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.