You know what’s astonishing about Katara? She grew up in a world without bending.
It’s not surprising that Sokka calls her bending ‘magic water’ in the first episode. It might as well have been magic to them at that point; they had never seen it in practice until they meet Aang.
So not only did Katara not have any teachers, she didn’t have any kind of guidance, no visual aids, no idea of how bending is supposed to look or work. The first time she ever sees actual waterbending movements is when she steals the waterbending scroll from the pirates. The first time she meets another waterbender is when she reaches the North Pole, where within weeks she outmasters pretty much everyone and goes on to teach the Avatar.
Everything she does is so incredibly impressive, and yet I can’t help but feel the most proud of her when she catches a fish on that little boat.
Literally insane to think about. Hama was the last waterbender of the south to be captured, when she was a young woman, i believe in her late teens / early 20s. She is approximately the same age as Kanna. Katara’s parents were born into a tribe in which all the benders were already gone. Then they grew up and had her. Thats two generations raised with the stories of a lost tradition, “back when my mother was young”, “back when gran gran was young”. decades of learning how to live without, how to adapt and survive. Decades of bending, in this far off, remote land, becoming a distant memory. Everything Katara learned before the scroll might as well have been reinventing bending itself. Did she beg the elders for stories about their lost friends and family, trying to glean some insight into how they did what they did? The southern raiders ship is forever frozen in place. Did she look at it, and wonder how anyone could command water at that scale, while she struggled to lift a fish?
