Avatar: The Last Airbender’ Remains at No. 1 but Suffers a Viewership Decrease
'Avatar: The Last Airbender' remained in first place on the Netflix Top 10, but saw a 6% viewership drop after its first full week of availability.
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TIL they made a live action Avatar series, now I need to find a friend with Netflix
Don't bother, it's really not worth your time.
And I say that as someone that only fell in love with the OG three years ago and watched the live series all the way through. That's to say, it's not nostalgia talking, the OG series is just 100x better.
Not really. Imagine you take Avatar season 1, and have to cut a bunch of content for time. Now instead of trimming the fat and making a leaner, more focused S1 of ATLA, you trim out scenes integral to both the plot and character development and replace them with shorter scenes comprised entirely of verbal exposition.
Thats Netflix ATLA. Aang and Katara don’t come to terms with Aangs age and the reality of the war by exploring the beached fire navy ship, they just all stand around in a room and Gran Gran somehow tells them all that.
Sokka and Suki don’t butt heads over Sokka’s childish behavior, only for him to be humbled and realize what a fierce warrior she is, and later they start to have feelings for eachother, instead they just do martial arts together and like each other because the script says so.
They don’t head to the North Pole so that Aang (and by extension Katara) can learn waterbending, with them both learning to waterbend together on the way, instead they leave the water tribe village because… of no reason, and then after stopping in Kyoshi, Aang gets a vision that the northern water tribe will be attacked so he goes there to warn them. Aang doesn’t learn any water bending during the journey, Katara inexplicably becomes a master during the journey even though she’s not learning it with Aang even, and when they reach the northern water tribe, they somehow already know about the invasion, so there was actually no reason for Aang to go to the northern water tribe at all.
The whole show is like that. I understand the decision behind having the cut out the world building bits like penguin sledding, and riding the sea serpent, and all the junk not associated with the journey. But they didn’t just cut out the filler, they cut out entire plot points, motivations, and character arcs and just replaced them with choppy exposition delivered via poorly read dialogue.
I took a screen shot of your comment so I can show it to people who want to try and tell me "it's not that bad." You summed it up perfectly and so eloquently.
I didn't have high hopes, but I have been a little irritated by the fact that people seem to be annoyed that I don't like it. I don't know why I have to lower my standards for a bad adaptation just because people think, "it's hard to do an adaptation." I have heard the live action one piece was fantastic, so I am sure it's possible, although I don't think it's necessary to do live action adaptations of any of these great animes.