It’s totally fine! It depends on the writer and the story. I know some writers supposedly fill out pages and pages of background information for characters that will never be relevant to the story, and while I generally have a rough idea of what their backstory is, I definitely don’t do that. It comes down to their role in the story, and what you are comfortable with. If they are a major character, I think backstories are important to understanding them, but they aren’t everything.
Problematic characters are the best! I mean, lol, my favorite characters of all time are like… Illumi Zoldyck, Yut-Lung Lee, Mutsuki Tooru, the holy trinity 😛 Also throw in Dabi and Nora and you’ve got My Type lol.
I’d say what I like about them especially is that their behaviors are always framed as wrong. The narrative isn’t seeking to justify their wrong actions, not even when it gives you horrific details of their past which helps you understand them, but you’re still like honey stop. And the reason it does this is because either the character has little choice and the victim is largely a monster (Mutsuki, the framing started to go wonky after the Touka thing which I still maintain had no narrative purpose whatsoever except La Drama, Yut-Lung going after his brothers, etc), or the story focuses on the victim’s pain and/or consequences for the villain (Killua’s pain after Illumi’s manipulation, Alluka’s innocence, etc stand in sharp contrast to Illumi, Yato’s struggles, etc). Focusing on the perpetrator’s suffering in disproportion to the victim’s suffering without framing it so that the perpetrator is called out appropriately can be kind of off-putting.
Setting up good foils can help (Killua and Alluka are excellent foils for Illumi; so are Milluki and Kalluto; Ash is a perfect foil for Yut-Lung, Kaneki for Mutsuki was a good idea, Yato and Yukine for Nora, Shouto for Dabi). The point of a foil is almost never, as people like to say about these kinds of characters, to be like “Good victim bad victim oh well.” That very rarely works and to get it to work you’ve gotta be able to show the character is making their own choices (Azula vs Zuko is like the only time I can think of it kiiiinda working and I’m still going to complain about how the adults were framed in terms of their interactions with Azula). The point of a foil is to be like “look at their potential.” If they’re all dynamic characters capable of change in the narrative, they should all be capable of growth and need to grow, and the problematic character should be able to offer something to a character who isn’t or who is as well.
What I dislike about BNHA’s framing is that Endeavor’s abuse focuses on Endeavor, not on Rei or his kids. Chapter 192, though, is actually really excellent framing on its own, so I do think Horikoshi is trying but is in a little over his head. I think it’s important a character understands what their actions have done at some point.
And as always, remember this quote by Dostoyevsky, which goes for characters as well as humanity in general:
“Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.”
So since literature is by its nature subjective, the definition thereof changes. Retcon is deliberately going back on something previously stated about the work,–like, for example, “it was all a dream” as a plot twist so that nothing that happened then matters, etc. Or for a famous example, making Luke and Leia twins in Star Wars when they were initially set up as love interests (Luke was always intended to have a twin, but it wasn’t intended to be Leia).
A plot hole is something that an author should explain but does not, and if you think about it, the story doesn’t make sense. Like again in Star Wars (which I love and shout THE FORCE in response to because #ohwell, I don’t enjoy being critical about the OT) when Leia says she remembers her mother, but her mother died in childbirth. That’s also kind of a retcon because Padme was written after. So yeah.
I do think people overuse the terms and not everything needs to be spoonfed to a reader/viewer, but if you’re contradicting yourself as a writer, you have to explain yourself in general, or else it’ll just come across as one of these. It is your job to help the reader connect the dots even if it’s not to hold their hand, and if the dots aren’t connecting–that’s a sign it’s one of these.
There are elements of storytelling which I (predictably) enjoy. One is what I like to call the mystique of the master. Here’s the setup: there’s a character – call them the master – who is particularly skilled, whether in brains or brawn, and sometimes both. The master need not be the best, but they do need to be very good. A large part of the tension comes from seeing the master’s plan (if any), how good the master is, or how the master can be defeated.
For examples, here are some characters skilled primarily in brawn:
Ravana from the Ramayana
Enkidu from The Epic of Gilgamesh
Roland from The Song of Roland
Ip Man from Ip Man
Levi Ackerman and Zeke Yeager from Attack on Titan
Arima Kishou from Tokyo Ghoul
Itachi Uchiha from Naruto
Yamamoto from Bleach
And here are some characters skilled primarily in brain:
Zhuge Liang and Pang Tong from Three Kingdoms
Hari Seldon and his “dead hand” from Foundation and Empire
Yang Wenli and Reinhard von Lohengramm from Legend of the Galactic Heroes
Dream of the Endless from Sandman
Light Yagami and L from Death Note
Robb Stark from A Song of Ice and Fire
Thrawn from Zahn’s work
Rommel in popular culture
And, naturally, some characters are skilled in both, the most obvious examples being Chrestomanci from Charmed Life, Dumbledore from Harry Potter and God from perfect being theology. Examples of these masters can be found scattered across a range of trope pages: Xanatos Gambit, Gambit Pileup, the Chessmaster, Old Master, Invincible Hero, the Ace, World’s Strongest Man.
Dramatic tension, the methods of the master’s defeat, and multiple masters
So much for the character of the master; now for the dramatic tension the character of the master affords. The master cannot be defeated easily and in a straightforward fashion; they cannot be “beaten at their own game”; if they could, they would not be the master. Instead they must either be mostly aloof from the conflict (Hiko Seijuro from Rurouni Kenshin), or remain undefeated (like Ip Man), or must be defeated/thwarted because of
factors outside their knowledge/outside context problems (commonly overlaps with Spanner in the Works; Thrawn),
adherence to their ideals (Bewcock on Yang Wenli: “If Yang were to ever be defeated … it’ll be by his adherence to his own ideals.” Yang is a man of conscience, much like Thomas More.),
some foreshadowed inner failing (hamartia, often hubris: Pang Tong, Dumbledore),
sickness which weakens them (Itachi Uchiha, Chrestomanci, “Worf had the flu”),
defeat by their own hand/they allow themselves to be defeated (Dumbledore, Arima Kishou, Itachi Uchiha),
the mistakes of their followers (Zhuge Liang and Ma Su at Jieting),
the mistakes of their superiors (Zhuge Liang and Yang Wenli),
guile and deception (Yamamoto),
allied treachery (Robb Stark)
being outnumbered by an unreasonable amount of opponents (Ip Man’s master in Ip Man: The Legend is Born),
being defeated by another master or masters (commonly outgambitted; Zhuge Liang and Sima Yi to Guo Jia in The Ravages of Time)
or some other way – as long as it’s not a straightforward defeat. If it is a straightforward defeat in their own field of expertise, they’re not a master.
A large part of the tension thus comes from seeing how the master is defeated, how the master got to their position, and – if the master remains undefeated – just how good the master is. A side note on Thrawn and his defeat by an outside context problem:
Regarding Thrawn’s appearance in Rebels, Zahn opines that Filoni and his crew did a very good job because they not only understood Thrawn and how they wrote him, but that they understood the meta around Thrawn and how to defeat him, which Zahn defines as to throw something to Thrawn that he can’t control nor anticipate.
A second (and even better) source of tension comes in if you have multiple masters in the story who come into conflict. This typically leads to a Battle of Wits. Mao Zonggang notes this in his commentary on the Three Kingdoms; part of the appeal of the story is that you have skilled people everywhere. A few examples on the brawn side: Xu Chu from Wei, Guan Yu from Shu, and Gan Ning from Wu. Some examples on the brain side: Guo Jia and Sima Yi from Wei, Zhuge Liang and Pang Tong from Shu, with Zhou Yu and Lu Meng from Wu. And these are just the ones I remember off the top of my head!
(The adaptation The Ravages of Time takes this even further, and has a group of eight particularly brilliant strategists – The Eight Geniuses – who are best at their craft, along with a host of other tacticians and unexpectedly brainy warriors.)
Other examples of multiple masters come from the trope pages mentioned above, but I will single out two more examples: Light and L from Death Note, and Yang Wenli and Reinhard von Lohengramm from Legend of the Galactic Heroes. Light is an interesting case of a master, as he’s not that good.
Yang Wenli and Reinhard are a good case of duelling masters. They’re on opposite sides, both are well-written with well-defined motives, and both are very good at what they do. Reinhard wins nearly all the time; Yang is never outright defeated. Their plans inevitably conflict, and when they finally meet directly in battle, I felt genuine excitement at seeing who was going to prevail. The copywriters for the English translation of Volumes 2 and 5 clearly know this:
The unbeatable magician and the unstoppable genius …
Despite the empire’s superior numbers, Yang continues to outwit its most resourceful generals via tactical wizardry. Reinhard, on the other hand, seeing through Yang’s devices, opts for all-out war. And so, the “invincible” and “undefeated” once again clash swords. Who will emerge victorious?
Problems with writing a master
And here comes the three problems with writing a character as a master. First: creating tension. If a master is too good, they become a boring invincible hero. Second: how to remove the master. Masters typically have to be removed from the story in order for the story to progress. Solving the problems of the story would be too easy otherwise. (Superman stays out of Gotham so that Batman can show his skill.) The removal of the master can be done via the methods specified above.
And the final, most pressing problem: how should one write an intelligent master? There’s a problem here that if you could completely specify what a master would do, you would be a master yourself. (Yudkowsky calls this Vinge’s Law.) Writing a master can be done in the ways mentioned by Yudkowsky and Graham Moore.
History as a source
I will mention one more way to write intelligent characters: base it on history. I once commented that a philosophical training gives an uneven advantage in debates; when someone who knows philosophy marshals arguments, they typically are not only stating their own ideas but can also draw from the ideas of other very thoughtful people. (See Krister Segerberg’s interview in Formal Philosophy: “If you want to be smarter than Aristotle, go beyond his methods.”)
This is weaponised by Yang Wenli in Legend of the Galactic Heroes. He’s a historian forced into military command; he simply wants to retire as soon as possible. The only problem is that he can’t because he’s too good at what he does; he’s a strategic genius without peer who consistently outwits every enemy he faces. He is too skilled to be left alone. He gains the moniker “Yang the Magician” due to his uncanny ability to turn defeat into victory. Part of the story’s irony is that he’s a master who wants nothing to do with his mastery.
(One of the funniest scenes in the series comes after Yang has just won a great victory. An enemy general muses that after such an occasion – what might the legendary Yang Wenli be doing? Probably dancing with a beautiful lady at a party. Then the scene cuts to Yang Wenli wrapped up in blankets in his room, with his ward telling him, “No, you can’t pretend to be sick just to avoid the party!”)
Yang manages to consistently outwit his enemies because he’s a historian. One of the themes of the story is that history repeats itself, over and over. It’s strongly implied that Yang is no genius in the same way his counterpart Reinhard is (and he is painfully aware of it, as seen during Reuenthal’s attack on Iserlohn). He is brilliant not because of his own knowledge, but because he leverages the knowledge of others; being a military historian, he simply goes through his knowledge of history, finds the situation most similar to the one he’s in, and applies the appropriate counter-strategy given the necessary adaptations.
Yang is intelligent in his own right, but he’s also leveraged the ideas of others until they’ve become truly part of him. History gives him a well of other intelligent ideas and strategies to draw on; Yang is a genius in part because he borrows the genius of others. And Tanaka is able to write highly intelligent characters in part because he borrows freely from historically significant people.
Part of the joy of going through Legend of the Galactic Heroes is seeing how history repeats itself and finding Yoshiki Tanaka’s sources. The opening lines of the 2018 series:
If the events depicted here bear a resemblance to anything you know, or the people appearing here bear a likeness to anyone you know, it is but a fluke of history and an inevitability.
Staring at the simulated model on the screen, Lieutenant Commander Lao said admiringly in Yang’s direction, “I’ve never seen a battle formation like this.”
“I’d imagine not … It’s a first for me, too.”
But Yang’s words were only halfway true. Back when humanity had lived only on the surface of a backwater planet called Earth, this kind of formation had appeared on battlefields any number of times. Even the brilliant tactics employed by Count von Lohengramm had precedent in ground wars.
When I read about history, I always find myself wondering why a certain person made a particular decision at a given time. I love to imagine alternate realities where things might have turned out differently. In the case of Legend of the Galactic Heroes’ battles I took historical events and imagined someone making alternative decisions, then extrapolated them from there.
To name some examples:
Reinhard’s strategy at Astarte is based on defeat in detail.
Yang Wenli’s tactic to stalemate Reinhard at Astarte was common in naval warfare. (From Adkins on Trafalgar, p. 55-56: “A standard tactic was for a ship to try to sail at right angles to the bow or stern of an enemy … vessels were constantly manoeuvring to gain this deadly advantage.”)
Yang’s victory at Doria is based on Nelson’s touch at Trafalgar.
The Alliance’s invasion is thwarted much the same way that the Russians thwarted Napoleon.
Yang’s repulsion of Bittenfeld at Amritsar is similar to how Ōtani Yoshitsugu repulsed the Kobayakawa at Sekigahara. (Reinhard’s response to Bittenfeld’s request for reinforcements parallels Napoleon’s response to Ney’s request at Waterloo.)
Yang’s strategy to draw out Reinhard to battle at Vermilion (if I remember correctly) is a variation of the Trachenberg plan.
Yang at the Battle of the Corridor is similar to Yi at Noryang (if I recall correctly).
[Note that I don’t claim that Yang’s way of thinking is ideal, or that it would work in real life – I merely point out that it works in-story, explains how Yang is a genius different from Reinhard, and fits in well with the story’s theme. For an informal critique of analogising and its limits, see Elon Musk on first principles. Analogising from history in general is far more difficult than it sounds, as Carr (What is History?), John Lewis Gaddis, and Holyoak and Thagard (Mental Leaps, chapter 6) point out.]
Being skilled at writing and living
Skilled writers typically craft character arcs. (Exceptions: experimental writing, or writing based primarily on ideas – such as Borges and Calvino.) The simplest example of a character arc: someone has an issue, and confronts it. If a character has no issues, or has issues and never faces them, they don’t have a character arc – and, consequently, definitely aren’t the main character.
The manga Tokyo Ghoul was widely criticised because its ending left many character arcs unfinished; in many cases, there’s an expectation that the writers will finish their story well. The most recent example I found concerned some developments in Noragami:
Adachitoka are good, guys. They’re just good storytellers. I have so much faith that they’re going to tell the best story with their characters that it is possible to tell, so I have zero fears. No matter what happens, it’s going to be for the best.
Of interest is Yudkowsky’s point on Level 3 Intelligent characters. As a corollary of Vinge’s Law, the most convincing way to make a character a master is to be a master yourself. If you want to be write intelligent and interesting characters, the best way is to be an intelligent and interesting person. Making a character a master is difficult, but it’s worth it. The tension is generates in-story is real – and done properly, it will improve your life.
And this all finally links up to some advice a friend once told me: to have a good life, make sure you have a character arc. Be the main character in your own life. Make decisions before your back is to the wall. Finish your story well. Everyone has problems. Try to overcome (or at the very least, accept) yours. Be the well-rounded hero of your own story. Try to grow.
Chesterton: “Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.” And in the same way – if we think of our lives like a fiction we make, we can make our lives to suit ourselves. Being someone skilled at writing our own lives is the same as being able to live and not merely exist.
[We can write ourselves into being masters, remembering – as Sekishusai tells Musashi in Vagabond – “Invincible” is just a word. Excerpts from the trope page on Musashi:
His driving motivation is to become “invincible under the sun,” but the closer he gets to achieving this goal the more he realizes how little the title means …
Musashi’s driven to become the strongest warrior in all of Japan, and to this end he overcomes obstactle after obstacle, never letting his failures overcome him and always working towards self-improvement as a warrior. It gets to the point where people are taken aback by his unnatural determination, some even calling him foolish for clinging to such outdated ideals.
After his massacre of the Yoshioka school, Musashi comes to terms with the fact that even his desire to become the strongest ultimately makes him feel hollow, and so his Character Development leads him to stray away from bettering himself as a samurai to bettering himself as a person.
In other words, being a master is not as important as people make it out to be. ]
This outside perspective is reminiscent of a Hamming question I was once told, useful if your life is in a rut:
If your life was a movie and you were watching it, what would you be screaming at your character to do right now?
This is not original to me; I’m merely clumsily restating what Thomas C. Foster puts much better in his book How to Read Literature Like a Professor. In his chapter “Never Stand Next to the Hero,” while discussing why some characters are more developed than others, he digresses briefly:
… we are all complete beings. We have many different qualities that don’t always fit together very smoothly. More important, we’re all capable of growth, development, and change. We can get better, although we sometimes fail to do so.
To put this another way, we are all, each and every last one of us, the protagonist of our own story. Those stories frequently clash with one another, so other people may not seem as complete, or at least as urgently complete, as ourselves, but that doesn’t alter the other person’s reality.
This post is titled “Thoughts on storytelling” and not “Thoughts on fiction” because I think that these principles are far more general than fiction alone. We make fiction to suit ourselves; similarly, we can shape our lives to suit ourselves. We tell stories about our lives; we can change.
This is an excerpt from a write-up to a get-to-know-you prompt, kindly given to me by @transientpetersen and @hardlocke separately quite some time before this. As part my answers to the prompt, I wrote about my views on fiction. My answer to the prompt grew overly long, so I excerpted this as a subset of my thoughts on fiction.
I would particularly welcome critiques and thoughts from @hamliet and @transientpetersen on this piece (as both of them have indirectly inspired parts of it; needless to say, that doesn’t mean that they endorse any of it) – as well as from any other interested people, of course! (If there’s an actual, proper, literary name for the mystique of the master, I’d like to know.)
I quite enjoyed this read! Thank you for linking me, friend. I like how you discuss that literary trope. Often the master is a mentor, who in most stories is set up to be defeated at some point so the main character can take over for them, step into their shoes, so to speak, but do it better. However, sometimes the masters have their own arcs in which case they would survive a defeat to grow.
A master character is interesting because they might be OP in one area, but they’re probably going to be weak elsewhere, and that’s breeding ground for a writer to dive into. Oftentimes their strengths even are double-sided coins to their flaws: for example, Levi Ackerman is a great character with a ton of physical strength and understanding of people; however, his flaw is related to violence. Master characters are, to an extent, the same as other characters, but they also exist to show the protagonist that no matter how strong they become in brawn or brain, that’s not usually the end goal of their character development. Using the “two sides of the coin” idea of a flaw is a good way to explore this–the end arc for positive development (tragic development can be just as satisfying and usually goes in the lother direction–see Light Yagami) is in balance for the character, often anyways.
I’d also state that the master character appeals to the common human quest for mastery and perfection, even, and a desire to be unbeatable in something even as there is also a desire to battle the unbeatable, to see if overwhelming obstacles that seemingly cannot be torn down can, in fact, be, and what would happen if that were to happen (like a villainous master character who seems undefeatable vs a character like Dumbledore who is kind of the ace card but then goes down).
I’d agree. And because verbosity is one of my weaknesses I’ll talk a little bit more about this.
I see the concept of “bad writing” thrown around to the point where it has next to no meaning in that people tend to view it as a cheap substitute of “I didn’t like this.” However, at the same time, not every “this is bad writing” claim is an “I didn’t like this.” Bad writing does exist. To an extent it’s absolutely subjective, but there are general concepts that most people would agree are not good writing. One of the concepts that is generally considered bad writing is misleading your audience.
Red herrings/bait and switch is a trope, however, and most tropes are tropes because they are often used in good writing. But a trope by itself is not good nor bad writing. A trope can either be seen as trite and pointless, or excellent, depending entirely on the execution of the trope.
Bait and switch, or red herrings, can be either good or bad. They generally work well if and only if you have an equally or preferably, even more so, satisfying option to appease your audience. Like “you were wrong, BUT HERE IS SOMETHING BETTER.” If you don’t, your audience will feel misled.
Being tricked but finding out the alternative is even more satisfying, though, is completely different. Deliberately misleading your audience without a more satisfying reveal comes across as… not awesome writing and you run the risk of alienating your audience by treating them like lols. Of course, no creator should be indebted to their audience and fandom entitlement is like, a legitimate thing that’s really creepy and disturbing to see, and teasing is all good, but if you’re deliberately building something up and don’t have something satisfying for your audience, that’s… not going to end well. Especially in a serial story which in part thrives on speculation and hype, of which theorizing is a part, you really don’t want to risk your audience thinking there is no point to theorizing anymore. (Overthinking is often a thing and tbh I don’t think BNHA is that deep of a series, but you definitely want your story to, like, make sense and satisfy as many as possible though it’ll never please everyone.)
At this point regarding the Dabi Todoroki theory, I can’t think of what would in any way be an equally satisfying or more satisfying option for Dabi’s real name and/or what happened to Touya. I can’t say that that cannot happen, though, because you never know, but I think things are just too heavily hinted at this point that I genuinely can’t think of something equally satisfying from a narrative perspective. We’ll see, though.
Oh, what a beautiful question! Thank you for asking haha.
So fanfiction is just fiction, to me. For as many original novels as we have out there, fanfiction has always been a massive part of culture. Dante’s Inferno is Bible fanfiction. Cultures retold their myths over and over again. It’s a form of art and storytelling that has been around for basically forever. I write original fic too, but fanfiction I don’t think of as lesser writing, and I think the culture that mocks it is stems from misogynistic attitudes towards fandom.
For me, my favorite part of any story is the characters. Hence, when I write fanfictions I try to focus on them and their development. I often write ships because shipping is fun for me, but I’m working on one right now that is gen and for some characters I only want to read gen. I guess that’s because it comes down to the character.
I like AUs because I want to explore characters in new settings, because I think while some parts of them would clearly shift in a different world, other parts of what make them intrinsically who they are as characters would stay the same, and I write to get to know them, I suppose.
Whether AU or canon-verse, I think I’m writing to get to know the characters more. I want to see how they would act in a world I’m familiar with, like a boarding school, or a fantasy setting, or pirates on the high seas, etc. I want to see how, in canon, it might be possible for characters to work out happy endings for themselves, find hope against the odds. For example, for my HxH fics, I want to examine Hisoka and find out what makes him who he is, but more importantly, what he wants, because if I know what he wants it’s easier to start scraping away at him to try to force him to develop in a way I would like him to (redemptively). Canon is amazing in HxH and I have no complaints really, but it’s still fun to explore the possibilities, because I believe the world is full of possibilities and our choices with whatever we’re given do matter, so I like exploring scenarios in which characters would be driven to realizations and potentially growth.
Characters are like friends. To be clear, I think you absolutely must maintain a healthy detachment to the extent that, if someone says “I don’t like x character” and you think that’s an insult on you and lash out back, you need to step back from fandom. But I also think characters are powerful, powerful creations that can truly impact people, and you can maintain a healthy perspective and still truly love them. Kaneki Ken, for example, saved my life. People can genuinely love characters and suffer with them, and grow with them. I’d like to explore those points of connection with the characters I connect with in my fanfictions. I think it helps me know myself, too. The more I write, the more I know what I think and believe. So I completely relate to what you say about using it as a way to process your feelings!
Writing, for me, whether original or fanfiction, is relaxing and stressful at the same time. It’s hard and it’s lifegiving, and it’s gotten me up in the morning and made me anxious at the same time. It’s fun, or I wouldn’t do it, but it’s also work, and fanfiction’s no less work than original fic, at least not inherently. But it’s a way to be involved with something I love (stories, and fandom).
This is a big question,
so I hope my response does the ask some justice. I’ll do my best to cover as
much as I can, but if you have more questions, just let me know.
First, I want to make
sure we’re on the same page when we talk about “character arcs,” because I
think that term gets used a lot of different ways in different areas and I
don’t want to confuse anyone.
When I talk about character arcs what I mean, and I think
what you mean too, is the path a
character takes through the narrative—from Point A all the way to Point Z
in their personal story, which
doesn’t necessarily have to line up with your main plot. Generally character
arcs correspond with major changes in a
character (also known as character growth), but that isn’t always the case.
Probably the easiest way
to approach character arcs is to think about them visually. We call them “arcs”
because that’s how they tend to graph out:
(If you write a lot, you
probably recognize this same arc as the “narrative arc” most stories go
through—that’s because the path stories take and the paths characters take
are often identical.)
I do research! I’m afraid I don’t have a ton of recommendations, though. It depends on what you’re writing, of course, but some things are definitely going to require more research than others. I’d advise against getting too bogged down in minutia, however.
For me, when I’m researching, I like to focus on stories of people who have been through what I’m researching, or lived through that time period, etc. Thanks to the Internet, those are widely available, but it’s helpful because having the facts isn’t going to necessarily help you adequately portray what it’s actually like to live through something. (which isn’t to say don’t look up the facts–definitely do.)
I’m not sure if this is very helpful, but suffice to say: researching is a part of the process! I’m not sure if there’s really a way to speed it up, but this is how I tend to research.
Shocked. To me when it becomes clear Kataang is going to be endgame is “The Headbend”.
I’m afraid of opening a can of worms here, lol! But in my opinion (aka if you disagree cool you don’t need to yell at me please–not you anon but tumblr in general):
The
reason I presumed they were heading for Kataang was because Aang
vocalizes his crush on Katara quite a few times, and in season 1 Wu
tells Katara she’ll marry a “strong bender” which Aang is then referred
to. Logically if you’re introducing a romantic element it should pay off
in some respect even if it doesn’t become canon.
But besides the
other characters/Aang himself telling us to view them romantically
statements, there is nothing to hint at Aang having special feelings for
Katara. They don’t share a unique emotional energy or thematic
struggles that are separate from the ones the entire Gaang shares
together. I think Kataang would have been better written if the writers
made Katara
and Aang’s dynamic more unique, as the writer of the meta I reblogged earlier stated.
Aang and Katara’s dynamic wasn’t necessarily unique from Aang and Toph,
or Aang and Sokka. Again, the Gaang shares thematic struggles, but none
of these struggles uniquely concerned Katara and Aang besides his
stated crush which came up like once a season until the last few
episodes.
Aang had to tell us multiple times “I have a crush
on
Katara” and a fortuneteller had to tell Katara “you’ll marry a strong
bender.” It’s classic telling instead of showing: it was not shown to
us that he felt anything unique for
her besides that, whereas Zuko and Katara’s relationship was always
unique to them. I was already biased towards angst but that the unique
emotional crux of the story came down to them (like, the most dramatic
scene in ATLA is almost always considered to be the Agni Kai, not Aang
defeating Ozai) as well as my favorite themes… I was sold. 😛
I’m
not going to argue that she should have ended up with Zuko in canon
though, but rather that if the creators intended for Katara and Aang to
end up together, they should have written their romance better. Even the
creators admitted that they’d kinda
forced Kataang in some respects after the ending of LOK, so that’s
something I feel confident saying: that it could have been better
written. The creators agree and it’s fine to disagree–many people like
Kataang and that’s great, and I myself like it well enough–so like,
this is my opinion. Please don’t come at me with a mob.
Oh gosh, I don’t know? My professor in college once called it “lyrical” (it was in the context of her expressing surprise that I suck at poetry despite the fact that my writing was otherwise apparently lyrical at the time) but I also think my writing has changed a lot since then, so I wouldn’t necessarily say that applies nowadays. I think I tend to have a lot of dialogue? And use a lot of hyperbole. But I also try to focus on emotions? I don’t know hahaha.
hamliet 