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).

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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.

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Going to bed now.

Comments

[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*