Someone didn’t like the play episode?
Someone has no soul!
Well, the effects were pretty cool.
Exciting news everyone! /Farnsworth:
You do know that he’s always delivering bad news when he says stuff like that, this on the other hand certainly looks like good news, good news indeed.
I’d heard the rumors about this one. I’m sure it’ll be great, but I can’t pretend not to be disappointed that it’s not just a never-ending series about Toph and Iroh fighting crime.
Well with the death of Mako I’m not sure I’d want them to focus on Iroh. The guy that did replace him was ok but it wasn’t quite the same.
Hey, what’s up, spoilers are fair game here, right?
The discussion in the movie thread and the availability on Netflix got me watching, and I just finished the whole series yesterday.
I’m not sure it’ll dethrone Batman: The Animated Series as my favorite cartoon ever, but it’s close. It did a great job avoiding so many cliches of kids shows and cartoons throughout the whole series, and I’m still amazed by the creativity at work. Eel-hounds! I mean, right up until the very end, we were getting more badass animal hybrids. There was impressive creativity at work in the fights too, and the animation proved totally capable of keeping up, because I could watch someone earth bend all day. It doesn’t even have to be Toph!
So it makes me kinda sad that my biggest problems with the series all came at the end. Aang’s avatar-state deus ex machina is the most obvious. Really? A rock hits him in the back and it fixes him? That alone is silly, and felt like weak writing, but it also tied into my disappointment over another choice: Kitara and Zuko totally should have ended up together. I thought it was being foreshadowed as far back as the fortune-teller episode. And then when Aang is first learning about his chakras from the guru, his big hang-up is the last one, letting go of things, Kitara specifically. So I thought Aang’s ultimate fate would be that sacrifice of letting go of Kitara to fulfill his destiny as the Avatar, and up until the very end Kitara was still kind of ambiguous about her feelings toward Aang, so I didn’t feel like it would have been “unfair” to her or anything. I really think they must have at least been considering getting Zuko and Kitara together, and bringing Kitara and Aang together in the end really felt like they played it safe and did the obvious thing instead. Which is all the more annoying, because the show didn’t do that very often.
More nitpicks: Needed more Iroh awesomeness after his jailbreak. Implied Iroh offscreen awesomeness doesn’t cut it.
Would have been nice to see Sokka get a little more time in battle at the end. Up until the Boiling Rock episodes when Ty Lee and Mai part ways with Azula, I thought maybe Sokka would fight one of them in the end. He did a great job crashing the airships and all, but I guess his arc kind of climaxed with stepping up and leading the raid during the eclipse. Shame that sword fighting didn’t come into play a little more.
Toph, obviously, was criminally underused, but I don’t blame them. I mean, once she can metal-bend, she’s pretty much unstoppable. Her assault on the airship control room was incredible, and I’m convinced she could have taken Ozai himself as long as it was a fair fight (and ultimately Ozai vs. Aang was a fair fight).
Oh, and the Lion-turtle thing teaching Aang how to “will-bend” kind of came out of no where. I don’t really know of a better outcome for Aang vs. Ozai, because I couldn’t see Aang killing him, but a “Disney-death” seemed out of the question too. It would have felt more natural to me if the will-bending was just something that came with unlocking his avatar state though (which again, shouldn’t have come from getting hit in the back).
And even nit-pickier, these aren’t really problems but observations: I thought we might get another run-in with the face-stealer. That was awesomely creepy and I was hoping it would have another role. They also seemed to go no where with the warning early in the series that if Aang dies while in the Avatar state, it breaks the cycle of Avatar reincarnation. That pretty much never comes up again after it’s mentioned. And speaking of his Avatar state, the finale of Book 1 has him turning into that giant water thing, which was amazing, and leaves his Avatar-state against Ozai in the end kind of a disappointment. But oh well.
Overall, a remarkable series and I’m glad you guys talked me into watching it. So as not to end on a complaint, the music during the fight between Zuko and Azula was awesome, wasn’t it? Easily best in the series, and the Zuko/Azula fight was already more interesting to me at that point than Aang/Ozai.
Yeah but Aang already let go of Katara to control the Avatar state at the end of book 2. Then Azula hit him with the lightening and bottled up his chakras. The rock Ozai threw him into hit the lighting scar and opened him back up. Still a little weak but it was all explained rather well I thought.
The thing that disappointed me the most was Azula at the end. I guess since the creators built her up to be such a better bender than Zuko they felt they needed to take her down a peg so he could convincingly beat her. I would have rather she have been normal and Zuko and Katara have to team up to beat her.
Thanks for saying this. I agree 100%. There was also the fact that she and Zuko had the moment in the cave, and had to move beyond his betrayal. All the elements of the romance were clearly laid out.
The only question was who Aang would end up with. I kind of think he and the acrobat girl would have worked well together.
Aang and Toph! She’ll keep him grounded.
Their kids will sooooo powerful!
I agree with pretty much everything you said Wholly. But these comments don’t really detract from how great the series is. They just demonstrate maybe how it could have been even better.
You’re right, but I guess I wish you were wrong. I kept thinking that it wasn’t truly Azula’s injury that “broke” his chakra, that it was still ultimately psychological.
I think even if she’d been normal, they had ample explanation for Zuko winning. He’d learned the lightning-redirecting from his uncle, and he’d completely re-learned fire bending from the old masters (the dragons), arguably a “purer” form.
I maintain he didn’t need to end up with anyone. I’d have been in favor of a sort of a monk/jedi explanation, he could have friends, but a romantic interest would be a detriment to his role as Avatar. But oh well.
Where do I get Team Zuko t-shirts?
Except for the fact that Azula kills Aang in the season 2 finale and it’s only the double-magic water combined with Katara’s healing prowess that brings him back.
He could have just died to save the day. That’s what I was expecting.
Either way, the whole Katara/Zuko thing was done on purpose just to mess with the shippers. Avatar subverted so many tropes and the good girl/bad guy romance trope is just another one they teased with before zipping right past. It goes hand in hand with the fact everyone expected a heel-face-turn at the end of the second season and Zuko wouldn’t really do that until the middle of the third.
Edit: Oh, and if you want to have a nerdy OTP argument, I’d say Toph/Sokka is better than Katara/Zuko. Though she’s a bit young for him. Then again, they’re all pretty damn young.
But that was cause he was dead, they would have needed magic water avatar-state or not. If anything, being brought back from that should have made him even more paranoid about his vulnerability in the avatar state and supported a chakra-psychologically-blocked take on it. Instead, it’s literally never brought up.
What’s a shipper? Anyway, I don’t see how Aang/Katara is more of a “subverted trope.” It still feels like the safer, obvious choice, which the series didn’t make a habit of going with.
Shipper* is a word used by people who care more about meta-wanking than actual story, and who think series creators obsessively read and react to the internet fandom.
*it’s short for “relationshipper”, a fan who champions a certain relationship in a series.
It may not get literally spoken about, but it’s still an extremely important part of the second season. In the first season whenever Aang gets into a sticky situation the Avatar state becomes a catch-all problem solver. Not being able to rely on the Avatar state is what drives Aang to work in the second season to actually learn the other bending forms, whereas he was a pretty bad student in the first season because he couldn’t be bothered to care.
That’s sweet.
Anyway, I don’t see how Aang/Katara is more of a “subverted trope.” It still feels like the safer, obvious choice, which the series didn’t make a habit of going with.
They managed to not do what you expected. They hinted at something and got all kinds of people in a tizzy, then went ahead and didn’t go for it. Instead they did what they said they were going to do from the very beginning, both with the relationship and with Zuko’s non-face-turn. Shippers hoped for something else, but hey, there are still people to this day who think Rowling betrayed them by not having Hermione end up with Harry.*
Anyway, Zuko and Mei have the show’s sweetest bit of romantic dialog. “You’re beautiful when you hate the world.” “I don’t hate you.” “I don’t hate you too.”
*I will never forgive the writers of Mythbusters for not having Kari end up with Tori. Mythbusters OTP! Kartor!
He never really found a master of any kind till the end of the first season though. That had as much to do with his lack of real training as anything else. And I never got the impression that fear of dying was as big a deal to him as the moments when he saw how powerful he was and how scary it was for everyone around him. You can try to tell me that he was also worried about dying because it seems logical that he should have been, but that’s never what came through in the show. He was afraid of how powerful and terrifying he could be in the avatar state, and the conversations were always about how he needed to learn to control it instead of having it kick in on its own, never about his own safety.
From a pop-eastern-philosophy viewpoint, “letting go” isn’t necessarily synonymous with denial and disengagement. Depending on formulation, of course, but Avatarworld has plenty of enlightened sorts who are fully engaged with the world anyway. Like Hillbilly Swamp Buddha!
But that’s a nitpick to the nitpick, overall I pretty much agree with most of that. The will-bending ending out in particular should have had more foreshadowing seeds dropped into earlier seasons, and ideally we should have seen Azula mentally disintegrate over several more episodes instead of basically all at once.
Edit by way of not really meriting a new post: more Iroh post-jailbreak greatness would have been good, too. The stage-by-stage reveal that Iroh’s apparent physical and mental decline as a prisoner was just a sham and that underneath the disguise he was actually a harder-than-a-coffin-nail badass was one of my favorite legitimately awesome moments in the series (which it was just remarkably packed with for a kids’ adventure show). I liked though that the jailbreak itself was offscreen, just with him telling the one friendly that she really didn’t want to be there that night, and then Zuko just gobsmacked at arriving just to see the immediate aftermath.
All that aside, I’m grateful to the movie version being apparently so execrable that it got me to check out the series out of curiosity.
There were two issues regarding the Avatar state that Aang faced in the end. The first was the matter of the physical block to his chakra path that was inflicted by Azula’s attack. That was sort of a “surface issue,” and was set up pretty thoroughly in previous episodes, and we knew that the scar was “bunching up his Chi” and that pressure could release it.
The second (and more important) issue, though, is Aang’s unwillingness to let go of earthly attachments, specifically Katara. He never really succeeds at doing this (even in the final few episodes, he is still professing his love for her), and the guru has told him that this will prevent him from ever being able to willingly trigger or control the Avatar state.
HOWEVER… We are also given two conflicting bits of wisdom from reliable sources that suggest that this may not be the whole story. While on the turtle, Yangchen reveals to Aang that the Avatar can never detach himself from the world, because the world is the Avatar’s sole duty. Even more to the point, I think, is the advice that Aang receives from Iroh when Iroh tells him that he thinks Aang is very wise to choose love over power, and that “Power is overrated.”
So with all of that in mind, here’s my reading of the finale: When Ozai throws Aang back against the rock, two things happen. The first is that he gets a whole lot of pressure right at the point of his old injury, which we know unlocks his Chi. The second is that he is on the verge of losing to Ozai, who is going to kill him and then ravage the world with fire.
So of course, this triggers the Avatar state. Not a controlled Avatar state, because Aang never mastered that. This just the regular old “Aang/the world is in mortal peril” version of the Avatar state. And you can clearly see that Aang is not in control, because he was dead set against killing Ozai, and yet this Avatar-state Aang is not holding back, and even pronounces a final judgement on Ozai and launches a final deadly attack… and then Aang regains control, stops the attack, and the Avatar state fades away.
And that’s the point where Aang finally “masters” the Avatar state–not by learning how to summon and control it, but simply by shutting it off, through force of will. In this scene, he follows Iroh’s wisdom and willingly turns his back on power, and instead embraces is earthly attachments, defeating Ozai with tricks that he learned from his friends. My personal reading is that it is this moment, and not being thrown against the rock, that was the truly important moment in the final fight. “The day was saved because the rock unlocked his chakras” is definitely not the message that I got.
Also, since Aang specifically defeated Ozai with an earthbending trick that he learned from Toph, I think it’s fair to say that Toph defeated Fire Lord Ozai be proxy.
All hail Toph!