u/Favacesa

I used to believe that the strong hate against Zutara, however toxic, was due to a mere difference of opinion between two groups of shippers, but I’ve recently gotten back into the fandom and the Zuko hate is out of control? Which is peculiar because he’s a huge GP favourite!

People are allowed to dislike any character they want, but the thing is, most anti zutaras do not *claim* they hate Zuko at all. They repost edits and art, they ship him with other people (Katara is where they simply must draw the line I guess) etc.

And yet they just… don’t like him? He’s an abuser (yeah lmfao), he’s a colonizer, he’s a bad boyfriend to Mai, he’s a pathetic bender, he’s immature, he’s a whiner, every girl he’s paired with deserves better, he encouraged Katara to kill in TSR (??), he’s amoral, he’s manipulative to Katara (??), *he* specifically is at fault for everything the Fire Nation has ever done. Meanwhile the unrepentant Mai, Ty Lee and Azula are just misunderstood, ofc. Zuko’s the one who actually conquered Ba Sing Se, after all.

There’s also a lot of downplaying of his abuse, kinda as if it’s overstated by his fans for sympathy points or smth. He has a third degree burn on his face💀

What the hell is going on? Is it contrarianism?

There was recently some discourse on twitter (yeah, I know) about this. Basically a few antis claimed that Zutara only exists because of the internet and fandom culture. They believe that a new viewer watching the show independently and without knowing anything about it would never get to Zutara.

I… disagree? I watched Avatar in 2019 for the first time as a teenager and I clearly remember getting to the pirates episode of season 1 and thinking “wow Katara and Zuko have some buzz, I wonder if their ship is a thing!”
At some point a friend informed me they were a huge, *huge* thing. But for the entirety of my season 1 viewing, I thought I had invented Zutara💀

The rest is history.

Frankly, I think one of the most annoying characteristics of the anti-zutara crowd is this insistence they “do not see how anyone could ship it”. Calling it a crack ship. Claiming they hate each other. Being *flabbergasted* that viewers liked the watergirl-fireboy pairing with a scene of fireboy throwing his whole body in front of watergirl to protect her from lightning. It’s so dishonest like, please cut the crap.