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

[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.