Do people who mock Katara realize that she, at the age of eight, literally saw her mother’s dead body???
(That’s Katara on the left and Hakoda on the right)
When twelve-year-old Aang sees the skeleton of Gyatso, he reacts (appropriately) by going into the Avatar State, but you’re going to mock Katara for being traumatized after seeing her mother’s dead body, when she was eight, after just talking to her?
Not to mention the fact that Kya was wearing the necklace:
Which means, you know, an eight-year-old most likely took the jewelry off of her mother’s corpse and put it on, in a combination of shock and grief, but sure, let’s make jokes about how she’s overreacting when she emotionally clutches that same necklace from time to time. How did you think she got it?
Did I mention she was eight? Because she was eight.
I was just going to end the post here but one last point: she was eight and she was a civilian. You know how This Is War has the lyric “The soldier | The civilian”. That’s Sokka and Katara. Even at the age of 9/10, Sokka was clearly in Soldier Mode. He didn’t hesitate in joining the other soldiers in fight. Meanwhile, Katara didn’t hesitate in making sure that the other civilians were safe. While Sokka obviously loved Kya, of course he loved her, he was probably already a little disconnected by the reality that most soldiers have to face: that people die in wars. Then there’s the fact that he wasn’t the one who had to run to get Hakoda (”I ran as fast as I could,” Katara says, as she wished she had been faster), the fact that he was on the other side of the village, the fact that he had celebrated a victory with the other soldiers at having turned the Southern Raiders back, and the fact that he didn’t rush into the tent to immediately be confronted with her dead body…Katara’s line, “You didn’t love her like I did” is obviously incorrect, but I think it’s safe to say that he didn’t experience the trauma of losing her like Katara did, due to a variety of different factors including all of the above and the sheer fact that tragedies affect people differently, regardless of the actual variables.
I think that’s kinda the point of Avatar, isn’t it? To show that people from the same family, in the same battle, in the same war, can come out with drastically different experiences.