{"id":273,"date":"2011-04-15T13:00:29","date_gmt":"2011-04-15T20:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/?p=273"},"modified":"2011-04-15T12:51:59","modified_gmt":"2011-04-15T19:51:59","slug":"mark-watches-avatar-s01e04-the-warriors-of-kyoshi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/2011\/04\/mark-watches-avatar-s01e04-the-warriors-of-kyoshi\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Watches ‘Avatar’: S01E04 – The Warriors of Kyoshi"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the fourth episode of the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender<\/em>, the two main male characters have to face their dismissive attitudes towards women when those behaviors get them in trouble. Intrigued? Then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for Mark to watch Avatar<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Where we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re going, you won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t need any pants!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I wish every adventure I went on started with these words. RIGHT. Oh god, Avatar<\/em>, how do you know my soul so very well<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The plot takes a backseat, in a way, to a large swath of character development in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Warriors of Kyoshi,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d something I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> fast, and the group has to land on an island inhabited by Earthbenders. (At least\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6I think they were Earthbenders? Correct me if I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m wrong.) On the way there, riding on the back of Appa, we get the first hints of what Sokka\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s story would be for the length of this episode.<\/p>\n

I think for the vast majority of us, the messages that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Warriors of Kyoshi\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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!!!!<\/strong> 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<\/strong>. Ok, that is so terribly exciting to me<\/em>. Does this happen more than I know of? I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m thinking back to the shows that I was allowed to watch as a kid, things like Doug<\/em> or Rugrats<\/em> or The Twilight Zone<\/em>. No, really, wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t allowed to stay up late ever<\/em>, but watching The Twilight Zone<\/em> was totally 100% ok and moral. Also, the first R-rated movie I ever saw was\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwith my parents!!!!\u00e2\u20ac\u201dThe Silence of the Lambs.<\/em> Really!!!! What is my life<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Point being, I have to think really, really<\/em> hard to recall if I ever watched something with a message this blatant. And I probably wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even have remembered it anyway, because I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m pretty damn sure I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> abide by, using the example of Katara, who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Warriors of Kyoshi.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t ever deny femininity.<\/p>\n

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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Warriors of Kyoshi.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Because of this, he ends up discounting the opinions of Katara for incredibly foolish reasons, one of those being because she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t demeaning to them.<\/p>\n

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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t waste any time trying to immediately discount the warriors, who are all women, by making shitty comments about their gender and their ability.<\/p>\n

The Kyoshi clan is interesting, in that first we learn that they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve chosen to stay out<\/em> 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll see a larger group before the series\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 end.<\/p>\n

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\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6well, 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<\/em> it was for Aang to convince them all that he was the Avatar. For Aang, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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.)<\/p>\n

That joy, though, starts to clash with Katara, but not because she doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want Aang to be happy. She absolutely does, but she knows that they cannot stay on this island long; they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t hear any of it. He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s eating up all the attention he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s getting, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d like to think that this is contrasted with what his life was like before he sealed himself and Appa up in that iceberg. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve 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<\/em> Avatar. I think that part of what causes Aang to act out the way he does here is that he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s seeing the positive<\/em> aspect of who he is, that people instantly respect him and give him things, and he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s essentially taking what he can get from it. I think that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ok, to an extent, but it ends up clouding his judgment to a detrimental extent.<\/p>\n

Back to Sokka. Oh, Sokka. Sulking so much because you got beat by a women<\/em>. O NOES. THE HORROR. And here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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<\/em> women who just happen to be able to kick your ass a trillion different ways<\/em>. And I love that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not about them being like<\/em> men. They have their own unique way of fighting and dress and presentation and they can just destroy you. I LOVE IT.<\/p>\n

Sokka learns the hard way that underestimating a person because they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re 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<\/em> fuck with women. Aang, on the other hand, has to learn the hard way as well, but what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s so sad about his half of the story is that his decision to treat Katara as nothing more than a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153jealous\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u00c2\u00a0 wear all <\/em>of their traditional garb, including<\/em> the face make up. And that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a really cool moment that to us might seem blatant and spelled out, but, again, this is a children\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s show on Nickelodeon. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve already accepted that a lot of what I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m going to see here, at least for this first season, is probably going to be fairly obvious at times. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not that the medium doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t allow it, but I think the writers are still finding their footing in terms of what they can do with this show.<\/p>\n

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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a rather dark and scary scene placed near the end of this episode that was a lot more bleak than I anticipated. \u00c2\u00a0The 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s done by ignoring Katara\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s warnings. He sees the fiery destruction wrought upon the small village, and even though he knows he didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t do it with his own hands, his lack of judgment brought this upon these people. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s such a stark, jarring moment, even amidst the scenes of violence, because it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the first time we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen such a blatant reference to the harm the Fire Nation is currently bringing to the world. All we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve known of their actions is from the scene in the Southern Air Temple, when Aang discovers all the dead bodies.<\/p>\n

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s right. It would only cause more damage and destruction. Still, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s nice that, at the very least, he uses the Unagi to put out the fires ravaging through the village before they leave.<\/p>\n

One last thing that deserves more than a bulleted note at the end: Sokka\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s sorry that he treated her like a girl and not a warrior. Suki accepts his apology, but not before she corrects him:<\/p>\n

“I am a warrior. But I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m a girl too.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In that statement, the writers tell the audience that these two concepts are not<\/em> mutually exclusive, that women can be whatever they want to be, and they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re still women, too.<\/p>\n

I LOVE IT.<\/p>\n

THOUGHTS<\/strong><\/p>\n