It's crazy to willfully not understand what we're talking about. You're the problem for not accepting that the narrative does exactly that and then saying we're weird for noticing it.
Katara is mostly retained for being Aang's wife, and therefore the Avatar's wife, and the mother of his children, especially Tenzin, the new airbender (because many people don't even know the other two, Bumi and Ky, exist), as well as a healer, more precisely "the greatest healer." Something she absolutely didn't want in the original show! And don't tell me Katara had the right to change her mind with age. She's a fictional character. Which means that if she changes her mind, we should see it and, above all, see the reasoning behind it; otherwise, it's just a slap in the face to what the character was in the original show, and therefore inconsistent and negligent in the narrative. Stop treating fictional characters like real people.
And the other things added to The Legend of Korra show do not compensate, because the truth is that the storytelling shows something other than what the dialogues say about Katara's character.
Firstly, Katara is called master by a college at the South Pole in front of Korra? Yet she will only be a healer throughout the show and in the moments she appears.
Secondly, Katara helped with Republic City? But she's still the only one among the Gaang without a statue.
She banned bloodbending? But we never see her involved in anything related to it.
It's commonly called "I don't want to do anything with this female character since she became the romantic partner of my main male character; but to avoid coming across as a misogynist, I'm going to say that she has done important things and that she is important, even if my narration ultimately contradicts these things because in truth I will never directly include her or directly link her to the things I said she did or that she was!"
And don't tell me that it's because she's old that Katara can't attend a bloodbending trial (knowing that when the trial took place, in reality, she wasn't even old and Sokka and Toph were there), or even her granddaughter's ceremony.
Because the other members of the older Gaang strangely have no problem being in action as old men, or even their younger versions from the past in the flashbacks of The Legend of Korra.
It's crystal clear that once Katara became Aang's partner, her role was reduced to that of a mother and a healer. Your insistence on claiming otherwise doesn't make you a feminist. It's the opposite. And we're not misogynists for pointing out damn narrative problems. It's a topsy-turvy world, isn't it?
I should also mention that this person also talked about Pema, but I didn't include that part. It's important to know that Pema is an even worse case than Katara. Because, in fact, the entire reason for Pema and Tenzin's relationship is that she wanted to give him children, unlike Lin. And narratively, aside from being the mother of Tenzin's children and taking care of them, she doesn't have a real role as an individual character... Her childbirth is even used in the show for a dramatic moment.
We don't reduce female characters to the roles of childbearers. It's the narrative itself that does that. And if you insist on not wanting to see it, that's your prerogative.
