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Avatar: The Last Airbender "The Painted Lady"

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  • 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 Aesop: The overall message(s) of this episode is somewhat conflicting on a number of levels.
    • Katara tells the villagers that they must help themselves rather than expecting someone else to come along and help them. This, however, flies directly into the face of Katara's previous declaration that she will always help those in need no matter what the cost and she receives a personal thanks from the Painted Lady herself for that she did. In fact, the Painted Lady herself, so far as we know, did absolutely nothing to help anyone until Katara came along and saved the day for her.
    • The villagers were not the ones who polluted their river. The army did that and they clearly didn't care for the villagers. Given the circumstances, it would have been virtually impossible for the villagers to "help themselves" in their current situation.
    • Katara says the villagers shouldn't have been dependent on the Painted Lady to fix everything. The problem is that they were not, at least not at first. They only became dependent on the Painted Lady after Katara had stolen the food for them. Prior to that, the villagers didn't even believe the Painted Lady was real, so Katara herself is responsible for creating that dependency.
    • A case could be made where sometimes it's wisest to not intervene as your own actions may only complicate a situation. This is exactly what Katara does when she blows up the factory and in turns create more problems. However, Katara completely ignores this point when Sokka brings it up and insists that doing nothing is the wrong thing to do.
  • Broken Base:
  • 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.

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