yue suffers under the traditionalism of her culture the same way katara does but since she doesn't actively fight against it up to and including her death no one talks about it. the instant iroh (a firebender she does not know besides his moment of fighting zhao) suggests that the solution is to sacrifice herself she is ready to do it without hesitation. even her dad doesnt seem sad about it upon hearing the news, he just accepts it
before i elaborate more on yue, i would also like to point out something crucial about katara that i think a lot of people neglect: from the ages of 11-14, her village was almost entirely female. with the exception of sokka, everyone she interacted with on a daily basis during these extremely formative years in any child’s development were with women and girls of various ages. while women of course can still maintain the system in the absence of men under patriarchy (and we do see this to be the case in their village to an extent), katara does not have to worry about being abused by the men around her, because there are no men around her. of course, her life is under potent threat, but that threat is external, not from her own people. sokka may be a pain in the ass, but he doesn’t actual wield any material power over her. she takes out her frustration with being forced to do domestic labor out on him, but he’s not even the one ordering her to do that: their grandmother is. sokka only has any authority whatsoever because he tacitly agrees with everything kanna believes, and she is truly the one in charge. katara feels stifled, miserable, and angry in her village not because of the traditions of her people, but because of the genocide they are facing. perhaps, in a world where the fire nation did not devastate the southern water tribe, katara’s greatest gripe would be the patriarchal traditions of her culture, but we really have no way of knowing that. she takes her anger out on sokka primarily because she has nowhere else to put her rage, and as her older sibling, he is the easiest target. that is the social dynamic that characterized her early teenage years.
while katara did technically still grow up in a patriarchal society, it was a highly unusually organized one, since it was still being led by women, with no men save for a single teenage boy. katara has the ability to fight back against the sexism she faces because she was actually raised to value herself. she is confident in her own agency and strength and feels it is distinctly cruel and foolish to deny a woman their rights on the basis of their gender because the only misogyny she ever truly faced growing up was her brother saying “boys rule girls drool” and inane shit like that. she was certainly never raised to think she couldn’t be a great waterbender, and we see from hama’s pov that for at least a century women waterbenders in the south have been at the vanguard of the resistance and actively fought against the genocide of their people. the fact that pakku denies her is thus totally absurd to her, because from her point of view, it’s quite literally the first she’s ever heard of the notion that women cannot use waterbending combat forms. of course she is familiar with the idea that men and women each have distinct social roles (and she has definitely internalized some of these notions subconsciously, even if she also resents its most obvious manifestations), but she has never once truly entertained the idea that her life’s only value is to serve men, so she balks at the idea that she “belongs in the healer huts,” that she is already engaged despite only being fourteen, that she must be the one to apologize to someone being unreasonable and cruel to her simply because he is an old man and she is a young girl. she has the frame of reference to notice how fucked up these manifestations of patriarchy are, because she grew up in a village surrounded by women telling her how amazing and special she is, and so she knows her own worth and will never compromise that for anyone.
yue’s situation is entirely different. after all, katara is not her mirror; sokka is. if anything, katara is her foil, her opposite. katara has the agency yue is denied. yue was raised with privileges katara was not: wealth, safety, resources, comfort, security. but katara had the privilege of being allowed to value herself. keep in mind that even though kanna may torment katara by making her do laundry, she’s still the type of person who crossed the entire globe to get away from cultural values she disagreed with, and those are the kinds of beliefs she is imparting upon her granddaughter. katara would never stand for being forced into an arranged marriage against her will; to her, the very notion is unthinkable. but to yue, it is her duty. she is a woman (read: just turned sixteen, therefore of marrying age) and a princess, and so she has equal duties to her father and her people (note that katara is also the daughter of the chief, but she displays absolutely no feelings regarding this fact whatsoever one way or another; hakoda is just her dad to her, nothing more). although yue is clearly a person brimming with desires, emotions, passions, interests, hopes, dreams, joys, fears, thoughts, humor, excitement, wisdom, and curiosity, her personhood is not recognized by anyone in her tribe (that we see). her father sees her as a symbol, her fiancé sees her as an object, and they both view her as property to be traded in an exchange she is not privy to and has no real say in. yue does not want hahn in the slightest, and yet she will be expected to bear his children, his heirs. in a beautifully tragic way, becoming the moon spirit was actually the best option available to her. in her final moments between human and spirit realms, she can finally exercise her own autonomy, and chooses to kiss sokka without guilt or shame. she can only reclaim her agency once she renounces her humanity.
there is a lot to be said about the ways in which yue and sokka parallel each other. it is, after all, yue’s primary relationship in the narrative. she was constructed specifically with this dynamic in mind. I could and often do enumerate the many ways in which they function as mirrors to each other, the most obvious being the ways in which their duties to their respective father-chiefs and cultures/people leads them to fully internalize the notion that their martyrdom is not only logical and necessary, but indeed, the ultimate exercise of their utility, which means that self-sacrifice is actually aspirational, because all they are good for is performing their duty. yue’s duty as a Woman and sokka’s duty as a Man involve functional differences when practiced, but ultimately arrive at the same conclusion: their ultimate purpose is to die for their people. their bodies are mere vessels, they must endure their pain silently for the sake of their people, their lives are not their own. yes, sokka complains a lot, but never where it counts. yes, yue cries a lot, but she never renounces her duty. and sokka would never force her to renounce her duty, because even if she claims he doesn’t (which is funny in its own way, lol he literally doesn’t tell anyone anything!), he understands what that’s like. sokka and yue’s story could only ever end in tragedy, because as much as they love and value each other, they do not value themselves enough to fight for their happiness. had the siege not happened, yue would have married hahn, and been miserable. the only person who could possibly intervene on their behalf and advocate for yue’s agency is katara, not sokka. and that is not because katara loves yue; after all, she barely knows yue. but unlike sokka, and unlike yue, katara loves herself.
as katara says in “the painted lady,” you can’t wait around for someone else to save you, you have to help yourself. that is the ethos that guides her. even when she acts in service of helping others, it is with the philosophy that she is doing right by herself before all else. she is her own hero, and by exercising that heroism, she is proving her own strength and power and reaffirming her own heroic narrative. of course she has a great deal of compassion for others, but that stems, first and foremost, in compassion for herself. she is guided by a very strong self-belief that what she is doing is right, that she is always fighting on the side of justice, that her anger and passion is always righteous, that she has the capacity to be a hero. and again, that is because she was raised by kind, competent women who told her time and time again that she is special, that she is the embodiment of hope for their culture, that she is valuable and worthy and strong. sokka grew up believing that his ultimate duty was to lay down his life for katara, and katara was raised with the belief that her duty was to live. to live, and to be a hero, and to bring hope back to her people. and so, if given the opportunity, she would fight for the right for yue to choose whom to marry, to dictate the terms of her own fate, to act upon her own desires. because katara knows this to be a fundamental right that she deserves, and so she recognizes that everyone else deserves it too.
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