Mark Watches ‘Avatar’: S01E04 – The Warriors of Kyoshi

In the fourth episode of the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender, the two main male characters have to face their dismissive attitudes towards women when those behaviors get them in trouble. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Avatar.

“Where we’re going, you won’t need any pants!”

I wish every adventure I went on started with these words. RIGHT. Oh god, Avatar, how do you know my soul so very well.

The plot takes a backseat, in a way, to a large swath of character development in “The Warriors of Kyoshi,” something I didn’t expect to happen so soon into the show. While one of the subplots needed to be dealt with before it got out of hand, the other was something I thought would be ignored for at least the remainder of the season.

The impetus for all of this involves Aang, Sokka, and Katara continuing the journey to find the Waterbenders at the North Pole. Unfortunately, Appa can only fly so fast, and the group has to land on an island inhabited by Earthbenders. (At least…I think they were Earthbenders? Correct me if I’m wrong.) On the way there, riding on the back of Appa, we get the first hints of what Sokka’s story would be for the length of this episode.

I think for the vast majority of us, the messages that “The Warriors of Kyoshi” send our way are incredibly obvious and blatant. Which is ok, in and of itself, but I very quickly had to put this all in context: This aired on Nickelodeon. NICKELODEON!!!! There were many young boys and girls who watched an episode of a cartoon that told them that treating girls like a lesser human being for merely being a girl was wrong. ON NATIONAL TELEVISION. Ok, that is so terribly exciting to me. Does this happen more than I know of? I’m thinking back to the shows that I was allowed to watch as a kid, things like Doug or Rugrats or The Twilight Zone. No, really, wasn’t allowed to stay up late ever, but watching The Twilight Zone was totally 100% ok and moral. Also, the first R-rated movie I ever saw was—with my parents!!!!—The Silence of the Lambs. Really!!!! What is my life.

Point being, I have to think really, really hard to recall if I ever watched something with a message this blatant. And I probably wouldn’t even have remembered it anyway, because I’m pretty damn sure I wasn’t looking for these things when I was nine years old. Actually, that put a pretty hilarious thought into my brain: Mark Watches, but written back when I was nine. THAT WOULD BE SO IRRITATING.

Anyway, on to the actual episode. On the back of Appa, Sokka launches into another of his sexist tirades about the roles women and men are supposed to abide by, using the example of Katara, who’s sewing his pants in front of him. I can tell that Sokka has been like this long before we were introduced to him in the first episode, because Katara has absolutely no patience for his wankery. She throws his incompletely mended pants back at him, and what starts off as just a small scene is actually a huge chunk of foreshadowing for “The Warriors of Kyoshi.”

Sokka believes that men are to be fighters and the women have their place sewing and cooking and being very, very traditional. I get the sense that he got this from his father, since in past episodes, he seems so desperate to prove that he can take the place of him while he’s out fighting the war against the Fire Nation. What the writers do here (and do amazingly well) is to not only dismantle that stereotype, but do so in a way that doesn’t ever deny femininity.

Aang, on the other hand, simultaneously has to deal with a parallel issue of his own, which starts off with Katara. Aang wants to constantly impress her, which is pretty endearing on its own, but he allows it to morph into a egotistical display of power over the course of “The Warriors of Kyoshi.” Because of this, he ends up discounting the opinions of Katara for incredibly foolish reasons, one of those being because she’s a girl. I enjoy the ongoing joke of the Airbending trick with the marbles because it shows that Aang is at least coming from a very childish place, and his journey in this episode is about learning to mature and learning how to deal with the opposite gender in a way that isn’t demeaning to them.

So, here we have two headstrong dudes unable to interact with any of the females in the story without being condescending, patronizing, or, in Sokka’s case, flat out rude. After riding an Elephant Koi to impress Katara, Aang is forced to run to land when the Unagi a giant eel that lives in the waters off this island, tries to attack him. On this Earth Kingdom island, the Warriors of Kyoshi surround and capture the three of them. Sokka doesn’t waste any time trying to immediately discount the warriors, who are all women, by making shitty comments about their gender and their ability.

The Kyoshi clan is interesting, in that first we learn that they’ve chosen to stay out of the war on the Fire Nation, and with intercut scenes of Prince Zuko and Iroh in the midst of this main plot, we learn that this probably will not last for very long. The Kyoshi people are also much larger than the Southern Water Tribe, but so far, no one seems to come close to the size of the Fire Nation. Are they the largest collected tribe in the world at this point? I wonder if we’ll see a larger group before the series’ end.

I did find it a bit funny that all Aang had to do was Airbend and then everyone accepted him as the Avatar? I mean…well, I suppose they are expecting the next Avatar to be the Airbender AND they know the Airbenders are wiped out, so maybe those are pretty good odds, but I still chuckled at how easy it was for Aang to convince them all that he was the Avatar. For Aang, there’s a really cute element to the joy he experiences for all the positive attention that he gets, though it does spiral out of control eventually. At the beginning, I guess I just wanted him to find these small moments of happiness because I know that he’s going to have a lot of difficult, unhappy moments ahead of him. (I am not saying I am prepared, btw. I am clearly not at all prepared for anything.)

That joy, though, starts to clash with Katara, but not because she doesn’t want Aang to be happy. She absolutely does, but she knows that they cannot stay on this island long; they’ve got to keep moving to avoid being captured by the Fire Nation, and hanging out on a single island for a few days is a bad idea. But Aang won’t hear any of it. He’s eating up all the attention he’s getting, and I’d like to think that this is contrasted with what his life was like before he sealed himself and Appa up in that iceberg. We’ve only had one flashback to his life when there were other Airbenders, and we saw that it was equal parts education and fun, but that it was all weighed down by the knowledge that he was the Avatar. I think that part of what causes Aang to act out the way he does here is that he’s seeing the positive aspect of who he is, that people instantly respect him and give him things, and he’s essentially taking what he can get from it. I think that’s ok, to an extent, but it ends up clouding his judgment to a detrimental extent.

Back to Sokka. Oh, Sokka. Sulking so much because you got beat by a women. O NOES. THE HORROR. And here’s where the writers do WONDERFUL THINGS with this story: At no point do they ever seem to erase the femininity of Suki and her fellow warriors. They are women who just happen to be able to kick your ass a trillion different ways. And I love that it’s not about them being like men. They have their own unique way of fighting and dress and presentation and they can just destroy you. I LOVE IT.

Sokka learns the hard way that underestimating a person because they’re a women is an awful thing to do. For him, he has to be embarrassed in front of all of the warriors in order to understand the message: You do not fuck with women. Aang, on the other hand, has to learn the hard way as well, but what’s so sad about his half of the story is that his decision to treat Katara as nothing more than a “jealous” woman ends up endangering and harming a whole village. As soon as Aang refused to help Katara carry the food back to Appa and start telling her that she was just jealous of all the fun he was having, I knew it was inevitable. The Fire Nation were going to come upon the island to find Aang.

But there is a moment of success before this happens. Sokka sucks up his pride and asks Suki if she will teach him, admitting that she is a superior fighter and that he was wrong to pick on her for being a girl. She accepts, as long as he also agrees to  wear all of their traditional garb, including the face make up. And that’s a really cool moment that to us might seem blatant and spelled out, but, again, this is a children’s show on Nickelodeon. I’ve already accepted that a lot of what I’m going to see here, at least for this first season, is probably going to be fairly obvious at times. It’s not that the medium doesn’t allow it, but I think the writers are still finding their footing in terms of what they can do with this show.

I will say that we do get a sign of how willing they are to go to darker territory when the Fire Nation finally does arrive. It not only proves that Katara was right and Aang should have listened to her, but there’s a rather dark and scary scene placed near the end of this episode that was a lot more bleak than I anticipated.  The Fire Nation descend on the Kyoshi clan and the women put up an amazing fight for being so heavily outnumbered. But when Aang and Prince Zuko begin to fight, Aang suddenly realizes what he’s done by ignoring Katara’s warnings. He sees the fiery destruction wrought upon the small village, and even though he knows he didn’t do it with his own hands, his lack of judgment brought this upon these people. It’s such a stark, jarring moment, even amidst the scenes of violence, because it’s the first time we’ve seen such a blatant reference to the harm the Fire Nation is currently bringing to the world. All we’ve known of their actions is from the scene in the Southern Air Temple, when Aang discovers all the dead bodies.

It’s actually kind of a sad scene when Aang listens to Katara (FINALLY!!!) and she convinces him that the only thing that they have left to do is to run, that merely drawing Zuko and his warriors away from that island is enough to save them. Aang wants to intervene and fight the battle himself, but he knows she’s right. It would only cause more damage and destruction. Still, it’s nice that, at the very least, he uses the Unagi to put out the fires ravaging through the village before they leave.

One last thing that deserves more than a bulleted note at the end: Sokka’s goodbye scene with Suki has perhaps the best line in the entire episode. I do like that Sokka still feels obligated to give Suki a proper, genuine apology for what he did to her. He tells her that he’s sorry that he treated her like a girl and not a warrior. Suki accepts his apology, but not before she corrects him:

“I am a warrior. But I’m a girl too.”

In that statement, the writers tell the audience that these two concepts are not mutually exclusive, that women can be whatever they want to be, and they’re still women, too.

I LOVE IT.

THOUGHTS

• Aang’s push up presentation was LOL-worthy.
• Look, Uncle Iroh is probably the best character ever. His opening lines are delivered with such a serene sense of dry humor
• “Still, hard to argue with a ten ton magical creature.” Appa, FYI, if you were my friend, I would never argue with anything you said. JUST FYI.
• Ok, so…there was a moment when Aang was riding the Elephant Koi where Aang was so poorly drawn that I didn’t care because it made me laugh so hard. Does anyone know which part I’m talking about? PLEASE TELL ME A GIF OF THIS EXISTS.