible teacher, and toph as a young sophomore year was fed up being treated like she can't do anything, so she taught herself
-she listens to classes online and studies and makes her own physics experiments and learns from the nature of the world itself
-and does better than anyone in her class
-eventually she starts to get 100s on every single test thrown her way, in every class
-she stops being dissrespectful but oh boy does she never back down from a fight if she doesnt like somebody
-at first she doesnt have a best friend but really wants one
-she has gym with aang freshman year and they get really competitive when theyre put on opposite teams
-she nearly takes aangs head off with a dodgeball once
-aang beats her in a mile run freshman year and she doesnt talk to him for a few months until she beats him again
-but they quickly realize how similiar they are and they become best friends
-they talk throughout their english class constantly and keep getting in trouble with the teacher
-aang keeps apologizing ashamed but toph only laughs waits five minutes and starts again
-but all her teachers learn to love her and are impressed by ger instead of pitying her
-when toph has 100s on every single test
she becomes known as the impossible, almost famous internationally for her perfect scores
-shes literally the brightest youngest genius in the world, found in an american public high school
-it seems impossible and like shes cheating except for her 35 average she gets in english every year
-it doesnt matter she cant read anyway she says
-toph loves sokka and after aang introduces them to each other, she never passes up a chance for annoying him for being a theater kid
-she gets involved with many schemes with aang and sokka
-but at first katara and toph dont get along
-one time, katara walks in the middle of toph cornered getting bullied for being blind as a freshman
-katara cant believe herself this is happening in this day and age and gets those kids suspended for discrimination
-toph gets annoyed at katara for caring so much and making such a big deal about nothing
-but one day she realizes katara doesnt pity her at all, shes only mad at the other people
-and she smiles to herself and realizes it is kinda nice to have someone care about her like that
-so she lets katara rant and rave
-but the next time someone said tophs makeup she tried on for the first time is so ugly because she can't see her own face to do it, in fact that explains why she dresses herself like that
-toph throws an entire textbook with perfect accuracy at that persons head
-and when katara is asked as student council president what she thinks should happen to toph next
-katara responds she should be handed a heavier textbook
-and toph smiles
zuko
-junior
-when hes young hes extremely rich and uses his money to get in and out of everything
-hes good at heart but lost still
-he originally went to ozais private academy because his dad is the principal there
-but when zuko stands up for someone being bullied, just like aang did, he doesn't get friends but instead he gets suspended because the bully was the school quarterback and when ozai defended the quarterback, zuko spoke up
-ozai didn't like that
-ozai is so mad he sends zuko to live with his uncle with strict orders that if zuko makes one more mistake he'll be sent to military school
-but zuko has a good healing life with iroh after that
-iroh has zuko take just one year off of school as they travel the world and connect with nature and camp and by irohs request, drinks a lot of tea
-iroh supports zuko finacially completely but feeling guilty and wanting to help out, zuko begins working at a tea shop with his uncle after his father cuts him out of recieving any of the family money
-iroh enrolls him at the same school as sokka katara aang and toph and after a year of traveling and zuko's heart has cleansed of sadness rejection and anger and now healed
-(but that will never stop him from losing his temper every now and then again too)
-hes in the same grade as katara now despite being a year older
-zuko is pretty jack of all trades in all of his classes, (but only master of one)
-and he also couldn't be worse in english even though his teachers think he has a beautiful way with words
-when he talks without thinking he moves people to tears
-but once he turned in a poem that said "you have to look within yourself to save yourself from your other self. only then will your true self reveal itself."
-he comes home sad he got a 20 on that poem "ruining his high gpa"
-but zuko has a natural gift for chemistry and iroh suggests he tutors some kids for it to increase his confidence again
-zuko meets aang, who wanted a tutor to perfect his classes
-it doesn't go too well at first
-after a year of healing and calm and zen, aang is very very Loud to him
-they argue constantly
-zuko's tutoring style is effective but very aggressive
-he tests aang constantly on the hardest chemistry problems he can come up with, some of it stolen directly from advanced college level courses
-aang is just a freshman but zuko has him learning advanced organic chemisty
-one night they were sent out of the library because aang tried to steal zukos answer key because the test was just too hard and zuko yelled at him to stop and they knocked a whole bookshelf over in the struggle of chasing each other
-but after they left it was the first time aang saw zuko laugh
-after that they start to get along and become best friends for life, despite the age difference
-it takes zuko a while to get used to aangs friends loud personalities but one day when hes older he realizes thats the first time he ever had any real friends his entire life
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in an ideal fic, what ships would there be and how would they interact? gm ☀️☀️
goodmorning! well, it’s 3pm now, but i love the sunshine emojis 🌞
obligatory disclaimer that i have mixed feelings about fanfiction as a medium. i much prefer reading paradise lost to the bible, but pride & prejudice & zombies does nothing for me. i think it’s similar to how when staging a play that’s been done a million times before, changing the setting must reframe the text on a thematic level for that staging to be necessary, and thus, good.
a lot of fanfiction, to me, whether published or lost to the archives of the internet, attempts to reframe the text without actually understanding the text. i realize that not all fanfiction exists to explore the text in the first place. sometimes it just works as good shorthand to explore one’s (often sexual) fantasies. you already know these characters––oh, and now they’re fucking.
so in that regard, i can’t exactly fault these authors for not understanding the text. i can fault them for other things, certainly, but thematic relevance was clearly not a goal in the first place. it’s the difference between a ship existing in a work of fanfiction to further the themes, and a fanfiction written for the sole purpose of exploring a ship.
with all that in mind, here’s a bullet-pointed list of fanfictions i would read should they exist and be well-written, but definitely do not exist and are not well-written because i have the appropriate amount of faith in the fanfic community (and that is... very little)...
a really long story from mai’s pov elapsing from her childhood to at least a year into zuko’s reign. the climax of the story is the turning point at the boiling rock wherein ty lee betrays azula. the first act is the buildup to all of that, and the second act is the fallout. the main ship being mai/ty lee, obviously. oh and at one point towards the end, mai and sokka play pai sho together. that is of the utmost importance.
a story told almost like an epic poem (perhaps with the structure of one, but still in prose) about suki’s adventures throughout the show’s chronology and then spanning afterwards as well. we learn about her backstory, what she got up to in the months in between seeing sokka. it’s usually quite bleak, as she is mostly helping refugees before getting kidnapped by azula, tortured for information, and then thrown into a horrific maximum security prison! but it’s not all bad. and seeing as suki is the protagonist, it would never make for a bad read, either. the main ships are sokka/suki and suki/ty lee. because duh.
azula, in the years spanning the depths of her recovery, going on hikes with toph. basically each segment is just the next hike with toph, in chronological order, and it tracks her development just through how much she is willing to divulge, and what toph would say in response. she grows a lot. unsurprisingly, toph makes for a great therapist. no romantic shipping of any sort, but azula & toph would share a really fascinating bond.
sokka and iroh playing pai sho. sokka and asami playing pai sho. (AU?? or are they in the spirit world?? idk lol) i suppose korra/asami would be present because korra’s all “kick his ass babe” and sokka/zuko would be as well because wherever sokka and iroh are together, zuko must be too. and of course, he is very invested in the outcome of this game, even if he does fall asleep at one point. i guess you’d have to make up the rules of pai sho, at least vaguely, seeing as there are no official rules, but isn’t it a lovely idea?
chell’s AU wherein azula and zuko run away together as children and join the gaang. just gonna link to it here. (read it if you know what’s good for you.) i don’t think there are really any ships, other than azula’s one-sided crush on suki, because azula does not have time to care about other people’s love lives (and it’s from her pov) but sokka/zuko is alluded to, if i remember correctly.
my AU that simply exists as an excuse to have sokka be a lightningbender. here.
a whole fucking novel of an AU wherein instead of being tasked to capture the avatar, zuko was simply left to die in the southern water tribe. he expects to either freeze to death or be eaten by wolves or, if he’s lucky, be killed instantly by the people there, but instead, sokka and katara take him in and he grows up in the swt, and goes with them when they find aang three years later. then of course shit goes down once azula shows up, and it’s all a whole thing! since it’s from zuko’s pov, the primary ship is sokka/zuko, obviously.
epistolary between firelord zuko and chief katara of the southern water tribe. none of their letters are remotely diplomatic, and mainly serve as gossip with only the occasional reminder that they are, in fact, world leaders. no ships.
sokka’s life postwar that kind of just details all the cool shit he did. shrug.
idk whether this counts as atla or lok, but i would read a chronicle of kya/izumi dyke drama in a heartbeat and am not ashamed to admit that.
ty lee and azula’s very complicated dynamic from alternating povs. i just think their respective feelings towards each other are super interesting. especially the night at the beach and the turning point at the boiling rock, though all the moments leading up to that are just as important. the ‘ship, though, would be mai/ty lee. (y’all know theyre my favs, right)
the katara cinematic universe is its whole own post, so i’m not even gonna discuss that here.
and then of course, our somehow very in-depth highschool AU (i don’t know how we got here, either) that could be its own series of young adult novels if written by someone with that kind of patience and focus (so to be clear, not me). hopefully, it would be imbursed with that painfully authentic sensibility american vandal (rip legend) had, while also being a bit too earnest, the way all coming of age stories are––but charmingly so. it might even be a series of vignettes, short stories from various povs that all come together in a painfully hilarious tapestry. azula begins studying for the SATs freshman year. mai sarcastically quips at anyone who deigns to speak to her. also she’s dating zuko, so that’s great comedy fodder of course. katara runs for student body president against azula. sokka and zuko land themselves in detention and they find a way to escape. toph joins the science club just because sokka runs the science club; things explode. stuff like that.
i used to say i’d want a kyoshi backstory, but now we have one, and i simply have yet to read it. oops.
oh and this is lok, but i’ve always wanted more on mako & lin’s dynamic. i just think they’re really cute together. (to be clear, not romantically. ew)
i think the avatar universe is also just rife with fascinating lore, though, and you could pretty much write anything, set in any time period, that complies with canon and– hopefully– enhances it. for example, i would love to read a story that incorporates the physics of their universe into its thematic framework. i really liked the stuff with the lionturtles, for example.
oh, and of course, a sokka/zuko vignette that’s just them going to see a production of king lear and then discussing it afterwards. that fanfiction exists for an audience of one, but you did ask me, so...
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edit sorry this post is both long (if the readmore fails i am truly truly sorry) & longwinded im just reflecting and thinking; (another edit: u can probably just read the tl dr and get it)
anyway allow me to spin some very personally based theory here for a mo while i put off/warm my fingers up from the cold in preparation to email my therapist
so growing up i had, i think only, het ships, but i never quite had the ones you were (narratively speaking) “supposed to” have
in most media i recall when i was a kid, there were like, 2 diff structures of character romance plot arcs in media i consumed, there was the main lead and 2 best friends model, where thered be the star of the show who had outside romantic leads and the 2 best friends (who were always a boy and a girl) would have their secondary romance, OR there were ensemble shows where there was a more clear romance set up between the main boy and main girl, then side characters whod pair off in whatever ways ended up happening. in the first, see: hannah montana, the second, see: zoey 101. obv this isnt a hard rule and there were loads of exceptions but like, lets just say i tended not to care for the romances set up for the main girls in the trio models, or quite as hard for the main boy and girl in the ensembles, and in general if there was an obvious romance between two leads i either didnt care or outright hated it
basically i never liked the ships they set up for us in straight media, as a kid (namely, a girl) i liked being that “ew pink!” “i hate valentines day” sort of contrarian, but what i remember actually disliking was the predictability of it, because i clearly still shipped characters, so it wasnt /really/ that i hated romance, per se
looking back on it i think it was probably or at least to a degree more like that i hated the hetero expectation of it- i can nit pick down to more specific examples of why i disliked the main pairings (kataang, for example, i thought was weird bc katara acted like a mother/older sister figure to aang, and i didnt feel like there was romance between them at all except where it felt shoehorned in) - maybe it was also that i thought it made more sense for a main character to be with someone they clearly already spent a lot of time with and not some random new hot boy in town (i very distinctly remember shipping miley and oliver on hannah montana, and i believe that was the first time i ever read fanfiction @ age like... 11 lol) as is often the case w like these things.
theres another level to this though, which is that i notice i tended to ship characters who were more vaguely similar to each other, like, physically (ie, similar heights, or hair colors mainly) obviously this is funny now since my main pairing is johnlock which is such a physically different ship we can construct them from basic shapes and colors and theyre still recognizable as who they are, but i have some thoughts about this- but i think there might be two interesting things about this again in retrospect
first of all, this sounds silly ik, but shipping the vaguely similar ones as a child’s way of queering heterosexuality is an interesting concept and not that difficult, like, two boys are also vaguely similar to each other in a similar way a boy and a girl with the same hair color and height might be, which is something i thought of a while ago
the other way in which this is really interesting to me now, that i think might have been more actually pertinent to myself as a trans child, is that i think i shipped the characters i did in an attempt to morph the concept of boy and girl? to find the boy counterpart to every girl??? that second one makes more sense actually. anyway, i digress
2 start off i definitely had gender feelings starting from a very young age so i think these observations ring more true than just reflections, PERHAPS
so the first thing i remember shipping, ie wanting them to be together, thinking about it an inordinate amount of time outside watching the films, even imagining them eating ice cream together in their pjs (i was NINE DHFJGghfkg) was jack sparrow & elizabeth swan from potc (basically my franchise of choice as a kid bc i never read harry potter) now this doesnt quite fit the “visually similar” thing bc actually orlando bloom looks more like kiera knightly and is prob due to them like making out in one movie, but i think this works for the “shipping as gender expression” theory, because elizabeth swan dressed up as a boy, spent most of that movie wearing boy’s clothes, etc- meanwhile jack was a wacky pirate which like hello duh i’d want to be. so i wonder if beyond the fact that they kissed and flirted, there was something to this concept of me wanting two characters to be together, meant i wanted to marry together two conceptual things happening with two characters, or absorb the cool dude and the boyish girl characters into each other to make one whole archetype for myself? i likewise shipped aang and toph (toph who, normally doesnt really have anyone to be shipped with, since she likes sokka but he has a gf) who we all know is the VERY boyish girl character, so boyish im p sure her actually being a trans dude later in life is a p decently accepted headcanon (i dont actually delve into aatla fandom though so i can only hope)
another thing about this ship thing, is most of my ships had brown hair (like miley and oliver), just like i always have, and in certain cases the girl character would look a LOT like me (i also shipped logan and quinn on zoey 101, which to my surprise n delight actually came true later (although looking back im like... 11 yr old me is glad they made out a lot but adult me is like uhhh why were the kids on this show making out a lot? anyway thats another issue) and i def was a weirdo girl with glasses and long brown wavy hair) which sort of further fuels my feeling that this was an attempt by my brain to do 1 of 2 things, if my own involvement really was a greater motivating factor in this thing, 1. ship MYSELF with a boy (which is like def possible for my gay kinnie ass, but not quite my thesis here) or 2. morph these boy and girl counterparts by imagining them together, seeing them together, etc
for example, i realize now, when i was a kid i drew an avatar sona for myself and said sona looked an awful lot like how id imagine a katara/zuko fusion would be, and the fact that i shipped zutara (very hard lol) was what lead me down this thought path rn
i feel like even to me this concept sounds weird and far fetched but like, gem fusion made enough sense for someone to write with its clearly, usually, romantic implications and we all “get” that, so whom knows???
another thing ive noticed while writing this is for a good few of these ships you can argue the boys in them can be read gay, like jack sparrow and zuko and aang, which feels even more strongly like me trying to marry my gay boy feelings to my tomboy realities [thinking emoji]
the biggest reason i think this makes sense to me is because when i was 10 i became obsessed with the idea that this boy i was friends with and i were secretly twins separated at birth, like i was so into the concept that we looked alike, i like hoped and wished so hard for it to be true, i wished a christmas miracle would happen for fucking real and a magic door in my house would open and be his new room and itd all work out perfectly! and you might think this was a manifestation of my difficulties with my family and wishing to leave it, but in my dream world my parents were still my parents and he came to live with us- which makes me think the obsession of ME looking like this BOY was a manifestation of my gender feelings, which i think can maybe be traced to this concept of pairing a visually similar, possibly gay, brunette boy to every brunette and/or tomboyish girl
anyway. if you actually read all of this id love it if you lmk somehow (doesnt need to be a like) like this is clearly very long and strange but i hope it makes sense. i think i stop myself a lot from ever commenting on gender or theory or whatever but i am a living breathing trans person who has experienced things and i have opinions and i dont think im claiming anything destructive with this lol i think its not unusual to reflect on the way you interacted with the world as a gay/trans kid
also im obviously not saying that shipping straight things is somehow inherently queer, im not trying to retroactively claim something about straight ships, like, those two characters are still functionally straight, and i definitely also shipped probably all of them for normal shipping reasons (although, kid ones, so less “oh theres a lot of ACTUAL romantic subtext between these two” but rather “oh theyre friends and would be cute together!” (or like they kissed and i was like O: )) but im just trying to theorize about something its possible my tiny trans brain was trying to express- and who knows maybe im not the only one!
anyway i guess the TL;DR is: when i was a kid i had a lot of “unconventional” straight ships- i already observed that i eschewed the main canon pairings in kids media in what was probably my tiny baby brains rejection of hetero culture, but i also actively shipped side characters who looked like me, and also looked like each other (ie, both tall and brunette, a boy and girl counterpart of Each Other) OR characters who seemed to be a gayish boy and a tomboyish girl, and im theorizing that maybe the reason that was was my tiny trans brain wanting to gem fusion those two together because of my Gender Feelings and fuse the boy with the girl and this desire manifested in shipping therefore thinking about a lot these pairings of boy and girl counterparts
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