forestofglory

I just watched Avatar: the Last Airbender for the first time. It was great! I loved the characters and how they grew and changed over the show. I also loved all the attention to wordbuilding details like building styles and food. I have some thoughts about how the show depicts traditional femininity and domestic labor that I wanted to share.

**Here be Spoilers**

For the most part I loved how the show dealt with these topics. It's pretty feminist in ways you might not notice.

Katara is very traditionally feminine in very badass way and that’s something I don’t see in media very often. Katara is in touch with her emotional side, she can do traditional women's work like cooking and sewing, and the show makes that important. She’s constantly doing emotional labor for team Avatar. I don’t think anyone else in the group even knows how to cook. Katara is also a good fighter but for me her most badass moments are when she uses her feminine side. When a woman they are traveling with goes into labor on the road she takes charge and safely delivers the baby. She heals Aang when he would otherwise have died after Azula hit him with a lighting bolt. And when Aang enters the Avatar state to attack the Sand Benders who kidnapped Appa Katara grabs his arm and silently faces him down until he calms down and stops attacking. This is incredibly brave of her.

It's a little frustrating then to watch how the rest of the crew takes her for granted and never really notices how much work she does to keep everyone comfortable. The show takes time to show us how Sokka has an important role despite his lack of bending but Katara's domestic labor never got explicitly acknowledged. In fact when Katara, after seeing a play about the group, protests that she doesn't just cry and talk about hope all the time everyone else just kinda shrugs failing to see what she does for them.

I was also a little sad that we never got to see waterbenders other than Katara heal. Healing was explicitly labeled as for women and Katara chooses to learn fighting over healing. I wanted Katara to be able to study what she wanted unconstrained by gender roles but I wished healing had been acknowledged as an important skill. I would have liked someone to tell Aang that to master waterbending he needed to learn healing as well as fighting. I also would have loved to see some healers at work during the battle at the North Pole.

Still Avatar did one of the best jobs I've seen in fiction of making domestic and emotional labor and vital part of a character and having that make the character powerful and important. I want to see more characters like Katara.