The unfortunate reality that most ATLA fans seem uniquely unwilling to engage with is the fact that the original show was deeply, deeply flawed. And fixing any one of the show's biggest flaws would have the net result of radically altering the landscape of the show.
Oh, you want to complain about Sokka no longer being as cartoonishly misogynistic as he was in the original (which was largely played for laughs and would not translate to a live action storyline nearly as well as you might want to believe)? You want to complain about Katara possibly not being treated as a stand in for her own mother by her entire family, her community, and especially her brother (and more problematically, her love interest)? You want to complain about the 'gender issues' not being as pronounced in the live action (POSSIBLY! we don't even know exactly what is meant by this because the show hasn't even come out yet, but too many people are jumping the gun and reacting to the clickbait rather than the actual content of the article that was published) as they were when the show came out? Ok, let's talk about that.
But first, let's talk about why it is that the Water Tribes are the only societies in the world of ATLA to exhibit such overt and hamfisted misogyny in the first place. This despite the fact that much less overt sexism is baked into the worldbuilding--and not the kind of in-your-face misogyny that the show realized it was dealing with intending to subvert, but the kind where every single world leader in the show is a man (Azula's brief stint as Fire Lord doesn't count), the entirety of the White Lotus (the only group of people aside from the gaang to be shown attempting to put the world back into balance) is comprised of men, and every mentor in the show is a man with one (1) exception--and that one exception and what she taught Katara are both ultimately villainized and treated as a cautionary tale.
There's been a lot of chatter over the years about the way Katara was treated in LoK, and the misogyny inherent in her 'arc' (if it can even be called that)--but very little acknowledgement that the seeds of her eventual treatment were planted in the original show. It's in the way that of course the only girl (EDIT: in book 1, and I could get into the way Toph's issues with gender are handled but that's really another post; also, much as I love Suki, she doesn't count either. She's in a handful of episodes and has very little character to speak of except 'girl badass who showed Sokka the error of his ways', and no real character arc.) in the gaang is The Mom, including to her own love interest, and while I enjoy momtara and dadko as much as the next girl that doesn't mean I think that this necessarily has to be an immutable cornerstone of her character. I think more interesting things can be done, and I don't know whether the live action show will do them, but I'm not willing to write it off just because the showrunner thinks Katara's warmth, optimism, and compassion are more key to the core of her character than her being everyone else's mom.
It's also in the way that there's this collective amnesia about the fact that Katara's attempt to fight the patriarchy in the North Pole ended not with Pakku realizing that girls can so learn combat bending just as well as boys... but with Pakku noticing the betrothal necklace he'd once given Kanna, putting together that Katara is Kanna's granddaughter, and allowing Katara to be an exception to the rule (which, as far as we know because it was never revisited and there were no girls training alongside Katara at the end of book 1, remained in place) because of that connection. Because of who her grandmother was, not because of who she is or what she was able to accomplish or how skilled she was with bending even before she found someone willing to teach her.
Not to mention the fact that Katara's endgame romance, which we're then supposed to believe lasted her the entire rest of her life, was one in which her feelings were decidedly unimportant, textually and subtextually. Aang didn't care about the fact that she'd never once expressed to him that she had romantic feelings--he cared about his feelings, pushed them on her multiple times, and despite the last time including an outright rejection from her.... she resolves those feelings off screen and then evidently is in love with him after all.
Katara's story was great for 2005... but this isn't 2005 anymore, the live action show is not going to be a cartoon aimed at seven-year-olds, and I think people are freaking out a little too much about the possibility that maybe there are other interesting stories to tell with these characters than an exact rehash of what we got in the cartoon.
If what you want is the cartoon with no changes..... go watch it. It's right there and it hasn't been changed.
