mereblogs

First off I’ll say that we don’t know exactly how much combat waterbending Katara does as an adult. I haven’t seen the new movie but I’m assuming she’s still a full combatant in that. And we also know that Katara is Korra’s waterbending master. But outside that we mostly see Katara revered as a healer.

Here’s why that bothers me.

Katara is a genocide survivor. She’s the last waterbender of the Southern Water Tribe, and she is incredibly invested in reclaiming her Tribe’s waterbending culture. We can see this very clearly in how excited Katara is to meet and learn from Hama in The Puppetmaster.

The biggest difference we are aware of between the Northern and Southern styles within the show is that bending in the North is gender segregated. Women are only allowed to heal.

This is clearly not true in the South. Beyond what we’re told about the difference in betrothal customs, we also explicitly see a young Hama doing combat waterbending before she’s captured.

Katara fights not only for the right to learn combat waterbending for her own sake - although she clearly enjoys being able to fight - but also as a means of carrying on the Southern tradition. She doesn’t want her tribe’s waterbending culture to be subsumed by the North’s.

That’s why it stings when Katara is known primarily as a healer. She was the genocide survivor who brought back the culture of Southern Waterbending just as much as Aang brought back Airbending. She should be recognised for that, and that necessarily involves being a great combat waterbending master - which Katara clearly is in the original series.

Instead the list of achievements we get for Katara, aside from specifically training Aang and Korra, could just have easily have been the accomplishments of a traditional Northern female waterbender.

Like I get that is practical advice, but people should not have to fucking do that. They should not have to train themselves around not sounding like AI, when AI only sounds like that BECAUSE it was trained on them.

Be honest