Abstract

In the third episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Book 3: The Book Of Fire, The “Gaang” consisting of Avatar Aang, Toph, Sokka, and Katara chanced upon a fishing village on stilts,ravaged by the pollution of its waterways. The pollution comes from the industrial activity of the Colonial Masters’ Fire Nation which greatly affected the village. This animation is from Nickelodeon, a channel geared for children’s entertainment, thus implicates humorous asides in what purports to be a serious epicurean reclaiming of a lost balance through indigenous visual culture, solidarity, media studies, and ecocriticism. Katara disguises herself as “the Painted Lady,” a folkloric figure of the village to help in healing the sick and providing food, which proved not to be as effective until a direct confrontation with the polluters had taken place. Katara dons the appearance of the Painted Lady as a benevolent force (to rival the Fire Nation’s industrial foment) and eventually worked with the villagers to seize their village’s wellbeing by the ousting of the Fire nation. This paper explores connective nodes relating this episode with other local environmental concerns that are at the forefront of increased geopolitical tensions in the region.

Keywords Avatar: The Last Airbender, Katara, waterbending, Fire Nation, coloniality, decoloniality, animation studies, ecocriticism, popular culture, praxis

Author Bio

Jose Santos P. Ardivilla is a political cartoonist, printmaker, and writer from the Philippines. He is pursuing a PhD in Fine Arts at Texas Tech as a Fulbright-Philippine Commission on Higher Education scholar. You may reach him at ardivilla.com

Suggested Reference Citation

APA

Ardivilla, J. S. P. (2024) “Ways of decoloniality by The Painted Lady: Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Katara demonstrates how to revive a community in ecological distress brought by the colonial expansion of the Fire Nation.” Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy. 11(2) http://journaldialogue.org/v11-issue-2/ways-of-decoloniality-by-the-painted-lady/

MLA

Ardivilla, Jose Santos P. “Ways of Decoloniality by the Painted Lady: Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Katara Demonstrates How to Revive a Community in Ecological Distress Brought by the Colonial Expansion of the Fire Nation.” Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy. 2024, vol. 11, no. 2. http://journaldialogue.org/v11-issue-2/ways-of-decoloniality-by-the-painted-lady/