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starlight-bread-blog · 8 months

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Katara is More Patient Then We Give Her Credit for

Katara has been getting a lot of flak for supposedly being hot headed and getting angry at very minor things. Even those who love Katara seem to accept this as the truth. But it's not. In reality, Katara is simply a female character who owns her rage. And I feel like there are two main components that debunk this notion.

Warning: Long, long post.

1. In the instances where Katara is angry it's either justified or makes sense in context.

The Waterbending Scroll

Katara stole, wouldn't you know it, a waterbending scroll. She practices before giving it to Aang, and fails hard. Then Aang who she's supposed to be teaching, gets it right and explains how to do it. Katara has an outburst.

Katara: Will you please shut your air-hole! Believe it or not your infunite wisdom gets a little old sometimes. Why don't we just throw the scroll away since you're so naturally gifted!

Why is Katara that mad here? Why did she have an outburst? Because she was carrying the burden of being the last waterbender of the Southern Water Tribe her whole life. Because her waterbending is the reason Kya died. Because she have been independently studying waterbending her whole life. And now her student is having it all easy and is trying to teach her.

And wouldn't you know it, she realized what she did immediatly. Literally, a second later.

Katara: Oh my gosh Aang. I am so sorry. I don't know what came over me. But you know what, it won't happen again. Here [the scroll] is yours. I don't wanna have anything to do with it anymore.

She even apologized to Momo. Katara had an isecurity rooted in trauma and pressure. When Aang try to teach her she hit a breaking point and lashed out. And not one second later she's already apologizing.

The Waterbending Master

Katara and Aang are going to see Pakku, the waterbending master. But when Pakku sees she's a girl, he says he won't teach her. This is why Katara gets angry. She flew across seas just to get rejected due Pakku is being a sexist freak. I think we can all agree that being denied something because of sexism is a good reason to get angry. And when Katara realized Pakku won't teach Aang if she'll keep insisting, she drops it abd tells Aang to drop it too.

However, that doesn't mean she won't study in secret. She deserved to learn waterbending and she knew it. She took the consequences into consideration and decided to not make a fuss.

But of course, they both get caught. Pakku says he will no longer teach Aang, the Avatar who absolutly needs to study and still refuses to teach Katara because he's still sexist. Only then Katara challenges him to a duel. Only when they have nothing to lose. She challenged a sexist prick to a duel, one who shamelessly denied her oppretunity because of her gender.

The Chase

At the start of the episode Katara gently hints Toph to help unpack a camp for the night. This is when she's not tired yet, and shows patience.

Katara: So Toph, usually when setting up camp, we try to divide up the work.

Toph: Hey, don't worry about me. I'm good to go.

Katara (still calmly): Well, actually, what I'm trying to say is, some of us might fetch water while someone else might set up the fire pit or put up the tent. *smiles* Even Momo does his fair share.

Toph (slightly irritated): Katara, I'm fine. I can carry my own weight. I don't need a fire. I've already collected my own food. And look. *earth bends a tent* My tent's all set up.

Katara: Well, that's great for you but we still need to finish-

Toph (loudly): I don't understand. What's the problem here??

Katara: Never mind.

Katara then goes to apologize. While also attempting to make sure her and Toph are on good terms by having her acknoledge that she wasn't 100 absolutly in the right.

Katara: Hey Toph, I wanted to apologize for earlier. I think we're all just a little tired and getting on each other's nerves.

Toph: Yeah, you do seem pretty tired.

Katara (slightly irrutated): I meant all of us.

Toph: Well, good night.

Katara: Good night.

By all means, Toph is in the wrong for the sheer refusal for communication. At first Katara calmly explained to her what was needed without even spelling it out. Toph was being passive, so she dropped it. And then she apologizes after doing nothing wrong just so they could be on good terms. Toph was the one being passive agressive. And Katara pretty much let it slide.

This is Katara. The patience she showed right here is her natural, normal self. The rest of the episode is under the context of sleep deprivation and how it's making them all hostile to each other. Including the pacifist Aang. Who's outburst leads Toph to leave. After she does, both Aang and Katara express remorse.

(Side note: I heard people take issue with the line "The stars sure are beautiful tonight, too bad you can't see them, Toph". It's been interpreted as Katara making fun of Toph for being blind, but it's just another instance in the recurring joke of the Gaang forgetting Toph is blind, and listed as such in the official A:TLA Youtube channel).

The Runaway

Update: This section, especially, is majorly outdated.

The episode has a silly opening where Aang is trained by Toph and Katara. Toph misses and accidently hits Katara with a big rock. After Toph doesn't apologize, it leads into a fight which is absolutly not to be taken seriously, that ends with Aang pointing out that it was supposed to be training.

It doesn't work as an exapmle for supposed hot-headedness because the reason this whole thing started because Toph hit Katara with a rock and refused to apologize.

But moving on to the real conflict of these episode, Toph scammed someone and Katara makes it clear that they shouldn't do it again, it'll draw attention to them. Aang promises her it won't happen again but.. um.. you know what happened.

Katara, being responsible, told them to quit because they'd potentially get exposed. Toph didn't reach well, telling her to lighten up. Katara rightfully gets angry, because they really might get exposed and Toph is dismissing her like her concerns are nothing. They have a short argument and Toph storms out.

This is why Katara was angry this episode. Her reasoning for being upset is the Gaang potentially exposing themselves for easy money. That's the conflict.

The Painted Lady

In this episode Katara sees a starving Fire Nation village but Sokka won't allow them to stay due to time limits. So she faked a disease for Appa so they could. Sokka confronts her. At first, she gives up and packs to leave. But since she destroyed the factory that's been polluting the villages water and taking their medicine, the people in charge assumed it was the civilians, and were coming to attack. Sokka and Katara get into a small but intense argument. Important to note, that she doesn't react intensively until Sokka does.

Katara: Well, what was I supposed to do?

Sokka: Leave! Do nothing.

Katara: No! I will never, ever turn my back on people who need me.

Her anger here doesn't highlight hot-headedness, it highlights compassion. Compassion is one of Katara's core traits. She's angry because she's being angrily demanded to see people suffer and stand by. And she will not tolerate it. She will never, ever turn her back on people who need her.

2. In reality, Katara is defined by her patience and compassion.

What I did here was listing off times where Katara did get angry. But Katara is generally a caring, kind person. Rather if it's cheering up Sokka, going shopping with him after he admitted to feeling useless; if it's pulling Aang out of the Avatar state, putting herself at risk when he's out of control; if it's helping deliver a baby of a stranger; or if it's freeing prisoners of the Fire Nation. She demonstrates impressive patience throughout the show.

The Deserter

In this episode Aang was asked to just control fire. Aang gets irrutated himself at this, but Katara assured him that it's probably for a good reaso. But when his master left, he firebent. He was being extremely careless with his new found Fire Bending and burned Katara's hands.

Did she...

A. splashed some water at him.

B. Yelled at him.

C. Ran away crying.

Yeah, she didn't express anger at all. Sokka was who's angry at Aang.

The Desert

The sand benders stole Appa and the Gaang is suck in a desert. Katara demonstrates her patience a lot this episode.

Toph and Aang are arguing about Toph not stopping them.

Aang: You just didn't care! You never liked Appa! You wanted him gone.

Katara: Aang, stop it. You know Toph did all she could. She saved our lives.

Sokka: Who's gonna save our lives now? We'll never make itout of here.

Aang: That's all any of you guys care about, yourselves. You don't care whether Appa is okay or not.

Katara: We're all concerned, but we can't afford to be fighting now.

Aang accused the Gaang of something horrible. Katara told him to stop, but still understood his anger and calmly explained to him that it's important not to fight in a life threatening situation.

Aang then storms out to look for Appa. Katara's response?

Katara: We'd better start walking. We're the only people who know about the solar eclipse. We have to get that information to Ba Sing Se.

She didn't get angry, she was rational and thought about the greater good.

After Aang comes back, Katara suggest they should try sleeping, gives the Gaang all of her bending water without drinking herself. And then finds a way to get to Ba Sing Se using the locations of star systems.

The Gaang spots a cloud and mistakes it for Appa. But Katara realizes the potential in a cloud. She tells Aang to fly and bend the water from the cloud so they could drink.

Katara (disappoibted): Wow, there's hardly any in here.

Aang (intensively): I'm sorry, okay? It's a desert cloud, I did all I could. What's anyone else doing? *Points at Katara* What are you doing?

After dealing with everyone's tireness, Sokka's high nonsense and Aang's attitude, carrying everyone, thinking of possible solutions to ensure they'd all survive, how did she react to Aang accusing her of not doing enough?

Katara: Trying to keep everyone together. Let's just get moving. We need to head this direction.

And after everything she did for everyone, she pulls Aang out of the Avatar state when he's raging, out of control.

Katara is not so hot headed.

She's sweet, nurturing and caring. She demonstrated incredible patience and perhaps even saved the Gang's life in The Desert with her resilience. Katara's compassion is her defining trait.

But that doesn't mean she's not a human being – she's allowed to be flawed, and in the moments where she does, she's very remorseful. And in the moments where she doesn't, people will still hold her accoutable for simply feeling a justified emotion.

Does it make you oh-so-hot headed to stand up to a sexist denying her opportunity? To make sure your friends don't destroy your chances to win a war? To not tolerate being told to see people in need and do nothing in a middle if an argument she didn't start? Of course it doesn't.

And other characters are allowed to express anger, to be flawed, in ways that are way worse than Katara without being labelled annoying hot headed by the fandom.

Katara is widly known to be irrational, letting her anger get the better of her, but it's simply not true.

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