While progressing its plot, Avatar: The Last Airbender always carefully left space to focus on its characters and develop their arcs as the story continued. Every main member of the cast had multiple episodes focusing on important parts of their development that revealed who they were and who they were becoming, helping the audience get that much more invested in them. The one big exception to this is Toph. Being introduced halfway through Avatar, the show made far less time for the earthbending master than she deserved.
Character-centric stories make up some of the best episodes in Avatar: The Last Airbender. Once the main plot is established and moves on its own, episodes like "The Warriors of Kyoshi" and "Imprisoned" establish robust subplots for Sokka and Katara that flesh them out as more than simple set dressing to the protagonist, Aang.
Over the course of the series, the trio undergo their own development. Sokka learns important lessons in "Bato of the Water Tribe," "The Northern Air Temple," and ultimately "Sokka's Master" that make him into the man he becomes. Katara's episodes provide some of Avatar's most powerful scenes, with "The Painted Lady," "The Puppet Master" and "The Southern Raiders" standing out as highlights.
All the while, Toph never receives such attention or development. She debuts in the sixth episode of Season 2 with "The Blind Bandit," making an iconic entrance that immediately made her a fan favorite character. Toph goes on to have so many cool moments and is such a unique character that it becomes easy to overlook an important detail: she never really gets any episodes, or an arc of her own. "The Blind Bandit" establishes much of Toph's characterization in her introduction, but no episode ever affords her the same amount of focus again.
The closest Avatar comes to a Toph-centric episode after her debut is "The Chase," "Bitter Work," and "The Runaway," but all three are just as much about other characters as they are about Toph. They each expound on her differences with Katara, contrasting Toph's hardheaded and lackadaisical nature with Katara's nurturing but uptight personality. Both characters learn from each other by compromising their differences, but narratively that means Katara gets the same development as Toph in those episodes -- despite being the main character in several others throughout the show.
Toph certainly gets cool and memorable moments in Last Airbender -- such as her holding up Wan Shi Tong's library or inventing metalbending -- but they don't actually add much to her character beyond reinforcing faith the audience already has in her superlative talents. While her discomfort with vulnerability -- including her difficulties in the shifting terrain of the Si Wong Desert -- could have been rife for exploration, the series largely skips over it. By the finale she demonstrates her mastery over sandbending almost as an afterthought, offhandedly referring to training she'd done that the audience never saw.
With comic continuations like Suki Alone and Katara and the Pirate's Silver, the Avatar franchise already proves willing to dig back into the timeline of the original series to flesh out the characters' lives between episodes. Whether it's in a comic or in future projects by Avatar Studios, exploring Toph's development and individuality would be a remarkable direction for the franchise to take.
Such a wonderful character certainly deserves the space. Given Toph is such a fan favorite, few would complain about a story that digs into the heart of Avatar's greatest Earthbender to really examine the character's bedrock.
