@iltacatact replied to your post “I feel like when I was younger, I didn’t really care much at all about...”
i loved her arch but i just feel like her personality and her relationship with sokka could have gotten more development. everytime she's on screen she just kinda runs away crying about being in an arranged marriage. what are her likes? her dislikes? what does she stand for?
I can really relate to this because that’s actually exactly how I felt about Princess Yue when I was a kid - I was like, she’s pretty, but she’s just always crying and there’s no point to her. Whatevs. Now, though, I have a bit of a different perspective in two ways.
One: I deliberately read her relationship with Sokka based on the emotional cues the show gives me for how it’s meant to be read rather than how I’d feel after knowing someone for so little time. The episodes in the show are short and there’s a lot going on during the seige of the north, so I kinda chose to give ATLA the benefit of the doubt and assume that there’s validity in the emotions that Yue and Sokka are shown as feeling about one another. Personally, I wouldn’t feel so deeply after so little time - but they clearly do.
Two: She stands for doing the right thing even if it hurts her. Yue crying so much felt really weird and unrelatable to me the first time I watched the show - but during my current rewatch, it really moved me, because I saw a girl that just can’t hold in anymore that she’s having an extended emotional breakdown over choosing to sacrifice her freedom to perform the duty she holds for her people, for the entirety of the two episodes she’s in. And then she sacrifices her life to save the moon spirit and dies. The whole time we know her, she is in mourning for what could have been, because she’s been sacrificing her own wants and needs for the good of her tribe since she was little. What are her likes? Well, for one, she likes Sokka - but that doesn’t get to matter. None of her wants really do. She was born to serve her tribe and she lived to seventeen to save the moon spirit, and she never got to be her own person. And it’s not fair, it’s not fair at all... but she’s choosing to do it because she loves her people and thinks it’s important and the right thing to do.