The gracious exploration of Avatar: The Last Airbender continues. Check out the introduction to the series here. Spoilers abound!
One of the unintuitive themes of Avatar: The Last Airbender is its choice to explore the power of the maternal in opposition to a world at war. At the risk of oversimplification, the power of the maternal is some combination of healing, comforting, defending, and empowering, all rolled up into one. Especially when juxtaposed with the aggressive, masculine power of the soldier, a mother’s love is (wrongly) viewed as weak or ineffective against the great dangers of this world. It’s the stuff schoolyard insults are made of: you too might have grown up around a slew of “yo’ mamma” jokes and the insults of “mama’s boy.” But ATLA poses the inverse question: what if the power of the maternal is key to the end of war and violence?
Let’s begin our exploration of gospel themes in Avatar: The Last Airbender with a look at the show’s leading lady, Katara of the Southern Water Tribe. She is introduced in the show’s first episode and forms the core of the show’s protagonist team, with airbender Aang and warrior brother Sokka.
At the outset of the series, Katara is stuck, growing into the mold of a domestic housewife instead of receiving the proper training to develop her latent waterbending skills. The great war with the Fire Nation was responsible for the death of her mother and the village’s men, including her father, left years ago to join in the fight. Raised by her grandmother, Katara has clear waterbending gifts, but the war has taken away the opportunity for her to train and forced her into the role of the domestic.
When Katara and her brother discover the Avatar frozen in an iceberg, her call to adventure strengthens her deep-seated maternal power. Katara senses a duty to support the unfrozen Aang on his journey. How could he make it in the world without her guidance and protection? Throughout the series, Katara will realize that her waterbending powers grow as she embraces her maternal instinct. She wrestles with the “mother bear” instinct to save her “cubs” from all harm and learn to avoid enmeshment with the wounded men she partners with. She fights against sexism and partners with other expressions of womanhood that oppose and compliment her own maternal duties. When she completes her journey into womanhood, she will have a mature and thorough understanding of how to use her waterbending powers to defend and heal the broken around her.
In the show’s first of three seasons, Katara learns some of the innate dangers and faults that the maternal heart can gravitate towards. She tries to hide painful truths from Aang about his past as a mother might try to keep the terrors of the world away from her children. When the truths about Aang’s past are uncovered, Katara is able to temper Aang’s rage with that same caring instinct. She learns that the ideal love of the maternal cannot keep their children from pain, but soothes and heals the unavoidable pains of life. Also in the first season, Katara befriends and becomes smitten with freedom-fighter Jet, a tween Robin Hood figure who raids Fire Nation caravans. The attraction disappears, however, when she discovers that Jet and his bandits have no qualms with collateral damage, attacking soldiers and civilians alike. Her attraction to Jet made her blind to the clues that his woundedness was manifesting as revenge, and she learns how enmeshing herself with another is a danger to those wielding maternal power.
Katara’s season one arc ends when she confronts waterbending master Paku, who refuses to teach his skills to women for the sake of “tradition.” Katara is enraged by the master’s sexism, challenging him to a duel that she eventually loses. In the loss, however, the duo discovers that Paku had once courted Katara’s grandmother, Katara’s surrogate mother. Even though he defeats Katara in their duel, Paku has an epiphany that his tradition is empty without love. Katara unlocks the wounds of Paku and opens him up to healing and change, a true manifestation of maternal power.
In her second season arc, Katara is paired with two new female foils, who each embody other expressions of femininity. Earthbender Toph flees her overprotective parents and joins the show’s core protagonists, and she models a femininity that is strong and empowered but decidedly not maternal. The two young women bicker across the season over dueling expressions of the feminine. Toph projects her mother’s overbearing nature onto Katara, which clarifies for Katara how the maternal instinct can backfire. Katara also projects onto Toph, confusing Toph’s independence for woundedness and cries for help. The duo eventually comes to a peace, recognizing that there are different ways to be a woman. Katara’s second foil is the team’s new antagonist, Prince Zuko’s firebending sister Azula. While Toph’s rejection of the maternal stems from a thoughtful rejection of her family system, Azula’s rejection of the maternal stems from deep and unhealed wounds. Azula came to believe her absent mother feared her firebending prowess, so she abandoned the family. If Katara embodies the maternal, and Toph thoughtfully abandons it, Azula loathes it. She seeks to destroy it in others and herself because she feels rejected by it. She embodies for us a heartbreaking question: What good is a mother’s love if you believe you cannot earn it?
By the third season, Katara seems to have learned how to thoughtfully seek out the power of the maternal, but her growth produces newfound temptations. Katara learns from the psychotic waterbender Hama how to bend the water in other people’s bodies, allowing her to control the physical motions of others. If the ideal mother protects and heals, then her opposite (to use Jungian language) consumes, controls, and smothers. When Katara is offered the opportunity for revenge on the man who killed her mother, a new and dark side of her personality emerges. On a mission for maternal revenge, she doesn’t hesitate to use this new “bloodbending” technique to torture information out of enemy solders, and she expressly rejects the idea of forgiveness. A “mother bear” instinct to protect can easily become a menace.
When the killer of Katara’s mother is indeed found, we discover him to be a hollow shell of a man, henpecked by his own mother and shamelessly weak. Katara is given the opportunity to kill the pathetic man, but at the last possible moment, she walks away from her opportunity for revenge. Neither extending mercy nor executing judgment, Katara chooses instead to retain her core maternal virtues: power in the service of protection and healing. Seeing this man is no longer a threat, she leaves him to his pathetic life with his own ill-tempered mother and returns to the team in peace.
In the show’s climactic final battle, Katara defeats Azula, the firebending prodigy who loathes everything maternal. Chained to a sewer grate in defeat, Azula is filled with rage and grief as the maternal ideal she tried to kill off has not only won the day, but spared her death. It turns out the maternal cannot be destroyed, as Azula had wished. Despite her firebending prowess, it is too strong for that.
Katara’s journey in the series is both beautiful and powerful. We are presented with a young woman learning how to love and embody the maternal ideal while navigating its complex dangers. She does not confuse the maternal with the domestic, because the maternal is too powerful to simply remain in the home. Nor does she confuse the maternal with overbearing control, which is really just a manifestation of fear. Instead, the maternal ideal is empowering and able to provide protection and safety to those in its orbit. It’s so powerful, in fact, that it played a key role in ending a century-long war.
I once officiated a funeral for a beloved mother. Though the family was not the churchgoing type, the mother had requested a Christian funeral before she passed. When I shared a list of traditional funeral readings from the scriptures, readings like the resurrection of Lazarus and Job’s insistence that he knows his Redeemer lives, the bereaved family requested something different. Did I have anything, a Bible passage or a set of prayers, that spoke to the love of a mother?
We discussed a number of possibilities, but nothing seemed to fit the bill. The family ended up deciding on a selection from Proverbs 31, an unexpected choice given how that passage has been a source of law-based frustration for many women within the church. During a time for eulogies, this mother’s three children each stood and spoke about her maternal ideal and love. As the passage says, a good mother’s children will “rise up and call her blessed.”
Katara’s powerful, maternal love is a reflection of the same love witnessed by attendees at this funeral, and it is a reflection of the maternal side of God’s love, who gathered his children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings (Mt 23:37). In this series, Katara is a catalyst for freedom, comfort, and healing, all reflections of the divine love of a God who cares. The maternal love of God is not fully found in the domestic, though that can be one avenue for God’s love to manifest. Instead, the maternal power of God exists whenever God deals with the matters of the heart. The non-enmeshed, un-manipulative, one-way love of God to people who are wounded by life’s intrinsic suffering is reflected by the maternal ideal. Motherly love, as witnessed by Katara, is a true taste of heaven.
As Katara embodies the maternal ideal, her brother, Sokka, wrestles with the masculine ideal. The duo share the challenge of growing into adulthood with righteous but absent parents as their guides. In parallel to Katara, we’ll next look at Sokka’s story of deep humiliation, which in turn leads to his great exaltation.
I’d propose that Katara vs Azula at the end is probably best read as the slow and steady student who struggles through mastering the basics and fundamentals of an art doing battle against the glib virtuoso who masters things easily but has never had to struggle.
Katara is a bit too young in this series to have a very fully realized maternal instinct (we know she becomes a mother later but I wonder if imputing to her a full-fledged mother instinct is reading that back on to the original series; and given the … shifting sorts of writing done, it’s ambiguous whether she has a maternal instinct toward Aang or a romantic attachment (romance is generally a weak spot in ATLA that became a catastrophic weakness in Korra, who is so selfish and power-obsessed she made Azula seem fairly nice to her friends by comparison).
There’s a lot about Katara that could be discussed. She is loving and kind and does have a maternal instinct but she’s also shown as being petty, vindictive and harbors a hatred toward the Fire Nation. Her envy of Aang’s effortless virtuosity at water bending spurs her to steal a water-bending scroll she regards at the Water Tribe birthright endangers the lives of her friends. Katara resenting virtuoso benders for bad and good reason is one of the threads woven throughout Katara’s story across the series.
For instance, in season 2 she resents Toph for her tomboyish and caustic ways (but here again we see that there’s a tension between Katara the slow and plodding student with real gifts who feels she’s no match for the flamboyant showboating virtuoso earth-bender Toph). It probably isn’t until she finally really meets Zuko that she discovers he, too, has lost his mother and that he has struggled to master the basics of his nation’s bending craft.
It probably isn’t until she meets Hama in season 3 that Katara fully realizes that people in the Water Tribe are capable of evils that she had up until that point tended to assume were only the domain of the Fire Nation. When Toph, Aang and even Sokka recognize that Zuko may not be as evil as they thought Katara promises that she will kill Zuko if she thinks he’ll do anything to harm Aang.
At the risk of doing a very, very big spoiler–the parallel defeats Azula experiences at the hands of Zuko and Katara show that Azula’s reliance on sheer virtuosity was not a substitute for mastering the basic disciplines of bending and combat. Whereas Ozai let his daughter seem to flourish as an unstoppable prodigy, Iroh inculcated in his nephew a continual return to the basics and bluntly told his nephew that some extended techniques might be too hard for him to master. Azula’s reliance on a mixture of virtuosic manipulation and brute force prevails but she doesn’t recognize that there’s such a thing as luck–Katara’s slow and more tedious path shows in the final fight that luck favors the prepared, and those who don’t forget to pay attention to their surroundings.
Jeremiah! Love this, and I think there’s a lot of merit to it. I agree with your thoughts on romance – the show is particularly weak, in both ATLA and ALoK, at writing fleshed out love stories. It’s a good move, I think, to not make teen love a focal point of the series – it may be universally relevant, but I’m not sure it’s able to topple any tyrannical empires.
I think Katara’s resentments toward virtuoso benders is especially prevalent in the first season, but I’m not sure I see it as strongly in the seasons to come. Toph and Katara bicker throughout the second season, but their reconciliation together comes in a feminist form during the Tales of Ba Sing Se episode. That’s the episode where they go out for a girls day and dump a gaggle of Belittling Mean Girl teens into the river, and the duo seem to be reconciled after that scene. I think the show is trying to articulate that the Girl-Power Tomboy and the Blossoming Maternal can reconcile because they have a deeper and more profound vision for their life than the Belittling Mean Girl, whose archetype is otherwise absent from the show.
I also think Katara’s stint as The Painted Lady in S.3 is meant to showcase her maternal power in a divine way. It’s not a stretch to see that episode’s impoverished village praying to something like the Blessed Virgin Mary for help, a mother-goddess type of sponsor. When Katara successfully stands in for this river spirit to defend the village (and receives the blessing of that spirit at the end of the episode), I think we’re meant to see that she is a masterful bender embodying this maternal spirit, even if she’s still so young.
So much of Katara’s story revolves around mothers, femininity, and strong women benders, it’s hard for me to see other storylines being prominent. I just posted my Sokka essay yesterday, and to your point, I think he also embodies this series-wide embrace of discipline defeating the virtuoso. Thanks for engaging with this! Hoping it continues to be a fun avenue for discussion over the six parts of the series.
I wouldn’t say that the resentment is all there is to Katara as a contrast to the virtuosi around her. Toph is not only a virtuoso but invents metal-bending; Azula has mastered lightning casting as a teenager, something Iroh warned is a hard form to master; Aang masters within minutes techniques that Katara spent months mastering–the contrast is so pervasive I think it’s an important theme in Katara’s story, she is the gifted but slow, steady and plodding student who learns incrementally, struggles to pick up new skills and is eager for instruction that is alternately denied her because she’s a woman or she’s given instruction by Hama that has hidden, nefarious aims.
The parallelism of the final showdowns with Azula highlights that the princess is defeated in BOTH cases by people who aren’t virtuosos but who are slow, methodical, creative and thoughtful students of their respective bending arts. The parallels by way of contrast to Katara, Zuko, or Sokka would be that the virtuosi, whether Azula, Toph or even Aang, have gained virtuosic powers at the price of having something resembling a normal life in terms of socialization. They are virtuosi as much due to types of social isolation as innate ability. While femininity and mothers are prominent in Katara’s story they aren’t the only element. her fraught feelings about her father are significant, too, resenting him for going away but understanding that he was obliged to do what he and the other men of the southern water tribe needed to do in order to preserve the overall future of the tribe. Approaches to learning and learning dispositions are a pretty crucial part of ATLA that I think are significant enough to be on par with a study of gender roles and, pertinent to the intended audience and its age bracket, arguably more salient.
[…] Continue to Part 2 […]