Richard's Online Journal
Avatar: The Last Airbender
Obviously, there’s no possible way I could have seen the last episodes by the date you see above, the day after they premiered in Americaland. Don’t be fooled. It’s just one of this blogging tool’s less known features. Just as in most you can set a Future date for posts, so can you set a Past one. I’m writing this in 2010, during a brief lull in our ongoing war against the Terminators. Oh, if only we’d realised Steve Jobs’ ultimate plan for the iPhone. So many deaths. So much horror. But anyhoo, Avatar…
For such a popular show, there’s a depressing lack of good quality images available. Time to hit Google, i guess…
Avatar: The Last Airbender (renamed The Legend of Aang over here to stop kids giggling in the playground, but I’m sticking with the American name because I hate the word ‘Legend’ in titles almost as much as the dreaded ‘Chronicle’) is terrific. Three seasons, 61 episodes, and easily the best Western cartoon for years.
It’s a tough one to describe, because the overall plot isn’t what makes it work so well. Two kids from the nomadic Water Tribe at the South Pole discover a young boy called Aang in an iceberg, frozen for a hundred years. Over that time, the evil Fire Nation has conquered the world, killed off the peaceful Air Nomads, and lain siege to the mighty Earth Kingdom. Aang turns out to be the Avatar, destined to be the master of all four elements and charged with saving the world that’s gone to hell over the last century, before a passing comet gives the Fire Nation the power-up they need to conquer the whole world. Decent enough premise. Nothing madly special.
Except it is.
Two things make it a great show — its style, and its characters. Avatar has an absolutely phenomenal level of detail, not in terms of endless lore and over-the-top exposition, but seamlessly integrated into the action. Every character has a distinct fighting style based on assorted real-world martial arts, in many cases bolstered with the ability to control various elements. As an Airbender, Aang fights with fluid motions, making full use of the available space to not simply dodge attacks but completely control his positioning. His main enemy… cough… Prince Zuko is a Firebender, with jets and sweeps of flame treated as an extension of his punches and kicks. And so on and so forth.
New Aquafresh Katara. Ensuring your dental hygiene, like it or not.
There’s a real sense of history and tradition behind everything you see, the designs of each major settlement, and the groups the team encounters. The stories are mostly built around the Adventure Town concept — a new location every week — and that doesn’t really change right until the ending, but the ever-increasing number of callbacks and return-visits helps to keep everything tightly bound together. At no point do you get the feeling that the writers have treated it as ‘just a kids show’
The same’s true of the characters. As a quick synopsis, you can just hand out a few standard cartoon/anime archetypes, with only a few real immediate variations. As the main female character, waterbender Katara offers the heart/emotion of the group, while her brother Sokka adds the slapstick comedy. Zuko angsts his way through a fairly predictable (but again, nicely done) character arc along with his wonderfully laid-back uncle Iroh, while his Big Bad father spends most of his time sitting in a room full of flames and slapping himself on the back about being evil.
But there’s more to them than that. In many ways, the use of such stock archetypes makes the frequent deviations and subversions from traditional kids’ TV rules that much more noticeable. Avatar is a very genre-savvy show, and one that thrives on doing stuff that western animation usually avoids. Several of the characters have romantic relationships, treated not as something icky and girly or as a saccharine fairytale affair (with one exception), but as a perfectly natural part of life. None of them are perfect, and all make mistakes at various points, but they’re firmly rooted in character flaws or a lack of information, as opposed to the more traditional “What an idiot…” goofs you get when the writing isn’t strong enough to let drama flow naturally.
That said, of all the cleverness on offer and all the great writing, Avatar’s greatest success has to be Toph. She’s a blind, sassy, twelve year old Earthbender who shows up in the second series, added in part to even up the gender balance of the main cast, and if one word describes her, it’s ‘scrappy’. Except she’s great, to the point that she never even gets close to being… well… a Scrappy. That’s a writing achievement…
Blind! B.L.I.N.D. Read my lips, I can’t read that!
At other times, things go wrong, with very unpleasant consequences both on and off-screen. Everyone, particularly Zuko, is prone to being pushed into situations where they have to cross a personal line, and in many cases, actually do, regardless of kid-friendly morality rules. One that particularly sticks out is the episode where the team spends an episode as con artists, using Toph’s skills to first cheat cheaters, and then go on to pull the old ‘hit by a car’ scam on innocent drivers, all without the usual lesson-learning/divine retribution, or even having to give the money back.
Another, rather darker, example involves Katara being taught Bloodbending — the Waterbending equivalent of Force Lightning. Controlling someone’s body by manipulating the blood inside them is pretty damn cold for a kids show, especially when her refusal to do it breaks down in the face of someone she’s really pissed with.
Bloodbending is an excellent example of something else the show does really well. It plays with its concepts. Each of the main elemental schools starts out pretty simple, with Katara using things like water whips and Aang bouncing around on air. As the show goes on, and the characters get more advanced, the writers really go to town with interesting ways for these powers to be used. Katara gets by far the best of these, turning the normally weak/healing-focused Water (a plot point in the show, in one of its more Very Special Episode moments) into an insanely flexible combat style. Melee, ranged, crowd-control, lockdowns… her last proper fight of the series features a truly stunning moment against one of the show’s most dangerous enemies. Wonderful.
Merchandising, merchandising! Where the real… money… is… I’m sorry, wait. What the hell is this… thing meant to be?
Rant time. It really, really annoys me that a series that goes out of its way to create good female characters — not Mary Sues, but capable, often conflicted characters with proper character arcs and personalities that can actually carry the damn story… also goes out of its way to ignore them in the Inevitable Toy Line. You can get Aang and Sokka and Zuko, and even minor characters like Roku and Jet. You can even get a Fire Nation soldier in a specific playset and Scary Half Naked Old Man Bumi.
Can you get Katara or Toph or Suki or Azula or Mai or Ty Lee or the Kyoshi Warriors, or any of the other girls? No. No, you can’t. Pathetic. The only one available is the crappy Lego Katara above, and even that only appears in one of the playsets. Nevermind that she’s insanely more powerful than her brother (who starts off as little more than comic relief, only to finally finds his place in the team as its resident tactician), even at the start of the show when she’s nowhere near a Waterbending master. He’s a boy and she’s not, and that’s apparently all that matters. Boo! Hiss! Silliness!
Note to self. Next time, pack a Plan B…
For all its great stuff, let’s not go nuts. Avatar is firmly a kids’ cartoon, even with its sometimes very odd flicks of more adult stuff (a particular eyebrow-raiser being a mudwrestling fight between Katara and Toph, supposedly aged 14 and 12 respectively…). Don’t expect Tolkein from the backstory, or characters that would make Dostoyevsky fall on its pen. That disclaimer aside, it’s well worth tracking down. Series 2 and 3 in particular are fantastic bits of television that start good and just keep getting better, and it’s especially nice to see a show like this come to an end while it’s at its prime, not through burn-out or executive meddling.
This isnt’s not something I thought I’d ever say again, but hurrah for Nickleodeon! And while I’m at it, hurrah for Michael Dante diMartino and Bryan Konietzko and all the others! And hurrah for that Terminator virtual pet in the iTunes App Store!
Wait. About that last on[CARRIER LOST]