Avatar: The Last Airbender still slaps

How does a 20-year-old Nickelodeon children's show have such staying power?

The TV Scholar Hall of Fame consist of shows plucked from my personal favourites list. They are shows that have made a deep impact on my relationship to television as a medium. These newsletters are less deep dives than they are spoiler-free, highlighted reminders of their impact — but scroll until the end for a list of academic recommendations if you want to dig further. The last show I wrote about was Sharp Objects; this month, I turn to Avatar: The Last Airbender.

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The year is 2005 and I’m 11 years old. Grey’s Anatomy was just about to premiere, Lost had finished airing its first season, and The Sopranos was on its last season. Not having access to cable, I only caught up on those shows a bit later (when I discovered Megavideo). But Avatar: The Last Airbender was a small, animated Nickelodeon show that had me and my sister by the throat, rushing to watch live or at least catch in re-runs.

We scoured stores looking for the DVD boxsets as soon as they were released, re-watched episodes and dissected every moment. It is with certainty I can say that Avatar: The Last Airbender was the first time I realized the power of serialized storytelling on television. I had grown accustomed to episodic stories like on Teen Titans or The Simpsons, sitcoms, and sci-fi procedurals. But the further I got into Avatar, the more I realized the show’s arcs were trying to achieve aspirations much greater than the average children’s programming.

I only recognized much later that I wasn’t alone in my adoration. The series ranks routinely on best-of lists, won a Peabody for its third season alongside Lost and Breaking Bad, and even snuck in an Emmy animation award for the episode “Lake Laogai.” A few months into the pandemic, the original series was added to Netflix and surged in popularity again, with the added bonus of a live action series announced, which finally premieres on February 22, 2024, nearly twenty years since the first episode aired on Nickelodeon (there was also a very bad live action film created by M. Night Shyamalan but we in the fandom do not speak of such atrocities).

ATLA has been taken to task academically, too. Just last year, Avatar: The Last Airbender and Philosophy was published, a collection of 27 essays that tackle everything from Anishinaabe philosophy to the ethics of bloodbending, time, disability (“Is Toph a Supercrip Stereotype or a Disability Pride Icon?”), moral responsibility, and genocide—all by different academics. This is on top of a handful of recent journal articles I skimmed on fandom, memes, race, and nationalism. I found at least a dozen master’s theses, too. For ATLA to still generate such scholarly interest speaks to its staying power as a cultural product, and legitimizes it as, in my opinion, one of the best shows ever made.

But sure, it is still a children’s show. The show stars Aang as the Avatar, a 12-year-old boy who has been stuck in an iceberg for 100 years. In this universe, the world is separated into four nations representing the elements (water, earth, fire, air), and a genetic section of the population is able to control the element itself. When he’s awakened by Katara and Sokka, two teens in the Southern water tribe, he finds out his entire peaceful civilization of monks have been the victims of a genocidal campaign brought on by the fire nation, who have been obsessively waging war for the last century. He embarks on a journey, with the help of his flying bison and friends, to fulfill his role as the Avatar. As the only person able to control and master all four elements, it’s his duty to bring balance to the world.

The show grounds itself immediately in very dark themes. Rewatching was like, woah genocide and war are front and centre. And at the core of the story is Aang’s daunting responsibility as the “chosen one” protagonist. Unlike many others in this Harry Potter-esque fantasy trope, Aang is deeply unprepared—his raw talents only get him so far, and he fails often. Over the course of the series, he importantly recruits the help of his friends (“Team Avatar”) and masters, spiritual guides, and spirituality itself to stop the fire nation.

The weakest part of the show while rewatching were the filler episodes, particularly in the first season. But I realized these episodes are often subtle character development for Team Avatar in ways that the plot-heavy, non-stop bangers don’t have time to tackle. It’s in these episodes where we learn more about Katara’s powerful abilities as a waterbender, or Sokka’s place in the group as the “ideas guy,” or Toph’s discovery that she might be the best earthbender in the world.

It’s in an episode like “The Swamp” where the show tackles philosophical traditions from East and South Asian schools of thought like Daoism, neo-Confucianism, Huayan and Chan/Zen Buddhism (De Cruz & De Smedt, 2023). Of note, the idea that despite our best efforts to sew division and separation between each other, we are each connected in ways we don’t spend enough time realizing. Filler episode characters also pop in throughout the series unexpectedly (this is all aside from the episode “The Great Divide,” which I am confident saying is the only fully skippable episode).

It is honestly a marvel that the show was able to fit so much philosophy, heart, and martial arts-inspired choreography in brief, twenty-three minute episodes, including carving out time to nuance villains far beyond cardboard cut-out tropes. Zuko, in particular, may be one of the most thoughtfully written villains in recent memory, from aggressively seeking to regain his honour as a banished prince to eventually, with the help of his caring uncle, unlearning the fire nation’s imperialism that he internalized since his childhood. Even Zuko’s sister Azula, who is less wavering in her allegiances and unstoppable power, is made more complicated than one might expect.

As I rewatched, race was the elephant in the room of my re-experience of the show. I don’t know that I thought about it that deeply at 11 years old, but this time I couldn’t stop thinking about the mostly white cast voicing Asian and Indigenous characters. This has only very recently shifted in animation more generally. Allison Brie voiced a Vietnamese-American character on BoJack Horseman for years until she apologized, and Jenny Slate only backed out of voicing a Black character on Big Mouth during the “summer of racial reckoning” in 2020. I was in awe of Blue Eye Samurai recently employing a mostly all-Asian voice acting cast, a satisfying marker of how far we’ve come in our cultural literacy of on-screen representation as it applies to animation. Avatar, written by two white men in 2005, did not have 2023’s advantage—but they nonetheless approached their world-building extremely thoughtfully, as Xine Yao points out in their article for the Journal of Asian American Studies:

Distinctive references predominate for each nation’s assemblage of cultural influences: the adversarial Fire Nation, Japanese and Chinese; the Water Tribes, Inuit; the Air Nomads, Tibetan; and the Earth Kingdom, broadly East Asian.

Maps in popular genre fiction typically reproduce the history of cartography as a colonial technology: spatial distinctions become historical differences that serve to isolate peoples, which Mark Jerng calls a “denial of historical coevalness.” The show, however, remaps our geographical assumptions: the Asian-inspired cultures are central, not a faraway Orient.

The assemblages of the show’s worldbuilding foreground often-occluded convergences between Asian colonialism, Asian North American settler colonialism, and Arctic and Asian Indigeneities.

ATLA’s disorienting worldbuilding can reorient our worldmaking attention to the structural in ways that deepen understandings of Asian-Indigenous comparative positionalities through which we may not only better critique such relationalities but also imagine insurgent possibilities. (Yao, 2021)

In the days after my rewatch, which I concluded furiously over Christmas since I didn’t have to worry about cooking for a few days (thanks mom!), I couldn’t stop listening to and meditating on the original soundtrack by Jeremy Zuckerman, only just released in November 2023 for the first time: the soaring violins, thumping drums, the ringing bell of “The Blue Spirit,” the chuk-chuk whispers in “Agni Kai,” and soaring, cinematic melodies that my sister and I hummed back and forth to each other over the years.

I’m still ruminating on what I was looking for in my rewatch, and whether or not I found it. I’m turning 30 this year, and Avatar represents this idyllic, preserved childhood memory of innocence and glee for life in my mind that I sometimes struggle to hold on to as my forehead wrinkles get deeper and I start to consider how quickly adulthood is passing me by. I always imagined I would rewatch Avatar with a partner as a bonding ritual, an entry to a special part of my brain. Perhaps, instead, I’m trying to recommit myself to, well, myself, in the negative space of solitude.

What I can say is god damn, most of it holds up spectacularly. I cried more than I’ve cried to any episode of television rewatching Appa’s bottle episode, which must be one of my favourite episodes of television, ever. And I marvelled at the way bending is represented and the thoughtful dialogue, each character so lived in and real to my imagination.

Most of all, it was a timely reminder that between the shades of darkness, genocide, war, the world breaking at the seams, you can still turn to community, and yes, even goofy fun and play, to warm up your heart again and recenter before pressing on. I guess it might be time to rewatch The Legend of Korra.

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Further reading:

De Cruz, Helen, and Johan De Smedt (Eds.). Avatar : The Last Airbender and Philosophy, Wisdom from Aang to Zuko. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2023.

Kerr, William. “Water, Earth, Fire, Air: Banal Nationalism and Avatar: The Last Airbender.” European journal of cultural studies (2023).

Liddell, Chelsea R. New myths for the modern era: Remembering Japanese imperialism in Avatar: The Last Airbender (MA Thesis). Indiana University, 2014.

Van Hoey, Thomas. “The Blending of Bending: How We Engage with the World of Avatar: The Last Airbender through Memes.” Metaphor and symbol 37, no. 3 (2022): 185–207.

Yao, Xine. “Arctic and Asian Indigeneities, Asian/North American Settler/Colonialism: Animating Intimacies and Counter-Intimacies in Avatar: The Last Airbender.” Journal of Asian American studies 24, no. 3 (2021): 471–504.