They’re making a whole studio just produce Avatar: The Last Airbender content – starting with, a thankfully animated movie. Which is honestly pretty cool. But I feel conflicted.
On one side – I’m glad the franchise is getting the respect and attention it deserves. I’m looking forward to stories about new Avatars and the Gaang’s later adventures. Mostly new Avatars. I mean there are thousands of stories they could tell – and that’s amazing. Maybe they’ll adapt the Avatar comics. Or the Kyoshi novels.
But on the other hand, I hate the idea of cinematic universes and mega-franchises. They milk the stories and characters dry, and prevent original content from being made. And there’s just so much content that it gets exhausting trying to keep up.
I’m also nervous they’ll focus too much on the characters they’ve already introduced – rather than creating new characters and telling new stories. I love them the way they are – they’ve had their arcs and stories told.
We don’t need a re-telling of Avatar: The Last Airbender. We don’t necessarily need to see more of Aang, Katara, Sokka, and Zuko. Their stories are done.
On the other hand, I’d love to see an animated adaptation of Zuko finding out what happened to his mother (which I bet will be one of the first things to be adapted), a look into how Iroh became the man he did, and even a bit of Suki’s childhood and her adventures during Avatar: The Last Airbender
All of that would be really cool.
But I also love all the room there is to wonder. Making all these stories and fitting them into the canon ruins that. People want answers, canon answers and that leaves so little room for imagination and thought. That’s half the fun of fandom. Now, with the extended universe, it just becomes more of a gate-keeping, encyclopedic nerd-boy version of how to interact with the canon.
All that being said – am I going to watch what Avatar Studios put out? Yeah.
I won’t touch the Netflix live-action series with a 30-foot pole. But the stuff by Konietzko and DiMartino? I’m going to at least give it a shot.
At least for the planned movie it might make sense for them to focus on the established ATLA characters just because of marketability. You got a pretty good continuation of their immediate journey after the show in the comics at least. So it makes sense for the movie to tackle the timeframe in their 20s, maybe early 30s. Then, there is also this weird issue with the naming of the franchise (thank you, James Cameron). What is this movie gonna be called? Either: “Avatar – Some Subtitle” or “The Legend of [Character]” (I know that at least in the UK the show ran under “The Legend of Aang”. Because maybe it might not be a good idea to have another movie come out with the title “The Last Airbender”, but we’ll see.
Other than that, I think the press release left it pretty open what is to come content-wise. I don’t think they will milk it as much though, just because Mike and Bryan have never been the creative types to do that.
We’ll just have to see
I’m not psyched for Avatar Studios. ATLA was excellent on its own; the reason I haven’t read the comics or watched Legend of Korra (beyond the first episode) is because I’m satisfied with where they left everyone. I’m soooooo tired of the MCU and I don’t want ATLA to fall into the same trap.
I feel like it’d make more sense to have an Infinity Train Studios or Cinematic Universe or whatever because there’s like infinite stories you could tell about people who board the train, but even that would get old eventually. Which isn’t to say that four seasons were enough. I’m satisfied with the ending (even though it very obviously wasn’t intended to be the ending) but knowing there was more they wanted to do makes me wish they were given the freedom to do it.