you start with lassoing the ocean

musesfool asked me about Katara! :D

I cannot even with Katara, she is the best. Well, really, I love all the A:TLA characters and think they are the best, but Katara holds a special place in my heart. She spends a lot of time being nurturing and responsible, which is a great and necessary role given who she travels with, she's compassionate, she's genuinely empathetic and kind, she's terrible at humor but a fantastic sib and friend. What makes her truly amazing, though, is the fact that she's so completely unafraid to get angry.

It's interesting to think about the way other characters- particularly other female characters- in A:TLA deal with anger. I don't think we see a lot of anger from Toph, Mai, Ty Lee, Azula, or Suki; the scenes I can recall involve more frustration or crankiness. The show doesn't invest a lot of time in anger that isn't Zuko's, and that comes from a completely different source and is also pretty impotent, Zuko being Zuko.

Unlike Zuko, Katara doesn't let anger get the best of her; she uses it to get results. We see this again and again throughout the series- with Sokka in the very first episode, with Master Pakku, with the Southern Raiders. Sometimes the results she gets are unintentional, like the iceberg, and sometimes they're unsuccessful, as with Master Pakku, but learning to use her anger productively is a key part of Katara's character development. I'd guess that Toph and Azula deal with anger in a similar fashion, but unlike Katara, we don't really see them actually or consciously acknowledging being angry. Katara, on the other hand, is always aware of her anger, the reasons for her anger, and the consequences of the actions she takes while she's angry, so much that we get entire episodes devoted to this process (Puppetmaster! Southern Raiders!). Unlike most of our protags, Katara understands feelings and copes well with them! This makes her, in a sense, both Aang's match and the ultimate anti-Zuko, and it's also what makes her so incredibly powerful. Azula is a frightening antagonist because she has pretty much no use for empathy. If Katara were the antagonist? That would be a whole different level of frightening.

Obviously there are many, many reasons to love Katara, but to me, this is possibly the biggest.