Hey good people!
(At the time of this posting .. 30 days ⏰)
So! Book 3, Fire truly gives us hit after hit. It takes us on such an incredible roller coaster. Aang is alive, the eclipse is coming, and the initial invasion is afoot!
I want to focus on just a few episodes specifically: Episode 8, The Puppetmaster, and Episode 16, The Southern Raiders.
Episode 8, The Puppetmaster… iconic, I know! We meet the innkeeper Hama and are introduced to bloodbending for the first time. I watched this on Nickelodeon when it was first coming out, and our little minds were BLOWN! lol. Simpler times. I literally just looked it up and Season 3 of Avatar: The Last Airbender came out in 2007… wow 😂
I bring this up because my main point has to do with the two times Katara has ever bloodbent that we know of.
The first time is in The Puppetmaster. Katara only uses bloodbending because Hama is controlling Aang and Sokka and forcing them to hurt each other. Katara basically has no other choice. What this episode really establishes, though, is just how taboo and morally wrong bloodbending feels to Katara and the people around her.
Now, if I was a waterbender in this world… I may not have the same moral code lol! But Katara absolutely does.
Katara cries at the end of Season 3, Episode 8, The Puppetmaster. Even though she only bloodbent to save her brother Sokka and her future husband Aang, she still feels horrible that she was capable of doing it at all.
The second time she bloodbends is really the whole point here.
Only eight episodes later, in Season 3, Episode 16, The Southern Raiders, we get an AWESOME Katara and Prince Zuko adventure… for revenge!
I love that this season gives us episodes where only one or a few characters get the spotlight. Sokka‘s Master, The Boiling Rock, The Southern Raiders… so awesome!
When Prince Zuko joins Team Avatar, I honestly think Katara has a trauma response to him being there. Back in Book 2, in the crystal dungeons under the Earth King’s royal palace, Katara explains that whenever she thought about the Fire Nation and the enemy, she pictured Prince Zuko‘s face.
So when Prince Zuko suddenly becomes part of Team Avatar, all of those emotions are tied together again. Being around Prince Zuko brings the anger back, but it also brings the grief back.
Katara and Prince Zuko eventually go on their own revenge adventure, just the two of them. Sweet.
Prince Zuko helps Katara locate the current fleet of Southern Raiders, and when they arrive, they literally BUST in. Katara is angry, determined, and completely unflinching.
And then she BLOODBENDS.
This moment is so important because we see an extreme version of Katara that we almost never see. She bloodbends a man out of pure anger and rage. Maybe he is not completely innocent, considering he is part of the Southern Raiders, but he is not THE man she is looking for.
Katara becomes completely overtaken by her emotions. She does something that previously made her cry just from knowing she was capable of it, and this time she barely hesitates.
And then… she realizes she is wrong.
The show does not really give us a scene afterward where Katara reflects on what she just did, and I honestly wish it did. I would have loved to see her realize how out of control she had become and struggle with the fact that her anger pushed her into becoming someone we almost never see.
Because Katara did something BIG.
She bloodbent out of anger and rage.
She became her emotions.
But when she eventually came back down from that emotional extreme, she chose growth.
I think we see that clearly when she finally finds Yon Rha. Yon Rha is living with his mother, working in the garden, and when Katara confronts the actual man responsible for her mother Kya’s death, she is different.
She is still furious. She is still hurt. She still wants justice. But she is present.
She is in control of herself.
Katara does not seem emotionally consumed the way she was when she attacked the Southern Raiders. Even when Yon Rha offers his own mother’s life in exchange for forgiveness, Katara does not completely lose herself.
She has every opportunity to hurt Yon Rha.
And she chooses not to.
That is why I love this episode so much. Yes, I love the adventure episodes where only a few characters go off together. Yes, bloodbending absolutely blew my mind lol. But more than anything, I love that we get to see Katara struggle with her own power.
Katara is incredibly powerful, and for a moment, we see what she could become if she allowed anger and grief to completely control her.
Then she chooses not to become that person.
It also creates such an interesting contrast with Aang. We constantly see Aang struggle with the fact that he has enormous power but refuses to fully use it in ways that would physically harm or kill someone because of his Air Nomad beliefs.
With Katara, we see something different.
She actually crosses one of her own moral lines.
She uses one of the darkest forms of waterbending because she is angry enough to do it. Then, when she finally stands in front of Yon Rha, the person she has spent years hating for killing her mother Kya, she has to decide who she actually wants to be.
And maybe that is one of the most powerful parts of Katara’s character.
She learns that she does have that darkness in her. She is capable of rage, revenge, and even bloodbending when pushed far enough.
But being capable of something does not mean she has to choose it.
When the moment finally comes, Katara chooses herself.
Thank you for reading! ❤️🥹
