there is definitely room to critique the latent misogyny in atla, which is true of basically all art and media (we live in a society), but saying that the world of avatar is largely patriarchal and the position of women in society reflects that system is not a legitimate critique. feminist media is not simply when the story-world is reimagined to empower women even if such a schema doesn’t make sense alongside the other structures maintained in conjunction with patriarchy. liberal feminist ‘girl power’ narratives that refuse to implicate patriarchy as the fundamental contradiction that feminism seeks to resolve cannot be actively feminist media because it elides the central tenet of feminism as an ideological project. feminist media must necessarily depict patriarchy to critique it.
does this mean i think that atla is a particularly feminist show? no, not really, but it undeniably has its moments. as far as depicting the ills of sexism through didactic moral lessons to be processed by children, sokka’s arc in “the kyoshi warriors” & katara’s in “the waterbending master” are rather well done, albeit simplistic by virtue of their intended demographic. the subtler ways patriarchy manifests throughout the world of avatar are, i would argue, more interesting—which isn’t to say that katara fighting pakku doesn’t make me extremely emotional, because it always has, and always will. but the narrative deliberately recognizing and portraying the ways in which women are only granted conditional power under patriarchy (such as in azula’s case) or stripped of autonomy entirely (yue’s positionality merely being the most blatant example) is not a design flaw in a show that otherwise purports to be empowering for girls; it is presenting a world, much like ours, in which the girls who inhabit it must fight for their liberation and the eradication of patriarchy. katara fighting pakku is such an inspiring moment because she is also inspiring every young girl in the audience to fight for their agency and refuse to be cowed by men in unjust positions of authority.
the notion that somehow portraying sexism is itself sexist is patently ridiculous. by that metric, atla is also pro-genocide because the protagonist is a genocide victim whose entire arc is about resisting the eradication of his culture and its values. yes, atla depicts the realities of existing in a patriarchal society, and that does mean that the positions of authority in such a world are occupied by men who enact and benefit from misogyny. atla is also narrated by katara, a complex, three dimensional teenage girl who is the hero of her own story and resists injustice at every turn, including the sexism she faces as a byproduct of living in a highly unjust and violent world. she is the linchpin of the narrative, of equal importance (at the very least!) to aang. dismissing her as “the token girl of the group” is simply incorrect; this is never her position in a narrative wherein she is quite literally its primary storyteller. depicting a consistently patriarchal world that the heroes must fight to overcome does not equate to endorsing that worldview—quite the opposite.
