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#like this fanbase's analysis comes close to that of the lord of the rings fandom
aangarchy · 3 months
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Ok now we're just taking the piss right? Right?
Once again this sort of thinking is removing a fundamental character arc that makes this story what it is. A big part of Aang's journey, especially in season 1, but tbh it does return in later seasons too, is accepting that he is the Avatar, and that he's the only one who can end this war. During the whole first season he is in complete denial about who he is and what he's supposed to do, which is why in most of this season there's no sense of urgency, and then once Aang gets faced with a very real, very close deadline he panics. This makes it even more brutal when in season 3, after accepting this responsibility, he gets faced with the reality of failure. He runs away again, this time not because he doesn't want responsibility, but because he knows how heavy his responsibility is and he doesn't want to burden anyone else with it. Removing the first aspect, aka running away and denying responsibility, it in turn also removes the heavy emotion from his later arc.
It keeps surprising me that people who claim to be such fans of the original seem to completely miss the point of most of this story? Like how could you look at Sokka learning about women's rights, Aang learning to accept responsibility, and Katara's motherly warmth which happened because how young she was when she had to step into a motherly role, and think "well we should remove that." You're taking out all of character development and going purely off of plot (which isn't gonna be nearly as good without the character development!)
Atla is probably one of the most analyzed and picked apart story, has one of the most long running loyal fanbases, people are STILL making thinkpieces about this show, and you manage to still misunderstand so much???
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