Avatar Shipping Wank: It must be Wednesday
Recently, the creators of Avatar: the Last Airbender announced a new series that's coming in 2011, titled Avatar: Legend of Korra. Normally this would be cause for joy and celebration, considering how many people enjoyed Avatar's first run, but wait! Ships from the first series are confirmed to have lasted? And they're not the ones I like?

Note: there are mild SPOILERS for Avatar: Legend of Korra here.



The new Avatar is a Water Tribe woman named Korra, who will learn Airbending from Aang's son, Tenzin. yukinoonomi dooms the fandom when she says, "I thought the shipping wars were basically done with the finale. Maybe I'm just being naive." We then get a bit of a wank preview as people in Avatar Fans have a polite disagreement over whether there will be shipping wank or not.

Wank starts in earnest with dietotaku's lovely comment, "Goddammit. They had to bring babies into this, didn't they. I am not watching this shit if I have to look at a bunch of Kataang flashbacks."

Things stay fairly quiet, however, until someone posts an interview with the creators where they confirm that Katara is, in fact, Tenzin's mother. They also add that they started up a very different sort of narrative so they could change things up.

dietotaku is back, saying, "They don't want to retread familiar paths but they'll retread familiar ships? Yaaaay."

myrasis adds, "Bracing for the smug Kataang shippers...Oh no they're already here nvm."

Various people reply to this, ranging from, "You're right! How dare they shove the canon ships in our faces!" to "How is confirming that a couple form the original series had children 'retreading original ships?'"


I expect this will be ongoing as more details about the new series emerge.

(I would just like to add that I am SO EXCITED that there will be more Avatar universe stuff, personally. I could not care less about shipping right now, when we are getting a female Avatar.)

ETA: There is now a great comic about the shipwars. (And the original threads are frozen.)