So I Wanna Preface By Saying I'm Really Enjoying The Netflix Series. There Are Things That I Think Original

So I wanna preface by saying I'm really enjoying the Netflix series. There are things that I think original the show did better (Zuko's outburst during the war council meeting, Katara freeing Aang because she lost her shit at Sokka), some I think the new show did better (having Zhao lead the attack on Kyoshi, all the expanded scenes with Zuko and Iroh, and especially having Zuko's crew be the 41st division), and some I don't particularly feel that strongly about that were just different (the restructuring of a lot of the season one plot points and Zuko actually fighting Ozai). However I think the only two things I actively dislike about the new show is the removal of Zuko and Zhao's Agni Kai and the way they changed Ozai's character to actually care about Zuko.

The fight with Zhao after his complete lack of respect for Zuko is one of the best moments of season one and is what initially establishes Zuko as a character that is more than meets the eye. As for Ozai, in the original show, the thing that makes him work as an actually solid villain isn't the fact that he's a badass dictator or anything like that it's the fact that he honest to god does not give two fucks about either of his children. He's an abusive piece of shit who publicly mutilates his son in front of hundreds of people and sent him on a wild goose chase to get rid of the child he viewed as a disappointment. The live action has stripped all of that away. He's still a shitty father but underneath that is someone who in his own fucked up way cares about Zuko. And that actively makes him a lesser character. He's little more than a standard issue evil dictator here and the fact that he scars Zuko seems like is was done more out of necessity for Zuko's backstory. If Zuko didn't need to have the scar I honestly wouldn't be able to see the live action version of Ozai doing it

Peace is overrated now give me the secrets to time travel I need to invest in google before it gets big

“If I had time travel I’d kill Hitler” “If I had time travel I’d stop my favourite politician getting assassinated” you’re all thinking way too small. If I had time travel I’d stop Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin from dying on the moon due to Soviet sabotage, kicking off the Great Nuclear War and devastating half of the planet.

Oh god that fucking Lion Turtle.

Seriously if there is one part of ATLA I hate more than any other it's energybending. It's such a fucking cop out and it's imo made worse by the fact that it wasn't even an issue that needed resolving to begin with. I mean Avatar is a kids show like you said. I was never expecting Aang to beat Ozai to death with his stick. Firebenders have been shown to have been locked up before. Why would this be any different? But then the show makes a big deal about the morality of killing this guy and hey I'm not opposed to a good ol' fashioned moral dilemma. It can make for some great character drama when everyone is telling Aang to make the hard call. Does Aang stick to his guns despite the risk or does he betray his culture and kill Ozai. That's interesting and definitely not something I'm opposed to. What I am opposed to is answering that question stupidly.

Energybending robs Aang of his agency in the choice to kill Ozai or not. It's no longer a difficult decision to betray everything Aang believes in for the sake of the world or to risk everything but stay true to what he believes is right. He just gets a free pass, an easy answer, which realistically isn't gonna solve the problem since Ozai's biggest strength is his political clout whether he's a bender or not. Just look at Napoleon. Man had a strong enough political influence that when he came back from an island not too far from France, he immediately came back to support from his allies. Ozai's continued breathing, bender or not, will cause problems for Zuko. The fact that this deus ex machina allows Aang to bypass a complex moral dilemma while also completely failing to solve anything will never not annoy and frustrate me. If there is one thing I hope the live action gets rid of (aside from Kataang the way is in the show) it's energybending

I honestly don't really like spiritual water as part of the plot in book 2.

This is an extremely obvious deus ex machina for the resurrection of Aang, which was introduced into the plot in an extremely ridiculous way. Seriously, saying that Aang could die while in the avatar state IN THE SAME EPISODE where you showed the resurrection holy water is extremely stupid. This very powerfully spoils the ending of the season, while destroying any sense of danger. Why should I worry about Aang if I know that Katara will resurrect him with some fancy water?

It would be better if this water didn't exist and only its healing abilities were in Katara’s hands. After Jet's death, we wouldn't know if the healing would work on Aang, since he could very well die. Maybe at that moment the full moon will rise, enhancing Katara's abilities, and she will save Aang by combining her powers and the spirit of the Moon. I mean, is it really necessary for this to have a deus ex machina that ruins the whole drama and provides clear guarantees of salvation? To be honest, this is just meh.

Beyond that, the obvious purpose of this dull water limits Katara as a healer. Famous question: Why didn't she use it when Jet died? At least they would introduce some restrictions for it, for example, that the healing properties of this water are revealed only during the full moon. And they say Katara couldn’t use it for a reason.

But it turns out that she forgot about this shit until the moment of plot necessity, which makes Jet's death mediocre.

There is another scene where this water is present: the dialogue between Zuko and Katara in the catacombs. And you know what's the funniest thing? If you cut out the information about spiritual water, the meaning of the conversation will not change at all:

- Maybe you could be free of it.

- What?

- I have healing abilities.

- It's a scar, it can't be healed.

- I don't know if it would work, but...

Actually, it got even better, because Katara needs to rely on her own strength to heal Zuko. And she wants to try not because she has magic water that she doesn’t know what to do with, but because she can at least try to help.

But the point isn't even that, but how smooth the dialogue remains if you cut out a fairly large piece of text from it.

This leads to my theory that this spiritual water was introduced after the script for the season was written. Like the authors didn’t know how to heal Aang at the end, so they introduced this stupidity at the beginning, and then in the scene in the catacombs, to remind the viewer that this shit even exists. Otherwise, I cannot explain why without this water what is happening becomes more logical

Katara's Story Is A Tragedy and It's Not An Accident

I was a teenaged girl when Avatar: The Last Airbender aired on Nickelodeon—the group that the show’s creators unintentionally hit while they were aiming for the younger, maler demographic. Nevermind that we’re the reason the show’s popularity caught fire and has endured for two decades; we weren’t the audience Mike and Bryan wanted. And by golly, were they going to make sure we knew it. They’ve been making sure we know it with every snide comment and addendum they’ve made to the story for the last twenty years.

For many of us girls who were raised in the nineties and aughts, Katara was a breath of fresh air—a rare opportunity in a media market saturated with boys having grand adventures to see a young woman having her own adventure and expressing the same fears and frustrations we were often made to feel. 

We were told that we could be anything we wanted to be. That we were strong and smart and brimming with potential. That we were just as capable as the boys. That we were our brothers’ equals. But we were also told to wash dishes and fold laundry and tidy around the house while our brothers played outside. We were ignored when our male classmates picked teams for kickball and told to go play with the girls on the swings—the same girls we were taught to deride if we wanted to be taken seriously. We were lectured for the same immaturity that was expected of boys our same age and older, and we were told to do better while also being told, “Boys will be boys.” Despite all the platitudes about equality and power, we saw our mothers straining under the weight of carrying both full-time careers and unequally divided family responsibilities. We sensed that we were being groomed for the same future. 

And we saw ourselves in Katara. 

Katara begins as a parentified teenaged girl: forced to take on responsibility for the daily care of people around her—including male figures who are capable of looking after themselves but are allowed to be immature enough to foist such labor onto her. She does thankless work for people who take her contributions for granted. She’s belittled by people who love her, but don’t understand her. She’s isolated from the world and denied opportunities to improve her talents. She's told what emotions she's allowed to feel and when to feel them. In essence, she was living our real-world fear: being trapped in someone else’s narrow, stultifying definition of femininity and motherhood. 

Then we watched Katara go through an incredible journey of self-determination and empowerment. Katara goes from being powerless and afraid to being a warrior, protector, healer, and liberator of others who can’t do as much for themselves (a much truer definition of femininity and motherhood). It’s necessary in Katara’s growth cycle that she does this for others first because that is the realm she knows. She is given increasingly significant opportunities to speak up and fight on behalf of others, and that allows her to build those advocacy muscles gradually. But she still holds back her own emotional pain because everyone that she attempts to express such things to proves they either don't want to deal with it or they only want to manipulate her feelings for their own purposes. 

Katara continues to do much of the work we think of as traditionally maternal on behalf of her friends and family over the course of the story, but we do see that scale gradually shift. Sokka takes on more responsibility for managing the group’s supplies, and everyone helps around camp, but Katara continues to be the manager of everyone else’s emotions while simultaneously punching down her own. The scales finally seem to tip when Zuko joins the group. With Zuko, we see someone working alongside Katara doing the same tasks she is doing around camp for the first time. Zuko is also the only person who never expects anything of her and whose emotions she never has to manage because he’s actually more emotionally stable and mature than she is by that point. And then, Katara’s arc culminates in her finally getting the chance to fully seize her power, rewrite the story of the traumatic event that cast her into the role of parentified child, be her own protector, and freely express everything she’s kept locked away for the sake of letting everyone else feel comfortable around her. Then she fights alongside an equal partner she knows she can trust and depend on through the story's climax. And for the first time since her mother’s death, the girl who gives and gives and gives while getting nothing back watches someone sacrifice everything for her. But this time, she’s able to change the ending because her power is fully realized. The cycle was officially broken.

Katara’s character arc was catharsis at every step. If Katara could break the mold and recreate the ideas of womanhood and motherhood in her own image, so could we. We could be powerful. We could care for ourselves AND others when they need us—instead of caring for everyone all the time at our own expense. We could have balanced partnerships with give and take going both ways (“Tui and La, push and pull”), rather than the, “I give, they take,” model we were conditioned to expect. We could fight for and determine our own destiny—after all, wasn’t destiny a core theme of the story?

Yes. Destiny was the theme. But Katara didn’t get to determine hers. 

After Katara achieves her victory and completes her arc, the narrative steps in and smacks her back down to where she started. For reasons that are never explained or justified, Katara rewards a male character who has invalidated her emotions, violated her physical and emotional boundaries, and forced her to carry his emotions by giving into his romantic advances—even though he never apologizes, never learns his lesson, and never shows any inclination to do better. 

And do better he does not. Throughout the comics, Katara makes herself smaller and smaller and forfeits all rights to personal actualization and satisfaction in her relationship. She punches her feelings down when her partner neglects her and shows more affection and concern for literally every other girl’s feelings than hers. She becomes cowed by his outbursts and threats of violence. Instead of rising with the moon or resting in the warmth of the sun, she learns to stay in his shadow. She gives up her silly childish dreams of rebuilding her own dying culture’s traditions and advocating for other oppressed groups so that she can fulfill his wishes to rebuild his culture instead—by being his babymaker. Then, in her old age, we get to watch the fallout of his neglect—both toward her and her children who did not meet his expectations. By that point, the girl who would never turn her back on anyone who needed her was too far gone to even advocate for her own children in her own home. Katara gave up everything she cared about and everything she fought to become for a man-child who never saw her as a person, but a possession. And even after he’s gone, Katara never dares to define herself again. She remains, for the next twenty-plus years of her life, nothing more than her husband's grieving widow. She was never recognized for her accomplishments, the battles she won, or the people she liberated. Even her own children and grandchildren have all but forgotten her. She ends her story exactly where it began: trapped in someone else’s narrow, stultifying definition of femininity and motherhood.

The story’s theme was destiny, remember? But this story’s target audience was little boys. Zuko gets to determine his own destiny as long as he works hard and earns it. Aang gets his destiny no matter what he does or doesn’t do to earn it. And Katara cannot change the destiny she was assigned by gender at birth, no matter how hard she fights for it or how many times over she earns it. 

Katara is Winston Smith, and the year is 1984. It doesn’t matter how hard you fight or what you accomplish, little girl. Big Brother is too big, too strong, and too powerful. You will never escape. You will never be free. Your victories are meaningless. So stay in your place, do what you’re told, and cry quietly so your tears don’t bother people who matter.

I will never get over it. Because I am Katara. And so are my friends, sisters, daughters, and nieces. But I am not content to live in Bryke's world.

I will never turn my back on people who need me. Including me.