Live Action Avatar the Last Airbender

We are starting to get better, past the first episode it has at least become watchable. We still seem to be having a problem with exposition, but at least the dialogue and delivery has gotten better. The other problem this show faces is its tone. For some reason they wanted to make it darker as if the show didn’t already deal with war, grief, and genocide. At its core it was a kids show. Now it was never JUST a kids show, like I said there were always some very heavy themes and the show got plenty dark but this show centers around children. Which means that they are going to be goofy and get distracted easily and that’s why the show is timeless, it's why it's multi-generational, it's why this show is so impactful and so rewatchable. And the Netflix version is gutting the show of its personality and charm.

We now have a little intro into Azula which I love, she seems to be casted properly, as does Ozai.

Omashu looks awesome, this is their best visual design so far. Not sure why we are jamming in storylines that don’t belong in season 1 when they can’t seem to even cover the material they have already. Jet, the mechanist, if the show doesn’t get renewed you’ve added unnecessary elements to a story that already had enough beef to it, and if the show does get renewed then you’ve used up some of your most impactful storylines already. Not to mention the fact that these moments are cheapened because they weren’t earned. Again they are moving too fast and wasting what should be super impactful moments.

ALSO the whole point of the books as seasons was that the elements and their episode focuses were very specialized. This combining all of them completely ruins the flow and structure of the series and of the character arcs. ALSO again all the characters are split up so no one is seeing anyone’s reactions to what is going on. The characters are only ever really split up by force in the animated series and for a good reason. The entire show only works because these kids are a solid group. They are going through this journey together and changing that makes the writing feel choppy and disjointed. Watching this episode is giving me whiplash because we are doing three different things in three different locations and we shouldn’t be. A MAN unlocks Katara’s bending abilities, a non-bending MAN. Unacceptable. They may have taken Sokka’s sexism away but they infused it right into the script, super gross, and inexcusable. Fuck Katara’s character I guess. Let’s be very fucking clear, Katara is badass because Katara is badass, NOT because some fucking dude told her “you’re great, just think of happy things” FUCK this so hard. The character assassination that is happening right now makes me want to vomit.

So…my biggest problem with shoving Jet in where he doesn’t belong is that we haven’t actually SEEN any of the results of this war. We’ve heard about it, people have talked, and talked, and talked but we have not seen any loss, we have not felt any negative emotional impact of this war that’s been going on. So Jet’s actions seem so drastic and his side is so unearned right now. There is a reason his storyline was placed where it was in the original series.

Clearly the writers didn’t know how to tell this story in a slightly longer form. Changing the episodes from 30 minutes to an hour should not have caused this much structural disturbance. The production team just had no idea what they were doing or what their end goal even was. I genuinely can’t even see the thought process behind shoehorning in some extra storylines, there isn’t actually a purpose to that. There is no reason that we are seeing things that should be in seasons 2 and 3. And for all of this to happen before we meet Bumi was just truly a terrible decision. That wasn’t a filler episode, Aang going through trials and reuniting with his old friend is so important to the story and so important to literally everyone’s character development. Iroh being captured so early is not just questionable, it's bad.