Katara vs Rayla

Can the Domestic Virtues explain why one character is so great and the other so bad?

Last week, I posted a guest article from Jared Trueheart - What Makes a Woman a Good Woman? The Domestic Virtues. In this article (which is required reading to understand this one), Jared discusses what virtues a woman must possess and cultivate to be considered good.

Trueheart identifies the Domestic Virtues as fundamental for a woman to be good at being a woman. These virtues are four:

Loyalty

Patience

Compassion

Fidelity

All are self-explanatory which is unsurprising but Trueheart explores how these virtues are exhibited by the character of Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey.

Back in the day, I read the Odyssey after reading Trueheart’s two part essay and I agreed with his assessment of Penelope’s character. She is truly a good woman and she is good at being a woman.

So much for Penelope then, but do we – in actual fact – judge girls and women by how well they perform the Domestic Virtues or this is just wishful, conceptual thinking? After all, Penelope is a character from a seminal yet ancient story; it might make sense that we would like her for these virtues because they are appropriate in her given context.

In short, the Domestic Virtues can explain why readers like Penelope in the Odyssey….

…but can the Domestic Virtues explain why female characters are liked or disliked in modern media?

I am going to argue yes, and I am going to form my argument by comparing two female characters from modern media - one who is versed in the Domestic Virtues and another who is not.

This essay will compare Katara from Avatar: The Last Airbender to Rayla from The Dragon Prince.

Some background

Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005 - 2008) and The Dragon Prince (2018 - 2024) are both animated family-friendly series which share the same head writer - Aaron Ehasz.

And if you didn’t know this, you would quickly discover it while watching The Dragon Prince because there are numerous Easter Eggs and references to Avatar: The Last Airbender which I did not fail to miss.

Because both series share the same head writer, comparing these two characters is undisputedly fair and appropriate.

I have watched both series in their entirety so I will give a quick one sentence review for each:

Avatar: The Last Airbender is good; let your children watch it.

The Dragon Prince is half-baked and infused with LGBTQ+ elements; do NOT let your children watch it.

With that out of the way, let us look at the two characters, Katara and Rayla.

In Avatar: The Last Airbender (ATLA), Katara is a waterbender from the Southern Water tribe in the south pole of the world. She goes on a journey with her older brother and the young Avatar Aang to help prepare him to bring down the Fire Lord, end a global war and bring balance to the world. She teaches Aang waterbending and they become a couple at the end of the series.

In The Dragon Prince (TDP), Rayla is a moon shadow elf in the world Xadia. She is an assassin who is sent to kill King Harrow of the human kingdom of Katolis, but she has a change of heart and helps the sons of the king (Callum and Ezran) to return the dragon prince egg to the queen of the dragons in the first three seasons. At the start of season three, Rayla and Callum become a couple. There are another three seasons were stuff happens, but we need not concern ourselves with the full plot, only with Rayla and whether she is virtuous according to the framework of the Domestic Virtues.

Now both characters in these two separate shows have fans and haters because art is divisive. Yet a number of my close friends have watched ATLA with me and most of them have watched some of TDP with me as well. And I have observed and discussed with them how awful Rayla is.

Yet we have never, ever had a similar discussion about Katara.

And I posit one reason is because Katara exhibits the Domestic Virtues while Rayla does not.

A fully comprehensive comparison could be the length of an academic thesis so all these examples will be selective and short for time’s sake.

We shall go through the virtues one by one and examine how Katara comes out with flying colours while Rayla crashes and burns.

Fidelity

The last Domestic Virtue is probably the most contentious. This is because men are not measured by their Fidelity but women are. That strikes a chord with our American, Christian sensibilities but it is true of the sex differences.

Wives who cheat on their husbands are labelled sluts, whores, bitches, etc. They are scolded, beaten and sometimes killed. An evolutionary psychological investigation of husband-wife murders reveals that a disproportionate amount of these were “crimes of passion”. These are murders in which the husband found the wife being unfaithful and killed her in the heat of the moment. This is outlined in the book Homicide by Margot Wilson and Martin Daly and is not culturally specific.

I will get this one out of the way first, even though it breaks the listed order. Both Katara and Rayla are chaste and we can assume that they are saving themselves until marriage.

Therefore, this is actually the one virtue that Katara and Rayla both share to the same degree in its practice and manifestation.

Both characters would be unlikable women if they engaged in sexual infidelity.

Loyalty

A woman who is loyal to her husband is not inferior in terms of rank. The sex roles are different, and the values that we place on men and women are accordingly so. Humanity always has and always will value wives who are loyal to their husbands.

[…] there is a way in which women show Loyalty to something superior, and that is to their family and people. In the sense that the whole group, whether it be family or tribe, is greater than the sum of its parts, Loyalty to that group can rightly be called strong feelings of allegiance.

Women who demonstrate Loyalty to their family or people are better at being women than those that don’t.

Katara and Loyalty

Katara is loyal to the same groups of people throughout the whole of ATLA. These said people are her tribe, her family, her friends and Aang. She does nothing to betray them in any of the episodes and does everything she can to protect them because she loves them deeply.

All of these aforementioned persons and groups are people Katara knows personally so her loyalty and allegiance are not abstract but instead solid and grounded.

Katara is the “sensible one” in the group throughout the series and can act a bit like an overbearing mother. But this is a consequence of her love and loyalty, she sometimes needs to pull back in the show but this flaw comes from a good disposition. It doesn’t come from a desire to control.

As well, Katara never wavers in her belief that she her are friends are on the right side in the war. She never has moments of doubt where she wonders if the Fire Nation are really in the right. She is loyal to her people.

Thus, her allegiance is clear, honest and wholesome. We know where she stands and who she roots for.

It is hardly difficult to extrapolate from the loyalty she shows to her friends and family that she would make a loyal wife. One imagines from what is previously displayed in the series that Aang and Katara would have a good marriage defined by loyalty.

Rayla and Loyalty

With Rayla everything is messy, and it doesn’t matter which of the seven seasons of TDP you watch. For the purposes of this essay though, we are going to focus on the first four seasons

It is hard to say she is loyal to anyone or anything except for the Dragon Prince (the dragon prince is a baby dragon called Azymondias or “Zym” for short). But even here, she isn’t so much loyal to Zym as she is to herself.

To demonstrate the above, we need to examine her lack of loyalty to anyone in the first four seasons.

In the first season, Rayla is part of an elven assassin group tasked with killing King Harrow and his son Ezran. This is for revenge as King Harrow killed the Dragon King and the Dragon Prince.

Later, however, Rayla, Ezran and Callum discover that the Dragon Prince is alive in his egg and Rayla decides that it would be a better idea to bring the egg back to the Dragon Queen rather than take part in the assassination.

Rayla tries to persuade the other elves (including her adoptive father Runnan who is the leader of these assassins) to call off the assassination but they don’t listen and she abandons them. She decides to journey with Ezran and Callum carrying the dragon egg over the border into Xadia where the Dragon Queen reigns.

Now to be fair, this is arguably the correct moral decision but this makes the question of Rayla’s loyalties exceedingly messy.

Because Rayla does a halfway house with everyone.

She doesn’t become wholly loyal to the human cause or the elven cause. She lectures Ezran and Callum on their “prejudices” about elves and doesn’t tolerate anything bad they have to say about them. She also lists all the bad things humans have done without recognizing that the elves have been both instigators and willing partners in the cycle of war between the human and the elven kingdoms.

But at the same time, Rayla is somewhat remorseful that she was a member of an assassin band which was going to kill Ezran and his father. She also tries persuading other elves and dragons that Ezran and Callum can be trusted.

If Rayla was handled more competently by the writers, her unstable loyalties would be the beginnings of an identity crisis and the start a character arc but, instead of growing or changing, she remains in this confused state.

But maybe she is loyal to the Zym the Dragon Prince, as I previously suggested? The show suggests that the surviving Dragon Queen is the ultimate ruler of Xadia and outranks even the elven kings, so perhaps Rayla ditching her assassin comrades to return the prince is her placing her loyalty where it should actually lie?

The issue is that’s not how it is portrayed.

Ezran, Callum and Rayla are convinced that, if they return Zym back to the Dragon Queen, the cycle of wars and violence might finally end and lasting peace might be possible between humans and elves.

But later in the series, Rayla reveals that she wants to return Zym because it will clear her family name. Her parents were his guardians when he was an egg and it appears that they fled and ran when the humans killed the Dragon King and so her family’s name has been besmirched.

She mainly wants to return Zym to clear the name of her parents and herself. This would incline one to think she is loyal to her parents and to her family above all else but for one problem.

Rayla was sent on the assassination mission with the other elves to redeem her family name. The elves of her village placed her on this mission to give her a chance to atone for the cowardice of her parents. All the assassins on the team, including Rayla, make a magical vow that they will take the lives of King Harrow and Prince Ezran.

Yet, when Rayla discovers that the egg is unharmed and Zym is alive. She immediately decides not to take part in the assassination. Rayla never spends a moment wondering whether returning the egg will be enough to redeem the name of her family. She never considers whether she should still help her team kill Harrow and Ezran and then return the egg.

No, instead, Rayla immediately decides against assassinating anyone, even though the assassinations would exonerate her family name. There is simply no internal conflict and this suggests that she isn’t especially loyal to her family, otherwise, she would have been conflicted over what to do (even if just for a moment).

The truth is Rayla isn’t loyal to anything but herself (unless you are of the opinion that one can be loyal to abstract ideas or goals such as “peace between humans and elves”).

But definitive proof that Rayla is loyal only to herself can be found in the first episode of the fourth season.

As mentioned earlier in this essay, Rayla and Callum become a couple at the start of the third season. But if you were wondering whether Rayla demonstrates loyalty to Callum after reading the previous paragraphs, I would ask you to read them again and take a wild guess.

Now, Rayla doesn’t cheat on Callum – she somehow does something worse.

There is a time skip of two years between season three and season four. And Rayla has abandoned Callum for these two years in order to to go searching for the main villain who went MIA at the end of season three. What is more, no one was forcing her to go on this hunt.

Rayla left Callum to chase for a ghost – for someone who went missing after the final battle in the last season and who nobody has seen since. What is worse, she ditched Callum on the morning of his birthday.

At the end of the first episode of season four, she returns to Callum and… chooses not to apologize for leaving him for two years.

In fact, she never apologizes.

Rayla should have done the dogeza (kowtow) to apologize to Callum for leaving him for two years

Tomoko Kuroki in Watamote shows us how it is done. (chapter here)

And Callum should have dumped the elf then and there. He should have found himself a kind, caring, pretty, castle maid for a girlfriend instead but, apparently, Aaron Ehasz wants your boys to grow up to be doormats for absent and heartless girlfriends. This is another reason not to let your children watch TDP.

Rayla’s abandonment demonstrates a complete absence of loyalty to Callum and their relationship. She may not have cheated on him but she abandoned him and in a cold, heartless way which is just as bad.

TL;DR – Rayla is loyal to no one. She is loyal only to herself and whatever she thinks is a good idea at the time. Her loyalty is abstract at best and she is also selfish to the core. We also see that she is an awful girlfriend and that there is no reason to believe she would be a good wife.

Patience

Women’s primary duty, while men are away from the house (where danger hides), is to raise the kids. This requires patience. Babies especially require patience. Loyalty requires patience.

Obviously, Katara and Rayla do not have children and so do not demonstrate patience in the context of family and the home but they do (or don’t) in other arenas.

Katara and Patience

Katara does lose her patience at times in ATLA. Sometimes it is comical as with Toph in episode six of season two, but other times she is just impatient and impulsive.

But there is one domain in which Katara shows consistent patience.

In the ninth episode of the first season, Katara tries teaching Aang some waterbending techniques which she had to master through trial and error and with much effort. But Aang takes to waterbending like a fish to water and quickly exceeds her.

This angers Katara and causes her to become jealous to the point where she shouts at Aang later in the episode, irritated by his success. Of course, by the end, she apologizes to Aang and works through her jealously and eats humble pie.

On the face of it, there is no display of patience in this episode but we do see the fruits of this virtue in Katara’s waterbending.

In order to learn any craft, discipline or skill, patience is necessary. Especially when you find something hard and do not take to it easily.

Katara shows patience by continuing the hard task of learning to bend water. At the start of episode one, we see her practising and we can see that there is much room for improvement. She doesn’t get discouraged though and continues to practise.

While she does initially get jealous when Aang proves to be a natural, she does apologize to Aang for her bad behaviour, drops her jealously and most importantly keeps learning and practising. She doesn’t give up or become discouraged after seeing Aang run metaphorical rings around her.

Continuing to persevere with a skill, even when others are better and you are not naturally gifted, is a fruit of patience.

Katara’s patience is admirable and one can imagine that being practised in the virtue of patience would dispose her to being a good mother of young children.

Rayla and Patience

There is nothing positive to say about Rayla in regards to patience because she simply has none and doesn’t display this virtue ever.

Quite the opposite, she seems constantly impatient about everything.

Whether it’s walking, journeying, talking, arguing with Ezran and Callum, she doesn’t show any patience in anything.

In fact, she becomes quite impatient when either Ezran or Callum says or does something that is even remotely offensive to elves or other magical creatures even when by accident. Rayla never, ever pauses and says to herself:

“Well of course, Ezran and Callum would believe that. They grew up in a human kingdom and I am the first elf they have met. Also, they have a right to be a little suspicious and cautious around me, I was part of a team which was going to kill them and their dad. They aren’t going to be able to determine truth from fiction about elves overnight - this will take time and I must try and be patient.”

Introspection, empathy and patience are not things that Rayla is capable of in TDP.

It is reasonable to infer from her inability to be patient about anything that Rayla would not do well with small children including her own potential children.

Compassion

Shaping and moulding the next generation of men and women is no small task. In our modern world we undervalue childrearing by outsourcing it to day-care centres and nannies. But from our ancient past all the way up to the turn of the 21st century having and raising children was a woman’s primary purpose.

To do that well women need several virtues. Patience, which I outlined last week, is the first. The second is Compassion.

Babies can be horrible. As can toddlers, and kids, and pre-teens, and especially teenagers. Tolerating their crying and whining and their needs requires immense amounts of Compassion. Parents, especially mothers, sacrifice their time and energy to provide for their children. They hold them when they need holding and punish them when they need punishing.

As with patience, compassion is a virtue that can be seen outside the contexts of the home and family.

Katara and Compassion

Katara is easily the most compassionate character in ATLA. Her compassion extends not only to her tribe, family and friends but also to innocent people affected by the war.

To go through an exhaustive list here would be make this essay too lengthy for its own good so here are two examples:

The first is in the third episode of season one. Aang discovers that he is the last airbender and the rest of his ethnic group were killed by the fire nation. He enters the avatar state in a fit of rage and loses control of himself. Katara, understanding that he is heartbroken and needs to know that people are there for him, tells him that she emphasizes because of her own losses and, more importantly, that both she and Sokka are there for him.

The second is in the third episode of season three. The group come across a village in the fire nation suffering from illness and starvation because of a nearby war factory which is polluting the waters of the lake that they depend upon for their survival. The team are passing through but Katara decides that she must help them and she does so in secret and by herself initially. Later in the story, she convinces the group that they have should destroy the war factory.

Katara’s compassion shows us that she has a warm heart and would be a good friend. It also suggests that she would make a good mother as she’d be able to be compassionate with her children.

Rayla and Compassion

This is the second virtue which Rayla doesn’t have or show in any meaningful way.

It is actually fascinating how such a heartless character could be created under the watch of a head writer with so much experience and who cannot help but remind the audience that he was the head writer for ATLA but here we stand. I mean a character who leaves their boyfriend for two years without any contact is the definition of heartless and the opposite of compassionate.

But it is actually worse than Rayla not being compassionate – she is actually the opposite.

In episodes six and seven of season two, a dragon, which was intimidating a human village by circling it for days, is shot out of the sky and chained to the ground by humans. Rayla, not seeing how the humans might have been justified to shoot the dragon down, decides she will go and free it alone.

Of course, her attempts end with her being surrounded by human soldiers who she cannot hope to defeat and the dragon is still not freed. Fortunately for her, Callum decides to betray his fellow humans and comes to the rescue.

Now Callum is learning to be a mage but because he is a human there is only one type of magic he can use – dark magic. Although there is nothing dark about dark magic. Dark magic is casting spells by using pieces of dead magical creatures, pieces such as unicorn horns, griffin talons etc. Why it is so heinously evil to use animal parts to cast spells is never explained in a serious manner. The writers just wave their arms in the air and wail: “Ooo! Dark magic! Dark magic bad! Ooo!”

It is terrible, lazy writing.

In any case, because Callum cannot use “good” magic on account of being human, he is forced to use “dark” magic. He uses a snake’s rattler to cast a spell that turns all the chains binding the dragon into snakes. This allows both the dragon and Rayla to escape.

A side effect of using “dark” magic for the first time in the show is that you enter a short coma and have bad fever dreams. This happens to Callum but fortunately Rayla gets him far away and to safety.

One might think that Rayla would be distraught, saddened and pained to see Callum in a magically induced coma. One might also expect she’d feel guilt because she put Callum in this situation by going on a suicide mission. And of course one would expect that she’d be panicking and anxious for Callum’s health and doing everything she can to help him.

In a word, we’d expect compassion.

But as you have probably predicted, there is no compassion from Rayla. She gets angry at Callum because he used “dark” magic to save her and the dragon. There is not a shred of gratitude, only a self-righteousness attitude and haughty demeanour. She even says to Ezran that “this is what you get for using dark magic”.

It is only after Rayla demeans Callum’s act of bravery in front of his younger brother that she starts acting with a modicum of compassion and tells the sleeping Callum that she cannot lose him because “you mean so much to me”.

But this single sentence doesn’t mean that Rayla is compassionate generally or that she has the virtue of compassion.

Allow me to provide a crash course in virtue ethics to explain why.

Aristotle in his Ethics explains that virtues are habits. They are practices which you can choose to exercise like a muscle until they become easy and automatic.

Consistency in a good habit is what makes one virtuous. Therefore, the man who tells the truth consistently has the virtue of honesty and can be described as an honest man. Because of this, he doesn’t become a liar if he tells a lie once.

The same is true of vice – the opposite of virtue. A man who consistently lies has the vice of dishonesty and can only be described as a liar. He doesn’t become an honest man if he tells the truth once.

Unlike Katara, who is compassionate as a habit in ATLA, Rayla does not demonstrate compassion as a habit. It is inconsistent and based on her own mood.

This is true of all the previously examined virtues, Katara is loyal and patient as a habit and, although she is not perfect, she keeps exercising these virtues. Rayla does not.

What Rayla does exercise as a habit is the opposite of compassion– contempt. Which she dishes out to anyone who she thinks is in the wrong or who has done something wrong such as Callum when he used “dark” magic to rescue her.

Rayla’s lack of compassion, even when the occasion calls for compassion, does not suit her for the role of being a girlfriend, wife or mother.

Conclusion

Katara displays the Domestic Virtues, they are part of her character. The opposite is true for Rayla.

So I put it to you that Katara in Avatar is a better young woman and is also better at being a woman than Rayla.

For anyone who would dispute this, I have these questions:

1. If you are the parent of a daughter, would you prefer her to take after Katara or Rayla?

2. If you are the parent of a son, would you prefer him to marry a woman like Katara or a woman like Rayla?

3. If you are a man, who would you rather marry, a woman like Katara or Rayla?

4. If you are a man who wants children, would you rather have a woman like Katara bear your children or Rayla?

To be clear with the last three questions, I am not asking if you would choose Katara or Rayla; I am asking if you would choose someone like Katara or Rayla. Or, put another way, I am asking if you would choose a woman who takes Katara as her role model or one who takes Rayla as her role model.

These questions are neither absurd nor preposterous. The fact is only one of these characters has the Domestic Virtues which would dispose her to being a good wife and mother. Only one of these characters is worthy of any emulation.

We may not engage with fiction like ATLA or TDP and consciously check if the behaviours of the female characters are congruous with the Domestic Virtues, but I’d argue that everyone does this on a subconscious level.

It doesn’t take long for someone to assess a woman and figure out if she’d make a good girlfriend/wife and mother, even if they have no conscious conception of the Domestic Virtues.

Therefore the conscious knowledge of the Domestic Virtues is a useful aid along with our subconscious and intuitive assessments of a woman’s character.

And what is more, the Domestic Virtues can serve as a good yardstick for measuring whether or not a female character in a story is a good representation of ideal womanliness and femininity.

Addendum

In his essay, Trueheart says that the Domestic Virtues, much like Jack Donavon’s proposed Tactical Virtues for men, are amoral and don’t have anything to do with being moral or being a good person.

The Tactical Virtues simply measure what makes a man manly and masculine or, put another way, what makes a man good at being a man. For instance, Donavon argues that strength is a Tactical Virtue and that the possession and practice of strength makes you better at being a man but he doesn’t say these will make you a righteous or morally good man.

Both a brilliant detective and an underworld assassin will have strength but only one of them will be using it for a noble cause and to accomplish what is Good, True and Beautiful.

It is likewise with the Domestic Virtues, they do not measure what is moral per se.

Katara is feminine and good at being a woman but that doesn’t make her a good person. Katara is a good person because her values are orientated towards the Good, the True and the Beautiful.

Rayla is not feminine and is not good at being a woman but this in-itself doesn’t make her a bad person. I would argue she actually is a bad person but not because she doesn’t practise the Domestic Virtues.

One of my more controversial opinions is that a woman/girl can be a good, moral person without actually being feminine and vice versa for men. I would argue this is far from ideal but possible.

An example of this in fiction would be the character of Toph in ATLA. Toph is a twelve-year-old girl who is going through a rebellious tomboy phase and is not very girly at all. She also does not measure especially well against the yardstick of the Domestic Virtues (although she exhibits loyalty to her friends).

Nonetheless, one could hardly describe Toph as a bad person in ATLA. Like Katara, her values are orientated towards the Good, the True and the Beautiful.