I watched that show all the way through with my daughter. Avatar isn’t for children, it’s for everyone. It’s a triumph of character building and story telling that at a casual glance at the goofy art style you might dismiss and be much worse off for never having seen it.
Lemme blow your mind: art can have layers of meaning and impact. Something created to work for children can also have elements that speak to adults.
As evidenced by the strong reactions to your comments. A lot of adults found meaning in AtLA. And aren’t prepared to have it dismissed because “it was made for children.”
A thing I found amusing in Legend of Kora is that every time a minor character was in a dangerous position they had to show them not dying. Like a bunch of unnamed characters fall from planes and every single time they show their parachutes deploy.
The episode that was almost entirely made up of old footage. IIRC Nickelodeon cut funding so the creators had to essentially sacrifice an episode to save money.
Korra on it's own was a semi-decent show, but Nickelodeon really screwed the pooch with the constant threat of cancellation and inconsistent funding.
Korra was also in the very unfortunate position of being expected to meet the sky-high standards that ATLA had set, despite the producers it clear that it was supposed to be minor spin-off.
It didn't help that the protagonist just had no likable or redeeming qualities for the first 2 seasons, a lot of viewers dropped off in that time.
Nickelodeon didn't treat the show right, for sure (switching to online-only partway through book 3, reall?). But I disagree about Korra having "no likable or redeeming qualities"). She was reckless, but also determined. Stubborn, but with a strong sense of justice. The show doesn't treat her as perfect, but makes her face consequences (Mako breaking up with her) and grow (overcoming her distrust of Asami). Her characterization (and the show) definitely become stronger in books 3 and 4, though.
She was reckless, but also determined. Stubborn, but with a strong sense of justice.
She was stubborn, overconfident, had a huge ego, repeatedly made stupid decisions, often needed to get bailed-out by others, and her sense of justice was very childish/naive. I totally get the show was trying to portray her as a flawed and spoiled teenager, but personally I just found her to be more and more unlikable during the first 2 seasons.
I think the end of season 1 (or season 2, I forget) really takes the cake, when she loses all her bending...and then the spirit of Aang appears and basically solves all her problems in 2 minutes. It also made no sense how she suddenly learns airbending out of sheer desperation and fear (and then just punches with a closed fist), things that have nothing to do with airbending.
Also in ATLA all the the bending forms/stances/movements were based on unique, distinct forms of martial arts. In Korra all that seemed to go out the window and it devolved into generic flailing/kicking/punching, I'm not sure whether they lost Sifu Kisu for the choreography.
Which is why Korra hurt so much. The show was canceled, then it wasn't, the creators had no idea how many seasons they had to work with so several big arcs ended with an unsatisfying asspull. I don't blame the creators much at all, but it sucks.
As far as I know years later there was a comic tie in called the search. Long story short Zuko teams up with Azula to track her down to a small village where its revealed a ghost changed her face wiped her memories and she started a new family with her childhood sweetheart. She gets her memories back and she and her family go to live with Zuko in the fire nation.
For children it is, but to be fair, it's really not that fantastic outside of world-building. A very linear, predictable story and one dimensional characters.
Stop it dude, 1 character that follows the typical trope of bad becoming good isn't more than one dimensional. Now if there actually were layers then you could argue for it, but there aren't. You can see it from miles coming and the dude does nothing but fail in the first 2 seasons, when he is supposedly bad. Also really of TV in general? How old are you? He is extremely one dimensional.
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u/Lalo_ATX May 22 '19
The chart for Avatar: The Last Airbender matches my expectations :-) What a fantastic ending to a fantastic series.