Hungry For…?

Now, there is some room for the other characters to respond which the kidnapping plot forecloses entirely.

I see Aang react with shock and concern. I just think that's in character and respects his commitment to Air Nomad morality. He's the Avatar, after all, and it would not be unreasonable for him, as the idealist he is, to sincerely worry about the spiritual implications for the art of waterbending. Especially because of his affection for Katara, whose courage and compassion he deeply admires and associates with the ideal of waterbending I decided, he points out that flow and healing are the core of waterbending. To use these principles to invade the body instead and violently colonize the nervous system to force it into submission.

Hama is well in the place to counter that this isn't what she did. She didn't invent waterbending to conquer. She didn't do it for fun. She didn't do it because she craved domination. She wasn't the one initiating invasion, violence, incarceration, or overwriting bodies. She wasn't the aggressor; she was the victim.

Sokka, I actually see siding with Hama. I know, but hear me out! Remember, Sokka is the strategist and warrior of the team. Remember that he's the head behind the invasion plan. Remember that he lied to Wan Shi Tong, who is basically a God of Knowledge, to search the Library of Wan Shi Tong for a strategic edge against the Fire Nation. He is the one who came up with the plan to weaponize a cosmic phenomenon against the enemy. If he's comfortable, even enthusiastic, with exploiting the eclipse that incapacitates the bodies of firebenders at scale, why would he be scandalized that Hama did something parallel, at a much smaller scale, through the Moon? Additionally, the Fire Nation raids are not abstract for him. He lived through them and knows what it means when black snow falls. I think he's entitled to have some emotional investment and respond to Hama as a fellow warrior of the Southern Water Tribe with the same strategic acumen and wit he deployed to develop the plan for the invasion. I also think, as a non-bender, he might deem it a little hypocritical to think bloodbending is more dangerous than any other bending. The show never really goes there, but he is constantly fighting with and against individuals who weaponize the environment. He is well aware that his sister could bend water into his nose and down his lungs to drown him on dry ground. Aang could suck the air out of his lungs. Toph could bury him alive and crush his body at will. Just because they don't do it doesn't mean that he doesn't constantly think about all the ways he would be defenseless. He's smart, sure, but as a non-bender, he's well aware of the asymmetries that stake against him in every battle. He might even question if Aang's discomfort is less philosophical and more unfamiliarity with such asymmetries in vulnerability. (Sorry, I just started to think of reasons why Sokka specifically would back Hama, and more than I expected kept emerging. He is from the Southern Water Tribe, too. He has skin in the game.)

I don't know if Toph would have a strong opinion (again, we scratched the kidnapping), but I deem it plausible that she can respect the craft, maybe even feel solidarity, right? The technical ingenuinty would undoubtedly impress her. She, too, developed metal bending when capturers put her into a cage designed to incapacitate her body. As if she wasn't terrified under the fury. As if she didn't dread that her parents would keep her in metal clad rooms once she's delivered back home, forever trapped in a coffin. Not even by enemies but by people who love her. Toph loves her freedom and literally broke the taxonomy of earthbending to keep it. How can she truly judge another woman for doing the same after years of deprivation, isolation and abuse?

See how much character work we can do if we are not preoccupied with boring and incoherent kidnapping mysteries?

In my vision, Katara is initially overwhelmed by the flood of information, her compassion for Hama, and the conflicting flickers in her chest because she wants to agree with all three of her friends, but it's just a lot. I would not underestimate how scary it must be for Katara to know what might happen to her if she was ever captured and incarcerated. I mean, remember the episode in Book One where she lets herself be arrested on purpose to help Haru after he got in trouble because she encouraged him to not hide his earthbending. She notices how that prison was far less scary to her because it was an iron construction surrounded by water. She was arrested as an earthbender, not a waterbender. Now she knows what waits for her when she's ever locked away.

This gives us an entirely different argument for Katara to consider when Hama offers to teach her bloodbending. It need not be framed through domination, coercion, and transgression. The appeal can actually focus on what bloodbending did for Hama: protect her. "You may never need to use this, but this form of waterbending may save your life and freedom if the Fire Nation ever captures you. I spent years developing it to walk free again. You wouldn't have to, because I can arm you with the knowledge and capacity that no one, Fire Nation or otherwise, can ever hurt another waterbender like they hurt my comrades and me. My suffering can spare yours."

Again, without kidnapping plots interfering, we have time. Katara doesn't have to decide right away, but the full moon is tomorrow, so she has about a day to make up her mind. The kids are on a schedule, and if they move on, they won't be able to or have time to come back in a month.

In this version of the episode, we can structure it a little like "Zuko Alone," focusing on Katara's interiority and her trauma, and sprinkle in some flashbacks to give it more texture. We can have her cook with Hama, and after sharing so much about how Hama was harmed and violated, she can also tell Katara about the Water Tribe of her childhood. I mean, Kanna isn't native to the South Pole, and we don't get a clear timeline on when she arrived and settled in as far as I'm aware. Hama isn't only a witness of the annihilation and aggression of the Fire Nation, but also a witness of the before. We can show how meeting Katara gives her reason to hope: for the end of the war and for returning home. Hama would love to see home again, maybe teach some young waterbenders before her time comes. Katara won't have to bear the burden of keeping their lineage alive alone. They don't even talk about bloodbending to really make clear to the kids' audience that this is Katara's choice, not Hama's curse.

Aang may discourage Katara, or at least implore her to really think about what carrying on this technique means, what obligations she'll have, and how it might change her relations to others once she has the power to control others. For whatever purposes. (Look, Aang is written to set the moral standards. This version is less what I would find cool and more about staying as close to the source material as possible to show another version was available within the scope and characterizations.)

However, I don't think I would make Aang central (at least as input) in her contemplations. I think this version of the episode has a lot of potential for some intimate and vulnerable moments between Sokka and Katara. He encourages her to learn from Hama. At this point, we established that it's plausible for Sokka to actually see Hama's point, and her words really got to him: What if Katara is captured by the Fire Nation? Ever since Hama told her story, Sokka can't stop seeing Katara in one of the cages she described. He can't stop seeing her tied up by her hands and feet just to drink. His motivation to encourage Katara is simply because he wants his little sister to be safe. They are moving through Fire Nation territory; currently, Katara is more vulnerable than ever before. Of course, they all are, but with Hama's story in mind, he wants Katara to have a way out of this situation because he's not satisfied with leaving it up to chance. (I think it's so wild that Sokka's most vulnerable moment related to his sister is when he talks to Toph and Katara merely overhears it coincidentally. I think the siblings would've deserved such a moment where they really talk about how losing each other would break them.)

It's a controversial choice Katara is about to make, so I think it's valuable to let several characters counsel her because they love her so much they cannot not care and leave her to herself with the contemplation. However, I think Katara (I mentioned "Zuko Alone" style flashback storytelling) has been through so much that we have so much material to let her make her own considerations. Besides maybe some moments with her mother, where she subtly shares little waterbending lessons Katara didn't understand when she was a little child, I think Zuko's betrayal and moments when she feared for Aang's life for weeks. How powerless she felt. How she agonized that all her skill and knowledge wouldn't be enough to save him after the damage was done. She remembers how little healing could do once Azula's lightning struck and penetrated Aang's body.

When she tells Hama at last that she wants to learn bloodbending and is ready for the lesson, she shares her reasoning under four eyes with her; waterbender to waterbender: She thought about what Aang said about healing, and that he's right; her waterbending heals. She values that. However, healing is reactive; it means people have already been hurt. Violence has already succeeded, already harmed, already killed. Bloodbending, though, can interrupt the harm and violence. It can prevent the body from performing the form to make lightning, the guard from locking the door, the soldier from killing when their knees buckle under them. Depending on how much Kataang the writers would've wanted, they could've adjusted the intensity, but Aang's severe injury after Zuko's betrayal, when Katara truly believed that he might've changed, is the catalyst for her choice to seek and embrace the knowledge and skill of bloodbending. She's tired of waiting for violence to hurt first and for her to heal after the damage is done.

I think that's the way to give Katara agency in learning bloodbending in a way that keeps compassion and care the driving forces of her desire to learn the technique. When you establish this as her motivation, I think her later usage of bloodbending for revenge hits harder, actually, and also intensifies her agecy and responsibilities when she first uses bloodbending to avange her mother, but then stand back.

Last but not least, we have time and opportunity to apprach the actual teaching session with Hama under the full moon as teaching, instead of predatory coercion. In the original episode, Hama forces Katara into bloodbending (without any instructions because even when the episode earlier went out of its way to establish that it took Hama years to develop the technique, you actually just have to terrify peope into skill and that's all the teaching depiction of Southern Waterbending we got... I mean, come on) by forcing Aang and Sokka to attck each other and the only way to safe them is to interrupt Hama through bloodbending (see, didn't even change the "mechanism" through which Katara learns bloodbending: interruption of harm, but in this version, bloodbending as inerruption of harm is insight Katara gaind from her own painful experiences and her desire to protect people from violence). In this revised version, it can be consensual.