ATLA Book One: Water
Chapter Fourteen: The Fortuneteller
In which Aang considers becoming a jewellery maker, a platypus-bear lays an egg, and Sokka eats some cream puffs.
“The Fortuneteller” is a delightful, theme driven episode
that gives us a return to the “Gaang visits a village” episode set up. It is
the most heavily comic episode since “The King of Omashu”, and the purest
“Gaang visits a Village” story since the same episode, with no arc villains, or
any villain at all, with the conflict being driven by the love interests of the
Gaang and their attempts to solve a problem in the community they visit, making
the episode a heavily thematic story about love, fate, an the way the two
intersect.
The first aspect of the episode worth exploring is Sokka’s
frustration with Aunt Wu’s fortune telling, a frustration that opens up an
exploration of the tensions between rationalism and the supernatural. I spoke
in my first essay about how much of the humour for Sokka’s character comes from
the fact that he is the ordinary, non superpowered character who is singularly
unimpressed with the fantastical nature of the world he is in, an aspect of his
characterisation that is key to the way he is used in this episode. He is
suspicious of Aunt Wu, questioning the accuracy of each of her prophecies. But
the story isn’t a simple case of Sokka’s rationalism showing the wrongness of
fortune telling. The Avatar world is undeniably driven by the supernatural,
with a population of people that are capable of manipulating elements with chi
and advanced martial arts, and an already established spirit realm existing
alongside the material world. As a result, Sokka’s over the top rationalism is
out of place in this story, a fact confirmed as he repeatedly causes himself
the distress predicted by Aunt Wu. More than that, Sokka’s ideology is somewhat
out of place in this world, a fantastical world where it is entirely possible
for fortune telling to be genuine and accurate.
The perils of putting too much trust in the fortunes of Aunt
Wu are still explored, however. A prime example of this is the classic “Can
your science explain why it rains?”/ “Yes! Yes it Can!” exchange (quite
possibly Sokka’s funniest line so far). While we are never given a reason to
disbelieve Aunt Wu, it is obvious that the villagers place too much importance
on her prophecies. The villagers are clearly risking their lives, both on an
individual level, as the Gaang encounter a man who is far too calm around an
angry platypus bear, and on a town wide scale, as they refuse to check to see
if the volcano has become active. We also see people becoming too reliant on
the prophecies in smaller, less harmful, but still unhelpful ways: the man who
has stopped bathing, the man who keeps wearing red shoes so that Aunt Wu’s
prophecy for him is guaranteed to come true, and Katara’s requests for
predictions that even exasperate Aunt Wu. While Aunt Wu is presented as
genuine, and her prophecies are not out of place in this world, the story does
still show the villagers letting her prophecies micromanaging their lives to be
a problem.
In spite of these perils, Aunt Wu is pointedly not presented
as a charlatan to be defrauded. She is clearly not seeking profit from the
town, not charging for telling people’s fortunes, and is only framed as making
up prophecies when she is trying to get rid of Katara so that she can be left
in peace instead of being made to tell more fortunes. She is never shown as not
believing in her predictions. And, of course, as the man who becomes Sokka’s
nemesis throughout the episode happily points out, technically all of her
predictions come true.
One such genuine prediction is her recognition of Aang’s
fate as the Avatar, where she correctly identifies the struggle of good and
evil that is his ultimate fate in the series. In this sequence, the episode
touches on the theme of the struggle between epic fate and personal hopes and
desires, with Aang hilariously responding “Yeah, yeah, I knew that already, but
did it say anything about a girl?”: he is remarkably unconcerned about his
upcoming struggle with the fire lord, instead wanting to know how his
relationships with the people immediately close to him will work out. He’s an
ordinary twelve year old, really. This struggle between the epic and the small
scale is reflected in the episode’s placement within the series-wide narrative:
Aang learned about the short amount of time he has to master the elements in “Avatar
Roku” after being informed of the arrival in Sozin’s comet, yet is still taking
the time out to have his fortune told, and is protecting a small village that
seems to be of little importance to the hundred year war. Placing the episode
at this point in the season reveal a crucial detail about ATLA: while the
series is about a world spanning conflict, it always takes time to foreground
the importance and value of the people who live in the world affected by that
conflict.
But for this episode, the personal concern Aang wants Aunt
Wu to address are his feelings for Katara, which are made explicit for the
first time in the series here. And so, for the first time, I’m going to try and
write some analysis on Kataang. The first detail worth picking up on is Aang
making Katara a necklace out of Sokka’s fishing line, a detail that continues
plot around Katara’s lost necklace. And it’s a nice detail about a continuing
theme in their relationship: Aang is aware Katara is upset about losing
something that connects her to her mother, so he offers her the support he can,
and he does so in his typically masculinity-defying way. It’s a key theme of
their bond, a bond born out of mutual support and affection for one another.
While Aang’s feelings about a romantic relationship between
him and Katara are certain, the episode does crucially emphasise Katara
considering the possibility of the relationship. Most importantly, it’s a
moment where Katara is removed from Aang: it isn’t a moment where he realises
he still has a chance with her when he thought she was disinterested in him,
but a moment where the audience is shown her considering the nature of her
feelings for him, avoiding a narrative where Katara is just a prize for Aang.
It has been shown how much she cares for and supports Aang before, such as when
she defends Aang when the village kicks him out in “The Avatar Returns”, and in
her listening to his past pain in “The Storm”. However, it is only after
connecting Aunt Wu’s prediction (whether she’s taking it seriously or not
anymore) to Sokka’s comment on Aang’s powers that she starts to consider
whether her feelings for Aang run deeper than just being, as she suggests at
the start of the episode, “good friends”.
Katara’s “Aang’s a good friend” comment at the start of the
episode does set up a potentially problematic “friendzone” narrative, one that
is leant into further when Sokka tells Aang that “The problem nice guys like
you have [is] being too nice”. But this “nice guy TM” stereotype is mostly
evaded. The episode seems to initially support Sokka’s statement when Aang’s
genuine disinterest in Meng seems to make her more interested in him, but
ultimately, trying to be detached goes terribly for Aang, and actually means
Katara takes less of an interest in him when he tries to act that way: he
correctly realises that being aloof is a terrible approach for him, and instead
pursues romance in a way that defies gendered expectations. Ultimately, it is
unsurprising that Sokka’s advice is unreliable: it’s quite clear that he is
lying, or at least exaggerating, when he claims to know everything about women:
only a few episodes ago, in “Jet”, his exchange with Katara made it quite clear
Sokka hasn’t been kissed yet. As a result, the episode ultimately rejects the
“friendzone” and “nice guy” lines of thinking.
Furthermore, in the “you don’t like me like I like you”
scene, it is made clear that Meng realises Aang genuinely doesn’t have romantic
feelings for her. Meng’s story ties together the themes of the episode neatly,
demonstrating the dangers of putting too much stock in an assumed fate: she
falls for Aang solely on the basis of him having big ears, before even getting
to know him, and gets hurt in the process. It is an unhealthy approach to love,
and comes from taking too much stock in Aunt Wu’s predictions: it’s not that
Aunt Wu is necessarily wrong about her future husband, but more that she
shouldn’t let her actions be driven by her fate.
Ultimately, the key resolution to the themes of this episode
comes in the form of Aang and Katara’s Cloudbending. Notably, this provides the
first hint of elements being able to mix, with Aang and Katara being able to
bend with both water and air bending, foreshadowing the “Separation is an
illusion” theme that runs throughout Book Two. This episode also shows that the
separation of rational and supernatural is also an illusion in the Avatar
world, where both are able to coexist peacefully. Finally, the story makes it
clear that while there is a grand overarching narrative to ATLA, the characters
are more than capable of taking fate into their own hands, and individual
people can reshape the fate set out for them, in matters of grand importance,
and personal importance. Individual people do not have to be driven by a wider
epic narrative, but instead carve out their place within that narrative.
End of Part Thirteen.
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