Riley and Zuko and Audience Demand for Pain in Romance (spoilers)
Why do audiences feel entitled to seeing romance as a mechanism to resolve pain?
Protest shipping, where people take their demands for fictional romance as a moral stance, doesn’t happen with equal fervor for every attractive pair of characters. I have noticed a pattern, which characters receive this intense fan entitlement and criticism. The heat and venom of these takes is strangely proportional to how strongly people like the characters, to be sure, yet the people who created those lovable characters are then subject to criticism of their moral fiber. I am not exaggerating on this point, Zuko Katara adherents have written articles claiming that the unfulfillment of their preference means the show should have had female writers (the show did have a few women writing for it.) But while the vocabulary implies that these are wise intersectional criticisms of misguided stories, these takes are actually directed at stories that subvert gross tropes, and seem to insist upon undoing that commentary in favor of a hot but unhealthy relationship dynamic.
I am myself a fan of gross, unhealthy drama, and that’s really why I’m so baffled that people are doing this, people who I thought understood why we were shipping these overly dramatic relationships between characters who explicitly do not want this. But instead of having fun with these ideas, apparently instead people are now just insisting that grown up relationships entered consensually are just bad, forced, inauthentic story choices, and that teeny dramas where people are broken and lost and immediately rescued and fixed are a correct and sensitive representation of trauma in the real world. Let’s get into the two overly specific examples:
2020 gave us a resurgence of interest in Avatar: The Last Airbender, but also gave us the gay Christmas dramedy Happiest Season, and in both cases, the creators are critiqued and pressured to “fix” the romantic outcomes. There’s some projection going on here, as the writers are called shortsighted and selfish, fulfilling something prejudicial and gross by “forcing” certain couples together whose romance is “unearned.” But is that not exactly what this specific fan behavior does, arguably, succeeds in doing, sometimes? When a franchise has both longevity and spineless CEOs who would rather do the popular thing than tell a story, this fan demand can and does force romances into stories where it doesn’t belong. Luckily, these two stories did get told as their creators intended, and the fan reaction says a lot about the screwy romances we’re accustomed to.
Having interesting characters who aren’t looking to date, who have responsibilities that prevent them from living in the same place that would make them not even consider dating, characters who are already dating someone, these things are not forcing characters together unnaturally, they are just depicting free grownup choices, depicting romance without making them bleed their pain in front of each other and the audience, to prove that they cannot survive alone and must be together.
If these stories have romances that are “unearned,” how is it that love can be earned? The basis of the love story, as presented, is choice, choosing the person with whom you have shared history, interests, and a future. The basis of the ship fans feel entitled to is pain. Conflict and disinterest is seen as disqualifying for the love story as told, but considered romantic tension when it happens to the character the audience wants to heal.
Often fan resentment sits with the character who presents the most pain. Watch any reality dating show, and there’ll be a segment where contestants share their tragic backstory as they bond with each other. While The Bachelor portrays romance as other things besides a pain-for-loyalty transaction, it remains a core mechanic: if a girl tells the saddest story and explains her struggles, only a monster would send her home. It makes for a compelling narrative thread, but transparent suffering is not a real way to pick a spouse.
Also, stories should not all be harems, where side characters are all implicitly dating fodder for the main characters. Fans declare that their ship is a better option even in cases like Riley and Zuko, where both characters are never shown to be single or looking. Besides that, even people who are single and looking realistically remain friends and don’t date, often. So why is it treated as a flaw in the writing for characters to be friends?
The thing that these two share, (along with many other fiancées of fan imagination) is that they carry a burden of pain too great to bear alone. Riley’s pain is the greatest pain in the story, the most compelling, and she’s not entirely over it. It makes her compelling and sympathetic, and to be fair, hers is the only name from the movie that I remember without having to look it up. But telling her story and having her ex Harper apologize to her is more effective than marrying Riley off based on trauma bonding with another character who was also hurt by Harper. Riley is a compelling portrait but the fan demand that she be paired off illustrates why it would be awful for that to happen.
The movie is about Harper’s fear of coming out to her conservative middle class parents. Harper has no idea how unpleasant (or worse) it will be if she does come out, and most of the movie depicts her parents viciously rejecting their friends and family members over small differences, like career choice or education level, or “lifestyle.” The narrative specifically brings up rage and being disowned as potential realities for closeted kids with unaccepting parents. If Abby and Riley rejected Harper and dated despite having careers in different states and having no shared history, then the moral would be that generally, closeted people are unforgivable cowards, that they are just sources of trauma for attractive people to bond over. Harper’s behavior drives the stress of the movie forward, and to do that, it’s pretty uncaring and hurtful. But the type of story where you have to get together with the first person to hear your tragic backstory is far more insensitive and destructive than a story where the person who caused harm apologizes and is forgiven.
The narrative even anticipates this and addresses this. While Riley is protective of Abby, as someone thrust into the Harper Closeted Stress Nightmare as Riley once had been, they don’t really know each other, and Riley doesn’t know how to comfort her. Abby and Harper have a shared history, and she knows that Abby’s parents died around Christmastime, and Riley is insensitive to this through no fault of her own. But that friction is just an example of how Abby and Harper have a life together. Even though Harper is a terrible person around her family, they remain a couple who lived together and were on the verge of marrying, there was never a chance of a love triangle between Harper, Abby, and the person Abby just met and with whom she only has Harper’s bad behavior as a shared point of experience.
Zuko and Katara are much the same, their interactions are highly dramatic but not substantial enough to imagine a life together. Zuko does not experience the most pain of any character in ATLA, a show with genocide and prison camps, for example, but he is the character who most obviously bears a pain he is unable to bear alone. But far from being the woman-centric feminist choice, the implications of the fan demanded couple are horrific. Zuko spends most of the show hunting Katara down, and even holds onto her dead mother’s necklace for a time. Far from necessary or groundbreaking, a romance between them would play neatly to the tropes of kidnapping bodice rippers. When they do become friends, it’s after Zuko helps Katara track down her mother’s killer for a revenge, real honeymoon stuff.
These two characters have limited or zero investment in finding someone to date during the war. Certainly there are shows where an unexpected crush changes your life and causes you both to grow together, but this show treats teen crushes as more an incidental fact of life rather than a means for self improvement — many of the heart-eyes moments of the show were misunderstandings or mistakes, like Katara’s interest in the terrorist freedom fighter Jet.
The moment where cheesy pain-for-understanding transactional romance even occurs between these two characters, when they are trapped together (do I need to say that this is not the foundation of a healthy relationship) and Katara’s anger at the death of her mother causes Zuko to open up about his mother’s banishment and his changing understanding of the pain his empire causes. While the Slate article insists that it’s the consensual relationship that is the outmoded trope that failed to be subverted, this exchange is a very standard romance novel formula seen in 50 Shades of Grey and others, he expresses pain and remorse but not change, and she offers to heal him in advance of him actually doing anything. Thankfully the show was good at subverting even fan favored tropes, and he was allowed to grow on his own rather than being fixed by romance. The decision to give weight to his actual childhood sweetheart, Mai, was also refreshing and surprising, since the writers could have easily made him a virginal bad boy who is surprised to learn about relationships to force sympathy on him and elevate the importance of romance in his story, but again, the progression of Mai and Zuko’s romance happens largely off screen, something that impacts the plot, not what the plot is about.
I will agree that Zuko and Katara’s friendship is more compelling than Aang and Katara, but the reason is not that the showrunners don’t understand romance, it’s that they just aren’t writing a romance. The show was about other things, and some of the teenagers dated, because some teenagers date and it’s realistic for a group of young people to have some characters navigate the issues that come with dating. The show had never been a love triangle, and that might be why it’s still interesting and watchable by fans who grew up, that it never became the boring show that shippers would have it be.
Fans even point out that same lesson, but miss its content, and assume the person learning it was just bad. Aang also assumed that hurt and upset are signals of an opening for romantic comfort. But rather than learn this lesson along with Aang, fans use it to argue he’s just bad for her, while making the same mistake he made, assuming hurt and confused people who don’t have romance on their minds just need to kiss and realize they’re in love.
I was a Zuko Katara shipper once, I get it. I know they have a very interesting tortured dynamic. But I also have experienced trauma, and experienced the real world interpersonal version of this entitlement. People have a sense that after I tell them the worst thing that happened to me, it becomes their destiny to interfere in my personal life, that I become special and their needs that relate to me become destiny, my pain giving their life meaning as a healer, and if I don’t want that, I’m misguided and wrong, I’m failing to see the true meaning of my story.
Hearing the litany of demands and disturbing assumptions about pain and romance from angry shippers, I realized that the meaning and worth of these characters and how they grew has nothing to do with whether they get married to each other. The demand to marry them off to validate their pain and growth shows that audiences have a problem where they cannot accept a story of growing alone or with friends, that pain must be rewarded with a healer, automatically, like sinking a quarter into a machine and receiving a soda. In the case of Katara, the healer part is literal. Her shared history with other characters, her slowness to be vulnerable, the unconsidered and sort of unimaginable fact that he would rule a nation littered with trophies of the destruction of her homeland, and, ostensibly, she would have to spend a lot of time there if they were dating, everything about her and her history become things to be overcome for the sake of these disturbing, overplayed romantic tropes.
What these stories understand better than some of their fans is, when a person is in crisis, when a person doesn’t know what their pain means, who they are as people that this happened to them, what they need is a friend. If you start hanging out with someone and circumstances make you immediately share your deepest trauma, and shortly after that, that person kisses you, that’s someone willing to take advantage of your pain to do whatever they like.
Hurt comfort fetishists may well defend their aesthetic on the basis that people can like what they like, but the reason I chose the above examples is because fans of the hurt comfort pairing find it unacceptable that anyone thinks differently than they do. They call it a mistake to have a fully consensual, chosen relationship, and consider personal suffering to be a narrative promise to deliver some kind of dependent love solution. They imply that these few instances of avoiding the trauma bonding codependent option are examples of incorrect, anti-woman storytelling. And they do so not as fan fiction writers, but as film journalists, as educators, picking through the text and imagining an injustice whenever it challenges their assumptions. They take the language of advocacy for the abused, and use it to demand, sometimes effectively, that TV shows and movies adapt to their fetish.
The creators of these two pieces of media will probably be fine, and even if these wacky takes damaged their salability in any way, at least they told these stories unimpeded. But I’m sure you can think of stories where redemption and forgiveness and romance were rushed together in absurd ways, stories that seemed to be about something else but had near strangers give up everything we’ve seen them to be in order to fix each other. Pop culture outrage at the absence of romance-fixing-pain is more righteous than issues of glorifying abuse or of diversity and inclusion. Even worse, these takes use the vocabulary of progressive political action even when they are demanding the glorification abuse and shaming diversity and inclusion in terms of characters, writers, and experiences that are eligible to be shown.
