#thing which are……honestly completely irrelevant to their relationship; I’m glad it didn’t create drama there

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

Thanks For Listening

YA contemporary

a girl who’s the stage manager in her high school theater club is tired of nobody listening to her advice, so she makes an anonymous social media account that people might actually listen to

while also dating her first girlfriend and struggling with her relationship with her best friends

ace MC

[seyaryminamoto]

Re: my ask on The Great Divide and Avatar Day... Holy crap, I wasn't expecting you to write a whole essay! Thank you! (It's also interesting that you bring up The Fortuneteller as the series' other big filler episode - I was always under the impression that The Painted Lady was what rounded out the trifecta, but then, fandom opinion on it has never seemed as extreme.)

Hahaha, sorry not sorry xD I don’t know how to be brief, it’s a problem xD but I’m glad you seem to have enjoyed it!

I brought up the Fortuneteller because it’s from Book 1 too, same as the Great Divide, and Book 1 is the one where a first-time viewer largely might feel like what they’re watching isn’t really going anywhere. I mean, I remember asking my sister if they’d ever get to the North Pole back when I was first watching it x’D I guess if the show offered the occasional glimpse of where they are on the map you’d at least feel like they’re making some progress (as the old Turbonick site allowed). But until the Northern Air Temple, there’s not much in the way of revealing how far north they’ve traveled so far within the story itself.

Anyways, the other reason I brought it up was because the Fortuneteller is a generally loved episode, despite objectively it doesn’t do much for the plot at all. It’s a handy way to compare it to Avatar Day and The Great Divide, because the question would naturally be why is it better than these two? What would make that one, as plot irrelevant as it was, more cherished than these two?

As for the Painted Lady, though... conceptually, I like that episode a lot. Not because of the Painted Lady herself, honestly I’m not as stoked about spirits in general as a lot of fans might be, and I’ve never felt too passionately about Katara’s plotlines: what I loved was the Fire Nation village of Jang Hui. It’s by far the lousiest of Fire Nation villages we see, even if Yon Rha’s isn’t the greatest, but this one is basically being killed by the Fire Nation’s warfare policies. The message conveyed is one of the most important ones I felt the show should have put forward, and it’s that the lack of balance in their world is damaging EVERYONE. The Fire Nation’s militaristic approach to... well, everything, would have consequences not only for the rest of the world, but for the Fire Nation itself.

That’s why I’ve even taken advantage of that particular situation in my main fic, because confronting a Fire Nation character with the reality that the war is harming their nation is just a great development and growth resource that the show squandered... and I will never understand why it did xD

But beyond that particular element of conceptual brilliance... the Painted Lady leaves much to be desired for me too. I don’t lump it in with the others as “filler” because of what I said, it really does add something of far more important value to the war and worldbuilding than Avatar Day did (despite that one features Kyoshi’s story, which, sure, expands the history of the Avatarverse but not exactly your understanding of their world as a whole...?), and obviously, much more important than what The Great Divide features. Still, I really don’t enjoy Katara and Sokka’s conflict here. Sokka’s position to not help people, to do nothing and just push forward with their plans, when he had taken the exact opposite stance in earlier episodes (namely Jet, where he saves Fire Nation soldiers from the dam’s destruction, no less, or even the Northern Air Temple, where he could have easily said “well okay this is too much drama let’s go to the north pole now, Aang”) felt like the writers were just hellbent on turning them against each other just for the sake of drama. Yes, Sokka and Katara often clash because of how different they are, but it’s different here than it would be in Books 1 and 2: you’d expect they’d have learned a few things from their frequent conflicts, such as the one they have in The Great Divide, but it flat-out doesn’t look like they did. After this, they still clash over Hama and later yet over Yon Rha. Meaning... they didn’t learn much from this conflict either. So, there’s not much in the way of growing and changing as far as their sibling relationship is concerned? It’s kind of... disappointing. At least, it is to me.

It was also really strange for Sokka to be so hellbent on sticking to a schedule that looks like an Excel spreadsheet graphic when 

They have several days to spare when they reach the Black Cliffs in Nightmares and Daydreams.

He and the others wasted time in varying ways during the episodes leading to the Invasion (both before and after the Painted Lady) and he never used the schedule again as an argument to keep moving.

It’s not out of character entirely for him to act this way, but it makes no sense that they’d arrive at the Black Cliffs with time to spare if they devoted that much time to cleaning a river, getting Sokka a few swordsmanship lessons, lounging around lazily in a hot spring cove, visiting Roku’s old house for a while, running scams with Toph, dealing with Hama and her creepiness/saving all those villagers... I mean. Really. Time WAS wasted. A lot of it. And somehow they got there several days early?

For me, the conflict between Sokka and Katara in this episode feels less genuine than whenever they had conflicts before, partly because it was an old, tried and tired situation that presented Sokka as the cold-bloodeed and Katara as the emotional one (where Katara of course is framed as righteous and fair, while Sokka looks like a self-involved jerk up until he defends his sister). But it feels even worse after you progress in the show and find out that Sokka’s big concern over arriving on time was actually completely unnecessary? It’s an artificial conflict, really. It doesn’t feel genuine, it feels like it’s there just to create emotional stakes that don’t really pay off because we’ve seen these two for almost three seasons and we know their conflicts don’t last and always are resolved for the better (only for them to jump into a new one a few episodes later). No real difference here. You don’t learn a single new thing about these characters. It’s more of the same situations they’re always in. 

This episode is probably great for Katara fans, and it definitely paints her in much better light than the other Katara-centric episodes of Book 3 (The Puppetmaster and The Southern Raiders), so I’d assume a lot of Katara fans love it to pieces. There’s also the obsession certain areas of the fandom have over spirit alter egos of characters... I don’t need to elaborate much on what I mean, but safe to say I’m far from intrigued by that particular trope (though my bigger qualm isn’t with the Painted Lady but with the Blue Spirit, against whom I have a gazillion reservations and I’ll voice them as many times as I must). So, as far as personal investment in this episode goes... yeah. I really don’t have any other than in the village of Jang Hui because of the implications it holds for the worldbuilding and the Fire Nation as a whole. Beyond that... this episode doesn’t really do anything for me. I often have to rewatch episodes for research purposes with Gladiator... this one I haven’t watched since ages ago and I can’t say I’m interested in doing it again anytime soon.

Still, as far as trifecta of fillers goes, I think it’s difficult to really determine which episodes should be part of it? There’s a lot of filler content in ATLA, but often peppered with stuff that will be useful later on somehow. Yet there’s a lot of it that isn’t? The nuns of the Abbey never come up again. The pirates aren’t relevant past Book 1. The entirety of The Ember Island Players is absolute, unabashed filler content, and some people even feel that way about The Beach too. Soooo... I guess ranking the filler episodes depending on their usefulness can be tricky. Some are more useful, some are less so, most of them don’t feature much in the way of useful, lasting character development and sometimes resort to old problems that could have been resolved already... such as the Runaway’s big Katara-Toph rivalry, which hadn’t reared its ugly head since The Chase, so it looked like a problem long-resolved.

So, would I round out the trifecta of fillers with the Painted Lady...? Yeah, well, I can’t say for sure, but I can say it ranks amongst my least liked episodes just like the other two xD