Why Katara Chose Aang Over Zuko.

Why Katara chose Aang over Zuko.

Katara chose Aang because he was her best friend, because she knew him well, trusted him, cared for him more than anyone else. It wasn’t a choice she made lightly; as evidenced first in the episode “The Fortuneteller” and several episodes after that such as The Cave of Two Lovers, City of Walls and Secrets, The Earth King, The Headband, The Invasion, and The Ember Island Players, this was something that Katara thought about for a long time before she decided to start her relationship with Aang at the end of the series.

“But no 14-year old girl would ever want to date a 12-year old, especially when she could have Zuko who is taller and more attractive with a wicked scar!” The problem with that argument is that it is based on the assumption that Katara is a normal teenage girl… and she is not.

First of all, let me point of that by the time Katara was ready to forgive Zuko, she’d already learned the hard way to NOT judge a boy by looks alone through her experience with Jet… her only other canon love interest in the entire series. Moreover, Katara is much more mature than the average teenage girl IRL; with Aang, she is able to look past the surface and see that he is mature and wise beyond his years, and that he has genuine feelings of love and affection for her. Katara says it herself in “The Invasion”:

“We’ve been through a lot together, and I’ve seen you grow up so much. You’re not that goofy kid I found in the iceberg anymore”. In this, we see Katara affirming Aang as her peer; she does not see him as a little brother, she does not consider herself a mother figure to Aang, she sees him as an equal.

Katara also grew up in a radically different environment from our modern world, and also lives in a very different culture. Dating a 12-year old at the age of 14 may seem strange to girls IRL, but to Katara it may not seem so unusual. Look at the Northern Water Tribe; in their culture, a woman can be married at the age of 16, something we would consider unacceptable in the modern world.

As for Zuko… for 55 episodes, Zuko was Katara’s enemy. He kidnapped her, tried to blackmail her, attacked her and her friends on several occasions… but most importantly, the one time Katara chose to give him the benefit of the doubt, he betrayed her in the worst possible way. He nearly got her best friend KILLED. Zutarians fail to recognize how traumatic an experience this was for Katara. It permanently damaged Katara’s relationship with Zuko, and opened her eyes to Zuko’s greatest flaw: As Iroh once said, good and evil are always at war inside him, something that carries forward into the comics even after Zuko helps end the war.

Katara says it herself when she threatens Zuko: “You and I both know you’ve struggled with doing the right thing in the past”. Because of this, Katara never even considers Zuko as a potential partner. In the end, it was not a choice between Aang and Zuko… it was a choice of whether or not she wanted to be with Aang, contemplating her feelings for him, and deciding what Aang meant to her. Zuko was not even a factor.