Loklove48

I think it's really infuriating every time someone tries to defend themselves from sexism allegations due to how they talk about korra with "well toph" or "well katara". On so many levels the fandom doesn't even understand katara at all.

Toph was originally written as a guy and really doesn't have the emotional moments korra and katara do, korra and katara also notably have focus on their romantic pursuits and in general tend to align a bit with feminity in a way toph notably doesn't. While korra is still more tomboyish she will dress feminine and not be embarrassed to.

The fandom hated katara when the show was airing and we still regularly see it not know how to be normal about her. They mock her grief, they mock her emotions. Her being stuck on the death of her mother is treated like a joke.

Katara is used as a shield by the fandom and still regularly disregarded and insulted when korra isn't in the equation. People don't understand her character. Yes it makes sense for her to be grieving her mother when she's never been given the room to actually process it and was thrust into an adult role as a tween/teenager. She hates being seen as a mom to the team and yet the fandom constantly regurgitates that she is to combat any shipping and claim any romance with her in Canon is badly handled.

Her arc is about reclaiming childhood and being able to get to a point where she can start to heal from her grief. She's a world class bender who never wants to be pigeonhold into JUST being a healer, but she still takes pride in healing and her healing saved aang, why does the fandom believe she'd be so resentful of it that she'd hate to be deemed "the best healer in the world" by korra?

Toph is easy to like because she never goes against what fans thought, people hated katara so her pushing back against katara and making fun of her came with most people being on her side. She pushes back on feminity and makes fun of it/rejects it with us only ever getting 1 episode of her actually engaging with it in any way that could be positive.

People love tophs overconfidence but hate korras. People love how much of a snarky asshole toph is and think it's great when she rejects authority but when korra does it it's a problem. Korra is just as much of a protege as Toph was with her knowing the base of 3 elements as a child before the white lotus even find her and yet People try to argue all the time that she's unskilled and unimpressive.

Toph can do everything that korra does and people will trip over themselves to defend her but the minute Korra does it suddenly it's an issue.

"Well she's the avatar she's meant to-" the avatars have shown themselves to be diverse. No two that aang talked to about how to handle Ozai could agree. Toph actually really liked Korra in spite of herself for the brief time they met in season 4. I'm willing to bet if Toph had been her bending teacher she would've been completely delighted by korra. She's never one to compliment people so I doubt we'd see her commend Korra for being better with earth than aang/capable of metal bending the way someone like Katara would. But I still think she would've fully taken a shine to pint sized baby avatar korra.

The fandom so badly wants to act like Toph is better than korra in ever way when really we've been shown that tophs emotional distance negatively impacted her family life. And we can't argue that it doesn't make sense because nothing about toph ever screamed that she was a matronly person. She desired freedom and gave her kids way too much of it.