the library (of fun): everyone is all “Toph became a cOP? BUT HOW???? SHE WAS A ~REBEL~”
but that’s not accurate.
toph was never arbitrarily rebellious.
toph was in fact more ferociously loyal to her own principals than perhaps any other character in the original series.
for her to conquer, disassemble and reconstruct the inefficient and pettily nationalistic war period law into her ideal is not only logical; a literally earth-altering feat of such magnitude which would require such nobility and audacity and cunning and mythic fortitude is an accomplishment better suited to toph than any one else with which we are acquainted in the avatar universe.
THANK YOU.
Toph rebelled against her parents because she knew her parents were full of bullshit in how they treated her. She rebelled when in Ba Sing Se because she understood enough about how that society worked to know that it was terrible and didn’t deserve to be respected as reasonable; she grew up in the highest of upper classes and recognised the shit going on in that city for what it was. She rebelled against all sorts of things as a personal statement that she wasn’t going to be held to standards applied to her because of inaccurate assumptions about who she was.
She didn’t just go, ‘breaking rules is fun!!!!’. She went, ‘maybe I should make the rules every once in a while’. So. Yeah. Makes a lot of sense to me.
And for all her well-rounded and solid characterization, she was still only about twelve years old in ATLA. She was great, but I’m pretty sure the culmination of her character development didn’t happen in her preteen years.
Also, I only saw the ATLOK premiere once. I know she taught people metalbending and her daughter became the Chief of Police, but was it ever stated that Toph herself was a cop?
Hmm, I’m not sure if that was ever stated, we just saw the big statue of Toph in front of their HQ, and it looked she was wearing a similar police uniform.
Thanks for your two cents. I do agree that in the time gap, Toph must’ve developed more off screen.