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i had to draw this (from @transvox on twt)

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can we talk about Alastor sneaking in a lil taste here

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they're such a toxic power couple I kinda love it ngl

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My animation with Alastor 🔥👹🦌 I tried very hard and I think the result turned out to be very cool and what do you think? ❤️ I struggled a bit drawing Alastor’s human form and maybe there’s something I could have done better? 😅

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He's my favourite. I'm obsessed.

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Watch Hazbin Hotel, they said...

It'll be fun, they said...

Me after episode 4: *ugly crying into my hands*

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“They finally made this theme more blatant-" Why does it need to be blatant. What's wrong with subtlety? Concepts can be underused but subtlety is not neglect.

Blaring all your concepts and themes is not good writing. It's so disruptive to a story's flow when the characters look off the screen to be like "See? This is the concept. The idea. The theme."

If you can feel the hand of the author becoming too heavy that's bad.

For example: I see people saying Azula's abuse in ATLA is more blatant in the live action and it's good because "it's being discussed more". It already was discussed at length. The show made it clear she was a victim at every turn, every behavior, every reaction, it came from a place of trauma. It was made clear that she was scared of ending up like Zuko because Zuko was an example of what would happen to her if she failed. When she says she's better than Zuko it wasn't just because she was raised to think hersef superior to him but because Zuko failed and failures get mutilated and exiled, failures are abandoned. In that final Agni Kai the music is morose and somber because this isnt some epic battle its a fucking tragedy, the burning out of "Ozai's brightest light" and Azula finally succumbing to her terror and trauma she was repressing now that her worst fears are realized. How can you see a fourteen year old girl chained to a sewer grate wailing and writhing and breathing fire desperately as unsympathetic? Even Katara and Zuko are horrified as to what has become of her.

The writers weren't looking us in the eye and saying "See? She's a victim too" when they wrote this, they weaved it in. They weaved it into her obsesison with symmetry, her extreme perfectionism, the way she talks about Ozai, the ways she calls herself a monster, her isolation from those with healthy home lives, all the ways she held herself together and ultimately all the cracks and seams that she shattered down when she fell apart. It did not need to be blatant to be clear.

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*deep breath* Okay. Here we go.

I don't think the Netflix Avatar show likes women very much. It's a great show for fans of Aang, Sokka, Zuko, and Iroh specifically. All four of those characters get a ton of great material. In fact, it's super great for Sokka stans, because the show takes him ultra-seriously and can't go five minutes without one character or another (usually a woman) praising him.

But the way it handles its female cast is troublesome.

Katara

So, all three of the main trio got some changes made to their stories. They changed Aang's story so that he wasn't running away from his responsibilities; He was just clearing his head and somehow accidentallied himself into a tsunami. Whoopsy-dooodle. Aang did nothing wrong.

They changed Sokka's story so that him being a leader of his people and a great guardian warrior is treated with complete seriousness. Multiple times, characters stop to talk about how brave and noble Sokka is for taking on such an intense responsibility, and tell him to his face what a great warrior and a wonderful leader he is. Also his misogyny is erased.

And they changed Katara's story so that she directly got her mom killed because she sucks at waterbending.

Katara tries to waterbend to attack the Fire Nation soldier but couldn't manage it, provoking the soldier to start actively searching for her and forcing her mom to fake a waterbending attack and draw his fire. They changed Katara's story so that her bad decision making fucking got her mom killed.

This is treated with the same level of severity as "Sokka was bullied by mean kids and also his dad doesn't think he's good enough to be a leader."

"I hoped Sokka would do better but not everyone is meant to have people's lives in their hands," Sokka's dad says of him.

Yeah, you're right, that's totally comparable to watching your mom get barbecued because you tried to waterbend in a situation you shouldn't have and then failed.

In fact, they give Sokka's greatest trauma more weight because it gets examined again with Yue next episode, while Katara actively getting her mom killed isn't brought up again at all. We get traumatized glimpses of it throughout the season leading up to the reveal, but after this scene in episode 5, it never comes up again.

But to be fair, Katara was a child. An event this significant would surely have motivated her, driving her to become the great waterbender she is now, right?

No! Katara sucks at waterbending and needs men who aren't even waterbenders to teach her how to waterbend. She requires instruction from Aang in episode 1 to learn how to waterbend, then from Jet in episode 3 to learn how to waterbend better.

And unlike the show, her relationship with Aang isn't a give-and-take; Katara doesn't teach Aang a single goddamn thing. He never learns to waterbend. She is a strictly a pupil throughout the whole season. Though she at least gets officially labeled a master in episode 8, so there's that.

In any case, the whole traumatic memory thing isn't even the only time she's directly compared with Sokka. Episodes 3 and 4 see Katara and Sokka bicker over whose morally dubious side character is better. Sokka likes the Mechanist and Katara likes Jet.

Ultimately, Katara is forced to eat crow when Jet turns out to be the worst, while Sokka is vindicated when the Mechanist sees the error of his ways and reforms. But not before two separate arguments where Sokka calls Katara childish and accuses her of acting like a little girl.

Arguments ultimately resolved when Katara apologizes to Sokka for not adequately respecting his very serious and ultra important role as village protector and leader. Gives him a whole speech about how great and glorious he is. And Sokka... appreciates Katara learning to respect him properly, I guess, because he never offers any similar sentiments back to her.

The show just... They need you to know how important Sokka is, okay? It's very important that you respect Sokka.

Suki

Suki suffers tremendously from that whole "Sokka's misogyny was removed" thing. Y'know, because they need something else to do with that episode. The show is deeply aware that Suki is Sokka's love interest, so they just do that right off the bat. Suki falls madly in love with him from the moment they meet, and spends the entire episode making goo-goo eyes and trying to get him to Notice Me Senpai.

They still do the "Suki Trains Sokka" stuff. But Sokka is a serious, dignified manly man worthy of the deepest respect now, so of course they don't make him wear the Kyoshi uniform. Instead, the main purpose of his training is to allow them to flirt some more. It's less martial arts training and more an excuse to grope each other and near-kiss.

Suki's just a waifu now. She still fights real good, but all of the stuff that made her relationship with Sokka interesting has been erased.

Yue

Yue, similarly, leaps straight to shipping from the word go. They write out her fiance, Hahn, by having Yue briefly meet Sokka earlier in the season. She spends one minute talking to him in the Spirit World about Spirit World lore; In that time, she falls so desperately, madly, unfathomably in love with him that she breaks off her marriage to Hahn and devotes herself to waiting for him to one day come to her.

"Never have I known such joys as that time you let me explain the spirit bear Hei Bei to you. Truly, we are destined to be together for life."

Like with Suki, they go out of their way to have Yue and Sokka already be a ship from the word 'go' so they don't have to spend time developing any kind of meaningful attraction.

They just. They really want you to know that Sokka is the manliest and most desirable man ever to walk this earth. It is very important that you understand how great he is. Women hurl themselves into his arms with zero effort whatsoever, because he's just so goddamn irresistible.

Fortunately, Hahn is super okay with this turn of events. He's the most chill guy ever, he gets along perfectly well with Sokka, and he completely supports Yue's right to dump him! In the famously misogynistic Northern Water Tribe, no less! What a swell guy. Aren't men swell?

June

June gets hit with that "rewritten as hollow waifu" stick too, but her eyes are set on Iroh. They rewrote June to be super attracted and flirty towards the man who was her unwanted sexual harasser in the source material. So that's fun.

Also, she barely does anything. Zuko hires her to find Aang, she succeeds, and then she fucks right off out of the show - But she manages to find time to express how unbelievably sexy Iroh is twice during that time.

She seriously just dropped into the show to flirt with Iroh and leave. She is unbelievably inconsequential.

Kyoshi

And then there's Kyoshi. They really want you to hate Kyoshi. She's constantly shot from below, as if looking down on Aang and the audience. Her voice takes on a demonic echoing reverb at one point as she's screaming at Aang that "THE AVATAR MUST BE A MERCILESS WARRIOR!!!"

She despises Aang, calling him a coward for running away from his responsibilities - Which, I remind you, is no longer a plot point because they unwrote that flaw from his character. So she's just a complete and utter asshole, shot from the asshole angle, yelling violently at him with asshole sound effects. They want you to despise this woman.

Azula

Awkwardly, they do not seem to want you to despise Azula.

There's a lot to be said for how Ozai treats Azula in the original show. The way the favoritism he shows her is every bit as cruel and manipulative as the unfavoritism that he shows Zuko. Ozai does not love Azula. He loves the reflection of himself he sees in her eyes, and his encouragement urges her to polish herself to ensure his reflection always shines through.

This is not that. The show instead erases the favoritism entirely. Ozai doesn't really care one way or another about either of his kids. He plays them against each other, bragging openly to Azula about how great Zuko is and unpleasably writing Azula off as weak and useless.

They've rewritten the dynamic between abusive father and his two abused kids in order to take Azula's pride away. Reimagining her from a gifted prodigy who excels at imitating the toxic behaviors of a father who doesn't truly care for her, to a put-upon overachiever tearing herself in knots to live up to the standards of her unpleasable father.

This results in a truly wild portrayal of Azula as insecure and jealous of Ozai's seemingly love for Zuko. Here, she is simply a browbeaten child constantly complaining to her friends about how mean her father is and conspiring to get one up over Daddy's Golden Child Zuko.

Which she fails at, because she backs Zhao. Zuko deftly defeats her without even realizing they're in competition.

Conclusion

The season ends well for some of these women. It ends promising that maybe we'll see Katara teaching Aang some day. It ends with Zhao bragging that Ozai just used Zuko to train Azula so maybe we'll see the more confident and misguidedly proud Azula some day. Yue becomes the moon like she's supposed to. June's still out there so maybe she'll get to do something again some day.

Katara gets to fight Pakku and lose, but she looks pretty cool. She gets to fight Zuko and lose, but she looks pretty cool. Azula learns to lightningbend because she's just so mad about Ozai's contempt for her and favoritism for Zuko, which isn't how you lightningbend.

But promises of future content fall flat when the content that exists is so underwhelming. This season made its feelings on these characters pretty evident, and it's unwise to expect better material from creators who've disappointed you with the material they already made.

The women of Netflix Avatar simply do not get to shine, outside of superficial moments like the "Women of Northern Water Tribe demand the right to fight and then fuck off and don't do anything for the entire rest of the episode" bit.

"In the midst of battle, we demand that you stop being sexist and give us permission to fight! This is a way better idea than convincing you to teach us to fight before the battle begins."

The characters of this show feel as if they've been reimagined to glorify the boys at the expense of the girls. The boys are treated with a great amount of care. They're dignified and made important movers of the plot, with their rough edges sanded off. While the girls are molded around them.

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what was live action atla’s obsession (using this term lightly) with showing mass amounts of death … the genocide of the air nomads was completely unnecessary and was clearly used for shock value, and so was the severity of which the northern water tribe was hit. if you have to resort to shock value, especially more than once, to get your points across or move a story you shouldn’t be writing the story

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Pardon me as I enter my ATLA phase…

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genuinely one of the worst things that’s happened to television in the last few years (exacerbated by streaming services) is death of Filler. going from 20 episodes to 8 because “we didn’t really need that episode where the main characters went to the beach right? it had no long lasting effect” but we DID!!! we needed to see how they act without the Big Bad Plot and to establish the dynamics between the characters and lay in the sun (do they forget sunscreen? how do they react to a thieving seagull? do they get buried in the sand or do they do the burying?). the plot isn’t everything. the action doesn’t hit as hard without the quiet moments. give us character development and our little scenes back

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sorry i will be having straight up NO CHILL about this WHY DID ZUKO FIGHT OZAI ??? JUST SO DALLAS LIU COULD SHOW OFF HIS ACRO SKILLS ??? I'M SORRY I WAS UNDER THE IMPRESSION THAT ZUKOS REFUSAL TO DUEL HIS FATHER WAS AN IMPORTANT PART OF HIS CHARACTER OR SOMETHING BUT I GUESS I WAS WRONG

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I need names of whoever is at fault for Sokka not putting on kyoshi warrior makeup and the dress in the live action and I need them now.

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So I had to stop on episode 6. Gonna continue watching tonight. I just have one thing to say so far. People think a good adaptation is the one that follows the story of the original. It’s not. It’s the characters. The characters are the ones that made the original so good. And none of them are as fleshed out here. You cannot seriously tell me the katara you see in the original is the one you see in the live action.

The writers decided to take the struggle and the growth of the characters away. I’m on episode 6. So far, Aang had everything come so easy to him, he didn’t struggle at all. Kyoshi fought for him at Kyoshi island. He enters the spirit world so easily, he finds Roku so freaking fast, he immediately knows Hei Bai is the spirit of the forest, out of nowhere. He learns absolutely nothing through those 6 episode. I could talk for hours about how that scene with Gyatso was a cop out. Why should their main character suffer right? He shouldn’t. So they just make up a scene where Aang meets Gyatso and he just outright tells him there’s nothing he could have done so he shouldn’t feel guilty.

The OG never had that scene. Because the OG knew the audience was smart enough to realize it themselves. There was nothing Aang could have done if he hadn’t run away, he would have died. But Aang needs to realize this himself, he needs to confront his feelings, learn from his mistakes, forgive himself and move on. But these days, writers don’t want their characters going through a journey, nope, the characters are just perfect, from the beginning to end.

Same said for Zuko. The writers apparently decided to make him softer, have higher morals, not as angry or determined, because that would make Zuko complex and interesting. He was good at heart in the OG show too, but he was spoiled and angry and violent. He’s none of that here, he’s gentle and respectful to everyone and just wants to capture the avatar, but not too much though. Zuko doesn’t even give everything he has to capture Aang, he doesn’t hire pirates, he doesn’t hire June himself (Iroh has to convince him to do it), he doesn’t follow Aang into the fire nation, you don’t feel his desperation, his determination, just how much he wants to go home. How could his journey feel interesting when we don’t see the dramatic shift in his character? The most interesting character in the show is not as ineteresting when he doesn’t go from a spoiled angry hurt teenager to an honorable smart and compassionate young man.

Yes, the story is fine, the visuals are nice, but it’s all very surface level. Everything is just flat.

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The butcher job to Katara's role in the story, through her relationship with and too Aang, the boy not the Avatar, is going in the hall of fame of adaption crimes.

Katara is a girl who has been stripped of so much. She no longer has a mother or father, she's has had to grow up too fast, and she's losing connection to her culture. Aang is this mysterious friend she pulled from the depths of the ocean and broke free from an ice prison. The first peer she's had in ages. He's a bender just like her, the first person she's ever met like herself. And he's fun, and he can take her to the thing she wants most.

That's why she was ready to run away with him. Because he breaks the bleak monotony of her life, and she brought him into her life.

In the live action, Katara doesn't bring Aang into her life. Actual magical water takes Sokka and her to him, and it's only by her clumsy misdirection of efforts is he freed. Not because she's tremendously brave, and a little stupid, and raced across the ice to help someone.

She doesn't catch him and bat Sokka's inspections away. Aang slides out like a frozen corpse, and after a few blinks Katara rather emotionlessly decides to pack him up to go.

When he wakes up, they don't get to have any fun. They don't get to makes plans to go the North, all so Katara can train. She doesn't figure out how long he's been in that iceberg. She doesn't tell him about the war. She barely knows his name before she finds out he's the Avatar.

Katara is the igniting spark of the whole story. She brings the Avatar back and keeps him safe because she's righteous, brave, and kind. It didn't just happen, she made it so. If she doesn't, if she's not the person who brings the Avatar back and yet also the one who sees Aang for Aang, because she the last person to ever know him as only Aang... then she doesn't really have a place in the story. She is no longer seeing something she started through to the end. She's just there, and that's what plays out in the live action.

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Katara.

Ugh. Ok, let's get these thoughts out of my head before I scream.

Katara could be a frustrating character in the original show. She was bossy, overbearing, and controlling. But those traits all stemmed from the same source: her desire to protect others, and to change the world for the better.

When talking about her personality, the word often used is "angry". But I think there's something more to that, the real heart of her character.

Katara is passionate.

Passion, by nature, is a hard emotion to control. It is an intense emotion that compels action. She was angry about her mother's death, angry at her father for leaving them, angry at herself for not being able to master her bending, angry at the Fire Nation for everything it took from her. But more than that, she was driven to do something about it.

From the very first episode, she takes no shit and refuses to let anyone get in the way of doing what she sees as the right thing. Everything she feels, she feels intensely, and she struggles to control that intensity and what it drives her to do. And the show allows her to make mistakes. She trusts the wrong people, bosses the group around, lashes out at them. At its very worst, her passion turns to cruelty, and she’s good at being cruel. If you know how to heal, you also know how to cause pain. Being empathetic and compassionate also means you know exactly how to hurt someone’s feelings. 

Water turns to blood. 

The live action version of the show has stripped that away completely. This Katara is passive, meek, and lacks autonomy. When she does speak up for herself, it falls flat, because it lacks any show of backbone at any other point in the show. She can't even bend on her own until she meets Aang, a change I can't forgive. She deserved that moment to herself. 

And you expect me to believe that this girl will learn to bloodbend? 

Bloodbending is every flaw she has taken to extreme. It’s absolute control, turning people into puppets, the ability to bend and break a body however you please. It’s passion turned to domination, to hatred, to vengeance, to destruction. 

Katara was a great character because her choice to be loving, nurturing, merciful, and in many ways traditionally feminine challenged the notion that those things are in some way easy or weak. They aren't. Loving people is terrifying, forgiving your enemies fucking hurts, that shit costs you. Caring so much you smother the very people you’re trying to nurture and protect, feeling so strongly you can’t act in moderation, was a compelling, logical arc for her. 

I don’t understand what they’re trying to achieve with this new version of her character at all. The actress is doing her best with what they're giving her, but they're giving her nothing to work with.

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Let's talk about the live action Avatar the last airbender, and the changes made to Aang's personality and character arc.

I understand why they removed many of the side adventures and goofing off from Aang for this version of the show. They needed to pare the story down to its bones for a shorter runtime and animating all of the creatures that Aang tries to ride would have been a nightmare for their CGI budget.

However, by taking out Aang's avoidance of responsibility and fear of his destiny, and replacing it with focus on his goals and fear of his power, they've undermined a lot of his character arc and don't provide enough context for WHY he is the way he is in the new show.

In the live action, he didn't run away that night of the storm, he went flying to clear his head and think. Which makes the scenes where Kyoshi and Bumi berate him for avoiding his responsibilities make no sense at all. References to Aang goofing off don't land, because he HASN'T BEEN. This kid has had his eyes on the prize since episode 1. It's frustrating for the same reason Sokka constantly calling Katara a little girl have been. When has she acted that way, in what way is this accusation accurate? It isn't.

Instead of making Aang afraid of the responsibility, they've made him afraid of his power. He's concerned he'll harm someone. While this is true to his character and a clever trait to emphasize, what's important to remember is that in the original show, Aang didn't start fearing his power until The Deserter, the episode where he accidentally burns Katara while learning to firebend. In that episode, we're given clear justification for his fear, because we see the consequences of when he isn't in control of his bending.

This trait also plays into the original story's ending, when he agonizes over having to kill Ozai. So again, it's an excellent choice to start depicting this in season 1. The problem is that they're not showing us. They're telling us.

In this new show, all we get is one flashback reference to Aang blowing a bunch of other students off a cliff while learning to airbend, and when he scares Katara and Sokka with the Avatar state at the air temple. I think this was a terrible choice. Aang was never afraid of his own element, and the scene at the air temple barely focused on Sokka and Katara's fear of him, so calling back to that later in this show didn't have the impact I think they meant it to. There was almost no emotional weight to the flashback scene, it wasn't given any time to breathe or make you really feel the fear this is supposed to inspire in Aang. Which would be less of a problem if this was meant to foreshadow future problems and fear. But it isn't.

It's being sold as the core, fundamental foundation of Aang's character arc. When his core was fun and avoiding responsibility, we saw that all the time, over and over, reinforced again and again with actions, dialog, and plot that showed who Aang is and how he will evolve in the course of the show.

That lighthearted fun is why he was able to build bridges, connect with people, make them laugh.

The live action just states these things. And expects us to accept it, without actually showing us.

I said when I started the show that the writing was weak, and after finishing season 1, I stand by that assessment. The cast is killing it and the bending looks phenomenal, but I have huge issues with the writing. I might break down the problems with Katara as well because *whew*....yeah. She's a problem.