In the interest of jumping right in, I'm forgoing doing an introductory post. I've been thinking about doing a blog for a while now and decided that it's time to start one. For the past nine months or so I've been reading feminist "geek" blogs on sci-fi, comic books, and feminism in general. They've made me think a lot more and a lot harder about the things I love, the things that annoy me and what being a feminist means to me. They've inspired me to think and hopefully my own blog will do the same. That being said, I went to this website and clicked the buttons and filled out the forms because I have something to say. A lot of somethings to say actually. So let's get started.
I am obsessed with Avatar:The Last Airbender, a cartoon show on Nickelodeon. It's got gorgeous animation, fantastic storytelling and characters that I love. Despite the fact that it's meant for children and I am not a child, I love it. Both the story and the characters are complex and utterly fascinating. I watch it every Saturday night online with one of my roommates who is equally as obsessed. We spend a fair amount of time discussing it as well, as it's one of those shows that leaves you desperately wanting to know what happens next as well as what happened with characters in the past. It's good, really good, and I highly recommend it for its story and characters. Most of all though, I recommend it for its girl characters, a strength of the show my roommate and I continually come back to.
All of Avatar's characters are well-developed and interesting. They never take the easy way out for characterization. The original antagonist for most of the first season has his own character arc of redemption instead of merely being a villain. From the first episode, he was never just a "black hat" as the friend who introduced me to the show described the characters to me. For those not in the know, "black hats" are bad guys, "white hats" good guys, and "grey hats" are those in between (think western). The comic relief character, Sokka, in addition to being the goofy guy who tells jokes, is smart and even the one who keeps Aang and Katara the idealists reined in when their idealism blinds them to the truth. Aang, our hero whom I adore, is a fun-loving kid who also has to save the world but never gets overwhelmed in either his angst or tendency to want to go penguin-sledding rather than face his overwhelming destiny. Nowhere is Avatar's approach to characterization more laudable though than when it comes to their female characters.
Katara, the love interest of Aang, is a badass. She kicks just as much butt as Aang does and from the very start has a fierce temper. While she does have the roles of love-interest and mother figure, she owns them. They're a part of who she is. She's never just motherly or the girl Aang loves. She's motherly because her mother died when she was young and she had to step up and take care of her family. She's Aang's love-interest because she's the first girl he's seen in 100 years, hot, and let's be honest, completely awesome. She's also got a temper, protective of her friends, and idealistic. In a lot of ways she's developed as the moral compass of the show as well. She's the one who wouldn't let "team Avatar" leave without helping the starving fishing village in the episode "The Painted Lady" and she was the one determined to help the captured earth-benders in "Imprisoned" (she also gives a super-corny speech that manages to rouse the earth-benders into fighting). She's the one who never forgets what they're fighting for. She's also definitely a feminist character as seen in the episode "The Waterbending Master", when she fights for her right to learn how to fight with water-bending rather than just learning how to heal with it. She fights and she heals, she's not limited by her gender at all. Katara is always both nurturer and warrior, the den-mother to the group and Aang's crush, she's many things and it never rings false. She's not just "the chick". She's a fully developed person who you can't help but admire.
And for the entire first season she was lamentably the only significant female character. Then in the second season, the writers gave us Toph, Azula, Mai and Ty Lee. This is where you really get a wonderful appreciation of the characterization. All of these characters are girls and they're all wildly different. Toph is tough, rude and not a fan of the nicer points of behavior. Azula is flat-out crazy (and one of the few exceptions to the rule of complex characters-- she's a black hat and there's no denying it). Mai is the bored teenager with a crush on Zuko while Ty Lee is cheerful and happy to flirt. All of them kick butt. All of the female characters on Avatar are real people, people beyond the roles of "the girl". They're all strong young women. I don't just have Katara to admire on this show, I have Toph who's the greatest earth-bender to have ever lived. I have Azula to fear and hope that someone grinds her into the dust. I have Azula's sidekicks who are just so much fun and so cool (and provide diversity in that both are formidable yet neither are benders) to entertain me. It's a show I hope lots of young girls are watching because it's still so rare to have a good adventure story with more than one girl. You could have more than one female character to be if you played Avatar, in comparison to say Star Wars with Leia (and who really wants to be Queen Amidala after the third movie, she was cool and then she wasn't but I digress). It's rare to have an adventure story where being the girl is not what defines her as a character.
As I explained to my mother earlier, there's a problem in our society's entertainment of still "othering" women. You can see it in just how many of today's movies don't pass Bechdel's rule (a movie must have more than one female character, they must talk to each other, and about something other than a guy). While a great many movies would be missed if you strictly followed this rule, it still says something disturbing about the way our society thinks. Men are still the norm despite women making up half the population. Why are female roles in entertainment still so limited to ones that revolve around men (i.e. love interest and mother) when we've come so far? Women still aren't the norm, undermining the idea of hey guess what, women are people too. Girls are expected to be able to relate to boy characters abd do because for years that's all they were given. But boys aren't expected to be able to relate to girl characters. How is that encouraging the idea that women are people too? It's not. And the media does have an impact on us, especially on kids. Avatar doesn't other its female characters. They're just as fascinating and fun as the male characters. More than just giving young girls role models in heroes (and villains of their own gender to hate in Azula), Avatar's giving young boys female characters that they can admire as tough, smart and good people who aren't just there to play off the male ones. There should be more such good shows on tv for kids and for adults too. More shows as well-thought out and fun as Avatar in general. And this is why I'm obsessed with Avatar, because it's not only good but gives me something I always love to see-- strong female heroes.
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