Avatar Beta wrote:
Yue was a big dull dud and honestly wouldn't contribue anything real to the story.
On the one hand, I do agree that Yue was a fairly dull character; she wasn't anything we hadn't seen a hundred times before in other stories, and there really wasn't anything particularly notable that set the character apart.
I don't necessarily think the character contributed nothing at all to the story, though. The whole thing with Sokka? Yeah, cute as it was, it was largely extraneous. I mean, it did give us a look at Sokka other than "the goofball non-bender", but even without that story arc, we saw quite a bit of that with Sokka as the series progressed and he matured - the arc with Master Piandao being one of my favorites in ATLA.
However, without Yue, there would have been no reviving Tui once Zhang had killed it, meaning the Northern Water Tribe would have been utterly flattened by the Fire Nation, which would've made certain later events much more difficult, if not outright impossible, as well as thrown off the world even more badly out of balance than it already was. We would've ended with the Water Tribe in a situation only marginally better than that of the just-about-extinct Air Nation(as a result of the Air Nomad Genocide), if not worse due to the loss of waterbending. Was that a dumb plot device? Yeah, kinda. But it worked for the story, and it's impossible to ignore Yue's role as the one who assumed that role.
But that is just one fellow's opinion.