Avatar: The Last Airbender - Realistic Fantasy
Every year, I find myself rewatching Avatar: The Last Airbender.
It’s a treasure trove of good storytelling, beautiful animation, stunning choreography,
and satisfying character arcs.
The amount of thematic depth that its 61 episodes cover is beyond impressive, and everytime
I go back, I can’t help but fall in love with it all over again.
What appeals to me most is that something about it feels real.
Amidst ancient spirits, people with the power to control the elements, and flying bison,
Avatar’s world and the lives of the characters in it are easy to understand and connect with.
This is a quality that many of the best fantasy stories have: being able to take something
that—out of context—seems wholly unbelievable and then finding a way to make it believable.
Avatar’s creators, Bryan Konietzko and Michael DiMartino, achieved this in the way they created
and presented their world.
Crafting a new world, especially one that’s drastically different from reality, comes
with a cavalcade of challenges—chief among which is convincing viewers to suspend their
disbelief and start feeling engaged in the inner workings of the world
"Shhhhh....I'm trying to watch."
For this to happen, the world needs to be consistent in regard to how it follows its
own internal rules and logic.
A story’s ability to pull this off is one of the major factors that plays into if it’s
just okay or great, and Avatar manages this successfully in a few different ways.
First off, Konietzko and DiMartino put a strong focus on creating and defining limitations
early on in the show’s development as a way to never let things get out of hand:
“To me limitations are good; limitations allow things to happen without going ‘wait
a minute…’”
They didn’t want to run the risk of introducing something that undermined the narrative they
planned out, so they made rules that couldn’t be broken: like bending had to come from the
body and only could affect nearby areas, only the Avatar could bend more than one element,
bending is something one must be born with, and there are no magical items that give people
unlimited power.
These limitations made the show easy to understand, while also lessening the risk of power creep,
which is something that occurs when new aspects are introduced that overpower existing elements
of the world, making everything feel a little bloated and over the top, which is something
that plagues a lot of shows that center around fighting.
There are certainly a few holes in the limitations the creators set for themselves, most notably
with the inner workings of the Spirits and Aang’s abilities, but they did a solid job
of not using those holes too often, which is something that the follow up series, The
Legend of Korra, kind of struggled with.
At most, Avatar only ever slightly stretches its limitation, but it never breaks through
them.
The additions to bending and Aang’s powers don’t feel random or cheap, but rather a
natural extension of the rules of the world.
What’s more is that everything in Avatar’s world, whether it be clothing, culture, or
infrastructure is influenced by bending.
For instance, the city of Omashu uses a combination of gravity and earthbending to transport supplies;
Ba Sing Se is surrounded by a giant wall that only Earthbenders could create and maintain
with relative ease; the Northern Water Tribe’s buildings are made of ice and the locals use
waterbending as a way to open and close the gate to their city; the Air nomads built temples
on high mountains that could only be easily reached by Airbending and they have a hermetic
set of ideals to reflect this isolation; and the Fire Nation were the first to enter an
industrial revolution of sorts because of their ability to generate power and, presumably,
manipulate metals with their bending of fire and lightning.
These details may seem small, but they establish a consistency in the world, which is what
gives it the quality of feeling real.
Another struggle that comes with creating a new world is making something original yet
not too “out there” that it becomes hard for audiences to follow.
Konietzko and DiMartino solved this issue by using and combining popular and easy-to-understand
ideas instead of building everything from the ground up.
While there are plenty of shows that center around martial arts and many others that have
characters who can manipulate various elements, none have done it with as much cohesion between
the two concepts.
Also, instead of populating the world with entirely made up creatures, they simply combined
real animals together, which creates interesting and humorous animals that viewers understand
just by hearing the name.
It might take some time to figure out what a Plimpy is in Harry Potter, but it is immediately
clear what to expect from a Saber-Tooth Moose Lion.
Even the show itself which is clearly inspired by anime is off-set with jokes and ideas that
are unique to being a show on Nickelodeon.
Avatar is a mash-up, and when looking at each of its core aspects independently, it treads
a lot of familiar ground, but the fusion of all of them together makes it one-of-a-kind.
Now, if world-building were to be split into two steps: development and presentation, all
of this would fall into development.The second, and maybe more difficult step is presenting
the world.
A writer can create the most in-depth and detailed histories, but if these things aren’t
presented to the audience in the right way, they won’t be effective in the slightest.
In fiction, the purpose of a world is to support the story being told, and Avatar achieves
this by using its world to create high stakes for the main characters.
A pretty common and effective approach to introducing a fictional world is having the
protagonist and the audience learn about the world at the same time.
For example, walking through a wardrobe and discovering a magical land or learning about
some secret innate power or, the often frowned upon, case of amnesia.
These approaches allow audiences to view the world through the same lens as the main character,
which opens up the potential for explaining how the world works without it feeling out
of place.
Avatar slighty twists these tropes by having Aang not know anything about the current state
of the world due to him being frozen for 100 years, but being extremely knowledgeable about
the past.
Because of this and how the group travels to so many unfamiliar places, from a narrative
standpoint, it makes sense for other characters to explain the inner workings of the modern
world to Aang as, in turn, he describes to them what the past was like, ultimately showing
viewers not only how the world works, but also making the world feel lived in by showing
how much has changed, and in a lot of cases, how much has changed for the worse, which
is important because, arguably, Aang’s disappearance caused it all.
Almost every place that Aang and company visit throughout the series is affected in some
way by the same issue: war.
Seeing the different ways that the war between the fire nation and the rest of the world
has affected not only each of the four nations, but individual cities and towns, serves to
flesh out the world and introduce backstories and histories that viewers become connected
to because they see characters directly affected by events from the past.
It is far easier to care about the history of a place when the effects of said history
are clear and personal.
And that is how Avatar presents its world: through the various people that Aang meets
on his journey to master the four elements.
During this adventure, it becomes clear how diverse, yet relatable the people and places
of this world are.
For instance, the earth nation is not one uniformed country.
Each city’s views are dependent on their experiences, which differ across the board.
Some cities are under Fire Nation control, and others have barely been touched by the
war.
Even views from inside the same city, like Ba Sing Se are entirely different depending
on which economic level one lives in.
As each city across the world is explored, a great sense of the struggle and turmoil
that has been caused by the war develops.
And this is so powerful because Aang blames himself for everything becoming this way.
The history of Avatar’s world is intertwined so tightly with the struggle of the protagonist,
which makes each location’s backstory tied to Aang.
In turn, this makes it so, for viewers, the world is actually worth saving.
A lot of films and shows center around the protagonist needing to save the world, but
in most cases, the only reason a viewer would care if the world is saved is because that's
just how you're supposed to feel, which is boring and too easy.
In Avatar, the majority of the show is spent exploring the world, giving hundreds of reasons
why it is important for to save.
Every episode strengthens this resolve, playing into the series long arc of defeating the
firelord.
And because of this, no episode really feels like a filler episode, despite there being
a handful of them that deviate far from the main plot.
The show is the perfect length to tell the story that the creators intended to tell,
and while a part of me will always wish for more Avatar, I'm glad this installment of
the story stopped where it did.
Avatar’s world is interesting and engaging.
Konietzko and DiMartino did an excellent job of utilizing every aspect of what bending
could do in a world and it followed a consistent logic, never really stretching its rules too
thin.
This created a perfect backdrop to tell a fantastical, yet very human story about a
war-torn world filled with everything from sacrifice, suffering, and loss to betrayal,
self-examination, and redemption to independence, wisdom, and kindness.
I think I speak for most fans of the show when I say that Avatar has one of those special
worlds that you dream of living in.
When watching, I can escape into a different world, while still being able to examine it next to
my life and my struggles.
And that is why I come back to it every year.