I totally get that. I actually go back and forth on this issue cause it did feel like Aang sort of let Katara walk all over him in the end, but then again, Aang is just a forgiving person to the point where it’s a character flaw. I do think that if he’d been older, things would’ve been different but the kid was only 12 years old and for the most part, he still idealized Katara since she was his first real friend after coming out of the iceberg. 

But I definitely understand why people wanted a little more from Katara’s end. I kind of wanted it to be more like Downton Abbey, like in S1 when Mary waivers on Matthew’s proposal because his prospects were suddenly in question and when she finally accepts him, he turns her down because he couldn’t really trust her feelings for him anymore and he didn’t want to be anything other than her first choice. I definitely saw a similar dilemma with Kataang in those last episodes. 

Yeah… I mean, it says quite a lot that half the Kataang fics out there are about trying to figure out what Katara’s feelings were during that period cause the show was so inadequate and vague. A lot of that is due to the structure of those Zuko field trips, it didn’t exactly allow for any relationships to develop unless it involved Zuko but the worst example of this is in the finale when Aang disappears and Katara doesn’t seem to care much at all. I mean, she goes along with the rest of the group but she very much treats him like the avatar who they have to find so he can save the world and not her best friend Aang who’s disappeared. And then when they give up on finding Aang, she’s just like ‘oh well whatever i’ll just go help zuko’. When I watched it for the first time, I was honestly wondering what the hell they were doing with Kataang cause it was so wonderfully developed in the first two seasons and now it felt like they had severed that bond and decided to throw away all that so Katara could go off with Zuko. 

I still think it’s a beautiful love story but it could’ve been perfect if that last bit was done better and sadly, I don’t think it was on the show. You can really tell that they were trying to create suspense for the shippers and unfortunately, that involved sacrificing Kataang development (Katara rejects Aang right after the ‘Zutara’ episode, they don’t speak for several episodes once Zuko shows up, they’re completely separated in the finale and don’t seem to even care or think of each other, while Zuko and Katara’s relationship is a huge plot point in the finale, etc). 

It’s not that I dislike Season 3 or that the other two seasons didn’t have flaws too, but I really had a problem with how they structured the show post-DOBS. It wasn’t efficient given the amount of time they had and also left a lot of loose ends unaddressed. Like, all those separate field trips with Zuko, that’s something you can do when you have a lot of time, but with so few episodes left, it seemed like they ignored everything else on the show. And in the end, the group dynamic still didn’t feel completely there and they always seemed to sacrifice one relationship to bolster another, which I thought they could’ve done better had they kept the group together more. Which is kind of why I consider Aang/Katara/Sokka/Toph to be the core members of the gaang, while I still associate Zuko more with the Mai/Ty Lee/Azula group because they had more development together and of course Suki was barely integrated at all and pretty much only interacted with Sokka. 

The most disappointing aspect was the show completely ignoring the Kataang relationship until EIP. It made no sense at all and unfortunately, the way it was presented in the end with Katara getting with Aang only after he saved the world, led a lot of people in fandom to see it as a ‘save the world, win the girl’ moment. Which is sad cause Kataang had such great development leading up to DOBS but then it just fell off a cliff afterwards. 

ok so a lot of folks have asked me for my personal and i’ve always been reluctant to give it out cause i got real life people following me on it (like my younger brother) that i can’t get rid of. so i decided to make a different fandom/personal blog where i can be inappropriate without RL people judging me and/or telling my parents that i’m a creeper. 

so if anyone is interested, follow http://lobsterstannis.tumblr.com/ 

1. But I honestly didn’t think a shock moment was necessary at that point and it certainly didn’t need to involve tying up three young kids in front of an angry crowd. It just wasn’t necessary and it completely just made the previous episode pointless because the big moment when Lin sacrifices herself wasn’t even worth it. We already know that Amon is a baddie. You could have him do any number of things to prove that he’s still bad. 

2. You know, I never thought about the sophomore slump with Bryke but in retrospect I don’t know why I didn’t. Maybe cause this show is set in the same universe as ATLA and I thought since they were so great with the first show, they would treat its sequel with the same amount of care. I don’t know. My expectations were pretty much in line with what they had produced before. I wasn’t expecting Korra to be better than ATLA. I just wanted it to be about on par or at least comparable and that’s where I was disappointed. Because here you have Bryke, with a lot more money, technology and resources than they had with ATLA, and yet they failed to capture the magic. 

4. Thanks! The reason why I’m criticizing is because these aren’t just nitty pitty details that went wrong. I can handle that. I don’t need every little plot detail to make perfect sense. I’m okay with a few plot holes here and there, but where this show went wrong was in character development and that’s a much bigger problem that can’t be easily brushed aside for me. 

1. They’re not masters yet! You only get tattoos once you’ve mastered airbending. 

2. They really needed to explain how Amon’s method worked because nothing about it made any sense at all. What does he like give you an aneurysm to lesion the part of the brain that deals with bending? I have no idea. Nothing made sense. IT WAS VERY UNCLEAR.

3. I agree so much. There was no reason to put Asami in that love triangle. She didn’t gain anything from it, she didn’t learn anything (other than Mako’s a pile of crap), nothing. She literally was just there to be the obstacle. Ugh. 

4. I think it’s too late for them to change Season 2 now. They’re already in the middle of production and at this point, it might be too little too late to fix any mistakes. But I’m hoping that because it’s a completely new story, they’ll just do that well instead of trying to fix all the mistakes of Season 1 because there is no way they can. They really closed the door on that cause they wrapped everything up like that. Retroactively fixing things might only make things worse tbh. I just don’t see how they could. The Amon storyline had lots of holes, but he’s dead now. The makorra thing was awful, but they already got together so it’s harder to address all of Mako’s bad behavior when Korra’s already like “I love you” without making it seem like backtracking. 

I’m not sure where you are in the series so I guess I’ll try to avoid talking directly about stuff that happens in later books (I’ve already read them all so it’s a little hard). But SPOILER ALERT for the show up to Season 2 at least. 

Tyrion Lannister - I liked him from right from the beginning. He seems to be the only person in the whole series who has a brain and also has a bit of a conscience too. He’s probably the most popular character because he gets all the good lines and even though he plays on the side of the “bad guys”, you don’t really see him as a bad guy because he does acknowledge that his family is kind of evil. At the same time, even though he’s fun and witty and definitely the most sympathetic Lannister, he does also hold the same sexist attitudes that men in that world hold. I do feel like his character stalls later on in the series. By A Dance with Dragons, I’m just not sure where he’s headed or what his purpose is. 

Catelyn Stark - She gets a lot of crap from fans for being a “bad mother” or for being mean to Jon, but I’ve always felt sympathetic towards her. In the books, she’s a little different though. They aged her and all the other characters up on the show, and they made her less severe against Jon. I think she played such a huge role in Robb’s victories in the books that got downgraded on the show because they wanted to focus more on the hot young guy. I was really bothered by that in Season 2 actually because she’s the one with all the POV chapters in the book, not Robb, and yet they gave Robb so much more focus on the show. Like, the whole trading Jaime for her daughters. That was her idea in the books but on the show, it’s Littlefinger who gives her the idea. 

Robb Stark - In the books, Robb is like a blank slate. I don’t think he’s really that fleshed out because he never gets an POVs but it worked because none of the “Kings” got POVs. And you really got the sense that he was just a kid who was thrust into this position of leadership that he wasn’t ready for and he needed his mother there to help him. The show really doesn’t capture that. They’ve really tried to make him into the heroic leading man but it shortchanges Cat’s role so much. Then, we get to his “big mistake”, which got butchered on the show imo. What was meant to be a demonstration of how Robb had inherited his father’s strong sense of honor, even if it meant being self-destructive, instead turned into a stupid Romeo and Juliet teen love affair. 

1. I don’t know if I would go as far as that because I do think the Avatar world is so rich, it would be a shame not to explore it more but that doesn’t mean ANY sequel will satisfy. I wanted it to be as high quality as ATLA and this just was not it. 

2. Yeah, I definitely get the sense that some people are very defensive about critique. I think it’s okay if you acknowledge the flaws but still enjoy it anyway but there are some things are just too glaring to look past. And it’s not like people are criticizing it for stupid reasons like oh my ship didn’t get together. There are genuinely big problems with how a lot of stuff happened in this show. 

3. Lol well we only got like 3 seconds of Bumi but I’m sure all the kids are a combination of Aang and Katara (that’s why they’re so awesome and hot). I would like to get a closer look to see what his eye color is cause it would be cool if Bumi had gray eyes like Aang but dark skin like Katara, and we know Tenzin has blue eyes like his mom. oh and give us Kya!!