TV Rewind: Why Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Bold Animation and Fearless Politics Remain Essential
Photo Courtesy of Nickelodeon
Editor’s Note: Welcome to our TV Rewind column! The Paste writers are diving into the streaming catalogue to discuss some of our favorite classic series as well as great shows we’re watching for the first time. Come relive your TV past with us, or discover what should be your next binge watch below:
When I first saw Avatar: The Last Airbender, I watched it through Netflix, but the old-fashioned way: by getting individual DVDs in the mail, each containing four to six episodes before I’d need to mail it back and order a new one. Now, as I watch it through the massive streaming service Netflix has become, The Last Airbender remains the same show I’ve always loved. It’s just as consistently beautiful, intense, profound and hilarious as I remember, balancing each element as well as the Avatar balances water, fire, earth, and air.
But as I’ve grown, and as my younger sister experiences the show for the first time, I’m finding new, different ways to connect to The Last Airbender’s stories and characters. The warring nations are no longer just a backdrop for cool battles (although damn, those battles are still so cool), but contain different political ideologies and structures based directly on the real world. I’ve grown to relate to more of its characters’ struggles and triumphs. Above all, the show’s unwavering message of choosing good over evil is more potent than ever.
Immediately, The Last Airbender felt distinct from the other cartoons I watched at the time. Unlike Spongebob Squarepants, The Fairly Oddparents or Jimmy Neutron, this show had a strict narrative, without a single episode being unimportant to the overall plot. I noticed how in the Pokémon anime, Ash and co. would meet a new friend and always promise to meet again someday at the episode’s end. They almost never did.
In Avatar, they mean it. Every action has far-reaching consequences, not just on a wide, geopolitical scale but even in how different characters view one another. Avatar: The Last Airbender was the first show to trust that my age range could understand and enjoy a complex, increasingly mature story, and it was right. As has always been the case, kids—even those with developmental disabilities—can understand a lot more than adults give them credit for, at times being able to view characters and plot points with more nuance than perhaps more narrow-minded parents.
Still, as I’ve rewatched the show, gaining more understanding about politics and media have changed my perspective on it. The last time I watched the show was when I was around 13, as one of the first shows I introduced to my younger sister, who was around five years old at the time. And although I recall her enjoying it, she was also too young to remember anything but the most vague, abstract structure of the show. We both started rewatching it together when it hit Netflix’s streaming service in May, and although my sister began watching with a nearly complete blank slate, The Last Airbender is also a radically different show from how I remember it.
As a privileged, white, middle-class kid, I didn’t really need to worry about politics growing up. I knew some people hated the Obama administration while others adored it, but anything I heard about it was an incomprehensible babble of political mumbo jumbo. When I was 16, something happened that changed that—on November 8, 2016, Donald Trump became President Elect of the United States. The morning after, my teacher broke down before class started. Fights broke out in the hallway between students of opposing ideologies. Some teachers tried to act like everything was normal; others spent the entire bell ranting for or against the upcoming leadership; another came into class, eyes burning red from tears, and gave us a bunch of pointless assignments to busy ourselves with while he sat silently at his desk. Politics were no longer something I could comfortably ignore. From then on, they were everywhere.
Even, as it turns out, in my favorite media.
While many forms of media, especially videogames, claim complete political immunity nowadays in order to not alienate any possible audiences, The Last Airbender thrives in its politics. Katara calls her brother sexist within the first five minutes of the premiere, and although its fantasy setting keeps it from directly calling out any political figures at the time, one can certainly draw comparisons between the insidious counselor to the Earth King, Long Feng (Who, by the way, literally says the word “political.” Can you imagine the reaction to that under today’s rage-fueled Internet?!) and the similar puppet-master/ vice president at the time, Dick Cheney.
But the political comparisons go far beyond those of when it was made. Politics have always been a cyclical discussion, and many of the issues The Last Airbender tackles in-depth are ones that have once again reared their ugly heads in 2020: Governments, particularly the Earth Kingdom, refusing to acknowledge the threats of oncoming destruction, lest it disturb their way of life certainly rings a bell with leadership across the country and globe, doesn’t it? “There is no war in Ba Sing Se” sounds a hop and a skip away from leaders and citizens alike proclaiming global warming, racial injustice, and our newest threat COVID-19 as nothing more than overreactions from the radical left, if not entirely made up.