Netflix’s ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ Stripped Away Everything That Made Katara Great

Five minutes into Netflix’s live-action remake of Avatar: The Last Airbender, I started to worry about my girl Katara. A narrator was delivering a crash course on the Avatar lore, and the Netflix captions informed me that the character speaking was Avatar Kyoshi (voiced by Yvonne Chapman), and not, as it was in the animated series, Katara (voiced by Mae Whitman in the original show, and played by Kiawentiio in the live-action).

It was the first warning sign. Sure, it’s a small change. Maybe even one that makes sense. (How would Katara know about all this Avatar stuff, anyhow?) But Katara’s voice is supposed to be the very first voice you hear. It’s supposed to be her story; her point of view. Still, even without that establishing voiceover, I hoped she’d get a chance to shine soon. She is, arguably, the protagonist of, if not the show, then at least the pilot episode. Surely, her moment was coming. So I waited. And waited.

I was waiting a long time. Katara doesn’t appear on screen for the first 21 minutes of the live-action remake. Instead, showrunner Albert Kim opted to dump the entirety of Aang’s backstory—which, in the animated series, is doled out in pieces via flashback—upfront. Perhaps he thought viewers would be confused without it, or perhaps he had no other place to cram that information in the eight-episode season. Either way, the result is undeniable: Katara is no longer a co-protagonist of the show. She’s a side character in Aang’s journey. Everything that made her so compelling, so passionate, so driven, has been stripped away.

When Katara and her brother Sokka (played by actor Ian Ousley) finally do show up in Netflix’s Avatar, they stumble upon Aang frozen in an ice block while out on a fishing expedition. This is in line with the pilot of the cartoon—with one key change. “I’m not doing this,” Katara says in the live-action, when the water around their boat begins to churn and the ice begins to shake.

But in the cartoon, she was doing it. Her brother had just said something chauvinistic and infuriating. (Kim deliberately chose to sanitize Sokka’s flaws in the live-action, another misstep, and an argument for another essay.) In response, the animated Katara gave him a piece of her mind. “You are the most sexist, immature, nut-brained—I’m embarrassed to be related to you!”

As she rants, the ice behind her cracks and fractures. Her brother pleads with her to calm down. But she won’t. She never does. She’s Katara. She’s as quick to anger as her fiery enemies, and her anger gives her power. And it was Katara’s anger at her sexist brother—her uncontrollable passion—that inadvertently rescued Aang from that ice block.

Kiawentiio’s Katara does waterbend to help free Aang from his icy prison in the Netflix show, and that’s something. But it’s a bland sort of sort agency that severs the connection between her power and her personality. It only gets worse from there. In the cartoon, Katara is ambitious to a fault. She’s even, at times, selfish. (It’s called character flaws! You need them for growth!) She doesn’t magically discover a waterbending scroll in her bag as a gift from her grandmother; she steals that scroll from pirates. She risks her friends’ safety for her own selfish desires, because she’s determined to live up to her power.

To be clear, I have no issue with the decision to remove the romance between Katara and Aang in this first Netflix season. With how young Gordon Cormier looks on screen as Aang, it probably would have felt forced, weird, or even inappropriate. No, it’s the fact that Kim has stripped Katara’s narrative arc of everything but her grief. Yes, Katara grieves for her late mother. But in the original series, she’s angry with grief. That anger drives her journey, and, in turn, Katara drives Aang’s journey—not the other way around.

In the animated series, the initial reason to go to the North Pole isn’t because Aang has a vision—it’s because he offers to personally to escort Katara to the other side of the world in search of a waterbending master. For her. She responds with uncertainty.”I don’t know,” she tells Aang. “I’ve never left home before.”

It’s a classic refusal of the call, because—at least in the first two episodes of the show—this is Katara’s hero’s journey. She’s Luke Skywalker, telling Obi-Wan she can’t leave Tatooine. When Aang reveals he’s the Avatar and that he, too, needs to master waterbending, they decide to embark on the journey together, as co-protagonists.

But in Netflix’s version of the story, Katara has none of that narrative drive. She doesn’t yell at Sokka. She doesn’t let her anger fuel her power or cloud her judgment. She doesn’t risk her friends’ lives for her own gain. She doesn’t even narrate the intro. (Instead Gran-Gran steals her famous monologue, the one all ATLA fans know by heart. That’s just rude!) Netflix’s Avatar robs Katara of her rage and pushes her to the sidelines. That, if nothing else, is a misstep I’m not willing to forgive.