Avatar: Analyzing the Series

Introduction

This year is Avatar: The Last Airbender's – (AtlA) – fifteen-year anniversary, but the series is on Netflix again which means I can watch the series without finding myself needing to change DVD. As such, this felt like a good time to restart my analysis of AtLA – and to a degree Legend of Korra (LoK) utilizing a new formatting style and – well, simply redoing everything despite getting through one episode as it's a scene by scene analysis.

Why?

There's no denying the series received quite a bit of critical acclaim despite the quality going down during the final season. The same can not be said, however, of the sequel series LoK didn't fair so well and is known for some rather poor writing, some of which threw out canon material from the original series LoK is meant to be a sequel for, yet the comics didn't fair much better, if at all.

What happened?

Well, Bryke – what fandom calls Mike and Bryan – aren't writers.

Prior to LoK, Bryke received a lot of credit for why AtLA was as great of a series as it is because they're known as the series creators. However, unlike other series creators like Vince Gilligan, Craig Bartlett, Eugene Roddenberry, Shonda Rhimes and J.J. Abrams just to name a few, they really didn't have that much of a creative hand in regards to a show – much of that is now credited to Aaron Ehasz and his writing team, which included Ehasz's wife.

Why do I say this?

As I said, fandom noticed a definite difference in quality between AtLA and LoK. While the animation for LoK improved – that's Bryke's specialty – the writing got a major downgrade, yet one of the things fandom noticed when the show ended was how much of the majority of the writing credit went to Bryke in LoK and how little went to them in AtLA. Writing is definitely not their strong suit.

I think part of the confusion comes from not knowing what a series creator – or a television program creator – actually is. They're simply, as Wikipedia currently puts it, "typically the person who pitches a new TV show idea and sees it through." Since this is what typically happens, everyone assumed this is what actually happened, when in reality Bryke get credit for pitching the idea, yet Ehasz as head writer had just as much to do with seeing it through as they did, if not more.

I say "if not more" because of how he ended up having to tweak Bryke's ideas, such as with Toph and Azula. Both characters were originally intended to be male characters. Toph specifically was meant to be a rival for Katara's affections yet make Aang look really good. Ehasz was approached regarding the direction of a forth season, yet Bryke decided they'd rather do the movie.

In fact, I don't trust the two in pulling off a live action series due to the fact they're not anywhere near as innocent regarding the original live action adaption as they want everyone to believe. I say this having seen the making of, so I know the two lied about being pushed around by M. Night Shyamalan, yet Ehasz has since revealed that Shyamalan also wanted a forth season and wasn't the reason the forth season got nixed. In fact, we also now know the original script Shyamalan wrote was in fact much longer, only to be cut down first by himself and then a ghost writer – probably Bryke – for a total of four scripts, the last two Shyamalan had nothing to do with.

There's discussion of an executive producer – which Bryke are definitely credited for in the movie, yet people forget they were such because Bryke like claiming they had little to no say regarding the movie, yet interestingly enough – the Katara in the live action movie actually looks like Katara from the pilot episode. That was one of the things which majorly struck me when I watched the pilot – which no, I will not be analyzing, at least not at first. I've got the entire AtLA series to get through.