I have no
idea how or what to write about Avatar:The Last Airbender. That shows how
much I adore this series.
I feel
compelled to write something about it since today is the tenth anniversary of
the show’s premiere on Nickelodeon, a fact that has startled me more than last
fall’s tenth anniversary of my own high school freshman year. (I wager the upcoming decennial of my
beginning college will also be a lesser shock.)
Avatar reshaped my idea of
what television could be over the course of its 2005-2008 run, and it has become
my personal favorite TV series.
And it
absolutely floors and delights me that my engagement in it was entirely accidental.
I barely
knew about it for the first few months of its run, and from the occasional
commercial or brief glimpse while channel-hopping, I assumed it was some
straight-laced anime rip-off without the parody and/or satire of something like
Teen Titans. I finally gave it a chance during a bout of
laziness, and if memory serves correctly, that episode was “Imprisoned,” which
snared me with its intriguing characters and some sublimely silly humor.
(This became
the first of several lessons I learned from the show: never underestimate the
value of boredom.)
The more I
watched the series, the more apparent it became that I had not seen anything
like it before on TV. As a kid, I was
aware of darker or serialized animated shows like Batman and Gargoyles, but
they did not hold my interest the way zippy comedies like Rocko’s Modern Life did.
When Avatar began, I was finally
starting to get into shows with real continuity, albeit ones that were only
intermittently serialized like Kim Possible and Danny Phantom. Avatar
was the first time I watched a show that was explicitly based on developing one
story over the course of multiple seasons.
It is a show where only one or two episodes out of 61 can be argued as
doing nothing to broaden the story’s world and its conflicts or to further our
understanding of the characters.
Michael Dante DiMartino & Bryan Konietzko’s Avatar is set in a world where people
can control the elements of water, earth, fire and air, and four nations exist based
around their own element. One person,
called the Avatar, is able to control all four elements, but after his
mysterious disappearance, the Fire Nation begins a war with the other nations
that lasts for 100 years. The Avatar
returns in the form of Aang, a Airbending pacifist who must master the elements
and defeat the Fire Nation before they secure their final victory.
When you see
the early episodes of a series after watching the show through to completion,
there is an inevitable moment where you realize just how inexperienced the
characters are compared to what they will soon go through. Avatar
provokes that feeling in me much more strongly than any other show. The characters’ evolution is so rich and
multidimensional that I never fail to feel astonished when I am reminded of
where they begin.
After the
prologue in the first episode, “The Boy in the Iceberg,” our first view of the
heroes is of the Water Tribe siblings Sokka and Katara as they fish in the
middle of the South Pole. Sokka is
nothing more here than a wannabe warrior and Katara is barely self-trained in
Waterbending. There is nothing here to
suggest that Sokka will become a great strategist or that Katara will be one of
the most awesome fighters in the whole series.
A few
minutes later, after the siblings unwittingly find the iceberg containing
Aang’s frozen body, we first see Prince Zuko of the Fire Nation, the show’s
beginning villain. He sees the light
emanating from the iceberg and believes it to be the Avatar. He thinks finding the Avatar is the path to
his destiny. We repeat viewers know it
is, but not in any of the ways he expects it to be. None of these three characters has any idea of
what’s coming, and it makes us excited to once again experience the surprising,
heartbreaking and liberating events in store for them.
Alongside
the marvelous art direction and the authentic use of martial arts &
Eastern philosophies, the greatest of this series’ riches is the
characters. In addition to being funny
and providing pleasant company, each has a set of flaws and contradictions that
make them dramatically involving and lovably relatable. Katara’s maternal strength is so comforting
that it becomes gripping when certain crises drive her toward her least mature
instincts. Zuko’s uncle Iroh has all the
wisdom of a stock mentor figure, but even he is prone to hilariously poor
judgment. These characters are equally
capable of great drama and great humor.
In fact, while most other shows feature only a couple of characters I
wish I could meet, Avatar supplies me
with at least a dozen.
If there are
characters I would not want to meet, it would likely be because they are among
the most effective villains ever created for family television. Chief among them is Princess Azula, Zuko’s
sister and the main villain of Season Two.
Prior to this series, only Dolores Umbridge from the Harry Potter books inspired anything
close to the hatred I felt over her. Picture Joffrey from Game of Thrones with
military intelligence and prodigious combat skills. You would have Azula, who is about as smug, cruel,
manipulative, xenophobic, ambitious, and dangerous a
villain as you can imagine. Watching
Azula in her horrible prime is the only thing I don’t look forward to whenever
I revisit this show.
But you know
what? No matter how much I want to see
her get her comeuppance, the way it finally happens always makes me feel sorry
for her. That also happens to me with a
few other villains throughout the story.
They are allowed to do utterly vile things, but they are also given
plenty of groundwork to let viewers understand why they are what they are. Sometimes they even behave more admirably
than the heroes. DiMartino &
Konietzko did not ration out their empathy with the characters, and it shows in
how these villains can provoke both scorn and compassion.
This
attitude toward the characters is an extension of one of the series’
fundamental lessons. The conflict I've
described sounds like one of good vs. evil, but events and characters reveal it
to be more complicated than that. The
Fire Nation aims to control the world, yet it is shown to be more open-minded
than other parts of the globe. The Earth
Kingdom is the force that stands a chance at beating the Firebenders, but many
of its citizens are opportunists who either use the war to strengthen their own
power or seek the most desperate and treacherous ways to secure any victory. The Avatar can be seen as a symbol of hope
for the Fire Nation as well as for the peoples being oppressed. Avatar
commits to the message that neither side of any conflict is exclusively right
or wrong. As far as I know, this was the
first piece of media I saw to firmly express it, and I think it does so better
than many adult-oriented war stories.
To
paraphrase Uncle Iroh (my favorite character), it is the combination of the big
and the subtle that makes Avatar so
powerful to me. Learning about the
different nations through their fighting styles is absolutely thrilling, but
it’s just as affecting to pause and hear Iroh sing one of this world’s folk
songs. Character touches that are almost
unnoticeable (Aang and Azula speak to each other in only two of their six encounters,
which clues us in to who her real nemesis is) are no less strong than the ones
we recognize immediately (Zuko’s sense of humor improving over the final ten
episodes). Learning the tragedy of a character’s
past can be more shattering than any defeat in combat. Avatar
finds the perfect balance between huge & exciting and delicate &
introspective.
For better
or worse, Avatar has changed my
outlook on entertainment, particularly television. The story’s optimism and relatively gentle
humor helped make me less responsive to dark and cynical material, both new (Archer and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) and old (certain episodes of Seinfeld and The Simpsons
are harder for me to watch now than they were years ago). The satisfaction of seeing things from
earlier episodes pay off reopened me to the exhilaration of serialized
storytelling and led me back to those shows I brushed off in my youth.
Perhaps its
largest imprint is the way I prioritize character when evaluating a TV show. When you devote hours or days to a trip, a
work project, or even just hanging out, you want to be sure the person going
with you is somebody you get along with well.
I feel the same way about watching a TV show. A series could consume my attention for
weeks, and I would generally rather spend that much time watching characters I
empathize with rather than ones I am supposed to observe and remain detached
from (the House of Cards cast, for
instance). Watching the Avatar characters felt like gaining new
friends and supporting them through their successes and failures, and the bulk
of my post-Avatar TV experience has
consisted of trying to relive that same wonderful feeling.
That feeling
never dimmed once in the ten years I have loved Avatar: The Last Airbender. It
pervades me during the greatest war victories and the most intimate
conversations. The series has given me uproarious
entertainment, awe-inspiring spectacle, stimulating philosophy and comforting
humanity. It remains in a class above
all I watched before it and all I have watched since.
All screencaps are from AvatarSpirit.net.
