Avatar: The Last Airbender

Well, it's another late-to-the-party entry.

I've now got two episodes left of Avatar: The Last Airbender, the wildly popular Nickelodeon cartoon that came out in the late aughts. The show is essentially a western-made anime, with a Japanese-inspired art style but produced in America.

The premise: the show is set in a world divided into four primary cultures, based on the four elements: the Earth Kingdom, Fire Nation, Water Tribes, and Air Nomads. The peoples of these cultures can practice a mystical art known as "bending," in which they can manipulate their given element magically as a sort of martial art. In each generation, there is an individual known as the Avatar, who has the ability to master all four kinds of bending. But 100 years ago, the Avatar disappeared, and in that time, the Fire Nation has launched a global war of conquest against the other three cultures.

The show begins with two teenagers from the Southern Water Tribe (the Water Tribes live at the poles of this world,) a pair of siblings named Katara and Sokka, come across a boy frozen in ice with a massive six-legged bison. Opening the iceberg, they revive the boy and his creature, who is revealed to be Aang, the Avatar, and the last survivor of the Air Nomads after the Fire Nation wiped them out.

The show follows Aang and his companions as they journey across the world, each learning and growing more powerful as they prepare to face down the Fire Lord and end the war that threatens the world.

The early episodes of the show are fairly episodic, largely focusing on Aang, Katara, and Sokka traveling across the world to get north, where Aang hopes to learn waterbending from the Northern Water Tribe (aside from Katara, who is still a beginner at this point, the Southern tribe's waterbenders have all been killed) while they are pursued by Prince Zuko, the badly scarred son of the Fire Lord, and Zuko's amazingly cool uncle, Iroh.

The focus on Zuko and Iroh is actually one of the first things that jumps out as interesting about the show. Zuko, when introduced, is the embodiment of the aggression and cruelty of the Fire Nation, but his humanity, which is nurtured by his uncle, begins to show through as the early episodes go on. Zuko's role in the series transforms over time, and his internal struggle is one of the primary sources of drama in the series.

As an adult watching the series, (it came out while I was in my last years of college, so I never would have seen it as a kid) it did take a few episodes for me to adjust to the tone of the show, which was particularly simplistic to begin with. However, over time, the show introduces more nuanced and complex ideas about anything from abuse to nationalism to ableism to war crimes. For a kid's show, the background is actually profoundly dark, and while there's no Game of Thrones-like graphic violence (the show is intended for kids, after all,) the psychological scarring of war and other forms of violence are omnipresent throughout.

It's also a really interestingly realized fantasy world, using color-coded artistic design to give you a sense of how central its four elements play into it, while still allowing for variation and distinct subcultures to form within its established world-structure.

Like many "young people have to save the world" kinds of shows (Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the one that jumps to mind,) there's a major theme of having the dual pressures of having all the normal challenges of growing up on top of the pressure to do what no one else in the world can do. That being said, the show thankfully does not get bogged down in what I like to call "high school bullshit" - the show acknowledges the lower-stakes issues of teen (or pre-teen) hormones but never lets those overshadow the life-and-death issues.

One thing I appreciate about the show is the character Roku. The Avatar is reincarnated when they die, and the reincarnations do a rotation of world's four cultures. Periodically, Aang can commune with the spirits of his past lives, and the one he tends to see most frequently is his immediate predecessor, Roku, who was from the Fire Nation. Even while the Fire Nation is on its fascistic, imperialistic war of conquest, we're reminded that their people are also just people, and have the capacity for good in them.

I have two episodes left in the series, having made it halfway through the four-part finale. I'm very curious to check out the Legend of Korra, which is set in the same world, but follows Aang's successor, a girl from the Water Tribes, and is said to be on par with the original show in terms of quality.