The Failed Masculinity of Netflix’s Sokka 

The theater performance was better than this

Na dude that theater scene was funny. THIS. Is just downright sad.

@@senatorarmstrong4662 what is comedy without a little tragedy? that said, ya, it's pretty sad. on the bright side, we can pretend it doesn't exist.

😂

The Ember island players episode only showed us the highlights This shows us the whole damn play.

Avatar had the perfect character writing, but everything changed when the Netflix Nation attacked...

Facts bruh…

Great character that was perfectly flawed. He had lots of room to grow.

and you can say they did the exact same thing about Katara

He was perfectly imperfect in the cartoon. While visually it is stunning, the acting and how Netflix is handling them is extremely disappointing

I was thinking the same. Netflix Suki gave me a predator vibe.

I was thinking the same thing!! She became less badass, and he became this “savior” for her. How did they get that so wrong in trying to prevent sexism??

@@Singinferyoo Yeap, just baffling. "Hey, let's remove the sexism of this teenage boy by portraiting this otherwise badass girl in a even more sexist way. We are progressive!"

when ppl were complaining about him about sexually objectified by suki I thought they were joking or smnth. then i saw the shirtless scene...like wat. this isnt riverdale or euphoria

EXACTLY. She was so down bad it was fking annoying

That sure is a take. There have always been both nuanced and unnuanced writers. Especially within the realm of cartoons that avatar is in, nuanced characters have been more and more prevelant, as shows have become more serialised. Since avatar aired we have gotten characters like the ice kind and gruncle Stan, complicated, nuanced characters. This take is one born of ignorance, an incomplete view of a media landscape. The writers for the avatar live action being bad it only representative of the writers themselves and maybe Netflix if you are willing to stretch it.

@@jambott5520 Guess why I put "modern writers" in quotation marks, friend.

@@12SickOne34 hate to be that guy.. but "quotation marks" not exclamation marks (!)

​@@12SickOne34 It's still a very disingenuous thing to say. Especially since most writers these days are upwards the age 30-40 + years old. Just goes to show you that media literacy and the ability to write nuanced stories is a skill that you develop and not something that you acquire with age.

I do wonder if there actually don't get it? Or if they just think the audience is too stupid to get it. Or both

He also taught Sokka how to make the fur bombs they used to try to open Roku's temple door

They are probably going to give both inventions solely to Sokka in the remake.

😂😂😂 exactly. I get the feeling these netflix writers are doing this on purpose

Right! Sokka wanted to be like his dad. And he was a lot like him. But this was actually a good thing because Hakoda is a great father and role model. It’s a good foil to zuko wanting to be more like his father, but needing to move away from that because Ozai is a terrible role model and father.

Minor correction it wasn't on the day of black sun. It was when Ba Sing Se fell. But the only way to remedy this is if we see the opposite happening through Hakoda's POV. Or have Hakoda say he was wrong, but I personally prefer the former as that doesn't assassinate Hakoda's character.

Exactly.

True. Which I think they'll expand later or retcon later that this was only Sokka's skewed view of what happened and what Hakoda said was entirely different.

@@vailingbow1068 did he fail the test cause if so they already made the dad a shity leader.

@@tracim3080 He didn't, but Bato bailed him out.

They did it probably because the idea of a positive patriarchal leader is a bad thing so they had to completely assassinate hakoda

He doesn't have everything the needs though. He lacks the training, the discipline, and the actual self confidence. Sokka frequently doubts himself, and puts up a cocky front. He has an internal conflict the entire show about how he's virtually useless, and even his plans don't always work out. It's later through training, and learning humility that he becomes something better for it. But he couldn't do that on his own. He needed a guide. So yes, he had the capacity, but he didn't know the way. Which is why mentors are important, and even the most self made man was built up by others to some degree. Having all the tools is useless if one doesn't know the design and how to use them. This isn't to discredit Anime Sokka, he's a great person with great potential, but untapped and untrained, he would have remained little more than the map man, and the comedic breaks with out the aid of others.

Not really though, Sokka actually ha doubts about himself

Is what you described this "character arc" that I keep hearing so much about? Huh, if only someone actually wrote one.

@@master_samwise its not just a character arch its a character sine-wave as Sokka face multiple ups and downs unlike this faker who basically just gets told no or fakatara who just has a line rocketing up with no actual bumps to make it interesting.

@@Jasonwolf1495 He went from someone who learns to become wise over time, to a little bit** following his penis and "men are stupid" stereotype.

I already commented about this on another comment, but modern writers really ain't any better or worse at writing characters than people of the past. Only real difference is that there is a much larger hating culture, giving more prominence to bad examples. One show does not make a trend.

Saying things like this only proves that people like you don't watch nearly enough modern media as you allude to in order to form an opinion like this.

Yeah - I guess stuff like Arcane, Primal, Andor, Puss in Boots the Last Wish, Dune 2, the Spiderverse movies, etc, don't exist /S

@@m.a.k.dynasty4504I’m not finding much in modern media that contradicts it that was made in the West. What little I do find is lower budget.

@@sexy1018 you just listed almost all the good stuff. The stuff that supports the OP’s point is a MUCH longer list.

“Look how they massacred my boy.”

Disagree. The sexism makes no sense. The south allowed women warriors. We know this because of Hama’s flashbacks of the fire nation raids. Women were fighting alongside men. Hama must have been one heck of a bender to be the last one remaining. WW2 in America saw women enter the workforce and doing jobs traditionally done by men. It changed women’s place in the workplace forever and inspired more women to have careers. If anything, the war in ATLA and lack of men at the South Pole would have seen more women doing men’s jobs including hunting and fishing. Katara accompanying Sokka is proof of that. The sexism was added in the early 2000’s because that was the moral dilemna writers fell back on during that time period. Sokka’s character doesn’t need to be sexier to be cocky. Any young boy put in charge of a tribe would get a large head about his "superior skills".

"I call it the stink n sink."

​@@ewe6096Sokka doesn't know about that. He's only seen male warriors before they go on their journey.

@@ewe6096 "Disagree. The sexism makes no sense" No, it makes perfect sense. In fact if he doesn't hold these values, it'd make NO sense. "The south allowed women warriors." Also false. Not one single woman from the village went to fight. "We know this because of Hama’s flashbacks of the fire nation raids." False again. They were not warriors, they were Waterbenders. There's a distinction. It's like saying if a bandit breaks into a woman's home and she stabs him with a kitchen knife she's a warrior. No, they were not warriors. All the waterbenders in the village had to fight because their village isn't very large, their defenses are poor, and they were the specific targets of these raids. If the women sat on their asses doing nothing, they'd have been wiped out. They're nearly wiped out anyway as the fire nation beats them in a war of attrition, and now the only people left in their village is elderly women and some children as the MEN go off to actually fight actively in the war. One single warship is enough to single handedly threaten the entire existence of this tribe, and it's because they have no warriors and no women that can have more children to replenish the numbers they lost. If all the men in a village are killed, the village is wounded but can heal. If all the women are killed, the village is dead. That's why the North doesn't allow women to fight, they are far too valuable. This is the ENTIRE source of men fight and women don't, because it's bloody obvious. "Hama must have been one heck of a bender to be the last one remaining." Forged in fire, literally. That doesn't mean she was a lifelong soldier, in fact she was clearly not one. "WW2 in America saw women enter the workforce and doing jobs traditionally done by men." Because all the men were off FIGHTING, which women couldn't do because they're not expendable and men are just better at it anyway. "It changed women’s place in the workplace forever and inspired more women to have careers." Indeed, and then it went way off the rails. Just look at where we're at now. "If anything, the war in ATLA and lack of men at the South Pole would have seen more women doing men’s jobs including hunting and fishing." You have no idea what you're even talking about. You've missed the point completely. Also fishing isn't a "man's job", the fuck are you on about?

For real. It's like everyone has to be a victim or a victimizer

The show took all things that were interesting and turned them boring and generic.

People pointed out it coukd be Sokka's skewed view point.

Bryke love them some daddy issues too: Zuko, Korra, Asami, Desna and Eska.

I'm incredibly pissed about Azula. Who the fuck is this whiny, weak, insecure little girl.

...and Aang! Aang was a kid who literally ran away from his responsibility. His character arc was that he had to learn to face his responsibilities head on instead of avoiding them. The Netflix show completely deleted Aang's flaws and this character arc, as they did with Sokka.

@@mori1bund he’s in my b tier of ruined characters 😂 the top list are my s tier misses

​@@taylorhauser3347Mai not S tier butchery?

Roku was so bad. They tried to make him funny? By far the worst casting and writing…

Gotta make men bad.

@HauntingSpectre 💯

Yes! the only flaw he has in the original series is not being with his kids because of the war, a good male model was what Sokka needed the most to not grow sexist in the first place. I can't believe Netflix butchered him.

Because having our protagonists (female and male) have flaws and complexity would be bad. 🥺

@@alejandrovegarodriguez6422 But they address the impact his absence had on them and had Katara say she understands why he left, but still felt a lot of anger and resentment toward him for leaving. And she and Hakoda have this beautiful scene of him talking about how much he loves her and how every night he would miss her and Sokka so much "it would ache." But OF COURSE Albert Kim can't have that in his "mature" Avatar.

Honestly they probably have enough animosity against anyone in the military to do their due diligence and research. My father himself was an infantry officer (infantry is closest to what you describe), and even then his job was _a lot_ more complex than that.

@@DiamondKingStudiosimo, based on the very black&white and all about power narrative this adaptation portrays i get the feeling the writers would actually quite look up to any military position

@@GreakyGeek Either they love it (glorify the generals and heroes and all that) or hate it (thinking war is bad for any reason and anyone who fights, even if drafted, is evil). There is no nuance, no recognition of moral conflicts, none of that.

Honestly, the idea of beign either one or the other could work as sokka could have seen them as separate due to his experiences and think he has to devote himself to only one and cannot be the other. But it seems this is more to give him insecurity issues.

Hakoda being a bad father was such bullshit. Real Hakoda loves his kids and he's proud of them. Who was this fake.

“A society that separates its warriors and scholars will find themselves defended by fools and ruled by cowards”

Especially since Sokka's greatest asset was his mind. And strategy is the key to battle. It's why Sokka's intelligence was so important during battles because he knew how to use tactics to get shit done.

@@akechijubeimitsuhide Not the mention they completely missed the point of Hakoda being a good father. Hakoda's love was unconditional. Ozai's was just conditional. Again, how can you get this very simple thing completely wrong? It is just absurd.

You are right! they are totally doing that relationship! I hadn’t thought of that but yeah that’s exactly what they did. They turned the southern water tribe into a Viking tribe 😬

yep that could have worked

And the thing is, even HTTYD doesn't solely stick to that aspect of Hiccup throughout the whole franchise. The shows and sequels later expand on his character and Hiccup evolves into a capable engineer, navigator, cartographer, and warrior on top of his already existing strategic and dragon-taming skills. All while still keeping his goofy demeanor. It's called _character development,_ and that's how it's done right. Something current writers don't seem to understand.

​@@AnimaVox_TRUE!! That's why I love Hiccup so much! He proves to be as much of a true Viking as anyone else but in his own ways.

and like... Hakoda was also an inventor... Hakoda is a good dad that loves his son...and what did they do.....have him call his son a disappointment in a flashback. JUSTICE FOR HAKODA.

Agreed. In a world of benders, nonbenders gotta get creative to fight on their level

I knew I forgot about one of his ideas in the first book.

@@master_samwise honestly it's probably the "least memorable" one? Because it didn't technically work? But, figured is bring it up. Thank you katara for the good idea. (Not xerox karara 🙄🙃)

Honestly that "it looked like it worked." Fits Sokka so well, he's like okay it didn't work, but lets leverage the noise we made to our advantage.

@@bigkirbyhj666 yes!!! And katara helps to make sure he knows. That even though it "didn't work" he was still helpful. By making the best of his failed idea. Which is waayyyyy better than just.. monologuing with the inverter (and destroying Hakota...)

​@@master_samwise also he is the one who saves the town from Jet.

"The Awakening" did a great job of showing how Hakoda is a mirror to Ozai. Right after Hakoda touchingly reassures Katara how much he loves & cares for his children, we're shown Ozai & Zuko's reunion. There's no love, just proclamations of how Proud Ozai is of Zuko's accomplishments. I don't know how the show runners of the Netflix series could watch that & create such a horrible interpretation of Hakoda's character. It shows a complete lack of understanding of the characters.

THANK YOU so many people don't realize hakoda is a mirror to ozai, I think it's odd because it becomes very clear when sokka shows up at his camp after ba sing se, it's the same premise as zuko's backstory and shows how the two fathers react to their sons interrupting an important war meeting

Oh my goodness I wish they’d dug into the idea of Sokka having a false perception of his dad! He was fighting in the war so it makes sense that his image of his dad is through the eyes of a young child and potentially over simplistic. I would love Sokka not knowing how to interact with his dad a first. Then they slowly grow closer once Sokka finds out Hakoda’s inventive.

Yes, but then he would have to have the same name for several videos and make it harder for us to tell whether he's talking about how they have no clue about sokka or katara or each individuals he talks about.

@@robinjameson4261the Netflix Has No Clue video series Season 1: Avatar: The Last Airbender Episode 2: they messed up Sokka big time

Facts! That's a whole bar right there bro🔥

@@robinjameson4261 I understand what you mean, but what I was trying to say is that Netflix does not have a clue about anything in general.

I'm betting they'll remove her "vulnerable" side and just keep her as the tough cool girl

@@Francisco-bu9ewyea and she’ll be the one who controls her parents

Toph is a girl boss who gets humbled. In these modern adaptations, humble is a word that doesn't exist for female characters. So, she's probably going to be extremely insufferable.

as a disabled person i would bet my good leg that they will fuck up her blindness ROYALLY. disabled people have a fierce sense of humor oftentimes because like, what other choice do we have to cope? they're gonna be too afraid to touch that part of her with a ten foot pole, ESPECIALLY since she's cocky and gets kinda humbled through experience. netflix had the option to hire disabled and blind consultants to help with the writing but did they? idk if they did, chief. find me here after we see Toph and if she's well-written and still has her jokes, i'll fork over the leg.

@@bloodstoppin im just waiting for them to cut down the blind jokes by a lot or even better, just remove them completely because apparently they are unable to distinguish what is actually offensive, so might as well just get rid of anything that has the slight possibility of it.

I feel like the writers of the live action need to reread and then rewrite their Sokka cause who was that on screen? Not sokka thats for sure.

Right!!!

cause modern writers don't have father figures.

I honestly can only imagine two possibilities: 1) we find out that Sokka remembers his darkest moment very differently because insecurities and self-doubt reshaped the memories of it and his father to something that doesn't actually properly correspond to reality Or 2) they honest to God just didn't catch this massive plot hole they created while rewriting the story.

the director of this show said he purposely did not watch the "movie' well he shouldve seen what WE DIDNT LIKE about that movie!!!

​@@teleportingpotatoe Calm down, you're safe now. There is no movie in Ba Sing Se. There is no movie within the walls, here we are safe, here we are free.

but noooo they had to make Hakoda toxic.....

Much better

@@Eilonwy95 I can even see a way the mark of the wise could be justified. Just have Soka call in his dad once he lost control. Then he gets the mark of the wise for knowing when to set pride aside and ask for help. Then my line for Hakota hits even harder since he knows he is about to leave Soka in a situation where he will not have anyone to turn to for help. It also still allows Soka to be insecure because even if his father sees potential in him he clearly hasn’t yet lived up to his personal ideal (his father). In the original this is a huge driving factor in Soka’s over the top sexism. He is desperately overcompensating for not only being left behind because of his age but also having to step up and fill in for his dad but only by default… which in turn made it super easy (barely an inconvenience) for him to drop that trait as soon as he is presented with evidence.

The episode where he goes away to learn sword fighting and everyone just laying bored whole days. 😂

No wonder Ai was the next step lol can’t even depend on decency anymore

​@@xT3ALxPACMANxAI will never make art as good as real humans. Give me a fucking break.

The funny thing is even with the changes they could have still had a decent arc by having Sokka be overconfident/arrogant about his abilities before getting humbled by Suki (sorta like the forest scene), then have him realize he needs to learn skills to be the leader/defender of his village he needs to be and then have him ask Suki to teach him. It's also let him show he values her experience and skill and set up the foundation for him learning from other teachers too. You could even arrange it so they have an actual conversation about their lives/fears/thoughts since it's clear the writers were laying in the foundation for their later relationship (and have a reason for the "I *am* a warrior, but I'm a girl too" line which is like a really weird line to cut out considering how important it is thematically and for Suki specifically).

Seems like Suki just have the hots for Sokka because...because! Nothing earned, nothing much in common besides them being kind of warriors in this adaptation. The relationship is just based off of infatuation...which is always short lived.

The reality is probably a mixed bag , the writers almost certainly Hate men especially fathers and literal patriarchs? Oh definitely but they can't portray " minorities " in a bad light so they make the male figures do bad things and make stupid decisions but also try their hardest to keep them away from what they would consider cardinal sins such as sexism.

I disagree while Sokka shows all these attributes from the first two episodes on. He needs to improve with them but that was already his foundation.

For Karl!

Rock and Stone brother!

For the Melon Lord

If you don't rock and stone, you ain't coming home.

ROCK and STONE to the BONE!

That's a different cave.

@@0deadx21 So they went into the sibling cave?

we call that the alabama breeding box@@arturmaxon2842

Secret tunnel, secret tunnel

the way i watched that entire scene in horror from the implications of it all

Men Bad, Women Good, Accept the new Gospel. :(

@@RazorO2Productions pretty much man. "Oh no this big bad man who has a lot of life experience is telling me I'm wrong, he must be the problem here"

I had completely forgotten about their shared interest in creating new inventions! They mention that in the Bato episode as well as one of the ones where the Gaang splits up during Omashu, don't they?

@Emarella yep when the gaang spilts up after they expose, Long Feng Sokka goes to meet with his dad. Bato has an off-hand remark on how similar they are. Then, just before their raid on a fire navy ship, Hokado tells Sokka how proud he is of him and how he is already a warrior

@RazorO2Productions Another ridiculous take. The show didn't do right by the female characters either, particularly Katara. So stop it.

Couldn’t keep his hands out of the cabbage cart!

Sokka with an engineering degree is like a squirrel-chimp with fire bending!

Can you remind what episode this is from again?

@@Gol.D-Roger “Chicanery”

@@DiamondKingStudiosHere I am, thinking those lines were said in the actual show. Read the replies more times than I’d like to admit and realized this is a BCS reference 😭

No, he sounds, looks, acts exactly like Sokka. Compare voice with Og Voice - Jack De Sena

@@ronnies732 meant purely by looks and wasnt saying it was a bad thing

@@Inflatedchair oh sorry, nowadays there is too much hate. Personally i see less amount of people complain about Sokka's character. They know what they are doing.

@@ronnies732 NP lol

​​​@@ronnies732 Live Action Sokka is more along the lines of Zuko and Iroh, that is, he was damaged and watered down but not ruined. Most people are focusing, fairly, on the fully butchered characters (Aang, Azula, Katara, Bumi, etc).

I don’t get why they’d remove that. Not only was it a reasonable character flaw, it was also played to be really funny. :/

I still don't get why they removed it💀

​@@thatonepossum5766 I'm with you. Instead, they gave Suki the bad guy role and made their relationship awkward

It’s the woke agenda, basic traditional gender role swap

​@@thatonepossum5766it's obvious why they removed it, if they kept it in they would've been targeted by right wing clickbait outrage podcasts like the daily wire for example, even by removing they still got called woke by a prager u podcast

I also felt they were trying to replicate the fog sequence in the swamp episode. If that means they exclude the swamp benders I'm gonna be soooo mad

That first point really ain't true. People, modern audiences, are perfectly OK with Sokka's attitudes in the original, or more accurately, OK with how the show portrays them, as the attitudes are clearly portrayed as a character flaw. So no, modern audiences aren't against this. If anything people seeing a character arc being of a person learning "wow, sexism is bad!" is very much within the sensibilities of modern audiences. We can see this because, people still watch avatar for the first time nowadays. And people don't get up in arms about it, at the very least not many. There will always be some media illiterate people, but it's not that many.

​@@jambott5520ah, you're misunderstanding the phrase "modern audience" it doesn't actually mean real people, it comes from a lot of bad writers making the excuse that their bad writing was actually good because it was for the "modern audience". Those authors live in a bubble or an echo chamber, they can't understand that most people won't like their work and believe that the majority of people are exactly them, so this "modern audience" they're talking about is basically just them.

@@jambott5520 that's the point they were making dude, there is no "modern audience" so it made no sense to remove the sexism because we all would've liked the character arc, but the showrunners decided it would be too terrible a concept for the "modern audience" to understand...this "modern audience" hates anyone that has to learn how to reexamine life and grow up, and yeah, many tv shows are written with this mythical group in mind first and foremost

and yet modern audiences have been complaining nonstop about him NOT having these flaws...

Also, it’s always ironic when people clearly do not understand the nuance of the social issues they are allegedly trying to avoid. As humans, we ALL have biases & prejudices that take time for us to understand & outgrow. It is why, I young teenage boy who oversells his sexist beliefs about strength & gender roles works so well, especially in the context where he had no proper adult role model to set him straight. It is the very fact that he was willing & able to accept change that makes his new world view have much deeper meaning. Anyhow, I will shut up before I start rambling any more.

The problem is the writers would consider what you described as sexism ... as they can not see the difference

​@@Ower8xI mean......op basically described sokka anyway lol like yes he is sexist but thats a flaw to be worked on all of the things op described are basically how sokka thinks about his place in life and his tribe

that's still sexism tho.... nobility and hierarchy is a very sexist idea of ruling...

@@TehMomo_ Sure Jen ... so a hierarchy based on race... is sexist ... or on IQ is sexist .... seriously ... Comments like these makes me think we should bring back the Trivium ....

Same!!!! Episode one club! I couldn't bear to watch more after that!!

I got to episode three then realised that if they were going to keep smashing important episodes together without the slightest understanding of why any of it originally worked, I was better off rewatching the real show yet again. Time much better spent!

Watched until episode 5 then quit and started rewatching the original

"All men are fools and all men are knights especially where women are concerned." From one of the Dunk and Egg stories though I probably ended up paraphrasing a tad.

sheesh i didn’t even realize that connection…live action katara would be right if she told sokka he didn’t love their mom like she did 🤣