seeing a bit of Discourse pass my dash about how 'realistic' Sokka's sexism in both Original Flavour ATLA and the new Netflix version is, and I'm not actually here to talk about that, what I'm here to talk about is: how 'realistic' you think any depiction of sexism is depends ENTIRELY on your cultural background and life experiences.

I could talk about what my experiences say constitutes 'realistic' expressions of sexism by an otherwise well-intentioned teenage boy who has grown up in a sexist culture, but...am I the target audience for either version of that story? No! I was too old the first time around, besides not being American, and I'm neither nostalgic for my childhood show now nor do I have children old enough to be its audience (also: still not American).

None of which is to say that experiences of sexism can't translate at all cross-culturally. But I do think, quite emphatically, that it's impossible to have a meaningful conversation about the realism of any fictional depiction of something like sexism without taking into account who both the audience and author(s) of the work are, because the possibilities for what constitutes 'real' are many and varied. For fiction set in the 'real world', you can at least discuss the real-world setting and people's experiences of it. This is not possible for secondary-world SFF settings, so authorial and audience context is all we've got. And without it you get a hell of a lot of people talking past each other. See also: a multitude of other heavily culturally contextual experiences.