The Greatest Earthbender in the World

All screencaps: Piandao.org

In the original plan for Avatar: The Last Airbender, Katara was the only female member of Team Avatar. Aang’s earthbending teacher was originally conceived as a “big, muscly kind of jerk guy” who would serve as a foil to Sokka’s nerdiness. Early production notes indicate that this character would have attracted Katara’s romantic attention, making the Katara/Aang relationship into a love triangle. Luckily, head writer Aaron Ehasz noticed the gender disparity and lobbied for the earthbender to be a girl. And thus Toph Beifong, the Blind Bandit, the Runaway, the Melon Lord, and the greatest earthbender in the world, was born.

Even in the early stages of her development, the character who would become Toph was blind. In most mainstream films and television shows, characters with disabilities are defined by them. Stories about these characters revolve around how very unfortunate it is that they can never lead a “normal” life, and these narratives typically suggest that every person with a disability resents their situation. Most of the time, however, these characters aren’t even represented, limited instead to Very Special Episodes in which the abled members of the main cast learn lessons about tolerance. Often, these one-off episodes portray the abled person admiring the person with a disability for their optimism in the face of terrible hardship. Basically, most media treats disability as a horrible affliction that we must look beyond, even as it ensures that all stories about people with disabilities are about their disabilities, not about their personalities or accomplishments.

Before Toph enters the narrative, the show subverts this pattern with Teo, a boy paralyzed from the waist down whose inventor father builds him a glider that allows him access to the skies. Unfortunately, though he does return in the third season, his story is almost entirely limited to one focal episode. Toph, by contrast, is a principal character, one of the uncontested main members of Team Avatar.

Toph’s introductory episode is an explicit rebuttal to the typical portrayal of people with disabilities. The first time we meet her, she is defending her title at a WWE-style earthbending competition as the Blind Bandit. Aang, Katara, and Sokka are initially skeptical; surely a tiny twelve-year-old blind girl couldn’t beat a bunch of full-grown men. However, she can and does, and she is only defeated when Aang unfairly uses airbending in his challenge for the title.

When she disappears afterwards, Aang must use clues gleaned from a vision to find her, as no one knows who she is. It turns out that she is the only child of a wealthy couple who have kept her existence secret in order to keep her safe. They are exceedingly overprotective, limiting her to beginner level earthbending lessons, and having servants not only supervising her when she goes out on the grounds, but blowing on her soup when it’s too hot. She is a prisoner in a gilded cage, and her repeated escape attempts do nothing but move the bars closer.

Later in the episode, after she and Aang have been kidnapped, Toph’s father reveals that his primary reason for keeping her close is her blindness. When Sokka and Katara ask for her help to save Aang, her father states, “My daughter is blind. She is blind and tiny and helpless and fragile. She cannot help you.” Toph, confronted with her father’s low opinion of her ability, says simply, “Yes, I can.” Sokka and Katara offer to help her, but she declines. Then she takes on all seven adult earthbenders at once and she wipes the floor with them.

Even in the face of a display of bending that floors master waterbender Katara, Toph’s father refuses to accept that she can take care of herself. He concludes that she’s had too much freedom and puts her under twenty four hour surveillance. Finally, she escapes one last time to join Team Avatar, claiming that her father changed his mind and is now perfectly fine with letting her travel the world. The last we see of her father, he is ordering two earthbenders to “do whatever it takes to bring her home.”

Toph’s father is presented as controlling and irrational, and the show condemns his point of view. He is wrong for controlling her and for viewing her in terms of what she can’t do instead of who she is. By condemning him, the show rejects the usual approach to the mainstream portrayal of disability. It strengthens this message by having Toph defend her actions with very little reference to her blindness, instead framing the conversation as a matter of agency versus control. She doesn’t explain that she has devised a method of sight that involves reading vibrations in the earth, thereby “overcoming” her disability. Rather, she points out that she’s good at fighting, that she loves it, and that she deserves to exist and be accepted as she is. Ultimately, she joins Team Avatar because they can give her that acceptance.

That’s not to say that the other kids don’t say insensitive things; in fact, one of the most compelling aspects of the show’s treatment of this issue is that it never entirely becomes a non-issue. It can be difficult to find a balance between normalizing a disability and erasing it, and I think Avatar: The Last Airbender does an admirable job. While the show never focuses another episode around Toph’s blindness, it also doesn’t let the audience ignore it and pretend she’s just like everyone else. She’s not, and that’s completely fine. The way it accomplishes this is through the power of jokes. When the group takes cover in a hole, Sokka laments that “It’s so dark down here. I can’t see a thing.” Toph responds, “Oh no, what a nightmare,” and Sokka apologizes. When they’re looking for things, she takes great delight in pretending to see them, only to remind her friends that she can’t. It’s a fun way to remind the characters and the audience that she experiences the world differently without making this difference a big deal.

The shift in Toph’s loyalty from her biological family to her found family forms the bulk of her character arc, and it is best exemplified in the development of her relationship with Katara. In “The Chase,” nurturing team mom Katara comes into conflict with the recently liberated Toph. Toph refuses to help the others set up camp, claiming that she can pull her own weight. The tension increases over the course of the episode, in which Team Avatar endures a sleepless night spent fleeing from Azula’s relentless pursuit, eventually causing Toph to leave the group. She runs into Zuko’s uncle, Iroh, to whom she confesses, “People see me and think I’m weak. They wanna take care of me, but I can take care of myself, by myself.” Iroh tells her that there is nothing wrong with getting help from the people who love you, and she decides to rejoin the team.

The tension between Toph and Katara can be traced to a myriad of sources. First, their respective elements are incompatible; while Katara is all about the push and pull of compromise, Toph is stubborn and rigid. Katara is also suffering from some serious disillusionment, as she thought that adding another girl to the group would give her the opportunity to bond with someone like her. Instead, Toph turned out to be very much “one of the guys.” This would be especially difficult to take for a girl who had no friends of her own age in the South Pole. Because she had never had a friend in her entire life, Toph probably seemed like the perfect candidate for companionship. As if that weren’t enough, Katara’s need to take care of others conflicted with Toph’s need to prove that she could fend for herself. Katara falls into a maternal role, and Toph is more interested in discovering what life is like without parents.

The issues raised in “The Chase” are resolved a season later in “The Runaway.” The episode begins with Katara and Toph sparring with Aang as part of his training. The training session quickly devolves into a fight between the two girls which ends in the G-rated, water- and earthbending equivalent of mud wrestling. Their tension thus firmly re-established, Toph basically sets out to tick Katara off. She does this by using her bending to pull a number of scams, first sensing the rock in the shell game, then eventually building to full-on blackmail. Katara warns her that she’s playing a dangerous game that could get all of them caught, a particularly serious situation considering the fact that they are in the Fire Nation. Her prediction promises to come to fruition when Sokka discovers a “wanted” poster for a girl known as “the Runaway.”

By this point, Katara and Toph have explicitly reassumed their mother and child roles. Katara thinks that Toph is acting out because she misses her parents and can’t deal with the fact that she still loves the two people she pretends to hate. Toph seems to resent Katara for trying to act as her mother. Later, she reveals to Sokka that she has conflicted feelings about Katara’s maternal qualities: “The truth is, sometimes Katara does act motherly, but that’s not always a bad thing. She’s compassionate and kind and she actually cares about me -- you know, the real me. That’s more than my own mom .”

Toph’s reckless behaviour takes on new significance in light of this confession. On some level, she seems to be asking for someone to discipline her; she needs Katara to provide order and rules. She needs Katara to fulfill the role of a mother, to care for her and protect her from her own bad ideas. This might be another reason for Toph to act out; she has to know that Katara will acknowledge her flaws, because that means that she cares for Toph the person, not Toph the idea. While she could look for validation from Aang and Sokka, neither her god-like student nor her crush can really fill that parental role.

Katara tries to re-define their friendship as a relationship between equals by offering to pull a scam with Toph. In this way, she can show Toph that she’s fun while hopefully removing the baggage of projected parental failure from their relationship. At the end of the episode, Toph tells Katara that she was right and asks Katara to help her write a letter to her parents, thereby relieving her of her role as maternal figure as Toph seeks to re-open communication with her actual mother.

Further proving the importance of her relationship with Katara is their shared vignette in “Tales of Ba Sing Se.” After observing that Toph has “a little dirt on [her]... everywhere, actually,” Katara suggests that they have a girls’ day out at the spa. It’s not really Toph’s scene, and she says as much; still, she makes it through, and even enjoys it, albeit with the help of humourous earthbending hijinks. Afterwards, a group of girls insult her makeup, and she opens up the stone bridge to dump them in the river, with Katara helping to punish them by floating them away on a wave.

The exchange that follows is remarkable. Katara tries to tell Toph that the girls had no idea what they were talking about, but Toph assures her that “It’s okay. One of the good things about being blind is that I don’t have to waste my time worrying about appearances. I don’t care what I look like. I’m not looking for anyone’s approval. I know who I am.” Still, she’s crying as she says it. Katara notices and tailors her response to reinforce Toph’s value as a person, even as she also addresses the unspoken question: “That’s what I really admire about you, Toph. You’re so strong and confident and self-assured, and I know it doesn’t matter, but you’re really pretty.” This response earns Katara the (should-be) coveted Beifong shoulder punch of affection.

This vignette accomplishes a lot in a very short time. It frames the spa trip more as an opportunity for the two girls to bond than a foray into beautification. It allows us to see how Katara and Toph’s relationship works when it’s not bogged down in mommy issues. It argues that women and girls should be defined by their personality instead of their appearance without demonizing the pursuit of beauty. Most notably, it removes the validation of women’s appearances from the realm of the male gaze. Girls insult Toph’s makeup, she and another girl punish them for their hurtful comments, and a girl tells her that she’s pretty. While it depicts women as the harshest critics of other women’s looks, it also suggests that women can build each other up and bolster each other’s self-confidence.

This is particularly interesting in light of Toph’s complicated relationship with gender performance. Whereas Katara fights to be allowed access to traditionally male spaces, Toph’s domination in Earth Rumble V and VI proves that she’s already there. As far as we know, she spent all of her time at home with her parents and servants, with regular visits from her earthbending teacher, Master Yu. It’s no surprise that a sheltered, disempowered kid would want to emulate the competitive earthbenders’ overt displays of strength and forge a place for herself among them. Joining their ranks, however, necessarily requires her to immerse herself in their hyper-masculine subculture, based on violence and trash talking. Toph happily becomes a master of both.

One of the more problematic behaviours that Toph picks up from the competitors is her tendency to base jokes on the denigration of stereotypically feminine traits. For example, when Aang challenges her to a match, she asks, “Do people really want to see two little girls fighting out here?” She calls him “light on his feet,” “Fancy Dancer,” and “Twinkletoes,” the last of which becoming her official nickname for him. She tends to view strength as physical power, and she obviously associates physical power with masculinity.

This becomes evident in the “Ember Island Players” episode. Before the four-part finale, Team Avatar goes to see a play about their adventures. The play is unutterably awful, mischaracterizing literally every single person (though nowhere near as terribly as the actual adaptation by M. Night Shyamalan, as these characterizations at least have some foundation in canon). Aang is an irritatingly cheerful woman, Sokka is a useless jester, and Katara is a moralizing crybaby with lines like, “My heart is so full of hope that it’s making me tearbend!”

During the first intermission, the kids complain about their portrayal. Toph, who won’t be showing up until the second act, just tells them that the truth hurts. Her friends tell her to wait for her own depiction, confident that it will be just as offensive. Toph emerges onstage as a massive, muscular man, introducing himself as Toph, “because it sounds like ‘tough,’ and that’s just what I am.” Unlike her friends, Toph is ecstatic, and she says that she wouldn’t have cast it any other way. Then the actor Toph explains that he can basically use echolocation, and the real Toph beams.

The play is a clever take on a Hollywoodized A:TLA; therefore, both the actor’s ridiculous onstage antics and Toph’s reaction to her own representation can be read as commentary on the process of adaptation. A paragon of masculinity, size, and physical strength, actor Toph is what Hollywood usually chooses to depict when it must portray a cocky, powerful character. Even A:TLA almost perpetuated this uninspired portrayal in its original plan for Toph. In this moment, we see just how subversive Toph’s character really is. While her introduction hinged on the audience’s reluctance to see a tiny blind girl as a powerful figure, the deeper meaning of this scene relies on the audience’s knowledge of Toph’s strength. To an audience familiar with Toph’s accomplishments, the notion that this muscled giant is in any way her equal is laughable. She has real power, while he has ridiculous bravado. She has displaced him as the true possessor of strength, and he stands as an empty symbol. However, the fact that Toph then tells Aang, “At least it’s not a flying bald lady,” suggests that she herself still values (her flawed perception of) masculinity above (her equally flawed perception of) femininity.

This makes sense when you consider Toph’s approach to earthbending. To her, bending is all about being firm and grounded, and it is best taught by inflicting pain and slinging insults. When a blindfolded Aang moves out of the way of a rolling boulder that he was supposed to stop, she exclaims, “If you’re not tough enough to stop the rock, then you could at least give it the pleasure of smushing you instead of jumping out of the way like a jelly-boned wimp!” Katara warns her that Aang responds better to positive reinforcement, and Toph gets a chance to test this theory when he fights off a saber-tooth moose lion and stands up to her psychological assault. “You just stood your ground against a crazy beast,” she says. “And even more impressive, you stood your ground against me.” It is only after Aang has proven himself to be solid and forceful that Toph will call him an earthbender.

Earthbending forms the core of Toph’s character. It is ingrained in her personality, from her direct approach to problem-solving to her plain-spoken wisdom to her rock-solid sense of self. The reason for this lies in her own instruction in the art at the paws of the original earthbenders: the badgermoles. She explains: “They were blind, just like me, so we understood each other. I was able to learn earthbending, not just as a martial art, but as an extension of my senses. For them, the original earthbenders, it wasn’t just about fighting; it was their way of interacting with the world.”

Toph’s reliance on earthbending is her greatest strength and weakness. It allows her to detect lies, save her abled friends, and hold up entire buildings against the force of angry spirits. It also makes it nearly impossible to “see” anything clearly when she is on wood, sand, or ice, leaving her helpless in many dangerous situations. However, Toph refuses to remain weak, so she does everything she can to adjust to these materials. Wood and water are a lost cause, but she goes from perceiving everything as “fuzzy” when walking on sand to bending it into a scale model of Ba Sing Se, complete with the Earth King and his pet bear.

It is in the moment when she is most vulnerable that Toph discovers her greatest strength. In the final two episodes of the second season, the two men Toph’s father paid to kidnap her finally succeed. To do this, they send a letter ostensibly penned by Toph’s mother, telling Toph that she is in the city and asking her to come visit. They play off of Toph’s love for her mother; while her father made his opinion of her very clear, her mother says little enough that she might believably be willing to get to know the real Toph. Toph’s unrequited familial love is only the first vulnerability that they exploit; when she arrives at the house, they lock her in a metal box.

Up to this point, one of the incontrovertible truths of the A:TLA world is that it is impossible to bend metal. Xin Fu says as much when he tells Toph, “You might think you’re the greatest earthbender in the world, but even you can’t bend metal.” For a time, even Toph believes this. As all of her ploys to get out of the box prove unfruitful, however, she looks to the metal itself. Overlaid on the scene is the voice-over of a guru, telling Aang that all of the elements are connected. Even metal, he says, is just “a part of earth that has been purified and refined.” Without the benefit of hearing this voice-over, Toph nevertheless finds the impurities in the metal box and physically pries it apart. When her captors come back to investigate, she imprisons them in the box, exclaiming as she leaves, “I am the greatest earthbender in the world! Don’t you two dunderheads ever forget it.”

In this scene, we see the essence of Toph. She finds herself in a seemingly impossible situation, so she does the impossible to get out of it. She has been locked in a cage -- a metal box, the prison of her parents’ house, the jail of their controlling affection, or the dark dungeon that others assume she is confined to due to her blindness -- and she forges her way to freedom. Ultimately, Toph Beifong is a character who finds empowerment in disempowerment, turning perceived weaknesses into real strengths.

Verdict: Actual strong female character

The Avatar, The Warrior, and The Moon Spirit

All screencaps: Piandao.org

When I was working out this month’s posting schedule, I ran into a problem I haven’t had since we put together the Disney Princess series: too many ladies. I knew that Katara, Toph, and Azula needed their own posts, but that left me with the issue of placing Mai and Ty Lee. Should they get their own post or double up with Azula? Should I group Kya, Ursa, and Yue together to discuss the theme of women’s sacrifice, or should I risk the dubious implications of putting Yue and Suki together in what would seem to be a collection of Sokka’s love interests? What would I do about the two female Avatars? And, most importantly, could I fit Smellerbee in somewhere?

Avatar Kyoshi

Avatar Kyoshi: Master Genderbender

When Aang, Katara, and Sokka visit the Southern Air Temple, they come across a room containing statues of all of the past Avatars, a sea of dudes stretching across the floor and up into the walls. So it’s something of a surprise to learn in the very next episode that the most recent Earth Kingdom Avatar was a woman, especially given the fact that her statue clearly depicted a man who looks nothing like her.

While the show does wonderful things with many of its female characters, it’s scenes like this that remind us that its representation of gender is far from perfect. The Avatar is an almost omnipotent being whose primary responsibility is keeping the world working properly. While other world leaders are humans who have been granted tremendous power, the Avatar is a tremendously powerful being who has been given human form to keep him or her connected to human concerns. To make the Avatar a man about 99.9% of the time suggests that men are more worthy of this power.

The series already perpetuates this insidious message in many of its human hierarchies. The Northern Water Tribe, Fire Nation, and Earth Kingdom are all ruled by men, and the Air Nomads that we meet are all male, save for the Avatar Yangchen. The Order of the White Lotus, a secret society dedicated to spreading ancient knowledge across the world, is a massive sausage fest. The masters are men, the generals, admirals, and inventors likewise.

As a woman in an officially recognized position of power, Kyoshi is a big deal. She is also big in the literal sense, a statuesque woman with the biggest shoe size of any Avatar. She wears a uniform with face makeup intended to intimidate others, and she wields two fans that she can use both as weapons and as tools for bending. Whenever she shows up, she is the most striking, terrifying person onscreen. Had Aang been able to summon her to fight Fire Lord Ozai, you get the feeling that the show would have been over sometime during the first season.

The first time we see Kyoshi “in the flesh,” she is borrowing Aang’s body. He is standing trial for a crime that the villagers of Chin claim she committed 370 years earlier, when she killed their leader, Chin the Conqueror. While Aang and the Water Tribe siblings argue that no Avatar would commit murder, the first thing Kyoshi does when she possesses Aang’s body is admit to killing Chin. She offers a description of justifiable homicide, citing Chin’s tyranny and his army’s expansion across the continent. When he reached the peninsula where she made her home, he demanded her surrender, and she refused. To protect her people, she used her bending ability to break off the chunk of land that would become Kyoshi Island. Chin did not step back in time and fell to his death as a consequence. “I created Kyoshi Island so my people could be safe from invaders,” Kyoshi says, and you can almost hear the mic drop.

In an online game that bridged the gap between the second and third seasons, Aang ventures into the spirit world to reconnect with four of his past lives. Kyoshi tells him about one of her greatest challenges: resolving an attempted revolution in the Earth Kingdom. The peasants felt that the king did not represent their interests, and they started to destroy symbols of the old government, which included historical artifacts. The Earth King ordered Kyoshi to help him quash the revolt, and she refused; to his exclamation of “How dare you defy your king,” she responded, “How dare you defy your Avatar!” Still, she offers to protect his interests and Ba Sing Se’s cultural heritage if he will listen to the peasants’ grievances. She does this because, as she says, everyone should have a voice “if balance is to prevail over tyranny.” Unfortunately, part of her solution is the formation of the Dai Li, an elite group of earthbenders who became corrupt sometime during the 170 years since her death. Considering the fact that the city Aang established went wrong less than two decades after his own death, Kyoshi did pretty well.

Finally, in the last arc of the show, Aang calls upon Kyoshi once more. She gives him the advice that “only justice will bring peace.” While she admits that she made mistakes, she clearly considers the Avatar’s duty to be the dispensation of justice. To assume that kind of authority, a person would have to be pretty self-confident. Then again, if you were an almost all-powerful Amazonian woman who lived for centuries and watched kings cower at your feet, self-confidence would hardly be a problem.

Verdict: Strong Female Character™ (because she’s awesome, but ultimately undeveloped)

Suki

While the Dai Li didn’t work out precisely as planned, Kyoshi had more luck with the establishment of another fighting force: the Kyoshi Warriors. A group comprised entirely of young women, the Kyoshi Warriors practice a fighting style that involves using their opponent’s force against them. They wear armour that resembles their founder’s own preferred garb, as well as her customary makeup. Their leader, Suki, describes the outfit: “It’s a warrior’s uniform. … The silk thread symbolizes the brave blood that flows through our veins. The gold insignia represents the honour of the warrior’s heart.” As non-benders, their technique relies heavily on the use of fans as weapons.

The warriors are introduced in an episode which revolves around another condemnation of overt sexism. After claiming that girls are inherently better at sewing than boys (who are apparently better at hunting and fighting), Sokka needs to learn a lesson about the inaccuracy of stereotypical gender roles. The show teaches him this lesson at the hands of the Kyoshi Warriors. When he claims to be the best warrior in his village, Suki asks him to demonstrate his abilities. Sokka thinks that he will be showing off his skills to a bunch of untrained girls, but he quickly finds himself with his hand tied to his foot, humiliated by Suki’s vastly superior technique.

Soon, Sokka swallows his pride and asks Suki to teach him, which she agrees to do on the condition that he trains in the traditional uniform, makeup included. While this is played for laughs, it is to the show’s credit that both Sokka and Aang end up fighting Fire Nation soldiers while wearing this makeup, and absolutely no one comments on it either during or after the battle.

The most interesting part of this episode for me, however, is Suki and Sokka’s goodbye. He apologizes for his behaviour, saying, “I treated you like a girl, when I should have treated you like a warrior.” Suki replies, “I am a warrior, but I’m a girl too,” giving him a kiss on the cheek. The rest of the episode is fine, if a little heavy-handed, but this exchange, clearly intended to bring the message home, actually undermines it.

Let’s break the story down a bit. A sexist guy who thinks that fighting is an exclusively masculine pursuit makes fun of a group of female warriors. When they prove themselves to be better fighters than him, he is forced to confront his own prejudices. (Conveniently, there is no parallel story in which Sokka sees men who enjoy sewing and performing stereotypically feminine tasks, although the show does give him a love of shopping.) As a reward for learning that women can be warriors, he receives a kiss and a future love interest. This is the part that bugs me. Without the kiss, she is telling him that femininity and fighting ability are not mutually exclusive, and that he should respect both of these aspects of Suki. With the kiss, however, the message becomes more complicated and arguably less progressive. “But I’m a girl too” signals Suki’s romantic interest in Sokka, making her designated love interest status more important than the message that she deserves to be treated with respect because girls are people too. It also suggests that being treated like a girl necessarily means being valued as a potential romantic partner. In addition to all of this, the fact that Sokka is still spouting nonsense about treating girls and warriors differently proves that he didn’t really learn his lesson. Instead of a kiss, he probably should have been given the Not-As-Much-Of-a-Jerk-As-You-Could-Have-Been Award.

The next time we see Suki is in “The Serpent’s Pass,” where we learn that she and the other Kyoshi Warriors have taken work as security officers at the ferry terminal leading to Ba Sing Se. When the members of Team Avatar decide to forego the ferry and travel to the city using the infamous Serpent’s Pass, Suki accompanies them. Sokka, having experienced a terrible loss, becomes overprotective of her, and Suki confronts him about it. She can take care of herself, and she needs him to see that. She proves this claim when Toph falls into the path of a sea monster and Suki immediately dives into the water, armour and all, while Sokka is still removing his shoe. She saves Toph, and later reveals that she went along to ensure Sokka’s safety. She knows that she is highly competent, and she will only indulge Sokka’s misguided attempts at chivalry up to a point.

The next time we see her, she and the other Kyoshi Warriors are trying to protect Appa from Azula, Mai, and Ty Lee. Though they lose, the warriors do manage to send Appa away. Suki demonstrates tremendous courage: first, when she approaches the abused and terrified sky bison, and then when she takes on Azula in combat. Considering the fact that by this point, Team Avatar and its three powerful benders have been unable to do any real damage to Azula, Suki’s single-handed attempt to take her down is both foolishly brave and terribly impressive.

Unfortunately, if inevitably, Suki loses. She turns up again in the Boiling Rock, a Fire Nation prison that houses political dissidents. The Boiling Rock is famous for its inaccessibility; no escape attempt has ever been successful. Still, when Sokka and Zuko decide to escape with Sokka’s father, they are certain enough of their success that they neglect to figure out how to enact one of the most important parts of their plan. Suki takes this opportunity to have her Crowning Moment of Awesome, during which she travels over a prison brawl by running on the inmates’ heads, performs incredible parkour moves to scale a wall, and makes her way past four guards to tie up the warden. And she does all of this in the span of thirty-five seconds without getting out of breath. And she tops it all off with the line, “Sorry, Warden, you’re my prisoner now.”

It is because of this scene that it’s such a disappointment when she does almost nothing during the final battle. She accompanies Sokka and Toph onto an airship, but she doesn’t help them take out the crew or destroy the other airships. While the reason for her general lack of action clearly lies in the fact that Sokka and Toph are principal characters and therefore require our attention, I like to think that none of the writers could think of anything to top her display at the Boiling Rock. (Edit: Except that I am sometimes an idiot and forget that Suki actually saved Sokka and Toph from certain death when she brought an airship around to pick them up. Still, even this heroic rescue can't top her acrobatic feat at the Boiling Rock.)

While Suki’s characterization sometimes suffers due to her love interest status, she nevertheless manages to be an engaging, active character. She and Sokka work as a couple because she challenges him, matches his wits, and refuses to let him get away with his sometimes careless behaviour. She comes across as Sokka’s equal, not his accessory. One thing I particularly appreciate about Suki is that, even when we don’t see it, her story doesn’t stop. She doesn’t hang around on Kyoshi Island, waiting for Sokka to come find her; instead, she decides that she wants to help change the world. Even at the Boiling Rock, when she claims that she knew Sokka would come for her, it’s clear that she would still manage to get by on her own if he didn’t.

Verdict: Strong Female Character™ (because she’s amazing, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that her story largely revolves around Sokka)

Princess Yue

Sokka’s other love interest, Princess Yue, doesn’t fare quite as well. At the end of the first season, Team Avatar arrives in the North Pole, seeking a waterbending master to train Aang and Katara. While they’re busy with that plot, Sokka distracts himself with a love-at-first-sight attraction to the Northern Water Tribe princess.

We are introduced to Yue via Sokka’s male gaze. His attraction to her seems to stem entirely from her appearance; while Suki was introduced as a clever, sarcastic, strong-willed person, Yue initially appears to be nothing more than a beautiful mystery. He admires her status and looks, but gives no personality-related reason for his attraction to her. For the entirety of Yue’s first episode, she exists primarily to frustrate Sokka, expressing interest in him only to run away quite literally as soon as they are together. Because we see her through his eyes, we can only see her as a girl who can’t make up her mind.

This changes, however, when she reveals that she is engaged. Yue’s story, while still entangled with Sokka’s, shifts from a tale about romance to a lesson about duty. She tells him that they can no longer see each other, and he defends their non-relationship on the grounds that she doesn’t love, or even like, her betrothed. She responds that she does love her people, and he reminds her that she’s not marrying them. Still, she persists, telling him that he doesn’t understand the duties that she has to her father and to her tribe.

This exchange and the shift it signifies are subtly subversive. Yue is the antithesis of a Disney princess; while she does want to follow her heart and marry for love, she understands that being a princess requires her to put aside her individual desires for the sake of the tribe. She’s learned the Spider-man lesson, but in this case, it’s the knowledge that with great privilege comes great responsibility. Sokka argues in favour of romance over civil duty, and in so doing demonstrates his naivety. He tries to tell her what choice to make, and urges her to defy social convention; she seems to recognize that her position of power is itself a matter of social convention, and that she must therefore live by it.

Her devotion to fulfilling her obligations becomes clear when we hear her backstory. When she was born, she was very sick and likely to die. No healers were capable of saving her, so her father pleaded with the spirits to save her. He took her to the oasis where the moon and ocean spirits live in the form of koi fish; they gave her life, and she took the name Yue, for the moon. Knowing that spiritual help made her life possible, Yue is aware that she owes the moon spirit a debt. Up to this point, it seems that she has repaid it by devoting herself to her people, who draw their power from the moon.

When Admiral Zhao kills the koi that embodies the moon spirit, Yue discovers the true nature of her debt and its payment. As Aang observes, “Without the moon, everything would fall out of balance. You [Zhao] have no idea what kind of chaos that would unleash on the world!” Yue figures out that she can restore balance by giving her own life to the moon spirit, and she recognizes this as her real duty. Aang defeats the Fire Nation armada using the Avatar State, but Yue ultimately saves the day.

The show deals with the topic of women’s sacrifice on a few occasions. For the purposes of this post, it would be best to limit the discussion to the situations in which a woman trades her life for the lives of others.

Kya performs the quintessential maternal sacrifice, giving up her own life to save Katara’s. What separates her death from those of a large number of fictional mothers is the fact that she includes the village in her bargain. She saves her child, but she also secures the safety of her people. However, the truly subversive aspect of Kya’s sacrifice lies in its consequences. She’s obviously fridged, but, while many stories would use her death to drive a man’s character development (either her son, Sokka, or her husband, Hakoda), A:TLA makes Kya’s sacrifice the foundation of Katara’s characterization.

Yue’s sacrifice is a little different. First, its most obvious narrative implications lie in its effect on Sokka’s character development, as her death and rebirth as the moon spirit at least superficially fulfill the requirements of a classic fridging. Sokka’s loss leads him to be overprotective of Suki because he believes that he should have done more to protect Yue. What the show neglects to address is the fact that, despite its effect on his life, Yue’s sacrifice had very little to do with him. She didn’t die because he failed to protect her; she died because she chose to give her life in service to something greater. The show’s focus on Sokka’s feelings, however understandable, nevertheless undermines Yue’s agency.

There’s a trend in superhero movies of the past few years, in which the individual white male hero performs the ultimate sacrifice in order to save the world. Captain America does it when he crashes the plane in the Arctic, Batman does it when he flies the nuclear bomb away from Gotham, and Iron Man does it when he carries the missile into space. Except none of them actually die. When iconic white male characters sacrifice themselves, they somehow manage to save everyone and live to take credit for it. When equally courageous women of colour sacrifice themselves, they stay dead, and the narrative tends to focus on the emotional response of the men their sacrifice affected.

Verdict: Supporting Role (because the narrative doesn’t spend nearly enough time acknowledging her as a person before it shows her to be a hero)

The Last Waterbender

All screencaps: Piandao.org

When I became an aunt, I volunteered to compile a list of suitable children’s programming. Living in the age of DVDs, Blu-rays, and Netflix, I knew that I had decades of shows to draw from, and I wanted to pick the best of the best. To qualify, shows had to be enriching, empowering, and intelligent, though bonus points were available for sheer coolness. Above all these things, however, I looked for ladies.

The show that topped the list -- and the one that we’ll be analyzing this month -- is chock-full of them. Avatar: The Last Airbender is set in an Asian-inspired fantasy world separated into four regions: the Air Temples, Fire Nation, Earth Kingdom, and Water Tribes, analogous to Tibet, Japan, China, and Inuit territory. In each region, a significant percentage of the population is born with the ability to control their respective element. One person, the Avatar, can bend all four elements, and their mission is to maintain balance between the four nations and to serve as the bridge between the natural and spirit worlds. When the Avatar dies, he or she is reincarnated into a newborn baby of the next nation in order (Air, Water, Earth, Fire -- lather, rinse, die, repeat).

When we join the story, this cycle has been disrupted. The last Avatar, an airbender named Aang, disappeared, and in his absence, the Air Nomads became the victims of genocide at the hands of the Fire Nation. The Fire Nation selected the Water Tribes as their next target and, a hundred years after the eradication of the airbenders, only one waterbender remains in the south. This is Katara who, with her older brother Sokka, discovers the Avatar and joins his quest to save the world.

Katara is not only the first female character we meet, but the first voice we hear. She explains her world’s history in the opening credits of every episode, going into greater depth in the introduction to the pilot. It is her point of view that frames the show. In addition, she is responsible for breaking Aang out of the iceberg in which he was frozen for a century, thereby acting as a catalyst for his narrative. While the show is named for Aang, it is very clearly Katara’s story as well.

When we first meet Katara, she is fourteen years old and frustrated. She has a father who left two years earlier to fight the Fire Nation, a brother who dismisses her bending as child’s play, and a power that she cannot harness due to a lack of training. She is prone to outbursts of rage that are accompanied by uncontrolled displays of bending. Because bending requires specific movements, the fact that Katara can crack ice apart with nothing but the force of her righteous fury speaks to the depth of her power.

Katara’s storyline in the first season revolves around her quest to become a trained waterbender, as she defies the sexist traditions of her culture to achieve her dream. This quest begins in the first episode, when Sokka not only dismisses her bending ability as a weird trick that she should keep to herself, but blames her for the destruction of their canoe. “Leave it to a girl to screw things up,” Sokka says; Katara responds by calling him out on his sexist attitude and his dependence on her. When he tells her to calm down, she refuses, and her anger releases the Avatar from his iceberg. A:TLA explicitly has its hero enter the narrative through the force of one girl’s unapologetic feminist rage.

This arc reaches its conclusion in the final episodes of the first season, when Katara, Sokka, and Aang reach the Northern Water Tribe and its thriving community of benders. Having worked with Aang to develop her ability, Katara seeks a master to train her. Unfortunately, the best instructor available, Master Pakku, refuses her entry to his program. In the Northern Water Tribe, he tells her, female benders learn how to heal while their male counterparts learn how to do everything else. Katara rejects this model, saying, “I don’t want to heal, I want to fight!”

She soon gets her chance; Pakku dismisses her as a “little girl,” and Katara challenges him to a duel if he’s “man enough” to take her on. Aware of her own inferior bending technique and the reality of her inevitable defeat, Katara nevertheless chooses to face Pakku and forces him to fight her. She refuses to be dismissed and, while fighting, she exclaims, “You can’t knock me down!” It’s meant literally, as Pakku has just sent a torrent of water over her, but she intends for him to understand her full figurative meaning. She won’t give in, she won’t bow down, and she won’t be made to feel like anything less than what she is: an already accomplished waterbender who deserves the chance to master her element.

Still, it takes a plot device in the form of a necklace, representing the need to defy tradition when the tradition is flawed, to change Pakku’s mind. He takes Katara on as his student and, by the end of Book 1, declares her a master of waterbending (and the practical application of feminist rage). Because Aang has not been as diligent with his own studies, Katara becomes his teacher, serving another important role in the salvation of the world. By the end of the first season, she has achieved her lifelong dream, and she has done so by refusing to abide by men’s rules.

In a lesser narrative, this admittedly awesome moment would have been the zenith of Katara’s character development. She would have broken through the glass ceiling, struck down the most overt forms of sexism possible, and then settled into her role as Aang’s love interest. Having established herself as a Strong Female Character, she would never again have to prove that strength. Instead, the show uses its next two seasons to explore the nuances of her character, revealing an array of compelling strengths, weaknesses, and contradictions.

One aspect of the principal characters’ connection to their respective elements is the reflection of the properties of that element in their own personalities. Zuko is hot-headed, impulsive, and destructive, and Toph is tough, blunt, and resistant to change. Aang is gentle and generally non-combative, but his grief and anger have an almost cyclonic quality, sweeping him up and tearing apart the things that get in his way. Like water, Katara can assume a variety of forms, ranging from a nurturing caregiver who keeps the team together, to an inspirational force empowering the downtrodden, to a vengeful spirit committed to punishing wrongs.

The first form is best exemplified in “The Desert” and best described in “The Runaway.” In the former, the team is lost in a desert, having lost Aang’s flying bison, Appa. Toph is unable to see through the shifting sands, Sokka is high on cactus juice, and Aang is downright murderous. Without a firm hand to guide them, they would die and the information they carried would be lost with them. Katara takes it upon herself to save the group, saying, “We’re getting out of this desert and we’re going to do it together.” By remaining calm and helping her friends, she manages to get them out.

The remarkable thing about this episode is the ease with which Katara leads the group. As the oldest person with the most tactical know-how, Sokka tends to lead most of the time. As the Avatar, Aang takes the lead in official Avatar business. However, in a situation where staying together gives everyone a chance to stay alive, it is Katara’s status as the glue that allows them to survive.

In “The Runaway,” Sokka reveals that he relies on Katara’s strength and responsible nature. He describes the role Katara has played in his life since their mother’s death: “I’m not sure I can remember what my mother looked like. It really seems like my whole life Katara’s been the one looking out for me. She’s always been the one that’s... there. And now, when I try to remember my mom, Katara’s is the only face I can picture.” The show explicitly acknowledges Katara as the team mom, but at the same time, it defines the motherly role. It is not merely about nagging her friends or bossing them around, but about being the source of strength on which they can rely, no matter the situation.

Katara plays this role even for those outside the group of principal characters. In the first season, she gives a rousing speech in an attempt to motivate imprisoned earthbenders to rise up against their Fire Nation oppressors, risking her own safety in an effort to secure theirs. She tells Aang and Sokka, “I’m not leaving. I’m not giving up on these people.” In a third season episode, “The Painted Lady,” she echoes this sentiment: “I will never, ever turn my back on people who need me!” True to her words, Katara helps the people of a Fire Nation fishing village nearly destroyed by polluted water. Taking on the guise of a local legend, the Painted Lady, she becomes a superheroic force for good.

“The Painted Lady” also serves as the first in a triptych of episodes that encapsulate Katara’s Book 3 character arc. The arc focuses on the issues of revenge and forgiveness, culminating in Katara having to decide what to do to the man who killed her mother. In this first episode, Katara demolishes the factory that is pumping pollution into the river; she thinks that destroying the factory will save the town it has suffocated. Instead, she causes soldiers to invade the village, seeking vengeance for their lost property. They promise to “cure the world of this wretched village,” forcing Katara and her friends to save it once and for all.

Here, Katara inserts herself into the situation without considering the consequences of her actions. Thinking that she is helping them, she takes revenge in the villagers’ stead. Had Sokka not figured out what she was doing, she would have been responsible for the destruction of the village. While the episode’s primary message is basically “when helping others, first do no harm,” “The Painted Lady” also sets the stage for the show’s treatment of the destructive power of revenge.

In the second episode, “The Puppetmaster,” Katara and company encounter an elderly woman named Hama, who confesses to being the former last waterbender of the Southern Water Tribe. They bond quickly, and Hama offers to teach Katara the bending techniques of the south. Hama’s methods turn out to be quite destructive, as she teaches Katara to steal water from plants, leaving large swaths of dead, desiccated vegetation. On the night of the full moon, Hama explains that the most important technique she will teach Katara is one of her own invention. Having been captured during a Fire Nation raid, a young Hama was imprisoned and forced to live in terrible conditions which prevented her from using her bending. Eventually, she realized that life requires water and that animals are “nothing more than skins filled with liquid.” This led her to invent bloodbending, a form of waterbending that allowed her to control the movements of any other creature.

Initially, Katara rejects this teaching, saying that she doesn’t know if she wants that kind of power. Hama responds, “The choice is not yours. The power exists, and it’s your duty to use the gifts you’ve been given to win this war!” She appeals to Katara using their shared loss, reminding her that the Fire Nation is responsible for wiping out their culture. Then she goes further, including the death of Katara’s mother as reason for her to punish the Fire Nation. She reveals that she has been imprisoning civilians just as she and her fellow waterbenders were imprisoned. As she states, “We have to fight these people whenever we can, wherever they are, with any means necessary.” Finally, she asks Katara to continue to enact her revenge.

For Katara, this is a powerful appeal. She and her friends face nearly impossible odds in their battle against Fire Lord Ozai, and she stands to lose everything if they fail. Still, I think that it is the loss already suffered that most threatens to make her give in. Katara’s quest to become a waterbending master was, in part, about connecting to a culture to which she had been denied access, living as she did in a small village of non-benders. She never experienced the community of benders that Hama lost, and even the Northern Water Tribe is not a sufficient replacement. Beyond this loss, however, is the loss of her mother, Kya. As we learn in the final episode of the triptych, Katara is willing to do just about anything to avenge the death of her mother.

Still, she refuses to learn bloodbending, telling Hama that she will stop her. Hama bloodbends Katara, who manages to fight back due to the superior strength of her own bending ability. When Aang and Sokka arrive to fight Hama, she bloodbends them into a fight to the death. To stop this, Katara uses the technique on Hama herself; despite being untrained, Katara immediately masters waterbending’s most difficult form. In this moment, she essentially cements herself as the greatest waterbender in the world.

However, her moment of triumph is also a moment of defeat. Despite losing, Hama tells Katara, “My work is done. Congratulations, Katara, you’re a bloodbender.” Katara sinks to the ground, weeping. Katara may not have agreed to take up Hama’s crusade, but she now knows that she is capable of doing similarly terrible things. In a way, Hama has infected her.

In the final episode of the triptych, “The Southern Raiders,” we see that the infection has taken hold. At this point in the series, Zuko, who spent most of his time tracking down the Avatar in an attempt to regain his honour, has joined forces with our heroes. He has accompanied both Sokka and Aang on important personal quests, and he has proven his loyalty to them. He has not, however, earned Katara’s trust, and she has gone so far as to threaten to kill him if he steps out of line. She trusted him once before, and he betrayed her; she does not easily give second chances.

Her important personal quest is getting revenge on the Fire Nation soldier who killed her mother. Both Sokka and Aang try to dissuade her, telling her that she should forgive the soldier and move on, but Katara says that that would be impossible. When Zuko tells her to save her strength, she tells him that she has plenty: “I’m not the helpless little girl I was when they came.” Implicit in this statement and in Katara’s recollection that her mother sacrificed herself to protect her is Katara’s feeling of guilt. She has immense power now, but she couldn’t protect her mother when it counted. She had to rely on her mother’s strength so that she could one day increase her own. For Katara, a child who not only suspects, but knows that her mother exchanged her life for her own, it would be impossible not to think of her death as Katara’s fault. Tracking down and punishing the man who physically did the deed might allow Katara to feel less responsible.

This doesn’t mean that Katara is above doing terrible things in her quest for revenge and redemption, which becomes evident when Katara bloodbends the man she suspects is Kya’s killer. When it proves to be the wrong man, she appears disheartened, but not particularly remorseful. The weapon that once horrified her is now just another in her arsenal. Still, when she finds the killer, she uses only normal waterbending, which suggests that some of that initial reticence has been restored. She still resists becoming Hama’s successor.

When it comes time to make a decision, Katara decides not to kill the former soldier. She explains the situation to Aang: “I wanted to do it. I wanted to take out all my anger at him, but I couldn’t. I don’t know if it’s because I’m too weak to do it, or if it’s because I’m strong enough not to.” Aang tells her that she did the right thing, and that forgiveness is the first step toward healing. Katara replies, “But I didn’t forgive him. I’ll never forgive him.” She does, however, forgive Zuko.

This is a significant point in Katara’s characterization. Whole episodes are devoted to Aang learning how to let things go, and we know that he has had to overcome the loss of his people in order to become a better Avatar. We appreciate his thoughts about forgiveness because we know that he knows what he’s talking about. But Aang and Katara are very different people, and her inability to forgive is just as important to her character as his unwillingness to take revenge. After watching three seasons of A:TLA, the viewer knows that she holds grudges, that she has immense stores of rage, and that the loss of her mother has informed much of her personality. To take violent revenge would be to become Hama, but to forgive Kya’s killer would be to stop being Katara.

It is this Katara that defeats Azula, Zuko’s younger sister and the most compelling villain in the show. She risks her own life to get close enough to trap Azula in ice, then shackle her to a metal grate. Even against an Azula who is not at the top of her game, this is an impressive feat, considering the fact that she spends just about the entire time she’s on screen soundly thrashing Team Avatar. Katara also heals Zuko, the person she once described seeing as the face of the enemy. In this sequence, she displays the tremendous growth she has undergone as a person and as a bender.

I should mention that Katara accomplishes all of this while technically being Aang’s love interest, proving that the best kind of love interest is one who is just as dynamic and interesting as the main character. My major complaint about their romance -- other than the fact that they are really, really young -- is that we generally see it only from Aang’s perspective. In these scenes, Katara tends to transform into the Mysterious Girl, a creature whose sole aim in life is to frustrate the male character who just wants her to stop seeing him as a little boy. The most explicit commentary we hear from Katara on the subject occurs in “The Ember Island Players,” when she tells Aang that she is confused and wants to focus on more pressing matters like, you know, the battle that they’re about to fight. When the show ends with a kiss between Aang and Katara, it feels like the culmination of a major arc in his storyline, and nothing more than a subplot in hers.

Finally, it is important to note that, voice actor and film casting notwithstanding, Katara is a young Aboriginal woman. She is not only an active, compelling female character whose value to the narrative goes far beyond her function as a love interest, but a strong, intelligent, nuanced woman of colour. She represents a fictionalized version of a population that is too rarely depicted in mainstream television and film, and the Fire Nation’s attempts to eradicate Southern Water Tribe culture and disempower its people echo a very real oppressive history. As a character, Katara is not only strong, but important.

Verdict: Actual strong female character