Nickelodeon Drastically Changed One Avatar: The Last Airbender Character

If you're rewatching "Avatar: The Last Airbender" for the first time since childhood, one thing that might surprise you is how long it takes for Toph (Michaela Jill Murphy) to join the crew. She isn't introduced until "The Blind Bandit," six episodes into the second season of a 3-season series. Despite her late entrance Toph quickly integrates herself into the group, and soon it's hard to imagine this show without her. In other words, Toph is the Danny DeVito of the "Last Airbender" franchise, a rare example of a late-addition character turning out a massive success. 

Adding a fourth member to the main group wasn't easy, however. In a July 2025 oral history about her debut episode, creator/writer Michael Dante DiMartino and writer Bryan Konietzko talked about how they always knew they'd be introducing an Earthbender to the "Avatar" cast, but didn't quite know how to pull it off. 

"We knew it was going to be a blind Earthbender, and we had the name," Konietzko said, but they weren't immediately sure on the character's gender. "We had gone through the debate on whether or not to keep her a boy or make her a girl; writer Aaron Ehasz made really good arguments about how there were already two boys in the group, and if we added a third, it really put Katara in a different position."

They decided it'd make a more compelling dynamic for Toph to be a girl, but Nickelodeon wasn't on board. They didn't think another female character was good for business. 

"In relation to the toys, they'd say, 'No one's gonna buy a Katara figure,'" recalled director Ethan Spaulding. "I know this not to be true because of 'Star Wars.' You want Princess Leia; you want all the characters because of the storytelling."

Luckily for Toph fans, the "Avatar" writing team stuck to their guns. As DiMartino explained:

"Sometimes, we'd say we could change that; it's not a big deal. Other times, in a case like this, we had all debated it, we all decided this is the best path forward. We decided that we weren't going to go back. Usually, if we were like, 'This is really important to us and the choice we're making,' somebody somewhere would back down, and then we'd just continue on our way."

Sure enough Nickelodeon backed down, and Toph enjoyed her status as one of the most interesting and well-received female characters on all of children's television. With her rich backstory and the show's deft handling of her disability, she became a role model for a lot of young viewers and was a clear fan-favorite in general. It'll be fun to see if the live-action Netflix adaptation can pull off the same feat with her, although admittedly the updates so far haven't been promising. 

The show also included a fun joke in season 3 that seemingly referenced the initial dispute with Nickelodeon over her gender. In "The Ember Island Players" the gang watches a play based on their lives, only to find out that the play's portrayal of them is full of cheesy, inaccurate, lowest-common-denominator material. The only character who's happy with her portrayal is Toph, who's depicted in the play as a gigantic muscular meathead. Toph, in a line only the Nickelodeon execs might agree with, cheerfully says in response, "I wouldn't have cast it any other way."