#wasted characters

Thank you for the lovely ask! I do like Bela a lot and I do fucking hate s3 so this is an interesting question.

An older youngling the lucked her way through order 66 to later join the inquisitions and work her way up so she can grow strong enough to end the monster that killed her family

Not realising until her death that she had become what she worked to destroy

(The title’s just an allusion/joke. Shoot me.)

Correct me if I’m wrong (I know I could be) but out of the entirety of the ATLA and LOK series, we witness three official female leaders in total: Earth Queen Hou Ting, Commander Kuvira and Fire Lord Izumi.

EQ Hou Ting is every horrific stereotype about female leaders, and women in general, imaginable (and probably how Bryke wanted Azula to be written and interpreted). She’s greedy, cruel, temperamental, hateful, vain, self-absorbed, demanding, irrational, egotistical, preoccupied with appearances/status, etc. I think her sole purpose was to show how much more insidious the Earth Kingdom’s monarchal rule and police state politics had become, but with the added bonus of getting to represent the evil witch-queen of Bryke’s nightmares. Her death was also, dare I say, extremely violent and arguably uncalled for. But she’s in the same coffin as P’Li and Ming Hua there.

C. Kuvira is...well...a dictator, to put it nicely. Irregardless of how she may view herself and her actions too. She was lawfully chosen as the leader of the Earth Kingdom after the EQ was murdered by wannabe anarchists and Suyin rejected her chance to take the spot, sure. But after reaching incumbency, she immediately set out on a mission to ‘right the wrongs’ of the EK’s shortcomings and solve international drama plus world hunger by turning the whole planet into one big gulag-plantation under her authority. Neither her reasoning, fears or her childhood give much illumination for the decisions she makes (and of course don’t excuse them) but we’re supposed to accept that they do. (I say this while acknowledging that she wasn’t completely wrong to want the Earth Kingdom to be ruled by a strong, unyielding person that would actually make improvements for the betterment of others.) Worse yet, it’s been theorized that she was supposed to replace Azula in the hearts of many Azula fans and be the in-spirit ‘Azula Redemption’ that we still haven’t gotten. Furthermore, they continued her arc in the LOK comics that, amazingly, are reportedly worse than LOK at developing believable, consistent 3D characters. She was adopted into and raised within the still well-off Beifong family but her sister Opal was apparently mean to her for some reason? Well, that’s very unfortunate, but does not make me sympathize with her anymore than I already may have in the tv series she was conceived for. Azula’s unfinished story stays superior and imo far easier to be understanding over. Why keep trying to rewrite Azula into these other characters when the real deal is already around anyway? Why are they being bitter and headstrong over her, even now? Will Azula ever get to just try on the Fire Lord’s headpiece?     All in all, Kuvira gets off basically scot-free with no repercussions (despite Suyin of all people hilariously promising that she’d get exactly that) or even a chance to actually make up for what she and her accomplices did. Her arc continuation as far as I can see, is basically just filler that does no justice to her character or that of others. All this and she’s allegedly a personal favorite of Bryke—that they may even have called ‘attractive’ at one point—which may reveal a lot about why they placed so much focus on her post-series that other just as enrapturing characters did not get. There’s a huge amount of bias present around her.

FL Izumi is Zuko’s daughter and it’s a wonder that we were given even that much information on her. In the entire series she spoke an astounding three lines. Three. All of them on the same topic, and in response to a man with far more influence on the story than her inquiring why she’s adamant about not bringing the Fire Nation into another war. As if the last war the FN was in didn’t last a century and finally end less than a century ago. She had her lines wasted on that exchange.

All this to say that we watched the entirety of two series, with no positive, extremely influential female leaders being truly represented. Two of them are very negative figures. One is downright nasty albeit less ‘conquest-thirsty’ than another. One operates as basically a silent figure in-show. Only one has a profound effect on Avatar Korra, and the feelings the two share in that one important scene seem to be forgotten just as quickly as they come. All three were meant to be forgettable in their original appearances.