YMMV / Avatar: The Last Airbender "The Painted Lady"

• Anvilicious: Both the pollution message and Katara's desire to help people aren't exactly handled with much in the way of subtlety but instead dialed way higher, particularly the latter. Which is unusual for Avatar.
• Broken Base:
  • The conceit of the episode — Katara essentially sabotaging the schedule for the invasion against the will of her friends to help an extremely impoverished river town — has been pretty divisive among fans. Some say it makes Katara look Unintentionally Unsympathetic with pretty massively Skewed Priorities, while others argue it greatly expands her caring and heroic nature. Others also point out that given the final outcome, Sokka was likely going overboard.
  • Related to that, there's a further discussion as to whether Sokka was right to assert that they could've come back to help the town after taking out the Fire Lord, or given the already-horrifically polluted state of the town, they had intervened at the best time possible.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • While it makes Katara look stupid, as per above, there's no gainsaying that her championing of the downtrodden peasants is this, constantly enforcing her All Loving Heroine status.
  • Additionally, when the townspeople turn on Katara for impersonating their local hero and for being a waterbender, Sokka (who has been complaining about deviating from the schedule the entire time) defends her and tells them to be grateful for what she's done.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Sokka's schedule is brought front and centre in this episode. He stresses how important it is that they make it to the invasion on time, and that schedule would have added an element of overarching tension in an otherwise episodic season. What if, thanks to Katara's actions, they miss the invasion or barely make it? How fast can Appa take them? Can the Gaang really stop to practice their bending and help someone in need? What if a Fire Nation soldier spots them and they waste crucial time trying to stop him? Alas, it is never brought again in subsequent episodes — in fact, they arrive at the rendezvous point four days ahead of schedule.

---