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ljwritesIn Part 1 of this essay we examined the cultural values of the Water Tribes and how they affected the story of Avatar. Now let us take a look at the darker side of Water Tribe culture and how the Tribes worked through it as a society and as individuals.
Bring Me All Your Chauvinists: The Darker Side of Togetherness
Spoken to the tune of "Bring me all your elderly!"
Avatar actually begins with an impressive display of casual sexism, and an even more impressive reaction to it that just happened to crack the Avatar out of his hundred-year nap. In short, I guess, feminism saved the world, but doesn't it always? All right, that's your Aesop moment, people! We're done here.
But to continue just because I like to go on and on (and on), traditional gender roles seem to prevail in Katara and Sokka's Southern Water Tribe village. Sokka is the eldest male in the village and thus seems to call the shots on who to exclude, for instance, when he kicks Aang out in "The Avatar Returns." I should also point out that this decision-making process does not exclude women, since Kanna as the eldest woman and perhaps Sokka's grandmother, and mother (or mother-in-law) of the chief, seems to have a say as well. Also, even young women like Katara seem to be have the right to challenge such decisions, as when Katara begs Kanna to override Sokka's banishment of Aang.
Nevertheless, Sokka is still the sole warrior in the village, their first and last line of defense against external threats, and his adorable band of warriors-in-training are all boys as well. (Though, as in the case of Hama, the Southern Tribe seemed to allow women waterbenders unlike their Northern counterparts.) This is in contrast to the Fire Nation, where we see women firebenders often serving as guards. I'm not saying one is better than the other, by the way, only that--for better or for worse--the division of gender roles in the Southern Water Tribe appears fairly rigid.
Given his people's traditions, it's no wonder Sokka had a difficult time processing the idea of female warriors in "The Kiyoshi Warriors." The way he came to respect the Kiyoshi Warriors (and uh, really respect their leader) is a great story of character development in of itself full of poignant moments, for instance how surprised and moved he was to realize Suki came along to protect him on "The Serpent's Pass," or the dreamy look on his face at Suki's display of badassery on "The Boiling Rock, Part 2." His personal transformation on this issue may well have larger implications for his tribe as well, as he will no doubt have a leading role in the Water Tribes' affairs and the tribes themselves come into increasing contact with the outside world.
The Southern Water Tribe's and Sokka's attitudes, however, pale in comparison to the real thing when Katara runs smack up against the traditions of the Northern Water Tribe. All her enthusiasm, passion, and talent for the art meant nothing before the tribe's insistence that women could never be waterbenders, only healers.
Just say "no" to women waterbenders!
To be fair, the Northern Water Tribe way seems to suck for non-bending women as well. Yue was engaged to marry someone she didn't even like, and was prepared to accept it despite her growing attraction for another boy. Only those with exceptional courage like Kanna could escape such arranged matches by escaping the community altogether; not an easy decision by any stretch of the imagination.
As an aside, this really explains the look on Kanna's face after Katara yelled at her in "The Avatar Returns" that her one chance of being a waterbender was gone. Kanna knew the ways of the people she left behind, and probably realized that Katara would not find a teacher even if she made it to the North Pole. Was Kanna thinking about the immensely talented waterbender she had once been engaged to, and how he might react to Katara? I don't think Kanna had the heart to crush her granddaughter's hopes by telling her, though. But now we're in fanfic territory, so let us move on.
As Kanna said, community is about intertwined destiny, the realization that everyone is in it together. So why was the Northern Water Tribe so cruel to many of its members, taking away the choice to develop their talents and to marry whom they chose? Did the Northern Tribe simply lose its values and its way?
Yes, partly, I think they did lose their way. But I also think the reason they lost their way says something about them as a people--as with the Air Nomads earlier and the example of Hama in Part 1, sometimes the loss of values is not so much a disregard as a distortion.
As anyone who has been part of a group knows, community isn't all about warm fuzzy feelings and trippin' out on the circle of life, man. Anytime two or more people get together personal conflicts will arise, different agendas come into play, and power struggles happen. For a group to work together through these tensions, there has to be control and discipline. This is doubly true of a group such as the Water Tribes which had to survive under adverse conditions. For the group to work as a cohesive whole instead of a pack of bickering people, the community had to set up and enforce rules of conduct, and division of labor and resources. The need for rules came with the need for community.
On a smaller scale, we see this need for group control and discipline in the Water Tribe characters, particularly Sokka and Katara whom we see the most of. Beyond personal discipline, Sokka and Katara also demand cohesion and unity in the group, for instance with Sokka's uber-schedule and Katara's anger at Toph in "The Chase" for the latter's refusal to pull her weight in the group. This may be related to the loss of and separation from both parents at a young age, but that just reinforces the point; it is the deprivations and challenges they faced that instilled in the siblings a belief in a closely-knit, smoothly working group. This is true of the Water Tribes as a whole. The harder things are, Sokka and Katara's instincts tell them, the more important community, sacrifice, and discipline. They will get through adversity together, or not at all.
But community rules can start working against the group instead of for it. Despite the Water Tribes' famed resourcefulness and flexibility, we see the Northern Water Tribe bound by rules that cause misery for its members. These pressures may result in the unraveling of the very community the rules were made to support. It became so bad for at least one woman that she literally fled to the opposite end of the globe. Even if most others did not physically remove themselves from the community, community cohesion could well weaken in quieter ways, with the loss of loyalty and affection to the group. Here is the irony, that custom and expectations, instituted to support the community, can destroy it if left unchecked.
This raises the challenge of adaptability, and its tension with community. Change the rules, is the easy answer, and it's correct in theory. But for people who have lived in a system formed by those rules, it's not nearly as easy to face the prospect of change. Expectations are formed from cultural norms, and self-interest. It can be hard to give up on traditions that don't look broke, especially hard when those norms are in your own interest (i.e. you are a man). This puts the courage to adapt in tension with the stability of community, but of course in the long run there is no contradiction--the community must renew itself, time and again, if it wants to survive the changes life throws at it.
Change never comes easy, but the Water Tribes did adapt to the times and made themselves a stronger community for it. I will discuss those changes in the next and final section.
The Element of Change: Toward a New Equilibrium
The most dramatic community adaptation we saw in the show was the acceptance of women waterbenders at the Northern Water Tribe. The beginning of that change came about through Katara's strong will and Pakku's Heel Face Turn through a cool dueling scene that was essentially a waterbending Agni Kai. Cooler in some ways (literally cooler, too), because there are some things you can do with water that you just can't do with fire, and that duel was demonstrative of the innovative uses of water. True to the Water Tribe cultural values, there's more emphasis in this scene than the three Agni Kai scenes on the communal aspect including the emotions of the spectators, including children. In the end, though Pakku wins the duel, Katara wins the argument.
Change you will comply with. Or else.
Some have questioned the way Pakku changed his mind as being self-interested, as in, "oh shoot, I never got to tap that ass because of our stupid traditions!" Or worse, that it was disingenuous, kind of like those guys who talk themselves up as feminists, without knowing or wanting to learn the first thing about feminism, in the hopes of getting laid. I thought the conclusion of the duel was a bit of a letdown at first, but it can also be read this way: The engagement necklace was a very personal reminder of how social repression can break relationships on a personal and communal scale. Not only was Pakku's relationship with Kanna destroyed for it, but the Northern and Southern Water Tribes were split off from each other, too. The Northern Water Tribe had to go a different way, or it would never be whole.
(My favorite exploration of the issues in the Pakku/Kanna romance is Perfectly Matched, by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
amanda_violet. In that story Kanna doesn't fall into Pakku's arms the moment he shows up on her iceberg; he demonstrates his change of heart before she accepts his courtship.)
The Water Tribe characters on a personal level also learn to change and adapt. Sokka revises his opinion on the role of women, as examined earlier. Katara learns to let go of her control and to be a little wilder in episodes such as "The Headband" and "The Runaway." That doesn't mean they let go of the best parts of their cultural values, of course. Sokka is an effective leader because he is not only personally creative and resourceful but because he knows how to pool different individuals' talents into a working whole. Katara inspires the group (and others, such as Haru and the other earthbenders in "Imprisoned") and keeps them together with her conviction in their goal and the group. In essence these characters, by changing and growing, come into the best of the values they were raised with. Change and growth, after all, are cherished values of the Water Tribes.
Another, subtler healing in the community is the resumption of relations between the Northern and Southern Tribes. The split was never explored in much detail, but from what comes through in the show it seems that the Southern Water Tribe, the more liberal group in their treatment of women and also more active in the war (and geographically closer to the Fire Nation), took heavy losses from retaliatory raids that took away their waterbenders. Meanwhile the Northern Tribe, the more traditional and isolationist group, chose to shut themselves away from the war. While the Southern Tribe languished in primitive conditions and wartime deprivation, the Northern Tribe enjoyed the full comforts of their civilization. Interestingly enough, calling this the North-South divide is quite apt, because that is incidentally the term used to describe the political, social, and economic gap between developed and developing countries in our world.
(Another fic callout: Kimberly T.'s one-shot Operational Risk Management makes beautiful use of this dynamic, while elegantly resolving a plot problem that many viewers of the series might have been puzzled with. I highly recommend it, and it has since become part of my headcanon.)
The rapproachment of the isolated, tradition-bound North and the war-torn, liberal South is both an opportunity and a challenge. The reintroduction of waterbenders into the Southern Tribe will have immediate effects on the standard of living, and the Southern Tribe can help the Northern Tribe update their social norms. On the other hand, there is bound to be resentment against the Northern Tribe for failing to help while the Southern Tribe suffered, while the differing social expectations and values will likely cause conflict. Change is difficult, even for a people who count it among their greatest virtues.
But maybe community and adaptability are valued by the Water Tribes not because they are easy to attain, but rather because they are difficult to live by. It's hard for different people to work together and live by common rules. It's even harder to change those rules so the community can stay flexible and humane. The Water Tribes are a courageous people not only to live where they live, but also to take on such challenges in their cultural values. I look forward to seeing more of their society in the new show, Korra, how this resilient and resourceful people react to a time of rapid change, what changes and what stays the same.
Because no matter what changes may come, some things stay constant--the enduring connection between those who share the bonds of history and destiny. And perhaps that constancy, that security, is what allows the Water Tribes to face the future with courage no matter what the adversity.
Bring Me All Your Chauvinists: The Darker Side of Togetherness
Spoken to the tune of "Bring me all your elderly!"
Avatar actually begins with an impressive display of casual sexism, and an even more impressive reaction to it that just happened to crack the Avatar out of his hundred-year nap. In short, I guess, feminism saved the world, but doesn't it always? All right, that's your Aesop moment, people! We're done here.
But to continue just because I like to go on and on (and on), traditional gender roles seem to prevail in Katara and Sokka's Southern Water Tribe village. Sokka is the eldest male in the village and thus seems to call the shots on who to exclude, for instance, when he kicks Aang out in "The Avatar Returns." I should also point out that this decision-making process does not exclude women, since Kanna as the eldest woman and perhaps Sokka's grandmother, and mother (or mother-in-law) of the chief, seems to have a say as well. Also, even young women like Katara seem to be have the right to challenge such decisions, as when Katara begs Kanna to override Sokka's banishment of Aang.
Nevertheless, Sokka is still the sole warrior in the village, their first and last line of defense against external threats, and his adorable band of warriors-in-training are all boys as well. (Though, as in the case of Hama, the Southern Tribe seemed to allow women waterbenders unlike their Northern counterparts.) This is in contrast to the Fire Nation, where we see women firebenders often serving as guards. I'm not saying one is better than the other, by the way, only that--for better or for worse--the division of gender roles in the Southern Water Tribe appears fairly rigid.
Given his people's traditions, it's no wonder Sokka had a difficult time processing the idea of female warriors in "The Kiyoshi Warriors." The way he came to respect the Kiyoshi Warriors (and uh, really respect their leader) is a great story of character development in of itself full of poignant moments, for instance how surprised and moved he was to realize Suki came along to protect him on "The Serpent's Pass," or the dreamy look on his face at Suki's display of badassery on "The Boiling Rock, Part 2." His personal transformation on this issue may well have larger implications for his tribe as well, as he will no doubt have a leading role in the Water Tribes' affairs and the tribes themselves come into increasing contact with the outside world.
The Southern Water Tribe's and Sokka's attitudes, however, pale in comparison to the real thing when Katara runs smack up against the traditions of the Northern Water Tribe. All her enthusiasm, passion, and talent for the art meant nothing before the tribe's insistence that women could never be waterbenders, only healers.
Just say "no" to women waterbenders!
To be fair, the Northern Water Tribe way seems to suck for non-bending women as well. Yue was engaged to marry someone she didn't even like, and was prepared to accept it despite her growing attraction for another boy. Only those with exceptional courage like Kanna could escape such arranged matches by escaping the community altogether; not an easy decision by any stretch of the imagination.
As an aside, this really explains the look on Kanna's face after Katara yelled at her in "The Avatar Returns" that her one chance of being a waterbender was gone. Kanna knew the ways of the people she left behind, and probably realized that Katara would not find a teacher even if she made it to the North Pole. Was Kanna thinking about the immensely talented waterbender she had once been engaged to, and how he might react to Katara? I don't think Kanna had the heart to crush her granddaughter's hopes by telling her, though. But now we're in fanfic territory, so let us move on.
As Kanna said, community is about intertwined destiny, the realization that everyone is in it together. So why was the Northern Water Tribe so cruel to many of its members, taking away the choice to develop their talents and to marry whom they chose? Did the Northern Tribe simply lose its values and its way?
Yes, partly, I think they did lose their way. But I also think the reason they lost their way says something about them as a people--as with the Air Nomads earlier and the example of Hama in Part 1, sometimes the loss of values is not so much a disregard as a distortion.
As anyone who has been part of a group knows, community isn't all about warm fuzzy feelings and trippin' out on the circle of life, man. Anytime two or more people get together personal conflicts will arise, different agendas come into play, and power struggles happen. For a group to work together through these tensions, there has to be control and discipline. This is doubly true of a group such as the Water Tribes which had to survive under adverse conditions. For the group to work as a cohesive whole instead of a pack of bickering people, the community had to set up and enforce rules of conduct, and division of labor and resources. The need for rules came with the need for community.
On a smaller scale, we see this need for group control and discipline in the Water Tribe characters, particularly Sokka and Katara whom we see the most of. Beyond personal discipline, Sokka and Katara also demand cohesion and unity in the group, for instance with Sokka's uber-schedule and Katara's anger at Toph in "The Chase" for the latter's refusal to pull her weight in the group. This may be related to the loss of and separation from both parents at a young age, but that just reinforces the point; it is the deprivations and challenges they faced that instilled in the siblings a belief in a closely-knit, smoothly working group. This is true of the Water Tribes as a whole. The harder things are, Sokka and Katara's instincts tell them, the more important community, sacrifice, and discipline. They will get through adversity together, or not at all.
But community rules can start working against the group instead of for it. Despite the Water Tribes' famed resourcefulness and flexibility, we see the Northern Water Tribe bound by rules that cause misery for its members. These pressures may result in the unraveling of the very community the rules were made to support. It became so bad for at least one woman that she literally fled to the opposite end of the globe. Even if most others did not physically remove themselves from the community, community cohesion could well weaken in quieter ways, with the loss of loyalty and affection to the group. Here is the irony, that custom and expectations, instituted to support the community, can destroy it if left unchecked.
This raises the challenge of adaptability, and its tension with community. Change the rules, is the easy answer, and it's correct in theory. But for people who have lived in a system formed by those rules, it's not nearly as easy to face the prospect of change. Expectations are formed from cultural norms, and self-interest. It can be hard to give up on traditions that don't look broke, especially hard when those norms are in your own interest (i.e. you are a man). This puts the courage to adapt in tension with the stability of community, but of course in the long run there is no contradiction--the community must renew itself, time and again, if it wants to survive the changes life throws at it.
Change never comes easy, but the Water Tribes did adapt to the times and made themselves a stronger community for it. I will discuss those changes in the next and final section.
The Element of Change: Toward a New Equilibrium
The most dramatic community adaptation we saw in the show was the acceptance of women waterbenders at the Northern Water Tribe. The beginning of that change came about through Katara's strong will and Pakku's Heel Face Turn through a cool dueling scene that was essentially a waterbending Agni Kai. Cooler in some ways (literally cooler, too), because there are some things you can do with water that you just can't do with fire, and that duel was demonstrative of the innovative uses of water. True to the Water Tribe cultural values, there's more emphasis in this scene than the three Agni Kai scenes on the communal aspect including the emotions of the spectators, including children. In the end, though Pakku wins the duel, Katara wins the argument.
Change you will comply with. Or else.
Some have questioned the way Pakku changed his mind as being self-interested, as in, "oh shoot, I never got to tap that ass because of our stupid traditions!" Or worse, that it was disingenuous, kind of like those guys who talk themselves up as feminists, without knowing or wanting to learn the first thing about feminism, in the hopes of getting laid. I thought the conclusion of the duel was a bit of a letdown at first, but it can also be read this way: The engagement necklace was a very personal reminder of how social repression can break relationships on a personal and communal scale. Not only was Pakku's relationship with Kanna destroyed for it, but the Northern and Southern Water Tribes were split off from each other, too. The Northern Water Tribe had to go a different way, or it would never be whole.
(My favorite exploration of the issues in the Pakku/Kanna romance is Perfectly Matched, by
amanda_violet. In that story Kanna doesn't fall into Pakku's arms the moment he shows up on her iceberg; he demonstrates his change of heart before she accepts his courtship.)The Water Tribe characters on a personal level also learn to change and adapt. Sokka revises his opinion on the role of women, as examined earlier. Katara learns to let go of her control and to be a little wilder in episodes such as "The Headband" and "The Runaway." That doesn't mean they let go of the best parts of their cultural values, of course. Sokka is an effective leader because he is not only personally creative and resourceful but because he knows how to pool different individuals' talents into a working whole. Katara inspires the group (and others, such as Haru and the other earthbenders in "Imprisoned") and keeps them together with her conviction in their goal and the group. In essence these characters, by changing and growing, come into the best of the values they were raised with. Change and growth, after all, are cherished values of the Water Tribes.
Another, subtler healing in the community is the resumption of relations between the Northern and Southern Tribes. The split was never explored in much detail, but from what comes through in the show it seems that the Southern Water Tribe, the more liberal group in their treatment of women and also more active in the war (and geographically closer to the Fire Nation), took heavy losses from retaliatory raids that took away their waterbenders. Meanwhile the Northern Tribe, the more traditional and isolationist group, chose to shut themselves away from the war. While the Southern Tribe languished in primitive conditions and wartime deprivation, the Northern Tribe enjoyed the full comforts of their civilization. Interestingly enough, calling this the North-South divide is quite apt, because that is incidentally the term used to describe the political, social, and economic gap between developed and developing countries in our world.
(Another fic callout: Kimberly T.'s one-shot Operational Risk Management makes beautiful use of this dynamic, while elegantly resolving a plot problem that many viewers of the series might have been puzzled with. I highly recommend it, and it has since become part of my headcanon.)
The rapproachment of the isolated, tradition-bound North and the war-torn, liberal South is both an opportunity and a challenge. The reintroduction of waterbenders into the Southern Tribe will have immediate effects on the standard of living, and the Southern Tribe can help the Northern Tribe update their social norms. On the other hand, there is bound to be resentment against the Northern Tribe for failing to help while the Southern Tribe suffered, while the differing social expectations and values will likely cause conflict. Change is difficult, even for a people who count it among their greatest virtues.
But maybe community and adaptability are valued by the Water Tribes not because they are easy to attain, but rather because they are difficult to live by. It's hard for different people to work together and live by common rules. It's even harder to change those rules so the community can stay flexible and humane. The Water Tribes are a courageous people not only to live where they live, but also to take on such challenges in their cultural values. I look forward to seeing more of their society in the new show, Korra, how this resilient and resourceful people react to a time of rapid change, what changes and what stays the same.
Because no matter what changes may come, some things stay constant--the enduring connection between those who share the bonds of history and destiny. And perhaps that constancy, that security, is what allows the Water Tribes to face the future with courage no matter what the adversity.
