Female Rebellion in Avatar: The Last Airbender

Image take by Jasmyn Rivers-Green. Photographed fan art purchased at AnimeNext 2018.

If you haven’t watched Avatar: The Last Airbender then you are 15 years behind on a show that may have been the height of your childhood cartoon repertoire. ATLA, as fans most often refer to it, is a cartoon series about a boy named Aang (pronounced like “bang”), his flying bison, lemur-bat, and fan glider on an adventure to explore the world and a quest of self discovery. I’m kidding. The show is about a twelve year old boy named Aang, but it’s so much more than a simple coming of age, self-identity tale. It’s filled with moral ambiguity, the villains are painted as human (besides the big bad, who is purely evil carrying on his inherited terrorism), the colonizer/conqueror narrative has a familiar historical presence, and the topic of genocide is explored through the slaughter of the Air Nomads, but everything changes when the women in the series attack (queue the sound of distant djeme drums). And I am disappointedly shaking my head if you don’t know why that line is so pinnacle. There is an endless number of high quality characters in ATLA, but today is about the women and their feminist regime. These women are diverse in background, ability, education, and affiliation in the on-going centurial war that is raging around them.

Firstly, we have 14-year-old Katara. Due to her home, the Southern Water Tribe, being raided by Fire Nation fleets, she stands as the sole waterbender left in her hemisphere of the world. After a long journey to the Northern Water Tribe in hopes to find Waterbending Master Paku to teach her, she encounters sexism that is not unfamiliar to our reality. Paku informs her that the women of the Northern Water Tribe are forbidden to learn combative bending techniques, rather, they solely train in the medicinal arts of waterbending. Katara offers the wisdom that tradition is the enemy of progress and that in a war, all capable and willing persons should learn to fight, so she takes this cultural battle head on; she challenges Master Paku. Her lack of training causes her to lose the fight, but her determination for respect convinces Master Paku to take her on as a pupil. In a matter of days, Katara climbs the ranks of the class and is awarded the title Master Katara. Katara is the suffragette of the ATLA universe; first-wave feminism’s gender equality is at the top of her list as she goes mano-y-”wo”mano with the 60-year-old Waterbending Master. In this instance her character also represents second-wave liberal feminist’s beliefs that women are not instinctively care-takers and nurturers. In the series Katara does utilize her healing training, but fighting has always been her primary skill. In the war, she is a valuable asset to her team as she fights to end a century of tyranny.

If defying authoritative figures is what your heart loves, then Toph Beifong is probably your most beloved character. Toph’s personality goes against the grain of her appearance. She is a 12-year-old, short, blind, earthbending girl whom we are introduced to in a pseudo-WWE earthbending style match against large, able-bodied, muscular men. Due to her visual impairment, Toph’s condescending and overprotective parents sheltered her to near imprisonment. She was allowed an earthbending instructor, but her training was never permitted past the basics. Little did her parents and master know, she was already a highly capable, national pro-fighter, having won a gold title before the age of twelve. She was expected to be a well-mannered, meek tempered heiress, but she was a rowdy, strong-willed child. Toph represents the category of women who not only resist gender roles, but are also disabled, yet capable. Toph’s character challenges what is known as compulsory able-bodiedness and what that means in the ATLA universe. Her world does not see disabled bodies as valuable assets to the community, nor does it accommodate to their needs, but Toph’s bending ability alone allows her to reinvent what it means to see. In Toph’s case her ability to bend was the base for her individual model of disability. Not only had she mastered her element, but she developed a new technique for bending which allowed her to see using vibrations; this ability strengthened her fighting as she could predict a benders move before they entirely completed the motion, she could feel changes in heart rate, thus she could detect lies, and she developed an epic sense of spatial awareness, by stomping on the ground and creating vibrations, she can feel the layout of an entire city and remap it. She also invented a subcategory of earthbending, called metalbending, after being kidnapped. Her acquired power to detect lies and detect space was advantageous in the hundred year long war.

Rough and tumble was Toph’s style, but Avatar Kyoshi and her Kyoshi Warriors are composed, quiet, and lethal. Avatar Kyoshi was a powerful, indomitable force who upheld peace with formidable presence. (In short, she was a bad muthafucka.) In her lifetime, she established Kyoshi Island and she created a league of warriors entirely consisting of highly skilled, traditionally trained, elite teenage females; they known as the Kyoshi Warriors and are the sole military force which protects the island. None of the Kyoshi Warriors are benders, so they rely entirely on hand-to-hand, acrobatic, and weaponized fighting styles. This troop of women is the only all female, all non-bender, teenage group of fighters present in the ATLA universe, where the rest of the world is armed with adult, bending, men. In a male dominated war, the Kyoshi Warriors once again represent an inner strength and non-conformist lifestyle. Juxtaposed to the women of the Northern Water Tribe, the Kyoshi Warriors were a militant force to be reckoned with; Their fighting focused on using their enemies force against them in order to gain the upper hand, and with that technique they helped change the power structure of the war.

There are some necessary honorable mentions that need to happen in this article: Azula, Hama, and Smellerbee. These women hold a place in the hall of ATLA women for their contributions to conversations surrounding mental health awareness, corruption and abuse of power, and gender nonconformity, respectively. There are also women in the sequel to ATLA, Avatar: The Legend of Korra, where the band of women bring about entirely new perspectives of gender, sexuality, mental health, and ability. There is so much that Avatar: The Last Airbender has to offer, I can only recommend seeing it if you haven’t. With the wide range of topics it covers and the deep social issues it tackles, one being genocide as previously mentioned, it’s surprising it is a children’s cartoon.