A few weeks back I came across the unsettling realisation that the Avatar live action show as coming at us mach speed at an unstoppable pace, and at that time I resolved to watch it. Even as every preview stunned more and more with the presentation and what the team managed to achieve, behind the scenes comments by the team made me more and more anxious about the fact that no-one abroad seemed to know what made the original special. How it wasn't just the fertile concept, the interesting world or the gorgeously choreographed and animated fight scenes- Avatar was renowned for it's instantly iconic characters with their lovable dynamics, quirks and journeys that made them a family worth siding with. You'd think that would be the least resource intensive part of an adaptation to get right, but I guess spending god knows how much into giant redundant battle scenes is so much easier than actually telling a half decent story over a sensible amount of episodes.
I haven't binged my way through the Avatar show even though all the episodes are currently out, because I wanted to take it as it comes. And in that vein I've actually only watched the first episode but have been fed so much to digest that I don't rightly know what to do. So much was covered by that hour alone and yet I'm swirling with thoughts and opinions about every 30 second stretch that condensing those into coherent thoughts will be a challenge all on it's own. But I try not to make these into big reviews when we're talking about non-gaming content and therefore I'll try to stay general and airy with my thoughts. Focus on the bigger issues and what the show has got right and what it's currently doing wrong- because there is considerable ammo in both barrels.
Firstly, I need to start by commenting about a larger issue in recent content that I lay squarely at the feet of professional reviewers. 8 episodes is a frankly ludicrously little amount of screentime to cover a continuous story in a world as expansive as this one, and the breakneck pace of this show- and others with similar constraints, is hostile to the creative process. This comes after years of professional critics, not just lowly bloggers like myself, parroting the same critique for literally every piece of content ever. It used to be that whenever there was a brilliant show that everyone loved, it was the go-to lazy professional critic response to squawk "Yeah, but it's too long." "There were a few scenes that weren't absolutely critical to the progression of the narrative. If they were cut it would have been better." That seems to have taken route at an industry level where now downtime and narrative spacing has been made illegal in all shows to the point where we get something like Avatar.
Rushing from narrative point to narrative point is not cohesive to a good story. Making sure every episode in a series carries extreme narrative weight removes the concept of ebb-and-flow to storytelling. Trying to present a world you expect to be 'big as Game of Thrones' in a series that covers two less episodes per series than that impeccably better written adaptation is laughable. This shrinking of productions is becoming a noose around content, and it's suffocating writers- squashing out the talent. I genuinely think that many of the character problems this adaptation has come about because the team are too scared to waste a second having characters getting to know each other by sharing a quick joke or telling a quip. Everyone needs to be on task 24/7- making relationships and friendships feel contrived and unnatural.
Which I suppose brings me around to the characterisation- the show's weakest point. With the news about how the showrunners were smoothing over the actual character traits of Aang's playful side quests and Sokka's 'sexist' pretentions- I was worried about how these performances would pan out. And to be absolutely fair- the actors did what they were told wonderfully, unfortunately what they told to do kind of sucked. Rather than Aang exuberating a playfulness that overwhelmed the grim responsibility of the world's arbiter, literally introducing himself in the show by asking Katara to goof off and go penguin sledding with him- he tells Appa out loud about how he'd prefer to be goofing off rather than be an Avatar. There's so much telling instead of doing that it mutes the audience's connection to these people to a point where they feel personality deprived. But no one got as bad a shake as Sokka.
Sokka doesn't just lose all of his sexist jokes- (for which he was the punchline by-the-way; the show always made a point to clown on Sokka for his backwards viewpoints!) he loses all of his trademark jokiness altogether. Sokka is played as the straight man in every interaction- which misses the point of the character so badly it genuinely drives me mad. Sokka wants to be the straight man- he wants to be the dependable and capable warrior in order to live up to his role as sole man of the tribe since all the grown up warriors left. But he's still just a teenager and he's silly and doesn't command the respect he thinks he does, and ends up the butt of the joke a lot of time. Not in a cruel way, but in a sarky way. But after two live action adaptations that seem utterly oblivious to that, I'm convinced that showrunners are just allergic to children's shows, they bitterly refuse to watch them in their replication attempts.
What the show got right, however- seems to be literally everything else. The casting seems on point, the actors are all solid, (aside from the material they've given to read) the sets are outrageously good and the action is stunning! If only it wasn't all made so damned redundant by being useless. What is the point of the Air Bender destruction scene, which goes on for a while mind you, if we're just going to see Aang pick through the ruins in the same episode? It shows us the brutality of the Fire Kingdom early, gives up the mystery of what happened to the air benders early and removes the audience from the mindspace of the central character. All because these 'storytellers' wanted an early action scene to keep people hooked, it's madness!
Avatar has a good many episodes to go from here, and I seriously wonder for the health of the key character dynamics if this pace is maintained. Are we going to be able to see the friendship blossom between these three? Will Katara and Sokka ever remember to go back and say 'bye' to Gran Gran? Is Sokka going to regain any ounce of his humour in order to be likeable or will he remain the grumpy straight-man throughout? And what about looking further? Are they going to make Toph the incredibly capable and cool-tempered blind girl who jokes about her own condition in a way that makes everyone else the butt of the joke? Will they portray her journey in learning how to be a teacher without forcing the actress to bluntly exposit it all out in a monologue salad like what Aang had in episode 1? And can these shows get an actual decent amount of episodes for once, good god! If 8 is considered enough for a serialised show, what the hell is a limited series anymore? 3 episodes!?
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