Strong female characters with powers are just blobs of cliche!
Even the Avatar: The Last Airbender fandom isn't free of wank, as demonstrated when
fairsmithchild shows the community of
avatar_fans when she rants on how the only female main character, Katara, is a useless blob of cliche.
I'll copy the entry in question here, because the community owner believes that the internet is made out of sunshine and rainbows and people shouldn't fight in her community.
I think I might be alone in this but doesn't anyone else think there's more to Avatar than who's ending up with who? It seems to me that the majority of the posts lately have been Avatar fanfiction and fan art. My disgust for fanfiction aside, there is plenty to talk about besides who you ship. So in an attempt to break up the monotony of fanfiction and fanart pimping posts, I propose a discussion:
I think females in Avatar have been cheated. Of the five main characters, only one is female - the poorly written, blob of cliche known as Katara. Whereas the four main male characters are all governed by distinguishable and well-defined personalities, Katara is completely inconsistent. Case in point: We never see Katara doing anything even remotely athletic, and suddenly in "The Waterbending Master" she's flipping all over the place like a frickin' water ninja.
Not only is she completely stereotypical and bland, the writers have the gall to make her stupid! For example, in "The Great Divide" she takes the proffering of food on the justification of "Well, if everyone's doing it, then I guess it'd be okay." Not to mention her rampant gullibility.
And OF COURSE it's the female character who has the amazing healing ability (as if she needed more upgrades. What is she, Tessaiga?)
So, are the Avatar writers/creators ever going to write in a decent female lead character? They obviously are capable of doing so, judging from what they have done with the male chararacters (Sokka, Aang, Iroh, and Zuko are all deep, unique, and fascinating characters.) I guess we'll just have to wait and see if Zuko's sister is any better.
I'm surprised this didn't turn into a shippingwank, considering the first part of the post.
It seems that everyone politely disagrees with
fairsmithchild, until
amurderofcrows lays the smackdown on Fairsmith, who apparently does this bashing thing a lot.
chirachira suggests that Fairsmith put this bashing/rant in her journal, to which Fairsmith says "So do you mean I'm not allowed to discuss anything controversial on this forum? What is the forum for but for discussion?". A few commenters decide to set Fairsmith straight on what is a "discussion" and what is "bashing".
Fairsmith then whines about opinions, where she gets served by
amurderofcrows, who calls "Troll". Fairsmith does the classic "I thought we were friends!", which doesn't seem to work on Crows.
akavertigo steps in with the Troll calling in the form of a photoshopped image. This spurs the usual "Haha, you winz!" vs "SO immature!" miniwank.
There's a little bit of everything if you look at the rest of the wank, but Fairsmith stopped responding to them all (lack of witty comments?).
D'awww, the Avatar fandom is growing up!
Edit: It appears that Fairsmith has been deleting her own comments and her friends are coming to her aid (in the comfort of screened commenting, of course). There might be more to this wank than what we see!