I'm sure everyone here already knows that Asami is the light of my life, the fire of my loins, etc.
That being said, as much as I love her, she's not faring much better for similar reasons: the lack of agency, and then they don't flesh out her motivations.
The most glaring form of this is throughout basically the entirety of book 2, where her role and her storyline are hijacked to flesh out the male characters around her - Varrick and Mako. Asami is made the passenger in a plot about
the safety and stability of the company that she inherited from her father. She's got the pieces in place to start her own personal journey, but that subplot isn't about her, really. It's about learning that
Mako is a great detective, and about how he will go the distance to find out the truth, even if it's in conflict with the ideals of his job. That Mako, right?
Asami follows Mako to the triads and we don't get to see any form of resistance? She's just there to accompany him because Mako has an idea that these same types of people that killed Asami's mother - these same types of people that triggered the event that would allow Hiroshi's anger to fester for
a decade and then blossom into a breed of hatred that burns so hot and so brightly that it blinds him as he attempts to crush and maim and mangle his daughter
in his wife's (her mother!!!) name - have a way to help her company. We don't get to explore any kind of reluctance? She just follows? She accepts help from these people? She's as good as a lamp until she has to drive them both to safety in a scene that's reminiscent of
literally every badass sidekick chick scene in every action movie ever (and then the sidekick chick goes on to be nothing short of worthless the rest of the movie until she has one more moment and then is worthless again). This is about Mako and his inhibitions about working with Triads after getting out of all of that gang shit and being directly at odds with it now that he's a cop.
Next she... breaks down or whatever, and the way they express her vulnerability is through having her kiss Mako, because Mako is representative of Resolve and Reason in this subplot, both things that Asami apparently lacks. And he rejects her, then takes her later, then kisses his ex in front of a group of people THEN IN FRONT OF HER, and she doesn't even say anything. Amazing! Amazing. And this is after Mako puts the pieces together and Asami is happily signing her life away to Varrick because she's desperate and dumb I guess, and can't realize that she's being played by this guy at all, even though Mako's practically been laying it out in front of her all this time.
I don't know if anyone remembers this, but when Mako went to jail and Bolin came to visit, Bolin told Mako that Asami couldn't bring herself to visit him in jail because it reminded her of her imprisoned father. Like... we couldn't explore that with Asami? Bolin had to speak for her on this? It was absolutely shameless. That scene alone is the tl;dr version of how they treat Asami Sato's role in her story. Amazing.
Asami is a female character that has an incredible journey she needs to conquer. She has to live up to the greatness of the Sato name, and yet she has to cut herself from it so that she may rebuild it in her image, not her father's. Like Katara, or even Zuko, her story intersects with the Avatar's, but is also independent of it. She has to learn to carve her own path and build a better Future [Industries]. But she can't, because she has to take a backseat first to Mako, and then to Varrick, who essentially usurps her role as the engineer. She plays second fiddle to him. It'll be a miracle if we get to see Asami Sato, CEO of Future Industries, whose father was an inventor and innovator and likely trained Asami most of her life to take on this role someday (but not so soon, since she's a baby in corporate years), invent anything. And we don't need to. Because Varrick does that! But she
can be relegated to Appa-tier transportation without the Appa-tier affection. And I guess she can fight or something, but she's not going to get put in the vicinity of any real danger (unlike Sokka), lest she be willing to die a quick death. You know, like when the writers fridged Asami's mother.
Basically, I wouldn't point to either Korra or Asami as positive female role models because of how weakly they're written in the context of the story. Asami is slightly ahead though, if only for the fact that she respects Korra enough as a person to not make a move on Mako while they're still together.
This kinda ties into why I don't like Mako. He weakens Korra's story and he weakens Asami's story. Too many moments of greatness that either of them could have are wasted on his character. Amon compliments the bending of ONE PERSON the entire time he was active in the show, and who does he give that compliment to? Mako. SHAMELESS.
That's why I'm always mad about him in here even when he does things that are completely innocuous.
edit: omfg this post is so long and its about a cartoon character im a mess
