The thing I find really awful about Hama’s storyline is that I understand what the writers were trying to do? It’s one more part of the third book’s main theme (that was built up to repeatedly in earlier seasons) which is that the world isn’t black and white?
They do this most obviously, of course, with Zuko’s entire plotline, starting him out as the major antagonist and repeatedly and continuously peeling back layer after layer until he’s been entirely turned around, narratively, from the ‘big bad’ of the first episode, to a fundamental ally by the end. But they do it all over the place at different levels. Zuko is an individual who undergoes a redemtion, who changes from one state to the other. Then there’s the contrast of people Like Jeong Jeong and General Fong, Iroh and Long Feng, as ways to show that even if a culture is ‘evil’ or ‘good', individuals in that culture can be different, can even poison parts of that culture with enough power, or begin the healing process for more than themselves, with enough power.
Then they do something I’ve never seen any other children’s cartoon even attempt, which is they do it on a cultural level, too. They take Aang to the Fire Nation and show him that even the Fire Nation, as a culture, isn’t all bad. There are fishing villages and schools and acting troupes doing what fisherpeople and students and actors do. Cultures are made up of people, and the people aren’t wholly good or bad.
And the thing with Hama, what they were trying to do, was add a layer of this nuance to bending. They established, waaay back in season 1, that water is the ‘good’ element. Water heals, Fire destroys.
And the message of Hama’s episode was supposed to be ‘Water can destroy, too.’ (Later to be hammered home with the Sun Warrior episode with ‘Fire is life, too.’) But they kind of lost it because... because they lost their own message in trying to cram that revelation into one episode and a throw-away episodic character.
It kind of erased Hama’s nuance. In bringing the focus of that episode to how water-bending can be just as destructive in it’s own way as fire-bending, the nuance of Hama’s story, her suffering, gets lost in the cackling villain stereotype. The nuance is there, in her story as an abused woman who fought back against her abusers the only way she could, but in their effort to drive home ‘look, water-bending can be awful too’ they completely erased the power (and empowerment) behind it’s creation.
They included all the pieces for a true nuanced reading of Hama’s story, where she is neither wholly victim or villain, but a melting pot of both, because that’s far more realistic than either extreme. But they lost it, they missed the mark because our emotional conclusion to that episode was Katara’s horror, her swearing off of this path (which, I will admit I love that she didn’t manage to hold for it for more than like half a season), her disownment of Hama. Her complete and utter rejection of Hama, which feels like a victory in the face of the truly awful things Hama did, and thus completely eclipses the pity we ought to feel for Hama. Which is then reinforced as Hama cackles as she’s led away like it’s some kind of victory for her.
An abused-abuser is given into the care of people who are alligned with her old abusers, and she's more focused on ‘lol I corrupted you to, I win'??? They’re so focused on Katara’s arc here, the ‘add nuance to bending’ theme, that they completely miss the moment that proper characterisation and representation of the complexities of abuse could have made the episode a true masterpiece.
What if Hama doesn’t laugh? What if she screams? What if she’s furious, and terrified, and thrashing as she’s dragged away? What if she begs Katara to save her, avenge her, continue her work, kill them all, please, you’re just like me, you have to STOP THEM!
After that, I don’t think it truly matters what Katara does. What’s the right answer here? To violate the people who are just trying to protect their own in order to free a serial killer? To leave an abused woman in the hands of people alligned with her abusers?
They both have benefits and problems. If she freed Hama, what then? They're children already burdened with stopping a whole goddamned war, they don’t have the resources to take care of, rehabilitate, or even relocate Hama, and if they leave her where she is, what’s to stop her from just starting up again once they’re gone? If she didn’t, what then? Can she really just leave a member of her tribe in the hands of her enemies? What does ‘I will never turn my back on people who need me’ mean when both sides of the war need her, and picking a side means she has to turn her back on one of them.
Have the guard take Hama away or have Katara save her, it doesn’t matter. Afterwards, have Katara break down. She collapses to her knees in the dirt with her arms around herself like she’s trying to hold all the pieces of herself together and sobs ‘I didn’t know what to do, I couldn’t save everyone, what was I supposed to do?’ And she looks to her big brother, who’s only a year older than her, because there’s no one else to look to, because this war has taken everyone from her in one way or another. It took her mother when it killed her, it took her father when he went to fight, it took Gran-Gran when it called Katara to fight, and now it’s even taken Hama, a woman who should have been another Grandmother to her, by turning her into a monster.
And, because this is a kid’s cartoon, and there has to be a neat bow and a moral message, and this is already getting pretty damn dark, Sokka gets a moment to be the mature one, to show off how much he’s grown, been forced to grow by this war, and he kneels beside Katara and puts his hand on her shoulder and says ‘sometimes there is no right answer, you’ve just got to do your best, and you did. Sometimes you do your best and you try your hardest and you still don’t win, you still lose something, and that’s okay, that doesn’t make you bad, or wrong, or a failure. I’m so proud of you for trying anyway.' And he holds her as she cries under the full moon.
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