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Avatar 1x01-2x20 (no spoilers)
Mon, Dec. 18th, 2006 03:21 pmI'm not sure if I'm up to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
rilina's level of episode mainlining yet, but I feel watching 40 half-hour episodes in about four days is pretty up there.
Avatar: The Last Airbender is a cartoon running on Nickelodeon about a world in which there are four types of "bending" (think elemental magic): fire, water, air and earth. As the little intro spiel to each episode says, the Fire nation, Earth kingdom, Air nomads and Water tribes all lived in peace until the Fire nation decided to conquer everything about a hundred years ago. Normally, there would be someone called an avatar who could practice all four types of bending to keep the peace. The avatar is reincarnated into each tribe cyclically, but when the Fire nation invaded, the avatar never appeared. A hundred years later, Water tribe teenager Katara and her brother Sokka find the twelve-year-old avatar Aang and his flying bison in an iceberg.
Now they're on a mission to get Aang trained in all four types of bending while also trying to avoid being captured by the Fire nation and trying to prevent the Fire nation from taking over the world.
Whew! End plot exposition!
The series is very heavily influenced by anime in terms of character design and plot arcs, but I didn't actually feel that it was that much like anime. Of course, this is probably because the last time I watched American cartoons was.... eh.... Powerpuff Girls. From assorted comments that I've seen, it seems as though most American cartoons don't even have plot arc.
I watched season one (each season is 20 eps.) and was thoroughly unimpressed. I didn't like the voice actors, the individual episodes were too easily wrapped up with digestible moral lessons, the plot itself seemed rather obvious, and everything felt too easy. I think I was expecting something more like FMA, which is a pretty difficult standard to live up to!
Season two is much improved; there are now about an equal number of male and female characters, the plot arcs have gotten less predictable and more complex, and the characters themselves feel more real and less shoehorned into whatever the moral lesson of the week needs them to be. I'm still not completely fannish, but it is now on my season pass list.
Outside of plot and character, the thing that impresses me most about Avatar is the worldbuilding. It isn't as original and complex as Sherwood Smith's Inda or other such Giant Fantasy Tomes, but it's actually very well-done in terms of cultural appropriation. The entire world is based on Asia and other Asiatic-Pacific cultures; the Water tribes seem to be based on Inuit culture and the Air nomads feel Tibetan, but the Earth kingdom and Fire nation cultures are largely drawn from east Asia.
( More on cultural appropriation, Asian-ness and other such stuff )
rilina's level of episode mainlining yet, but I feel watching 40 half-hour episodes in about four days is pretty up there.Avatar: The Last Airbender is a cartoon running on Nickelodeon about a world in which there are four types of "bending" (think elemental magic): fire, water, air and earth. As the little intro spiel to each episode says, the Fire nation, Earth kingdom, Air nomads and Water tribes all lived in peace until the Fire nation decided to conquer everything about a hundred years ago. Normally, there would be someone called an avatar who could practice all four types of bending to keep the peace. The avatar is reincarnated into each tribe cyclically, but when the Fire nation invaded, the avatar never appeared. A hundred years later, Water tribe teenager Katara and her brother Sokka find the twelve-year-old avatar Aang and his flying bison in an iceberg.
Now they're on a mission to get Aang trained in all four types of bending while also trying to avoid being captured by the Fire nation and trying to prevent the Fire nation from taking over the world.
Whew! End plot exposition!
The series is very heavily influenced by anime in terms of character design and plot arcs, but I didn't actually feel that it was that much like anime. Of course, this is probably because the last time I watched American cartoons was.... eh.... Powerpuff Girls. From assorted comments that I've seen, it seems as though most American cartoons don't even have plot arc.
I watched season one (each season is 20 eps.) and was thoroughly unimpressed. I didn't like the voice actors, the individual episodes were too easily wrapped up with digestible moral lessons, the plot itself seemed rather obvious, and everything felt too easy. I think I was expecting something more like FMA, which is a pretty difficult standard to live up to!
Season two is much improved; there are now about an equal number of male and female characters, the plot arcs have gotten less predictable and more complex, and the characters themselves feel more real and less shoehorned into whatever the moral lesson of the week needs them to be. I'm still not completely fannish, but it is now on my season pass list.
Outside of plot and character, the thing that impresses me most about Avatar is the worldbuilding. It isn't as original and complex as Sherwood Smith's Inda or other such Giant Fantasy Tomes, but it's actually very well-done in terms of cultural appropriation. The entire world is based on Asia and other Asiatic-Pacific cultures; the Water tribes seem to be based on Inuit culture and the Air nomads feel Tibetan, but the Earth kingdom and Fire nation cultures are largely drawn from east Asia.
( More on cultural appropriation, Asian-ness and other such stuff )
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