Bi-babe-y

I redid this older comic I made for my storytelling class based on this post. Have some cute wlw love in your day.

It’s hard, if I had more free time I could make it so pretty, this is what I could throw together for the assignment.

Help support a queer artist: Ko fi, Redbubble, Teepublic

mood

I am in no way excusing what Cassie did, but I think a lot of people are missing the point of her storyline. She was raised in a way that absolutely fucked her idea of love, with her father leaving and how she was treated at a young age because of her body. To her, male validation=love and she will do anything to get that. I think this is also why her character is nude so often; in some of these scenes you can tell Cassie isn’t completely comfortable. People say she is being sexualized too much, but I think that is literally the point. To show how disgusting and uncomfortable the sexualisation of young girls is and the shit we are expected to do for men. Cassie going out with Nate is absolutely fucked but it also shows the effect of being treated like an object your whole life.

To me the point of this storyline is glaringly obvious and it kinda sucks to see people shitting on cassie all the time.

Katara's Story Is A Tragedy and It's Not An Accident

I was a teenaged girl when Avatar: The Last Airbender aired on Nickelodeon—the group that the show’s creators unintentionally hit while they were aiming for the younger, maler demographic. Nevermind that we’re the reason the show’s popularity caught fire and has endured for two decades; we weren’t the audience Mike and Bryan wanted. And by golly, were they going to make sure we knew it. They’ve been making sure we know it with every snide comment and addendum they’ve made to the story for the last twenty years.

For many of us girls who were raised in the nineties and aughts, Katara was a breath of fresh air—a rare opportunity in a media market saturated with boys having grand adventures to see a young woman having her own adventure and expressing the same fears and frustrations we were often made to feel. 

We were told that we could be anything we wanted to be. That we were strong and smart and brimming with potential. That we were just as capable as the boys. That we were our brothers’ equals. But we were also told to wash dishes and fold laundry and tidy around the house while our brothers played outside. We were ignored when our male classmates picked teams for kickball and told to go play with the girls on the swings—the same girls we were taught to deride if we wanted to be taken seriously. We were lectured for the same immaturity that was expected of boys our age and older, and we were told to do better while also being told, “Boys will be boys.” Despite all the platitudes about equality and power, we saw our mothers straining under the weight of carrying both full-time careers and unequally divided family responsibilities. We sensed that we were being groomed for the same future. 

And we saw ourselves in Katara. 

Katara begins as a parentified teenaged girl: forced to take on responsibility for the daily care of people around her—including male figures who are capable of looking after themselves but are allowed to be immature enough to foist such labor onto her. She does thankless work for people who take her contributions for granted. She’s belittled by people who love her, but don’t understand her. She’s isolated from the world and denied opportunities to improve her talents. She's told what emotions she's allowed to feel and when to feel them. In essence, she was living our real-world fear: being trapped in someone else’s narrow, stultifying definition of femininity and motherhood. 

Then we watched Katara go through an incredible journey of self-determination and empowerment. Katara goes from being a powerless, fearful victim to being a protector, healer, advocate, and liberator to others who can’t do those things for themselves (a much truer and more fulfilling definition of nurturing and motherhood). It’s necessary in Katara’s growth cycle that she does this for others first because that is the realm she knows. She is given increasingly significant opportunities to speak up and fight on behalf of others, and that allows her to build those advocacy muscles gradually. But she still holds back her own emotional pain because everyone that she attempts to express such things to proves they either don't want to deal with it or they only want to manipulate her feelings for their own purposes. 

Katara continues to do much of the work we think of as traditionally maternal on behalf of her friends and family over the course of the story, but we do see that scale gradually shift. Sokka takes on more responsibility for managing the group’s supplies, and everyone helps around camp, but Katara continues to be the manager of everyone else’s emotions while simultaneously punching down her own. The scales finally seem to tip when Zuko joins the group. With Zuko, we see someone working alongside Katara doing the same tasks she is doing around camp for the first time. Zuko is also the only person who never expects anything of her and whose emotions she never has to manage because he’s actually more emotionally stable and mature than she is by that point. And then, Katara’s arc culminates in her finally getting the chance to fully seize her power, rewrite the story of the traumatic event that cast her into the role of parentified child, be her own protector, and freely express everything she’s kept locked away for the sake of letting everyone else feel comfortable around her. Then she fights alongside an equal partner she knows she can trust and depend on through the story's climax. And for the first time since her mother’s death, the girl who gives and gives and gives while getting nothing back watches someone sacrifice everything for her. But this time, she’s able to change the ending because her power is fully realized. The cycle was officially broken.

Katara’s character arc was catharsis at every step. If Katara could break the mold and recreate the ideas of womanhood and motherhood in her own image, so could we. We could be powerful. We could care for ourselves AND others when they need us—instead of caring for everyone all the time at our own expense. We could have balanced partnerships with give and take going both ways (“Tui and La, push and pull”), rather than the, “I give, they take,” model we were conditioned to expect. We could fight for and determine our own destiny—after all, wasn’t destiny a core theme of the story?

Yes. Destiny was the theme. But the lesson was that Katara didn’t get to determine hers. 

After Katara achieves her victory and completes her arc, the narrative steps in and smacks her back down to where she started. For reasons that are never explained or justified, Katara rewards the hero by giving into his romantic advances even though he has invalidated her emotions, violated her boundaries, lashed out at her for slights against him she never committed, idealized a false idol of her then browbeat her when she deviated from his narrative, and forced her to carry his emotions and put herself in danger when he willingly fails to control himself—even though he never apologizes, never learns his lesson, and never shows any inclination to do better. 

And do better he does not.

The more we dared to voice our own opinions on a character that was clearly meant to represent us, the more Mike and Bryan punished Katara for it.

Throughout the comics, Katara makes herself smaller and smaller and forfeits all rights to personal actualization and satisfaction in her relationship. She punches her feelings down when her partner neglects her and cries alone as he shows more affection and concern for literally every other girl’s feelings than hers. She becomes cowed by his outbursts and threats of violence. Instead of rising with the moon or resting in the warmth of the sun, she learns to stay in his shadow. She gives up her silly childish dreams of rebuilding her own dying culture’s traditions and advocating for other oppressed groups so that she can fulfill his wishes to rebuild his culture instead—by being his babymaker. Katara gave up everything she cared about and everything she fought to become for the whims of a man-child who never saw her as a person, only a possession.

Then, in her old age, we get to watch the fallout of his neglect—both toward her and her children who did not meet his expectations. By that point, the girl who would never turn her back on anyone who needed her was too far gone to even advocate for her own children in her own home. And even after he’s gone, Katara never dares to define herself again. She remains, for the next twenty-plus years of her life, nothing more than her husband's grieving widow. She was never recognized for her accomplishments, the battles she won, or the people she liberated. Even her own children and grandchildren have all but forgotten her. She ends her story exactly where it began: trapped in someone else’s narrow, stultifying definition of femininity and motherhood.

The story’s theme was destiny, remember? But this story’s target audience was little boys. Zuko gets to determine his own destiny as long as he works hard and earns it. Aang gets his destiny no matter what he does or doesn’t do to earn it. And Katara cannot change the destiny she was assigned by gender at birth, no matter how hard she fights for it or how many times over she earns it. 

Katara is Winston Smith, and the year is 1984. It doesn’t matter how hard you fight or what you accomplish, little girl. Big Brother is too big, too strong, and too powerful. You will never escape. You will never be free. Your victories are meaningless. So stay in your place, do what you’re told, and cry quietly so your tears don’t bother people who matter.

I will never get over it. Because I am Katara. And so are my friends, sisters, daughters, and nieces. But I am not content to live in Bryke's world.

I will never turn my back on people who need me. Including me.

Say what you want about tiktok but the trend of writing the captions onto the video? That’s super helpful/inclusive for deaf/HH people (and even people who don’t speak a language natively etc) and I just think that’s kinda cool.

So many platforms have videos that aren’t accessible to people, but it’s become the norm on tiktok to caption the videos and that’s pretty nice. Also since the captions are actually on the video, that means when it gets reposted to other websites it is still accessible!

my problem with eloise bridgerton really comes down to these 2 things.

1, she is in an immense place of privilege, and 2, her character arc is bound to fail. Let me elaborate.

Eloise is a member of the Bridgerton family one of, if not the wealthiest family in the ton. They are never concerned about not having enough in fact they are constantly able to splurge on things they do not need. For example throwing a party that no one went to and never speaking about it again. Penelope and the Featheringtons do not have that luxury. They are constantly fighting to remain in their station every season, barely scraping by (we can also see this represented in their clothing as they use their dresses to show how extravagantly they live even though it is a falsehood). Eloise is a woman in a time where women were treated as subhuman, yes BUT she is also a girl from a wealthy family with 3 sisters and 4 brothers. If she really does not want to marry she does not have to, this is literally the reason Eloise becomes a spinster. Many other girls do not have this luxury, but she doesn’t see that. She sees everything she can’t do and then complains about it and this leads into my second point.

Eloise’s purpose as a character was always going to fail because this is a show about romance. It’s not a historical drama, it’s a romance show. Every single Bridgerton is going to get married, so her being this adamant about not wanting to be married(a perfectly valid choice btw) is completely undermined because she does marry later on. And this is made worse by the fact that she is constantly ragging on other women for WANTING to be married. Eloise thinks that every woman should want what she wants and if they don’t they are a disappointment. It’s genuinely so annoying to hear her speak because she doesn’t just want options for herself she is determined to make every other woman feel bad for not wanting what she does. But she never actually does anything about it. Because she’s just that. All talk.

That is why i’m on Penelope’s side, number one people being like “why didn’t she just turn herself in?” did we even watch the same show because Penelope literally would have done that if she thought the queen would have believed her. Number 2 let’s not act like Eloise being “ruined” in society isn’t the exact thing she claimed to have wanted. To be outside of this society she claims to hate so much. Number 3 Pen’s family had a lot more to lose even if the queen did believe her than the Bridgertons. Because they are so well liked and wealthy they can bounce back from pretty much anything. Penelope did do something with her words and yes she wrote them under a pseudonym because how many people do you think would have picked up a gossip column if they saw the name penelope featherington written on it?

To me Eloise is just a brat and i really don’t see that changing any time soon. So while i hope her and Pen make up it’s not for me because i don’t care if they make up, it’s for the audience so you can finally shut up about Penelope being evil.

Also her and Theo are not endgame sorry to burst your bubble.

edit: I also think this issue is exacerbated by the fact that we got Kate in season 2 and she holds a lot of the same beliefs Eloise does but we understand her motivations because of where she comes from.

Adam: *said I love you first, is a bottom, lets Eric do his makeup when they’re alone and very clearly enjoys it, is actively working on communicating better with Eric abt his feelings, worked hard to befriend Otis for Eric, is consistently putting himself out of his comfort zone for Eric’s benefit despite the turmoil in his family life and internalized homophobia and self hatred, is writing a poem for his boyfriend, and then proceeds to FORGIVE HIM FOR CHEATING ON HIM AND BASICALLY APOLOGIZES FOR ‘CAUSING IT’ AND PROMISES TO TRY TO PUSH HIMSELF FURTHER OUT OF HIS COMFORT ZONE*

Eric: 🤩I’m breaking up with you and I’m ~saying~ it’s not your fault but I’m saying it’s because you’re not on my level of queerness yet (read: I’m better than you) which basically means I’m breaking up with you because there’s something wrong with you(so its ‘not your fault’ but it is because of you)! I know you’re out to the entire school and we kissed in front of your dad but you’re not out to your mom yet — I expected you to come out to everyone on the planet the day we started dating! and oh yeah, cheating on you with a stranger I’ll probably never see again on a 1 week vacation was more enjoyable for me than our tender and loving relationship and I’m going to heavily imply that cheating or as I like to call it my ~moment of freedom~ was a result of your shortcomings. I’m gonna just walk away now without any remorse or emotions on my face even though you’re clearly heartbroken and trying not to cry — oops you’re crying now sorry bye 🚴 toodles! 🤩

“the live action watered down katara’s character!” yeah and so did the comics and the legend of korra but i don’t remember seeing yall complain about that. or is it only bad when bryke aren’t the ones doing it?

We’ve all been there.

Zuko finds out Katara was parentified from the age of eight and was a single mom friend of three until he stumbled into the position of gaang dad friend. So when she visits the Fire Nation Zuko dotes on her, making sure her every need is anticipated and catered to. He even goes as far as - to the horror of his council - kneeling to remove her shoes.

Because of this she earns the nickname Lady Katara among the palace staff which she finds amusing but a little confusing. So one day over tea she asks Iroh why they call her that and he explains:

"They're just practicing."

"Why would you need to practice a nickname?"

"Well my dear, they expect that within a few years Fire will preceed it."

And that's about when Katara chokes on her tea.