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.