Regarding the water tribe characters
I've said this before on my Twitter in someone else's comments but avatar is stifled by the perspective of the White American liberalism of its creators and the water tribe characters are the biggest victims of this stifling.
I mean there's of course Katara who slowly throughout the show is reduced to being the Avatar's wife. She is remembered in world for being Aang's significant other and though we are told that she had important work in the Republic like banning blood bending for instance, we aren't shown any of this stuff. She's mostly Aang's significant other until the end where she's just the healer every now and then.
I also find it strange that she never called Aang to order when he didn't pay attention to his other kids but then again the writers never give her an opportunity for her to call Aang out when he does something uncalled like the two non-con kisses. From what I've heard, they say they resolved it off screen which is bs to me.
Then there's Sokka who did have that whole arc about unlearning misogyny and he has an arc where he's trained by Piandao but we don't really get an opportunity for much else and initially I was content until the episode where he revealed that he didn't remember how his mom looked and that when he tried, all he saw was Katara.
That was genuinely so exciting for me, it was the first time, as a kid, that I saw a darker skinned boy be given the opportunity to be so vulnerable. I mean memory repression is a coping mechanism the brain uses right, and to finally find out that Katara wasn't as alone as she thought she was when it came to the unresolved grief that came with losing Kya and to know she heard that her brother has that too!
This was exciting, I believed that maybe they would finally talk about their mother properly but nope, it's never talked about again, Sokka goes back to just being Mr. Funny Guy and later even has his passion for engineering be ridiculed as well.
Now obviously I think Katara has it worse, I mean the spirit water being a symbol of her virginity thing kinda did it for me, but I feel like Sokka's memory repression never being touched upon is part of that pattern.
Now personally for me, the thing that made me realise that the writers were stifled by their white liberal beliefs and were weird to the water tribe characters was when I noticed the treatment of the water bending avatars that we know of which is Kuruk and Korra.
Both Kuruk and Korra are subjected to a very specific type of gratuitous violence (I said this exact thing in a few Twitter comments if anyone is reading this and thinks it sounds familiar). This violence specially involves the destruction of their spirits in the most painful way possible. It also involves them being hyper aware that their spirits are being broken and being helpless to stop the pain from continuing, with Korra, it destroyed her connection to her past lives and with Kuruk, it killed him out right.
Then there's of course Korra's torture that seemed rape adjacent and Kuruk actually got raped. Now I personally don't have a problem with story tellers talking about sexual assault but what kills me about these two cases is how the writers made them react to it.
Korra was temporarily immobilised and traumatised by what happened to her, but in a later season she goes to the man who facilitated her torture for help and, I'm paraphrasing this part because I can't remember her wording, tells that man she needed to experience that because it taught her a lesson.
And then there's Kuruk who was intoxicated when he got assaulted, couldn't remember what happened to him but was made to feel guilty for that happening to him. It's described as a man needed to find some way to relax and let loose or something like that and he is made to apologize for being assaulted.
Now I'm not an Indigenous person but I am a Black African and darker skinned and these characters meant so much to me and my equally darker skinned cousins because it was the first time we saw people who had our exact complexion. So you'll have to understand how hard I cried when I read what happened to Kuruk and how angry I was with the justification for the violence that Korra was subjected to.
I was already disillusioned with avatar because I hated the treatment of Katara and Korra and was put off by it but I didn't have the words to describe it. Then I heard that books that came out that had both the story of Kyoshi and even Kuruk and I was excited to learn about. I heard he died younger than any other avatar so I knew there was some sort of tragedy that took place but I wasn't sure what, I regret reading it because it felt like TLOK all over again all that I was thinking was "Dear God not him too" and I stopped reading and was left in tears as I said earlier.
The whole thing also made me not like Yangchen AT ALL and I noticed that the people who write stuff in this universe seem to be ok with lifting up an Airbender avatar/air nomads by having some water tribe characters be their stepping stool.
And both water bending avatars are seen by the people of their world as the worst avatars. It's irritating because it was because of Yangchen that Kuruk had to fight the spirits that were slowly destroying his spirit and if it weren't for Kuruk, the world would have ended right there and then but they couldn't let the people of the world know because then it would ruin Yangchen's reputation.
Obviously with Korra, as of writing this, we don't know the whole story of what happened for the world to hate her but I wouldn't be shocked if it turns out that it wasn't her fault at all either.
All in all I don't like how the water tribe characters are treated it makes me genuinely uncomfortable
