Now i'm not meaning to sound mean or anything if I do… I just think it's been incredibly silly. That so many people are getting so pissy about these adaptations Though as I get roped into short sometimes I find just so many people Bitching How about sokka Not being sexist In shorts So it's like my god I really don't care and personally I don't see the appeal of established characters or Keeping characters the same throughout the multi verse
"…his dead son, who died in war…" More specifically who died during the siege of Ba Sing Se, in the same battle where Iroh himself breached the wall, forever tying his greatest "victory" to his greatest loss. It was the reason he abandoned the siege and lost his title. It's basically the most important event with regard to who Iroh is as a person when we meet him in the show. I don't really have anything specific to say here, I just wanted to highlight exactly how tragic the loss of Lu Ten was for Iroh, and how much of an impact it had on him.
You've covered pretty much all of my criticisms of the show, but my absolute biggest probably has to be how often it uses exposition. Everything is explained. Constantly, and it's always the same. It's not just annoyingly tiring, but it also drains the characters of a lot of life and it also feels very…condescending. Like we as the viewers are being treated like children and have to be spoon fed because the writers either don't trust the intelligence of viewers (except that even as kids we were able to understand the OG show just fine lol), OR they sincerely have no idea how to handle subtelty. I get that subtelty can be difficult to convey, but damn it's like they're slamming us in the face with a sledgehammer enscribed with the words "HE'S THE AVATAR". It's a problem I see in a lot of shows today, but especially so in remakes it seems, and particularly so when they're trying to play for a much wider audience appeal I think.
I hated most of the show's changes that you've listed, but quite a few of the "smaller" changes I genuinely really liked. There wasn't really any reason to have that absolutely metal scene with Avatar Kiyoshi on the island, but it was so badass and well done that I stan it lol. I loved it. I did like the funeral scene for Iroh's son, and I really liked the scene where Iroh is confronted by an Earth soldier over the horrors he committed as a general. I mean, he wasn't always the uncle we all know and love. I liked Ozai making the 41st soldiers Zuko's ship crew. Not only could it potentially meld very well with Zuko's character arc, but it also gives some more added depth to Ozai's cruelty. He would have sacrificed the 41st, if not for Zuko criticizing that decision to his face, but for Ozai, it never mattered who had to be sacrificed so long as someone was. So, it worked for Ozai either way too because he was getting rid of two things he saw as failures in the end. In general, I do like a lot of what they did with Ozai.
On Sokka's sexism in the original, I think the reason people were frustrated (myself included) is that while it wasn't a major part of his character arc I don't think, having a character be confronted over bigoted views and then growing out of them as a result leaves a much bigger, respectable and enjoyably interesting impression than just…ignoring its existence at all. It stripped away a lot of the depth his character had, and I think that's really what people took issue with, though he obviously wasn't the only character they stripped depth away from (glances sadly at Katara).
I still enjoyed the show for what it was, but…yeah, a lot of criticisms to be made. It's still got potential, so I wanna reserve at least some judgement, but as it stands it is kinda forgettable.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about this, and while plenty of criticisms and nit-picks can be made about this show, part of me wants to tear it apart. However, even with all of its flaws, the show is simply "fine". It is neither bad nor good. What I can't forgive is the treatment the writers gave Katara. They turned Katara, a powerful waterbender, into a meek background character! It also took away most of the emotional motivations for the main characters.
Something I'm thinking about with this series in particular – we have a TON of supplemental material that didn't exist when the original animated series came out. I'd rather have had very skilled writers do the story very differently, leaning on all of the interesting new information, than what seems like a collection of homages more focused on Remember This than telling a good story. Do the Water Tribe's sexism through Katara with Sokka unwilling to fight it, both learning from new beginning states. Have Bumi actually going senile for Aang's 'losing people' pain, then have Gyatso still alive to explore that dynamic. Change it up, don't just do it all over again – we've seen the animated series, give us something new! I know a lot of people would have HATED that, but being largely novel would have made it more able to lean in to the strengths of hour-length episodes, and easier to retrain it to feel complete after each season because of how Netflix likes to cancel things.
Also Paramount Plus is advertising ATLA in the recommendations beside this comment box lmao.
Random note: I have a proper hypothesis for why Aang doesn't really waterbend in this season.
Budget and time. Water physics is much more difficult to render in CG than fire or earth, and thus more expensive. The show really just seems to have strained its budget pretty hard, and ended up with serious limitations like the Air Nomad Genocide being a fairly small affair. Live action is obscenely costly, so that large-sounding budget might actually just be shoestring as far as a show with THIS much VFX is concerned.
Someone, I think it might have been Mother's Basement, also theorized that this is also why Aang doesn't have his signature S1 character trait of running from his responsibilities by wandering off to random places or goofing off with airbending tricks – it's expensive as hell to put all those sets in, or render Aang's goofy airbending games, or put in a bunch of different hybrid animals. There's a lot of this show that implies they were limited hard by budget or deadlines and had to push something out the door.
This is actually one of the biggest reasons to not do things in live action: It's just so much less efficient cost-wise than animation. They could have done something like a FMA: Brotherhood retelling animated with a different style if they wanted to retell the original story with a darker tone.
Live action Avatar should have been saved for something different, like smaller, more personal stories set in the universe. Like imagine if they had done some kinda Gotham-style spinoff in Republic City, and kept it to a few sets without having to figure out any of the crazy stuff like Air Temple architecture.
Although I don't understand why people find the idea of live action appealing at all. Why do people want it, specifically?
Spicy take here: Blue People Avatar Studio should have made Magic Kung-Fu Avatar. Think about it. Which studio has the biggest VFX budget and best fluid-dynamics simulation technology on the planet? Which studio has a team that pretty much exists to design and render weird hybrid creatures for extended periods of time? That's right – James Cameron's furry softcore extravaganza studio. Should have just given them another billion dollars and asked them to make this.
Note: Take all this with a slab of salt. I'm not a licensed clinician, I just read what research and practicing psychologists write in papers and online. So this is all accurate only as far as I know from a bunch of academic sources I read a while back.
Something to note with Azula. I think the writers opted to play up a different side of their relationship dynamics than the one that was emphasized in the original show. It's not a bad change, just a different focus, that's actually quite interesting…
See, in the original, Azula was portrayed as being explicitly a psychopath… In the show, that doesn't go too far beyond the more stereotypical pop-culture portrayal. But if you include the comics, then the nuance they add is actually true to life in a really surprising way. See, clinical psychopaths aren't actually "naturally inclined" toward violence or sadism. They're usually incapable of feeling-type empathy but can exercise cognitive empathy (i.e., understand other people's motives as distinct from their own). They're also usually unable to feel any ingroup attachment or inherent respect for social norms, but can form personal attachments to individuals. But the main point is that any inclination toward violence is usually either in the form of intrusive thoughts (generally related to impulsivity) or a product of environment and upbringing, not just some natural drive. Under different circumstances they can behave cooperatively or even altruistically if they believe it's in their interest, and are just as likely to do that as anyone else; it's just that they don't stop to consider the risk of harming others (or, often, themselves – it's frequently completely indiscriminate risk-taking). The thing about torturing animals and so on is largely a matter of curiosity unhindered by fear or empathy – if you're a child whose higher cognitive functions just haven't developed (so no room for cognitive empathy yet, naturally) but also have an inborn insensitivity to others' pain, then it registers like just playing with toys and watching new, stimulating reactions.
This is relevant because, as you noted, Azula in the comics rejects the "good" parental influence of Ursa and embraces the "bad" one of Ozai… in large part because Ursa is afraid of her and treats her like a monster to begin with. And this is the part that's eerily realistic. The comic writers somehow managed to depict the exact scenario that creates a stereotypical "violent psychopath" – both a lack of parental love (often as a result of the parent being fearful of the child or otherwise distant/neglectful) AND the presence of a strong influence that incentivizes ruthlessness and callousness (whether that entails fiercely competitive social environments or an abusive parent who makes their kids fight for approval, like Ozai). She became like Ozai because he seemed to offer, in some twisted, hyper-conditional way, the love and acceptance Ursa didn't give her – she learned from an early age that this was the only way to get what she needed in life, which was parental love and closeness. Rather than being gently and patiently guided away from any harmful inclinations by a parent who could teach her to value life through the method that works (positive incentive – again, usually no fear or respect for social norms, so the most effective approach is to communicate "it is good, i.e., beneficial and rewarding to not harm others"), she was shunned by the empathy-having parent out of fear and could only turn to the callous parent.
Now, all this is not what's in the show. Instead, we get more focus on another aspect of dysfunctional parenting that the original story had too – the portrayal of being raised by a malignant, abusive parent (and in this case I'm inclined to believe it's malignant narcissism specifically). Namely, Ozai. He has certain key traits of that – particularly, forcing his children to compete for his approval, and splitting by treating one child as the "golden child" (Azula – but being idealized in that way also means being burdened by toxic expectations, so it's not good) and the "scapegoat" (Zuko – being devalued by a parent is a huge wound to a child's self-esteem), plus a good bit of "living out one's ambitions vicariously through one's children" (in this case, uh, global conquest – he's got a particularly grandiose profile with substantial megalomania and a bunch of authoritarian tendencies to boot.)
Again, this story kind of got weirdly close to the mark the first time around, closer than most popular media gets to an accurate portrayal. Ozai's a lot like Fred Trump, Donald Trump Jr's abusive father – except his golden child turned out to be a love-starved psychopath child who subconsciously leaned into the bit of "well if the only person who shows any actual love around here thinks I'm an irredeemable monster, there's no point trying not to be", and his "scapegoat" grew past all that trauma thanks in large part to the Gaang's willingness to forgive and the positive influence of a mother and uncle who genuinely love him.
I should note that in those situations, apparently NPD and BPD are basically polar opposites and tend to be drawn into mutually destructive codependency – whether it's the parents of such households being one and the other respectively, or each child developing one of those personality disorders later in life (the golden child developing NPD and the scapegoat developing BPD). And again, this all just lines up with surprising accuracy. Ursa treating her kids so differently can be read as a depiction of the Borderline type of splitting, which is often fear-based. And the disappearance bit isn't uncommon either as defense mechanisms go. Overall the live action take seems to focus on this dynamic, so it actually fits really well that both children are fighting for approval in different ways – they're at an age before personality disorders are thought to "set in" but also at a point where the inclinations have manifested.
All this is speculative to an extent, especially because it is a cartoon and a lot of these ideas are almost certainly subconscious patterns rather than something the writers intended… But you know, I can't help but wonder, did someone on these writing teams, especially of the original story, grow up in an abusive household or know someone who did? Did they hear some story about a kid who turned out really messed up because a parent treated that kid with fear and suspicion? Are these guys okay? Did someone have a psych or socio background? If someone there turned out to have serious experience with youth social work or something that would be unsurprising to me.
I liked the series well enough. I feel it was a competent homage that explored its own ideas in a way that expanded upon the source material. It did feel over-exposited, but I suppose I can forgive that because the material was condensed to the point that some things simply needed to be told, rather than shown.
Now i'm not meaning to sound mean or anything if I do…
I just think it's been incredibly silly. That so many people are getting so pissy about these adaptations Though as I get roped into short sometimes I find just so many people Bitching How about sokka Not being sexist In shorts So it's like my god I really don't care and personally I don't see the appeal of established characters or Keeping characters the same throughout the multi verse
Oooh ive been waiting for this review :O cherrys got notes ? ?️ ?
"…his dead son, who died in war…"
More specifically who died during the siege of Ba Sing Se, in the same battle where Iroh himself breached the wall, forever tying his greatest "victory" to his greatest loss. It was the reason he abandoned the siege and lost his title. It's basically the most important event with regard to who Iroh is as a person when we meet him in the show. I don't really have anything specific to say here, I just wanted to highlight exactly how tragic the loss of Lu Ten was for Iroh, and how much of an impact it had on him.
Last year we got Starefield. This year we got Expositor: The Last Dialogue.
You've covered pretty much all of my criticisms of the show, but my absolute biggest probably has to be how often it uses exposition. Everything is explained. Constantly, and it's always the same. It's not just annoyingly tiring, but it also drains the characters of a lot of life and it also feels very…condescending. Like we as the viewers are being treated like children and have to be spoon fed because the writers either don't trust the intelligence of viewers (except that even as kids we were able to understand the OG show just fine lol), OR they sincerely have no idea how to handle subtelty. I get that subtelty can be difficult to convey, but damn it's like they're slamming us in the face with a sledgehammer enscribed with the words "HE'S THE AVATAR". It's a problem I see in a lot of shows today, but especially so in remakes it seems, and particularly so when they're trying to play for a much wider audience appeal I think.
I hated most of the show's changes that you've listed, but quite a few of the "smaller" changes I genuinely really liked. There wasn't really any reason to have that absolutely metal scene with Avatar Kiyoshi on the island, but it was so badass and well done that I stan it lol. I loved it. I did like the funeral scene for Iroh's son, and I really liked the scene where Iroh is confronted by an Earth soldier over the horrors he committed as a general. I mean, he wasn't always the uncle we all know and love. I liked Ozai making the 41st soldiers Zuko's ship crew. Not only could it potentially meld very well with Zuko's character arc, but it also gives some more added depth to Ozai's cruelty. He would have sacrificed the 41st, if not for Zuko criticizing that decision to his face, but for Ozai, it never mattered who had to be sacrificed so long as someone was. So, it worked for Ozai either way too because he was getting rid of two things he saw as failures in the end. In general, I do like a lot of what they did with Ozai.
On Sokka's sexism in the original, I think the reason people were frustrated (myself included) is that while it wasn't a major part of his character arc I don't think, having a character be confronted over bigoted views and then growing out of them as a result leaves a much bigger, respectable and enjoyably interesting impression than just…ignoring its existence at all. It stripped away a lot of the depth his character had, and I think that's really what people took issue with, though he obviously wasn't the only character they stripped depth away from (glances sadly at Katara).
I still enjoyed the show for what it was, but…yeah, a lot of criticisms to be made. It's still got potential, so I wanna reserve at least some judgement, but as it stands it is kinda forgettable.
Watched this live and I'm gonna watch it again because it was a really nice review
I have spent a lot of time thinking about this, and while plenty of criticisms and nit-picks can be made about this show, part of me wants to tear it apart. However, even with all of its flaws, the show is simply "fine". It is neither bad nor good. What I can't forgive is the treatment the writers gave Katara. They turned Katara, a powerful waterbender, into a meek background character! It also took away most of the emotional motivations for the main characters.
"I have six pages of notes" LMAO STRAP IN EVERYBODY LET'S GOOOO
Something I'm thinking about with this series in particular – we have a TON of supplemental material that didn't exist when the original animated series came out. I'd rather have had very skilled writers do the story very differently, leaning on all of the interesting new information, than what seems like a collection of homages more focused on Remember This than telling a good story. Do the Water Tribe's sexism through Katara with Sokka unwilling to fight it, both learning from new beginning states. Have Bumi actually going senile for Aang's 'losing people' pain, then have Gyatso still alive to explore that dynamic. Change it up, don't just do it all over again – we've seen the animated series, give us something new! I know a lot of people would have HATED that, but being largely novel would have made it more able to lean in to the strengths of hour-length episodes, and easier to retrain it to feel complete after each season because of how Netflix likes to cancel things.
Also Paramount Plus is advertising ATLA in the recommendations beside this comment box lmao.
Random note: I have a proper hypothesis for why Aang doesn't really waterbend in this season.
Budget and time. Water physics is much more difficult to render in CG than fire or earth, and thus more expensive. The show really just seems to have strained its budget pretty hard, and ended up with serious limitations like the Air Nomad Genocide being a fairly small affair. Live action is obscenely costly, so that large-sounding budget might actually just be shoestring as far as a show with THIS much VFX is concerned.
Someone, I think it might have been Mother's Basement, also theorized that this is also why Aang doesn't have his signature S1 character trait of running from his responsibilities by wandering off to random places or goofing off with airbending tricks – it's expensive as hell to put all those sets in, or render Aang's goofy airbending games, or put in a bunch of different hybrid animals. There's a lot of this show that implies they were limited hard by budget or deadlines and had to push something out the door.
This is actually one of the biggest reasons to not do things in live action: It's just so much less efficient cost-wise than animation. They could have done something like a FMA: Brotherhood retelling animated with a different style if they wanted to retell the original story with a darker tone.
Live action Avatar should have been saved for something different, like smaller, more personal stories set in the universe. Like imagine if they had done some kinda Gotham-style spinoff in Republic City, and kept it to a few sets without having to figure out any of the crazy stuff like Air Temple architecture.
Although I don't understand why people find the idea of live action appealing at all. Why do people want it, specifically?
I recall in the cartoon that the comet was needed to allow the firebenders to reach the air temples.
Spicy take here: Blue People Avatar Studio should have made Magic Kung-Fu Avatar. Think about it. Which studio has the biggest VFX budget and best fluid-dynamics simulation technology on the planet? Which studio has a team that pretty much exists to design and render weird hybrid creatures for extended periods of time? That's right – James Cameron's furry softcore extravaganza studio. Should have just given them another billion dollars and asked them to make this.
Note: Take all this with a slab of salt. I'm not a licensed clinician, I just read what research and practicing psychologists write in papers and online. So this is all accurate only as far as I know from a bunch of academic sources I read a while back.
Something to note with Azula. I think the writers opted to play up a different side of their relationship dynamics than the one that was emphasized in the original show. It's not a bad change, just a different focus, that's actually quite interesting…
See, in the original, Azula was portrayed as being explicitly a psychopath… In the show, that doesn't go too far beyond the more stereotypical pop-culture portrayal. But if you include the comics, then the nuance they add is actually true to life in a really surprising way. See, clinical psychopaths aren't actually "naturally inclined" toward violence or sadism. They're usually incapable of feeling-type empathy but can exercise cognitive empathy (i.e., understand other people's motives as distinct from their own). They're also usually unable to feel any ingroup attachment or inherent respect for social norms, but can form personal attachments to individuals. But the main point is that any inclination toward violence is usually either in the form of intrusive thoughts (generally related to impulsivity) or a product of environment and upbringing, not just some natural drive. Under different circumstances they can behave cooperatively or even altruistically if they believe it's in their interest, and are just as likely to do that as anyone else; it's just that they don't stop to consider the risk of harming others (or, often, themselves – it's frequently completely indiscriminate risk-taking). The thing about torturing animals and so on is largely a matter of curiosity unhindered by fear or empathy – if you're a child whose higher cognitive functions just haven't developed (so no room for cognitive empathy yet, naturally) but also have an inborn insensitivity to others' pain, then it registers like just playing with toys and watching new, stimulating reactions.
This is relevant because, as you noted, Azula in the comics rejects the "good" parental influence of Ursa and embraces the "bad" one of Ozai… in large part because Ursa is afraid of her and treats her like a monster to begin with. And this is the part that's eerily realistic. The comic writers somehow managed to depict the exact scenario that creates a stereotypical "violent psychopath" – both a lack of parental love (often as a result of the parent being fearful of the child or otherwise distant/neglectful) AND the presence of a strong influence that incentivizes ruthlessness and callousness (whether that entails fiercely competitive social environments or an abusive parent who makes their kids fight for approval, like Ozai). She became like Ozai because he seemed to offer, in some twisted, hyper-conditional way, the love and acceptance Ursa didn't give her – she learned from an early age that this was the only way to get what she needed in life, which was parental love and closeness. Rather than being gently and patiently guided away from any harmful inclinations by a parent who could teach her to value life through the method that works (positive incentive – again, usually no fear or respect for social norms, so the most effective approach is to communicate "it is good, i.e., beneficial and rewarding to not harm others"), she was shunned by the empathy-having parent out of fear and could only turn to the callous parent.
Now, all this is not what's in the show. Instead, we get more focus on another aspect of dysfunctional parenting that the original story had too – the portrayal of being raised by a malignant, abusive parent (and in this case I'm inclined to believe it's malignant narcissism specifically). Namely, Ozai. He has certain key traits of that – particularly, forcing his children to compete for his approval, and splitting by treating one child as the "golden child" (Azula – but being idealized in that way also means being burdened by toxic expectations, so it's not good) and the "scapegoat" (Zuko – being devalued by a parent is a huge wound to a child's self-esteem), plus a good bit of "living out one's ambitions vicariously through one's children" (in this case, uh, global conquest – he's got a particularly grandiose profile with substantial megalomania and a bunch of authoritarian tendencies to boot.)
Again, this story kind of got weirdly close to the mark the first time around, closer than most popular media gets to an accurate portrayal. Ozai's a lot like Fred Trump, Donald Trump Jr's abusive father – except his golden child turned out to be a love-starved psychopath child who subconsciously leaned into the bit of "well if the only person who shows any actual love around here thinks I'm an irredeemable monster, there's no point trying not to be", and his "scapegoat" grew past all that trauma thanks in large part to the Gaang's willingness to forgive and the positive influence of a mother and uncle who genuinely love him.
I should note that in those situations, apparently NPD and BPD are basically polar opposites and tend to be drawn into mutually destructive codependency – whether it's the parents of such households being one and the other respectively, or each child developing one of those personality disorders later in life (the golden child developing NPD and the scapegoat developing BPD). And again, this all just lines up with surprising accuracy. Ursa treating her kids so differently can be read as a depiction of the Borderline type of splitting, which is often fear-based. And the disappearance bit isn't uncommon either as defense mechanisms go. Overall the live action take seems to focus on this dynamic, so it actually fits really well that both children are fighting for approval in different ways – they're at an age before personality disorders are thought to "set in" but also at a point where the inclinations have manifested.
All this is speculative to an extent, especially because it is a cartoon and a lot of these ideas are almost certainly subconscious patterns rather than something the writers intended… But you know, I can't help but wonder, did someone on these writing teams, especially of the original story, grow up in an abusive household or know someone who did? Did they hear some story about a kid who turned out really messed up because a parent treated that kid with fear and suspicion? Are these guys okay? Did someone have a psych or socio background? If someone there turned out to have serious experience with youth social work or something that would be unsurprising to me.
The climax to this series will be unlocking the avatar state and winning with the power of friendship with the other avatars.
I liked the series well enough. I feel it was a competent homage that explored its own ideas in a way that expanded upon the source material. It did feel over-exposited, but I suppose I can forgive that because the material was condensed to the point that some things simply needed to be told, rather than shown.
You know you done fucked up when you get the “I don’t know, dude.”