Clueless About Avatar · 4:09am Sep 23rd, 2020
After some careful reflection and feedback from you, the reader, I've decided that there's enough overlapping interest to archive my Avatar essays here as well as on the Tumblr blog I created for this purpose, Clueless About Avatar. (Don't worry. It won't have any impact whatsoever on my pony essays).
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I have never seen Avatar: The Last Airbender, and for the last 15 years, have never observed a single spoiler. Below is my blind-reaction/analysis of Season 1, Episode 4, broken up into two sections: a Dumb Summary™, and an honest reflection.
My Dumb Summary
In this episode, Aang and the Gang go to Girl Island - a village with one claim to fame - it had been the birthplace of one of the incarnations of the Avatar hundreds of years ago. She was a female avatar, so it’s not surprising that their culture evolved Girl-Jitsu, a special form of martial arts practiced exclusively by an elite squadron of young women.
Key Events of This Episode:
-The water bender’s brother, What’s-His-Face, gets his a** handed to him by girl warriors, and then dresses in drag to train with them.
-Meanwhile, Young Fire Dude gets into a duel with Older Fire Dude over who gets to hunt the Avatar. The younger one wins, but the Old Fire Dude doesn’t take losing well, so he launches the flame-throwing equivalent of a sucker punch. Iroh leaps in, blocks the flames, and chides the guy for being honorless. ‘Cause Iroh is the only fire dude with any sense at all.
-Back at Girl Island, Aang is fawned over for being the Avatar. Despite warnings from the Water Bender, Aang lets his fame go to his head, and endangers everybody by sticking around for too long. Then the fire nation shows up, trashes the village, and the protagonists skidaddle.
-Aang on the way out, leaps off the flying buffalo thing, and summons a water-puking eel to put out the flames that the Fire Nation had inflicted upon the village of Girl Island.
My Naive Reaction
This is the first episode of the series that truly grabbed me. That’s not to say that I have anything against Episodes 1-3, but in the beginning, rather a lot happens to get the story moving forward quickly. The result is a plot that pushes the characters forward, rather than the other way around. Here, on Kyoshi Island, however, everything that happens is because of who these characters are as people. When Ang reveals himself as the Avatar, he ends up with a massive crew of adoring young fans, and over time, lets the fame go to his head. He lingers on the island despite the danger of staying in one place for too long. Ultimately, his foolish actions end up getting the village razed. I love this. Ang’s hubris here is quite understandable, even relatable. In literally every other “chosen one” story I’ve ever read or seen, the author fails to take into account that such a thing could go to someone’s head. Here, it is addressed openly, and handled with enough innocence on Ang’s part, (and nuance on the writers’ part), that the character doesn’t come off as loathsome because of it. I really like that balance. I have a strong feeling that these mistakes that Ang made in this episode are going to shape his arc far into the future. Then there’s Sokka.
In the first three episodes, his character was defined almost entirely by misogyny and hunger. And here he is, faced with fierce opponents in a troupe of female warriors who put him to shame. We have all seen this sort of thing in girl-power storylines before, it‘ always satisfying to watch a misogynist have his butt handed to him by empowered girls. What really impressed me, however, was the fact that it didn’t take Sokka a whole episode to come around. After they whooped him a second time, he submitted to them with humility immediately, and begged to become a disciple. While it’s fun watching him train in drag, he adjusts to that pretty quickly as well. He respects these girls as warriors, and embraces his tutelage under them as a mark of honor. This impressed me more than anything. They didn’t drag his loss-of-misogyny arc out. At all. Once beaten, he put his desire to better himself ahead of his own ego, and instantly abandoned deeply ingrained lifelong prejudices. That’s no easy feat. If there’s one thing that 2020 has taught me, it’s that, under duress, people’s prejudices come boiling to the surface more toxic than ever. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t lost a friend over it. Sokka is better than that. Respect. Now everyone I’ve ever spoken to has told me that this story is rich in character development, so I expected from the beginning that Sokka would grow beyond the one-dimensional stereotype he started out as. I did not, however, expect to see so much rich development packed tightly into one or two simple scenes, and certainly not in an episode as early as this. So far he’s my favorite character, and I look forward to seeing where they go with this.
-Sprocket
Sokka's misogyny is drastically overpowered by his desire to become a warrior like his father. Not surprised he became someone's favorite so fast.
Congratulations, you've discovered one of the central tenets of ATLA.
Ah, glad to hear it; I'm interested, but I basically only still check Tumblr at all for a few things that haven't moved off it and am not really interested in adding anything new there or spending enough time to properly read essays, whereas I'm quite active on FIMFiction. :)
(I'd guess the archiving for future readers is likely more reliable here, too; I have much less trust in Tumblr's software to not break.)
Just checking: Is there a deliberate reason you're consistently spelling Aang's name with only one "a" in the first paragraph of the Naive Reaction section?
"before, it‘ always satisfying"
"before, it‘s always satisfying"?
"I don’t know anyone who hasn’t lost a friend over it."
I think I've avoided that so far...
I'm glad you're enjoying the show, and thank you for sharing your thoughts. :)
By the way, not currently appropriate for Sprocket Doggingsworth (so I do hope you don't mind me mentioning it here) due to spoilers/references to things they haven't reached yet (In fact, sorry, but you might want to even avoid looking at the story descriptions.), but I relatively recently have been quite enjoying some Avatar fanfiction from this author (Ao3) and thought I'd mention them in case anyone else in these comments was interested. :)
Oh, and I've also found this series (Ao3) (Again, probably good for our blog author to not even look at the descriptions, I'm afraid, if they want to be sure to avoid spoilers.) enjoyable.