Like many other people, I grew up loving the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender, as well as the characters who populated it. Like other fans of the original show, I also gathered in equal parts anxiety and excitement to watch the premier of the spin-off show, The Legend of Korra. Though I have smaller issues with the spinoff show regarding its handling of the Avatar universe, I overall enjoyed it despite the fact I believe it failed to capture the magic of the original series.
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My main beef with The Legend of Korra, however, is the portrayal given to the only reoccurring character carried over from the original series: Katara. We learn within the first episode of Korra that Katara is spending her time as a waterbending master teaching young waterbenders how to control their powers. As a now elderly woman whose children are now grown and with family members and closest friends from her childhood who are either estranged or dead, this seems like a reasonable occupation for a woman of her age. However, the more information we’re given about how she’s spent her life in the gap of time between the original series and the spinoff series, the more disturbing her life seems for those who were fans of the original show.
For those unfamiliar with the Avatar universe, a summary of Katara’s character from the original series is this: she is a smart, fierce waterbender (the name given to those in the universe with the power to control water) who lost family in the war that took place in the original series. In her very first character arc of the series, it’s established that Katara was the only waterbender left in the southern waterbending tribe she grew up in. In order to learn how to fight and help the protagonist, Aang, end the war taking place in their universe, Katara has to travel across the world to the northern sect of the tribe where waterbenders still live so the two of them can learn to use their powers. She then learns that the northern tribe upholds sexist expectations for male vs female waterbenders: while men are taught to fight with their powers, the women are expected to use their powers strictly for healing. To rebel against this, Katara learns simple fighting moves from Aang after he gets back from learning with the sexist waterbending teacher, Pakku. Pakku then catches Aang teaching Katara to fight and bars him from attending his future classes. Katara fights back against Pakku in order to earn her right to learn to fight from him and challenges him to a duel. Despite her inexperience, she fights with everything she has and, while she technically loses the duel, she impresses Pakku so much with her passion and drive that he agrees to take her on as a student and reinstate Aang as a pupil as well.
This arc, in my opinion, is the most powerful arc for Katara’s character in the entire series, and leads to my point about why the remainder of her life after the end of the series as portrayed by The Legend of Korra is such a disappointment. After this arc in the story we see Katara become just as involved in battle tactics, politics, and leadership as her co-parts, both male and female, in the series. In the end of the series after she plays a major part in ending the war, she turns to Aang and initiates a romantic partnership with him after little indication that she returned the feelings he’s had for her throughout the entire series. While the choice for her to end up together with Aang is something that is a totally different can of worms for me that I won’t go into at the moment, it’s a choice that I would have likely been eventually able to stomach had this been the last we saw of the two characters. However, we ended up seeing how Katara’s life continued from that point in The Legend of Korra, and the results of that were disappointing to say the least.
In The Legend of Korra we learn that Katara has, sadly, reverted to living the exact narrative she’s so clearly resisted for her entire young life in the original series. We learn through a series of one-liners and verbalized reminiscing from other characters that after the end of the original series, Katara quickly married Aang, started a large family with him, and proceeded to not do anything of political importance for the rest of her life until deciding to teach waterbending to Korra and occasionally healing a main character who was injured with her waterbending powers. While marrying young, starting a family, and living a quiet domestic life is clearly a perfectly fine choice for any woman in the real world, the choice to force this life onto a female character for whom they’ve made a major point time and time again would never be satisfied living that kind of narrative smacks of character assassination and sexism.
Had they written Katara’s priorities in the original series being to support Aang, nurture her own romantic feelings towards him, and heal others, I may not have as much of a problem with this writing decision. However, since the original series went to such detailed and clear lengths to portray Katara as a strong, capable leader and fighter, the writing decision feels forced and like an extreme disservice to her character.
This isn’t to say either that women cannot be emotional, sensitive, and loving as well as a great leader and fighter, because the original series showed that Katara was all of those things. Just as much as they emphasized Katara’s role as a leader and fighter, the show also emphasized that Katara was sensitive, emotional, and loving. In the light of all of the creators’ efforts to create Katara as a well-rounded diplomat, fighter, and woman, however, they completely dropped these traits in The Legend of Korra. We had no indication in the original series how Katara felt about settling down with a family, but it is almost beyond question that she would not have wanted to sit in the background for the rest of her life. After devising strategies for war, thinking extensively about politics in their plans to end the war, it’s absurd to suggest that Katara would have ever settled down to be a homemaker.
Even when Katara does appear in The Legend of Korra as an old woman, she is never consulted when help is needed to fight during the political struggles of the spinoff’s plot. She is never shown fighting even once, even when it would be more than appropriate for her to fight. Her old age, also, is by no means an excuse for her not fighting, as we see plenty of elderly people in the original series such as Hama, Bumi, Iroh, and Pakku who despite their advanced age are still able to fight and use their element bending just as powerfully, if not more powerfully, than the younger characters. To imply that Katara didn’t fight in The Legend of Korra because she was too old to do so is absurd and erases an unbelievable amount of canon evidence suggesting otherwise.
Again, I have every bit of respect for women who choose domestic paths in real life, but given this is a TV show that doesn’t exist in a sexism-free vacuum, my points, I believe, are relevant. Despite how large her family with Aang ended up being, we are given no indication that she had any career in politics or as a diplomat in either Legend of Korra or the canonical comic continuations. She is portrayed as having been nothing more than Aang’s wife as her life continued later on. Both as a young girl past the end of the original show and as a woman with a family later on, Katara was written as as having no political, diplomatic, or even physical clout as a fighter in any way past the original series, and it shows a complete lack of respect towards her and those who were fans of her. After all the work Katara put in just to be able to fight in the first place, it’s impossible to believe that she would have been satisfied to sit in huts in her old age doing nothing but healing and dishing out morsels of wisdom. It’s absurd, sexist, poor writing, and above all, a complete disservice to her as a character.
