One fan's history with Avatar: The Last Airbender

[ljwrites]

Sneak of lb_lee asked:

How did you get into Avatar, originally? What did you love most about it?

I first watched the show in 2010, a couple of years after it ended.(1) My then-boyfriend Mark got me into it by telling me it was a cool show with Asian-style cultures and protagonists, and after I watched the show on any online source I could find I married Mark so I could get my hands on his DVDs.(2)

I was a little skeptical until mid-Book 1, but by the time "The Storm" rolled around I was completely hooked. "The Storm" is to ATLA what "Duet" is to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine--the mid-season episode that brings the whole show into focus and establishes it as something serious and worth watching. These were both episodes that made the identities of their respective shows, communicating what these shows were and what they were not: "The Storm" told us that ATLA is not just a fun happy-go-lucky Nickelodeon show, while "Duet" said that DS9 was no Star Trek: The Next Generation rerun.(3) Both these shows had to establish their identities away from the brand they were part of, and these episodes were the early signals.

At heart "The Storm" is emblematic of my favorite part of ATLA, even though I love so many things about this show that I have an entire tag dedicated to all the reasons it's so good. This episode has a combination that I think makes for great complex stories: A clear sense of morality together with the acknowledgment that morality does not neatly correspond to tribes, nations, or other identifiable markers.

Here's why it's important to have both moral clarity and the complexity of affiliation: The lack of clear morality is where a lot of these would-be complex grey-morality works fail because they become like, "maybe mass murder isn't so bad?" And that is nope for so many reasons. On the flip side, works where morality corresponds exactly with political affiliation and, often by extension, race/species, take on obnoxious undertones as well. It's why The Lord of the Rings has aged so poorly in some ways and its knockoffs fare even worse.

ATLA and DS9 both represent that sweet spot where the show's morality is clear and yet the relationship of that morality to in-world affiliation is complex. We see Zuko and Uncle Iroh as representatives of the fact that the nationals of a warlike, genocidal nation can come around to being anti-war and so become vital allies in the process of bringing peace. We see evil in the Earth Kingdom and good in the Fire Nation, and get to take in the full scope of complexity in the world. We get to see, without being lectured at, that good and evil are not a matter of what you are but what you choose to do and who you choose to be.

This kind of basic moral soundness, supported by solid characterizations and worldbuilding that bring these abstract concepts to life, are at the center of what made ATLA work for me. That is why I suspect it appeals to so many even now, over ten years after the end of its run, and why time will be kind to its legacy.

Notes
1. Later events were to prove that this is about the right time for me to get into a fandom and that I shouldn't get into ongoing shows with all their potential for disappointment and disgust, but did I take that lesson to heart? Of course I didn't.
2. I kid, but how by much? All I'm saying is, it pays to have good taste in animation.
3. Don't get me wrong, TNG is a great show. There was no need to make two of it, however, a lesson that I wish Voyager's showrunners had internalized.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

I LOVE this essay, and I am writing down your words on moral clarity and complexity.

[ljwrites]

Thank you! It irritates me when people act like moral complexity equals moral vagueness or equivalence. I don't think moral complexity is even possible without moral clarity, because you need to know what the lines are in order to know you're skirting or blurring them.

[lb_lee]

That is so cool! :D Part of why I love Avatar is that it states that sometimes doing the right thing is HARD, and requires a lot of creativity and effort, but that doesn't mean it's not worth doing! A lot of the time, it either becomes, "you have to make the HARD CHOICES and that means throwing people under the bus!" or the story kinda warping its reality to make always being moral or pacifist easy.

I thought Avatar did a very good job at avoiding those two pitfalls, while still being a totally appropriate cartoon for kids! (Once I saw people complaining about how Avatar wasn't dark or adult enough, and I couldn't help but feel they wanted a show that wasn't Avatar. If you don't want to watch a children's show, then don't!)

--Sneak

[ljwrites]

Yeah, both indulging our worst impulses and making doing the right thing easy seem like copouts to me. I mean maybe Aang wouldn't have resolved his moral dilemma over killing Ozai the way he had if ATLA weren't a children's show; DS9, decidedly not a children's show, resolved a dilemma with similar parameters in the opposite direction and that was valid and interesting too.

Nevertheless, and I think loopy777 was the one who said this, criticisms of ATLA as being limited because of its rating don't really ring true to me because so few adult shows with all the range of expression at their disposal went anywhere near depth and heights ATLA did. The show set the standard for the portrayal of complex subjects like war, genocide, and abuse, and showed you don't have to be grimdark to deal with dark subject matter in an interesting way. It's like the anti-Game of Thrones that way XD

[lb_lee]

I know a lot of people really disliked the final Ozai defeat, but I actually didn't mind it. <.< I thought it suited Aang's arc and character to overcome a seemingly insurmountable moral quandary through spiritual transcendence! And I mean, if you're going to have a Deus ex machina, a lama character is a good choice for it!

--Sneak

[loopy777]

What I especially like about the moral complexity of the AtLA characters is that they don't feel like Figure A from a textbook. Their sense of morality are products of their personalities, experiences, and environment. Most fiction fails in this portrayal, I think, because the morality being examined is imposed on characters who have little to do with it beyond being either Good or Bad, or the situation is so obviously an artificial construct meant to Teach The Audience A Lesson that it loses all resonance.

Turns out that audiences connect to characters that feel like people. Whodathunk?

I still waver on whether I should ever try DS9. On the one hand, it gets comparisons to AtLA. On the other hand, it's Star Trek, the television franchise most beholden to painfully artificial morality constructs meant to Teach Me A Lesson.

[ljwrites]

It's why ATLA is among the more mature shows ever aired, regardless of rating.

Well, as DS9 aficionados say, DS9 is the best Trek with all that implies--it's good, but still Trek. Moralizing is built into the franchise, though I think it benefits from being a post-Roddenberry show. It's certainly more willing to play around with these moral constructs than prior shows, which is something I like about it.

[loopy777]

Well, I don't have a problem with moralizing, necessarily. It offers a formula and theme for episodic storytelling, at least, and of course teaching people morals is a good goal. It's when the characters and situations feel artificial in playing out the moral that I get fed up (see so many superhero stories examining whether superheros should kill), or when (as you mentioned in your reply to lb_lee above) the universe bends over backwards to make doing the right thing work out. I consider AtLA to avert that last part, with Aang's dilemma against Ozai, because I felt both the Lionturtle and Energybending fit very neatly into the shape of the setting.

I'll keep DS9 on my Maybe list.