My latest rarepair: Katara/Yue
Oct. 1st, 2020 11:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sultrybutdamagedI wrote a little about this on Twitter but then like so many ideas it took over my brain, so here's the long version. I may eventually turn this into a fic.
Rewatching Avatar: the Last Airbender and I really think Seige of the North would have been better if it was Katara who fell in love with Yue.
Because look, I love Sokka, who doesn't - but what does that relationship do for him? Not much. It is a painfully generic fantasy romance trope: country boy falls for beautiful princess, he's all wrong for her for her, she resists, there's some competition with her more appropriate boyfriend, bad boy wins her over. It's fine. Nothing wrong with it, but it's just sort of... there. And then she sacrifices herself fifteen minutes after mentioning the whole backstory that makes that sacrifice possible, which has never come up before because it had nothing to do with either her character or her relationship with Sokka until that second. Awkward.
But if it was Katara - first of all, gay, that's always good, but it's not just that. Considering they barely got away with letting Korra and Asami hold hands in one shot, there was no way they were going to do a full Katara/Yue romance back in 2005 anyway, but they wouldn't have had to. I think it would have been better even with an implied romance. Better for Yue as a character, better for the themes.
So it would work like this: The Gaang gets to the North Pole and Katara and Yue are paired up because they are about the same age and both girls. Yue's dad sticks her with watching out for Katara while he deals with more important man matters, because patriarchy. Yue is kind, but Katara's not that interested at first, because she's here for waterbending, not pretending to be a princess. But then after she gets rejected from waterbender school and shuffled off with the healers, she turns up fuming to Yue because she's there and willing to listen. And Katara goes on about how it's sexist to leave her out of fighting just because she's a woman, and Yue has her own issues with her society but also a different perspective. She's all about duty, and Katara is too, but Yue sees following the rules even if she hates them as her duty (i.e. marrying whats-his-name) while Katara thinks she has to break them. They bond a little. This gives a nice bit of contrast to how Sokka and Aang are sympathetic to Katara but don't really get how she's feeling in the episode - she needs a female friend for that, and considering that up until this point Katara has spent most of the show with boys, and being forced into a mothering position, it would be a nice change to have her with a female peer.
(Also, Yue could encourage Katara to appreciate her healing skills. The handling of Katara's healing in this episode is weird, like there was a scene that got cut or something. Because when it was introduced, it was this amazing rare thing she could do, and then in the North Pole episodes, it's treated so dismissively by her and everyone else. I kept waiting for Katara to realize it's not just her, it's all the women whose power is being dismissed as "just healers." But no, in the end she's the one special girl who gets to learn to fight and that's enough for her. It gave me an uncomfortable "not like the other girls" feeling. So having Yue as a voice for some of that would be good. End aside.)
Then Katara has her showdown with Master Pakku, which Yue is there for. And afterwards she tells Katara that she thinks Katara is extremely powerful and she'll be one of the best waterbenders ever.
This gets into the second reason I think Katara/Yue makes more sense than Sokka/Yue: because Yue has the moon-spirit in her, and the moon-spirit was the first waterbender, and yet Yue's not a waterbender herself. But if she had a sense for waterbenders, it would be a way to introduce her situation early on and less awkwardly. She could say that she can't waterbend but she's always been able to sense people who could, and tell that they were powerful, and that Katara is really special. And the subtext of that could be that, yes, Katara is a special waterbender, but Yue just thinks she's special, period. And so from there you would see them build a friendship over the two-parter episode. Instead of the drama with Yue's love triangle and the dates with Sokka, you would have Katara and Yue as friends, but with this undercurrent of flirting and feelings. A sort of very sweet, innocent proto-romance with a lot of self-discovery to it, because Katara is 14 and this is still a kid's show.
Then before Yue sacrifices herself to become the moon-spirit, she kisses Katara. (I mean, in 2005 she'd probably have to kiss her cheek or something, but let's just pretend.)
But then wouldn't this be a bury-your-gays? Well... sort of? In the show, Yue's death is treated like a tragedy after it happens, and Sokka has the vision in the swamp about failing to "protect" her, but that's coming from Sokka's perspective as a guy who thinks he has to protect everyone. But Yue didn't really die, she turned into a spirit, and I think if it was mainly Katara that effected, it would feel different. Katara gets her power from the moon, she can feel it, so in a sense she would be able to still feel Yue. She would know she wasn't gone, just transformed, and maybe even at some points Yue would seem to help Katara or connect to her when she was waterbending. She would be a source of strength for Katara, and that would be a way to demonstrate that she is still alive.
I'm biased because as a fic reader and writer I mostly think of stories from the view of "what would lead to good fic" and this set up would lead to a lot of fixits where Yue comes back years later. But even as a sad sort of almost-romance, I think it would be a good story.
Rewatching Avatar: the Last Airbender and I really think Seige of the North would have been better if it was Katara who fell in love with Yue.
Because look, I love Sokka, who doesn't - but what does that relationship do for him? Not much. It is a painfully generic fantasy romance trope: country boy falls for beautiful princess, he's all wrong for her for her, she resists, there's some competition with her more appropriate boyfriend, bad boy wins her over. It's fine. Nothing wrong with it, but it's just sort of... there. And then she sacrifices herself fifteen minutes after mentioning the whole backstory that makes that sacrifice possible, which has never come up before because it had nothing to do with either her character or her relationship with Sokka until that second. Awkward.
But if it was Katara - first of all, gay, that's always good, but it's not just that. Considering they barely got away with letting Korra and Asami hold hands in one shot, there was no way they were going to do a full Katara/Yue romance back in 2005 anyway, but they wouldn't have had to. I think it would have been better even with an implied romance. Better for Yue as a character, better for the themes.
So it would work like this: The Gaang gets to the North Pole and Katara and Yue are paired up because they are about the same age and both girls. Yue's dad sticks her with watching out for Katara while he deals with more important man matters, because patriarchy. Yue is kind, but Katara's not that interested at first, because she's here for waterbending, not pretending to be a princess. But then after she gets rejected from waterbender school and shuffled off with the healers, she turns up fuming to Yue because she's there and willing to listen. And Katara goes on about how it's sexist to leave her out of fighting just because she's a woman, and Yue has her own issues with her society but also a different perspective. She's all about duty, and Katara is too, but Yue sees following the rules even if she hates them as her duty (i.e. marrying whats-his-name) while Katara thinks she has to break them. They bond a little. This gives a nice bit of contrast to how Sokka and Aang are sympathetic to Katara but don't really get how she's feeling in the episode - she needs a female friend for that, and considering that up until this point Katara has spent most of the show with boys, and being forced into a mothering position, it would be a nice change to have her with a female peer.
(Also, Yue could encourage Katara to appreciate her healing skills. The handling of Katara's healing in this episode is weird, like there was a scene that got cut or something. Because when it was introduced, it was this amazing rare thing she could do, and then in the North Pole episodes, it's treated so dismissively by her and everyone else. I kept waiting for Katara to realize it's not just her, it's all the women whose power is being dismissed as "just healers." But no, in the end she's the one special girl who gets to learn to fight and that's enough for her. It gave me an uncomfortable "not like the other girls" feeling. So having Yue as a voice for some of that would be good. End aside.)
Then Katara has her showdown with Master Pakku, which Yue is there for. And afterwards she tells Katara that she thinks Katara is extremely powerful and she'll be one of the best waterbenders ever.
This gets into the second reason I think Katara/Yue makes more sense than Sokka/Yue: because Yue has the moon-spirit in her, and the moon-spirit was the first waterbender, and yet Yue's not a waterbender herself. But if she had a sense for waterbenders, it would be a way to introduce her situation early on and less awkwardly. She could say that she can't waterbend but she's always been able to sense people who could, and tell that they were powerful, and that Katara is really special. And the subtext of that could be that, yes, Katara is a special waterbender, but Yue just thinks she's special, period. And so from there you would see them build a friendship over the two-parter episode. Instead of the drama with Yue's love triangle and the dates with Sokka, you would have Katara and Yue as friends, but with this undercurrent of flirting and feelings. A sort of very sweet, innocent proto-romance with a lot of self-discovery to it, because Katara is 14 and this is still a kid's show.
Then before Yue sacrifices herself to become the moon-spirit, she kisses Katara. (I mean, in 2005 she'd probably have to kiss her cheek or something, but let's just pretend.)
But then wouldn't this be a bury-your-gays? Well... sort of? In the show, Yue's death is treated like a tragedy after it happens, and Sokka has the vision in the swamp about failing to "protect" her, but that's coming from Sokka's perspective as a guy who thinks he has to protect everyone. But Yue didn't really die, she turned into a spirit, and I think if it was mainly Katara that effected, it would feel different. Katara gets her power from the moon, she can feel it, so in a sense she would be able to still feel Yue. She would know she wasn't gone, just transformed, and maybe even at some points Yue would seem to help Katara or connect to her when she was waterbending. She would be a source of strength for Katara, and that would be a way to demonstrate that she is still alive.
I'm biased because as a fic reader and writer I mostly think of stories from the view of "what would lead to good fic" and this set up would lead to a lot of fixits where Yue comes back years later. But even as a sad sort of almost-romance, I think it would be a good story.
