It’s often funny, and sometimes silly, tempering weighty material with humor befitting its twelve-year-old hero.
When “Avatar” won a Peabody Award, in 2008, the judges praised, among other qualities, its “healthy respect for the consequences of warfare.” Despite these themes, it never mistakes darkness for depth of meaning. As a child, he says, he had been taught that “the war was our way of sharing our greatness with the rest of the world.” After travelling the globe in pursuit of the Avatar, he has seen enough to recognize the “amazing lie” for what it was: “They don’t see our greatness. Under the guidance of his uncle, who challenges his preconceptions, Zuko makes slow, painful progress toward redemption, and is eventually forced to reckon with the cost of his country’s exceptionalism. Zuko, the prince of the Fire Nation, is introduced as a storm cloud of teen-age angst and unresolved trauma, blinded by the need for his father’s approval and the Fire Nation’s distortion of its history. They’re allowed to fail-sometimes catastrophically-and to atone in ways that take multiple seasons to come to fruition. The protagonists change the course of the war and are changed by it in turn, accruing new abilities, beliefs, and anxieties as they go. Early episodes are largely self-contained, but the heroes’ relationships and emotional states don’t simply reset at the end of those twenty-two minutes. As they venture farther into the world, Konietzko and DiMartino marry the more traditional “monster of the week” format with longer-term story arcs and character development. Aang and his companions spend much of their time in villages ravaged by the war, and among the refugees displaced by it.
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While that larger conflict looms, the series is less interested in dramatic clashes between armies than in relationships and realities on the ground. On the eve of his confrontation with the Fire Lord, one of his past lives-a warrior named Kyoshi, who has killed would-be conquerors before-counsels that “only justice will bring peace.” Aang, like the monks who raised him, is a pacifist at heart, but the series makes it clear that his is not the only way of bringing balance to the world. Moral ambiguity abounds, and people from all nations see the conflict as, variously, an opportunity or a tragedy there are Earth Kingdom citizens who have become cynical or apathetic after generations of fighting, and those from the Fire Nation who are fully capable of doing good. Where earlier shows might have hinted at such an atrocity for adult viewers’ benefit, “Avatar” is overt, taking seriously its young audience’s capacity to confront the consequences of endless war. He is, he discovers, both the Avatar and the last of the Air Nomads. In the third, Aang returns to the temple where he was born to find the aftermath of a genocide. The first two episodes are largely what you’d expect: world-building punctuated by moments of whimsy. The series begins a century later, when a twelve-year-old boy named Aang is discovered and revived by a pair of Water Tribe teen-agers-and the Fire Nation is well on its way to global conquest. Just as the Fire Nation launches an attack, he vanishes. In a world where nations are defined by their connection to one of the four elements-water, earth, fire, and air-maintaining the peace falls to the Avatar, the only person who can achieve mastery of them all. Like all such stories, “Avatar” (created by Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino, and no relation to the James Cameron blockbuster) demands some exposition. Last summer, after “Game of Thrones” flubbed its finale, fans and critics held up “Avatar” as a counterexample: a fantasy series that knew what it wanted to be from the beginning. The series first ran from 2005 to 2008 on Nickelodeon, and swiftly made a name for itself as a politically resonant, emotionally sophisticated work-one with a sprawling but meticulously plotted mythos that destined the show for cult-classic status. 1 offering, and even now it remains a fixture in the Top Ten for the U.S.
And yet when “Avatar: The Last Airbender” arrived on Netflix, in May, it rose through the ranks to become the platform’s No. Photograph from Nickelodeon Network / EverettĪ fifteen-year-old cartoon is an unlikely contender for most-watched show in America. The Nickelodeon cartoon “Avatar: The Last Airbender”-now on Netflix, and more popular than ever-functions as both a comfort watch and a means of catharsis.
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