The essential melancholy of Avatar: The Last Airbender
I finally got around to watching Nickelodeon's epic series in its entirety. It exceeded the rave reviews I'd always heard.
Image via Nickelodeon
This essay contains spoilers.
Perhaps it was some sort of act of divine providence that Netflix started streaming the entirety of Avatar: The Last Airbender during the pandemic. I’d only caught bits and pieces of it on television and while I’d loved every bit of it that I’d seen, the show represented a glaring hole in my viewing experiences. So I decided to devote time to finally watching Nickelodeon’s fantasy masterpiece.
And it is, indeed, a masterpiece.
The Last Airbender is a shockingly grown-up bit of kid’s programming. On its surface, it’s a bit of a run-of-the-mill chosen one narrative about Aang, a kid with magic powers who rides around on a flying bison. Yet Aang’s story is so much more than that. The Last Airbender is a story about the horrors of war, about family, and about philosophy. It’s a kid’s show and the third episode is about Aang realizing he’s the last of his kind and that his people, the Air Nomads, were the victims of genocide.
For the uninitiated, The Last Airbender takes place in a heavily Asian-inspired world on the cusp of an industrial revolution. There are three remaining countries; the Fire Nation, the Earth Kingdom and the Water Tribe. Each country is home to people who can manipulate, or “bend,” their namesake elements. Aang is the titular Avatar and last airbender. The Avatar is a mantle handed down through a cycle of reincarnation through the four countries and is the only one who can bend all four elements, and serves as a guiding figure for the people of the world.
That changed when the Fire Nation decided to conquer the world a century prior to the start of the show. The Avatar at the time died, and was reincarnated in Aang. Yet Aang has been frozen in ice for 100 years when we meet him, has not yet learned how to bend an element besides air, and does not know about the war. It’s that century of strife that serves as the defining factor for almost every facet of the story.
There is a profound sense of melancholy in the air through much of The Last Airbender. It pulls its punches insofar as it’s a cartoon that aired on Nickelodeon alongside SpongeBob SquarePants. Being on the same network as a pineapple under the sea means that there isn’t a lot of blood and gore and nudity, and that there’s slapstick humor and occasional fart jokes. But the show simply wouldn’t work without that melancholy. You can’t tell a war story and have everything be sunshine and rainbows. The Last Airbender understands this, and it’s what makes it great.
In a way the host network makes The Last Airbender’s limits-testing all the more impressive and makes the gut-punch moments hit that much harder. Aang is by and large a happy-go-lucky kind of kid, but he also easily falls into despair. He’s a natural pacifist and is horrified by the idea that his destiny seemingly demands that he kill the evil Firelord Ozai. Death and loss are everywhere in the war-torn countryside our protagonists are traveling through. And it isn’t just set-dressing. It directly impacts the protagonists.
For a show about super-powered kids fighting evil conquerors, the show’s most iconic moment may well be a tear-jerking scene in which disgraced general Iroh mourns his son, who died in the battle that became Iroh’s most humiliating defeat.
The scene comes at the end of a vignette in which Iroh helps make children around the city happy, including singing a happier version of the song to put a crying toddler at ease, as he gathers the materials for his ceremony.
Iroh is the show’s beating heart, the conscience that turns antagonist Prince Zuko from a generic villain into a tragic conflicted figure. He’s how we know that the Fire Nation isn’t a faceless group of bad guys, which makes the introduction of the psychopathic Princess Azula all the more menacing.
It’s a kid’s show that devotes an entire episode to lovable bison Appa being mistreated and wounded after being separated from the protagonists. It’s a kid’s show that turns the Earth Kingdom capital into an Orwellian stand-in for Beijing’s Forbidden City ruled by a brutal secret police. It’s a kid’s show that forces Katara to grapple with the fact that she had to bend the water in an enemy’s blood to save herself and her friends. When Zuko and Azula have their final battle at the end of the show, the music reflects the utter tragedy of siblings trying to kill each other.
The cost of war is omnipresent even when it’s not being shoved in the viewer’s face. A Season 2 episode culminates in almost all of the major characters facing off against the powerful Azula. It’s a great action sequence, and it takes place in the ruins of a town that was clearly wrecked by the war. Many of the people Aang and his friends come across in their travels are refugees.
The Last Airbender isn’t good just because of these rough moments. The show is beautifully crafted. Its characters live in a cleverly-written world with intriguing lore and visit fascinating places. The characters are dynamic and complicated. But it’s that well-earned emotional weight that sets it apart. Too much young adult media employs grimness for grimness’ sake. The Last Airbender incorporates it because it has to do so to make its triumphs all the more rewarding.
The world of Avatar is beautiful and full of magic. Its protagonists, besides Iroh, are teenagers. Even through the horrors of war, they find ways to make things happy. An episode in the second season has our heroes guide a refugee couple to safety. The wife is nine months pregnant, and the birth of her daughter helps Aang realize what he’s really fighting for.
Things get goofy too. There’s a scene in which Aang hallucinates Appa and his little flying lemur Momo talking and dueling like samurai, with Momo adopting some very Toshirô Mifune-esque scruff and mannerisms. We savor the moments of joy because we care about these characters, and we care about them because of how well they’re written and the struggles they go through.
The Last Airbender is theoretically a kid’s show, but it’s the sort of material that only improves as you get older. It teaches good lessons and makes young viewers think about everything from conflict to gender roles. It’s some of the finest animated work I’ve ever seen.
Netflix just announced that the sequel series, The Legend of Korra, will be available to stream next month. I haven’t seen it yet, and I can’t wait to get back into this world.