Thoughts on Avatar: The Last Airbender After One Episode
Let's just get this out of the way, I personally hate the binge model for new release shows. As someone who tries to review new streaming series, dumping an entire show out on one day inherently puts it towards the bottom of my to-do list because of the inherent time cost to get through the entire show to adequately review it. That said, occasionally a show that uses this model will break through and I'll still cover it (Echo in recent months) but it has to be something I am already invested in from a fan's standpoint.
This is where Avatar: The Last Airbender on Netflix comes in. As someone who was in middle school when the original show debuted on Nickelodeon, a potentially good live-action adaptation was on my radar. For a lot of people my age, Avatar: The Last Airbender came at just the right time because it was when people were becoming aware of internet fan communities and the show itself grappled with mature themes that resonated with kids and preteens of the era considering what we were actively living through on the international stage. You would be hard-pressed to find another show from the era that inspired as many conversations online among relatively young viewers about complex and mature topics like genocide, ultra-nationalism, imperialism, patriarchal systems, and colonization. Ultimately, after watching one episode (and I will continue watching, I'm not abandoning the show at this point), it appears that somehow the writers managed to miss a lot of the key points of one of the most widely discussed and widely dissected shows.
First and foremost, the plot additions make little to no sense within the confines of the world as established. The first episode front-loads exposition about Aang's backstory and what was going on with the genocide of the Air Nomads (something reserved for later in the first season) in a way that takes a topic that already requires a little "turn your brain off" to comprehend to one that is just bizarrely complex. So the Earth Kingdom intercepts plans that the Fire Nation has to start the war, namely a plan for a ground invasion of the Earth Kingdom on the day that Sozin's Comet arrives, and shares this with the Water Tribes and the Air Nomads. Out of the gate, this changes the nature of the war. In the original show, they went out of their way to show the nuance that went into the rationalization of colonization and portray it as something evil. Sozin is characterized as someone who wants to invade other parts of the world under the guise of "spreading the prosperity of the Fire Nation around the world," a pretext used to this day (and in the early 2000s was used as the pretext for the wars that the United States was waging in the Middle East). By making him just generically evil and just someone who wants to take over the world just because, it's removing depth.
The other place depth is removed from the show is in Sokka's portrayal and the portrayal overall of the Southern Water Tribe. Originally, the Southern Tribe is tiny with very few people still living there because all the men had gone off to help the Earth Kingdom in the war. Here, the Southern Tribe is still somewhat robust with a lot of people living there. Also, there is no real reason given for why Sokka is basically in charge of defending the tribe when there are other adults around and able-bodied to do that. In the original, because the society is so rigidly patriarchal, Sokka is the de facto leader of the tribe because he is a man even though multiple women are more qualified simply by being adults, which informs his arrogance and sexist tendencies.
Inherently there is nothing wrong with making changes to a story when adapting from one medium to another, in fact, a lot of time it's a necessity. The problem is that a story adjustment should be warranted and something should be added to fill the void left behind that is equally interesting. So far, the changes have taken away parts of what made Avatar: The Last Airbender different from the dozens of generic fantasy properties that exist and turned it into just more of what has existed across multiple channels and streaming services because it is not replacing these changes with anything interesting.
That said, tune in tomorrow to Beware of Spoilers for thoughts on the first four episodes.
