wherein Liz ponders timelines and the popularity of non-canon ships

[edenfalling]

A couple random notes about Avatar: The Last Airbender:

1. I was trying to make sense of Zuko's timeline earlier. Early in season 1, he says he's been searching for the Avatar for two years. In season 1 episode 8 -- "Avatar Roku (Winter Solstice, Part 2)" -- Iroh says Zuko is sixteen. That implied that Zuko was exiled when he was 14 years old, which confused me because fandom consensus has him exiled at 13.

As of season 2 episode 1 -- "The Avatar State" -- I have the answer. That episode contains the third anniversary of Zuko's exile, and it's probably set in early February. So Zuko was exiled in the winter when he was 13 years old, and he says he's been seeking the Avatar for two years because he's counting calendar years, not durational years... and the year switches around winter solstice. (Or he's just rounding down, whichever).

-----

2. I stayed well away from Avatar fandom while the show was on and the ship wars were raging, mostly because what I saw of the ship wars reminded me of the worst excesses of Harry Potter fandom, and I had no desire to stick my hand into another meatgrinder. But what I did see seemed to imply that people who shipped Harry/Hermione were also likely to ship Zutara.

Having now watched a third of the show, this makes no sense to me. Going by character dynamics, the correspondences are Aang to Harry, Katara to Hermione, and Sokka to Ron. Obviously Sokka/Katara is going to be a minority ship (hello, incest?), so Kataang gets the hero-and-his-best-friend thing that Harry/Hermione also has, or the hero-and-the-girl-who-prods-him-to-do-better thing. So shouldn't people who like H/Hr also like Kataang?

But instead, we have people shipping Zutara, which, going by HP correspondences, would be like shipping... Draco/Hermione, I guess. And that's definitely a minority ship. (I think it would be even smaller if it weren't for Cassandra Claire, actually, and her Draco Trilogy.)

So what gives?

I think, after due consideration, that what is happening here has nothing to do with specific character interactions. It has to do with reader/viewer identification. People (women and girls, mostly), identify with Hermione or with Katara and ship their self-stand-in with other characters based on what they are comfortable with in a relationship, or what they find attractive. So they decide Ron is not good enough for Hermione and ship her with Harry, digging out ultra-faint subtext as appropriate to support the idea that really, it was canon. And they decide that Aang is too young or too goofy for Katara and ship her with Zuko, again making much of ultra-faint subtext.

(I should mention here that I like Harry/Hermione better than Ron/Hermione, mostly because Ron/Hermione has always struck me as rather unstable, but I never thought H/Hr was going to be canon. I figured R/Hr was canon as far back as GoF, and never did see why everyone kept arguing. But I like H/Hr fic, so I kept my mouth shut.)

I dunno, maybe I'm totally off base, but so far this is the only way I have been able to make sense of the popularity of certain non-canon ships, especially ones that develop while a series is still a WIP and thus lead to the most vicious ship wars.

-----

Going to bed now.

Comments

[ladyofshallnot.livejournal.com]

You've yet to see my main ships interact. But they will.

Oh, how they will.

[edenfalling]

Said ships being...?

[ladyofshallnot.livejournal.com]

ONE WOULD BE A LITTLE SPOILERY, I don't know if you know the events surrounding it yet.

The other is Toph/Sokka friendship OTP until she gets older. Though I like Suki and her relationship with Sokka as well, and sometimes I think that Toph/Zuko would be interesting when she's older as well.

[edenfalling]

Assume I have been spoiled for everything. (I don't know exact details of most episodes, not having watched them yet, but I do know the basic plot of the series, and the names and roles of most characters I have not yet directly encountered.)

[ladyofshallnot.livejournal.com]

Jet/Zuko brief and up fucked OTP! Their interaction is really glorious when it happens.

[askerian]

I don't think it's the same user base at ALL that ships Zuko/Katara and Harry/Hermione. For one thing the girls are almost nothing alike (apart from being team mom sometimes but even that they don't seem to approach the same way -- Hermione is the stern, this is the law parent and Katara the overprotective parent.) so there will be an overlap of course but in general it won't be the same people who'll identify with them.

I can't talk for normal HHr fans but the harmonians I saw around were more about the "omg they're soulmates, perfect partners, and between the two of them they're an awesome pair made up of raw power and strength and smarts and strong-willed-ness and and and they compensate for each other's rare faults and magnify their awesome points" and it never mattered that Harry was never seen actively flirting with Hermione or vice versa, their bond was on another level so they never needed to be blatant about it.

Aang/Katara starts with Aang flirting with Katara and hoping for more from pretty much the minute we see him pop up, in a very "hugs and kisses and positive attention yay!" way. It's absolutely nothing like HHr, or only in the most basic "hero + most important female character" way.

Zuko/Katara is, well, based on the insane hotness, the clashes, the potential for drama (prince and peasant!) and the perceived equals-of-opposite-elements component, be it in strength/ability or in, once again perceived, mental age and maturity. Harry and Hermione have never clashed like that, or were ever so passionale love/hate about each other (fandom providing the love, yes XD). (also the hotness was never there for me but then again that's probably a matter of my personal mental picture -- none of the trio hit my "wowza" buttons. Then again most of JKR's characters don't really get that from me. I hesitate to say none because i might have forgotten someone! >__>)

I should add that at the start of the show I never really saw Aang's crush as something that would actually end somewhere -- the maturity difference seemed too blatant and Katara never seemed to be returning it and seemed to take on a mothering role instead, that came across like the crush you grow out of and not the one that gets somewhere. Was never thinking zuko/katara would end somewhere and never shipped it as more than a "hey, that's kinda hot and we don't have a lot of characters so far" kind of thing (and now i'm seeing how they don't fit more than how they do, anyway). But when Toph popped up I was all "oh, she's his age, treats him as an equal and doesn't (s)mother him AND they interact in a way that makes them both grow up!" and if at this point the show had gone with Toph/Aang instead it might have worked better for me. (of course after the first couple eps all the chemistry between them fizzled out. Boo. XD)

(My main problem with endgame aang/katara isn't aang's maturity anymore, though, because he does grow up into someone who is equally mature as katara (probably even more XD). I found it believable until a couple eps before the end, where aang makes a moves and katara goes all D: !! -- then after the end suddenly none of her reasons for reacting that way matter anymore or are even mentioned again, just in time for the end of the show kissyfaces. It was clumsily executed.)


Also, Draco = Zuko... well, Zuko was never described as petty or a coward, and converting him to the side of Good was a huge part of the plot. Not so much with Draco. I don't think you can compare Dramione and Zutara that way, if only because we saw a lot more of zuko's motivations onscreen, so of course he would be a lot more prominent in fandom as well. He was the antihero, draco was just the school bully the hero outgrows.


Anyway. I did actually understand your comment about what we ship = what we like personally and if the show doesn't provide we twist/rewrite it, but then my fingers started throwing out other stuff XD;; sorry.

[ladylisse.livejournal.com]

omfg Avatar shipping is such a minefield. The main overlap I see between the Zuko/Katara people and the Harry/Hermione people is the focus on coded symbolism and the strong identification with the main female character. (Which I also see in Ron/Hermione people, although not so much with Aang/Katara people for whatever reason.)

I have to admit that I never saw the appeal of Zuko/Katara outside of pretty pretty fanart, but that's because I fell in love with Mai's character and the way she interacted with Zuko. Aang/Katara is kind of a weird ship for me because while I think it's adorable and love the way it fits into the overarching plot, on a purely character-driven level I've really come to love Aang/Toph more, especially now that the series is over and I can look back and see how everything played out.

I suspect I have a weird perspective on this because while I like Katara a lot, she's probably my least favorite of the main characters (that'd be Sokka, with Zuko and Toph close seconds), and I suspect that's kind of a minority opinion among shippers and the fandom in general.

[edenfalling]

Coded symbolism! Yes! Perhaps that is why I (from my safe distance) conflated the two groups of fans. I remember how people would read whole treatises into these tiny throwaway bits of canon, as if their ships were on a completely different level of writing from the fairly straightfoward surface-level storytelling of the rest of the series. I never could make sense of that.

I also do not identify with Katara or Hermione. And I tend not to approach fiction via character identification anyway (character sympathy, yes; identification, no), so... eh.

[ladylisse.livejournal.com]

oh hey that was not supposed to be a reply. Sorry for randomly spamming.

[edenfalling]

Interesting! If Zutara is largely based on visual appeal, I think that explains one of my problems with it. Katara does not read 'hot' or 'beautiful' to me. She reads 'pretty' or 'cute.' I think this is probably one reason I keep reading her younger than Zutara shippers seem to, though behavior issues are also a factor there.

If Aang's crush had faded over season 1, I would probably have seen it as a passing thing to get over, but it is being shown as something lasting, and Katara has occasional moments of, "...say, what if...?" sort of thoughts (in "The Fortune Teller" and "The Cave of Two Lovers") so she's not totally non-receptive, so it looks to me like a relationship thread that is actually going somewhere, not dying out. Also, my basic reaction to both Aang and Katara is "They are so cute!" whereas my reaction to Zuko is more "He is so hot" (and I want to hug all of them to pieces, because whatever their physical attractiveness, they are all completely adorable), so Aang and Katara fit together better in my head than Zuko and Katara. Clearly this is not the reaction of vast swathes of fandom!

As I said to ladylisse, I think I may have been conflating Zutara fans and H/Hr fans because of the similarities in their meta argument styles: the reliance on coded symbolism; the insistence that obviously their ship was superior and on a higher plane, which is why it wasn't coarsely obvious like the opposing ship (R/Hr or Kataang); the deep reading into fairly straightforward storylines; and so on.

Yeah, I know Zuko and Draco are nothing alike in their respective canons; I was just making rough comparisons. (And fannon!Draco has a lot more similarities to Zuko than canon!Draco does. Which is also mostly Cassandra Claire's fault, I think... at least at first. *grin*)

[voldy06.livejournal.com]

I guess, for me it comes down to "Which one is the more interesting pairing?". Meaning, sometimes I ship the canon pairings and sometimes I don't.

From my experience people still shipped H/Hr after GoF because of OotP, which barely had any R/Hr and Harry moved on from Cho in that book, so people hoped that maybe GoF had all been a red herring and JKR would go for H/Hr after all. Of course that didn't happen and only a few albeit vocal shippers still believed that in the last book H/Hr would happen. Personally, I stopped arguing for them when HBP came out.

The thing I like about Zutara is that there are major issues that would need to be resolved before they can get together and this makes them more interesting to me than Kataang. *shrug*

[edenfalling]

But OotP didn't have any H/Hr either... and as I recall, the prevailing H/Hr theory back around GoF was that R/Hr would happen, would be revealed as nonfunctional, and then Hermione would be free to get together with Harry. So you would think OotP would be problematic, because Ron and Hermione did not get together, and yet there was that attraction from GoF that still needed to be dealt with. (Man, it is weird to dredge back like this! I was so happy when I got onto lj back in late 2003, and began climbing out of the weird pressure-cooker that was HP fandom in 2002-2003. HP was, in retrospect, a very odd introduction to fandom.)

The thing that continues to baffle me about Zutara is that they have interacted, like, twice, and neither party has shown a damn bit of interest in the other as anything beyond an opponent, a tool, or an obstacle. They also don't think about each other when separated. So I am really not seeing any reason to put them together. And without that, I cannot get interested in any issues they'd need to resolve in order to get togther, because I cannot see what the point of them being together is at all. *shrug* Obviously many people's mileage varies!

[voldy06.livejournal.com]

I came into the fandom in 2003, the year that OotP was published, and at least by then a lot of H/Hr shippers were convinced that Hermione wasn't really in love with Ron and that R/Hr was just there to mislead us from the H/Hr endgame. One particulary essay from a user called Hawk92 comes to mind which analysed GoF and actually came to the conclusion that Hermione was in love with Harry. The link (http://talk.portkey.org/index.php?showtopic=4225), if you're curious, although I think it might me restricted to members only. (Heck, if you ever want to know what H/Hr thought would happen, Portkey is the place to go. There're like 150 essays.) In hindsight, I think people just took JKR's advice to "read between the lines" waaaaay too serious. And honestly? HP was the worst introduction to fandom ever, because a lot of people could become quite vicious. :/

I think until season three, when they actually begin to interact due to certain circumstances that I'm not going to spoil, Zutara totally makes no sense so I understand why you're baffled anyone would ship it. Heck, I wasn't interested in it either until the end, but then again I started watching Avatar only shortly before season tree aired.

[edenfalling]

I fell into fandom in February 2002 and started writing fic in April or May. (In retrospect, I am surprised it took me that long to jump in with both feet, so to speak!) I hung out mostly at FictionAlley and various Yahoo Groups, with occasional stopovers at SugarQuill and ff.net, and man, I was so happy to get onto LJ where it wasn't all HP all the time. Anyway, I have probably read most of those old shipping essays (H/Hr and R/Hr). Hell, I remember there were people who'd even get into shipping wars over R/Hr and H/Hr in popular epic fanfics.

The whole thing has always baffled me, partly because I do not 'get' romance in the way most people do (I am an aromantic asexual) so the issue of who falls in love with whom is always secondary for me, and partly because I do not understand the OTP mentality at all. I have always figured that the idea that there is only one person in the whole universe who can make a second person perfectly happy is sad, scary, and stupid. People can love lots of people, sequentially or simultaneously. People can be happy in lots of different ways, and all happiness takes work. So while I may think some ships are more likely than others, some are more stable than others, and some are more interesting to me personally, I do not understand the driving need to have one of them 'win,' so to speak. I think maybe some of that need to have 'your' ship become canon is because people see ships as having great importance to the thematic unity of a story, and if the 'wrong' ship becomes canon, it means the story has violated their guidelines for good storytelling... but since I don't consider romance central to almost any story, that argument fails to carry emotional weight for me.

Eh. To sum up, shipping is weird because people are weird. Inescapable fact of life. *sigh*