L.J. Writes

The Water Tribes come across as a people of contrasts. On the one hand they seem to be the great communitarians, valuing their communal ties and the bonds of family and friendship. On the other hand we have seen how oppressive that community can be in the Northern Water Tribe arc at the end of Book 1, when teenage girls were forced into arranged marriages and the role of women was strictly proscribed. How do we explain this seeming contradiction?

( The characters show similar contradictions... )

I remembered hearing that the Inuits or Eskimos had a custom where the groom staged a fake abduction of the bride. As background research for a short story about Aang and Katara getting married, I wanted to see if there was any support for the existence of this practice, and evidently there is--I found several references to bride capture among the Inuits, though there were some doubts about the veracity of the account. I also found a set of writings by Danish explorer Peter Freuchen who spent time with the Greenland Eskimos (in the story "An Eskimo Takes a Bride") and it... was crazy. Absolutely bloody crazy, involving a wild, violent fight while the groom carried the bride off, and bodily injury mostly to the groom. I had to keep reminding myself that the bride was willing, because otherwise it would be the most disturbing thing ever. (Well actually the most disturbing story in the collection would be the one where Freuchen takes a young Eskimo girl as his bride... sigh.)

So my Aang/Katara story isn't going to be exactly like "An Eskimo Takes a Bride," since Katara's people aren't actual Inuits or Eskimos (overlapping but separate designations, or so I've read) and Aang would cut off his hand before he hit Katara. But the idea of a clueless and gentle Aang having to stage a kidnapping with an exasperated Katara guiding him, and Sokka coming to her "defense," is too entertaining to pass up. Oh, and the characters are all going to be grown up, of course. My image of them as grownups is shaped by an excellent piece of fanart called Who Knows What We May Become. (The 2006 date would explain why Zuko is in his Season 2 look and why the grown Zuko appears to be a wandering swordsman.) Maybe a little younger than that picture, but definitely more mature than in the show.

The idea of the bride's brothers trying to fight the groom off comes not from any account of Inuit or Eskimo practice but from Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff, an Arthurian novel in a gritty historical style. There's a scene there where Artos must carry off Guenhumara from the wedding feast for their first night while her relatives try to stop him. It was all a consensual arrangement, of course, but Artos notes that there is some genuine feeling in her brother's struggle to keep Guenhumara from riding away. I see this as a safe, ritual way for Sokka to deal with mixed feelings about his little sister getting married.

So yeah, the story,  tentatively titled To Steal a Bride, is going to be fun to write, and hopefully it'll help me get un-stuck with my main novel-length project Shadow of the Dragon King. Below the fold are excerpts from the kidnapping sequence from "An Eskimo Takes a Bride" for those who don't have time for the whole thing. A word of warning: It's pretty violent, and a possible trigger for trauma.

( Insane excerpts from "An Eskimo Takes a Bride" )

I have the best boyfriend in the world. How do I know? He's the one who got me hooked on Avatar: The Last Airbender. I ended up getting way, way more into it than he ever did, but he was the one who got me started by introducing me to the show.

A few months ago, I had not finished Book 2 yet when I searched for relatively spoiler-safe Avatar posts and noticed a strange word, "Zutara." I put two and two together and realized that there were people who shipped Katara and Zuko. Evidently a lot of them. I called the boyfriend and reported this amazing fact, and he burst out laughing.
( "Yeah," he said. "There was a little something between them." )