Nanni

Katara is not the or even a connection between Zuko and Aang. Zuko and Aang have their own relationship, which revolves heavily around Aang's status and his past as well as Zuko's past and family. It's all very mytho-historical except that this is Aang, so it's also very personal and vulnerable and silly. Zuko gets to be both around Aang.

Katara is on the outside of this particular relationship in a lot of ways. The series does not layer on the symbolic freight between her and Zuko the way it does between Aang and Zuko. It doesn't have to. Katara is connected to Zuko largely through Aang. She has one scene with Zuko prior to the Southern Raiders that is not entirely about Aang and that sequence is mostly about their mothers.

Katara and Zuko have raging mommy issues. (They also both have massive daddy issues - Zuko is not much like his father, Katara takes after hers but this is always slightly submerged in the narrative because she's a girl. That's not the point though, it never really crops up in their relationship.) They are also massively invested in Aang. Aang is constantly the implicit pivot in their relationship. Sometimes their respective mother trauma steps in, generally without the full story coming out.

Aang and Zuko are not opposites. Aang and Toph are the two who are elementally and stylistically opposed (in um. most senses. Oh kids). Aang and Zuko are complementary, and the show's structure and storytelling constantly emphasizes that. It's not even that it's not a silly black and white thing - Aang and Zuko are quite explicitly red and orange - they're right next to each other.

Aang has absolutely no trouble with fire, which is in fact the trouble. Discipline and steadiness are Aang's problem with fire - that and aggression, but when he's intially lost in the glory of fire WITHOUT aggression (and without discipline) he hurts Katara, which doesn't help later.

It's just.

I just.

...Anyway, the person Katara is really in CONFLICT with during Southern Raiders is Sokka. It's Sokka she gets angry at. Zuko and Aang are acting in service to Katara's character development throughout the episode - although Zuko in particular has his own arc within that that involves him, once again, being really alarmed by Katara but refusing to flinch away from her - but Sokka's is really in a totally different place from her about their family once again, and this time they have to deal with that head on instead of skirting it, as they usually manage to. Sokka and Katara have different relationships to their family and that hurts them.

But Katara is so much not in between Zuko and Aang. She doesn't occupy that narrative position at all, and putting her in it even while trying to correct the fandom's tendency to treat it as if there's a romantic conflict there doesn't really help at all. Because it leaves the big problem - which is treating Katara as if she's stuck in between two men, which she is not.

Recently I finally found a fanfiction.net review from several months ago that made me want to clarify a few things.

I didn't invent anything in One Kind of Good-bye. Burial by exposure is still practiced in our modern world, despite it having been banned in a lot of places because of increasing populations, hygiene concerns, and cultural imperialism, and historically it has been one of the most common funeral practices. Sea burial, by sea goers and the occasional coastal society, is also not all that unusual. Beliefs about reincarnation that include a span of time spent in the afterlife to reflect and reqroup are also a reoccuring element in funeral practice. Many of these beliefs include community or family or society specific guardian spirits that watch over and/or take the dead. Washing the body, of course, is so common as to be one of the few things in human practice that approaches a constant. Aang's explanation of the Air Nomads' pre-burial practice is a heavily cut down summary of the basic intent and usage of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, as well as the very, very basics of its contents. Very basic. Very, very, very basic.

I did shift all of this around some: the Water Tribe's cultural influences are broad enough that sometimes it's hard to know where it would be most appropriate to go with their cultural practices that we don't get a look at in the series (sea burial is not the most common practice among Arctic peoples, but there's the whole elemental thing - I waffle about this a lot), and while the Air Nomads are somewhat more specific, I still took liberties. Where the the ideal candidate to read to and instruct the dying and recently deceased person is, in Tibetan practice, their teacher (which makes perfect sense), in this story Aang implies that the Air Nomads considered a student the deceased was close to to be the ideal guide.

I do actually have reasoning for that - part of it is simply that Air Nomads appear to consistently reach such old ages that by the time they die, most of them will no longer have teachers. The primary remaining earthly attachment will be to their students. In this case it is appropriate for the students to pick up the teaching from their teachers at their deaths and send them on with reassurances, exhortations, and love.

Anyway! I didn't make anything up! Nothing in that story is completely out of my fertile imagination except the story itself, and even that grew out of conversations I have had about mourning and death with people I am friends with.

I just. Want to say this. The practice, rituals, and beliefs I have the kids talk about in that story are nothing I dreamed up. They are things people really do.