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balillee · 2 months

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gran gran's veneers are really offputting

i do like the decision to make zuko's crew the 41st division. i don't think it's enough considering he didn't choose to take the 41st division with him (ozai forced him to take them), but it's just enough compassion for others that keeps me believing that zuko is still somewhat zuko. still can't forgive the change of him fighting ozai, however.

zuko doesn't go completely rogue and try kidnapping aang in the north

hated yue's wig. and zhao's

no inclusion of the northern air temple story SUCKS ASS. like the whole working of the mechanist into omashu was actually kind of smart if you ignore the fact that teo has no reason to learn to start flying if he has no relationship to air nomad culture, but you do lose the story about aang accepting that a group of earthbenders wanted to preserve and respect parts of his lost culture.

the scene at the end of the first episode where aang enters the avatar state after finding gyatso's body shouldn't have me cackling. you can't cut between gyatso looking like he's standing in front of god to a really awful cgi double of gordan cormier and expect me to not giggle

gran gran speaks fluent yapanese. i do not need her consistent expo dumps that are just word-for-word the intro to the cartoon. it's forced in and it's weird

don't expect me to care about momo nearly dying if you're not going to include him for more than three seconds at a time every other episode for the sole purpose of having thought of a momo-related joke

the earthbending looks lame. it should be quick, and strong. in the new show, exactly the same as the movie, earthbending feels a little too laboured all the time, and if by season 2 toph is pulling the same laboured movements, I AM GONE

in the same vein, waterbending just looks off to me. it's portrayed simultaneously as cutesy little splashes of water, but also like it should really hurt and has the power to push one or more people to the ground when it doesn't look like it could. this makes me scared for when/if (hopefully not if) they introduce hama later on.

mai doesn't sound nearly as bored as she should be

hakoda's a dick. sokka's most traumatic moment isn't his dad not believing in him, it's his dad placing the responsibility of wolf cove on the shoulders of a thirteen year old boy with no experience and then disappearing without a trace. hakoda may have understood that his son was just a kid with big ambitions and a big heart who wasn't ready for what he was about to be told, but he also believed his son could live up to that task and truly believed that sokka was capable of being a warrior.

bumi is kinda creepy to me in the new show. maybe it's just the armpit wigs that make me want to cry, but something about him gives off more 'creepy great-uncle' more than 'kooky, intelligent king'. also aang figured out that it was bumi far too early, and bumi's argument with aang was stupid. they're friends. bumi should not give aang the decision to either kill him or himself, it paints him more as a threat than as a, yet again, member of the order of the white lotus. let's hope they don't fuck up piandao the same way

ian oussley looks scarily like sokka

no inclusion of the reason why aang became a master airbender being because he created the airball technique. instead, apparently the other young air nomads were afraid of how naturally powerful he was, which was weird. maybe him being a young prodigy is meant to be a nod to him feeling like his bending could endanger others (JEONG JEONG EPISODE MENTION :O), but no. he was just a normal airbender kid.

the airbending and the firebending does look good. i think zuko's firebending is a little too slow, and it CRIMINALLY doesn't include his breakdancing, but it's otherwise really good. also ozai shouldn't be firebending so early on and so frequently. i think we see him firebend in the original in no more than like, five episodes. it's meant to be sparse because we're meant to be afraid of what the firelord is truly capable of.

at least they pronounced all the names correctly. no 'ong', no 'eeroh', no 'sohka'.

the casting for jet was kinda perfect. while i don't think they did the jet story right since it never included sokka distrusting him from the start, i think they captured the whole first intro to jet's character pretty well, the basic concept being 'dreamy looking guy that katara seems to trust a little too easily turns out to be a horrifically traumatised teenager who cares not for the collateral damage of his acts of terrorism'. jet's actor does that pretty well, and i did like the inclusion of the little straw he chews on, and hopefully when jet comes back and gets brainwashed in ba sing se he loses it (which was meant to be a tell that something was off with him).

the blue spirit was done well. the mask looked really good, and i think the whole episode was only lost on me because i know that zuko is the blue spirit because i'd watched the original show. had i not, it would have been the sickest shit, but then again when you copy the original so well, you can't fuck up. once again - THE GUIDELINE IS GOOD. FOLLOW THE GUIDELINE!!!!!!!!

had to turn back to tumblr after a year of not using it to hate on the new atla adaptation

a few things

speedrunning through half of the story with the fire nation family is not a good idea, actually. lu ten was introduced far too early, and with it you delve into iroh's backstory, motivations and true character before you've even fully developed the whole 'silly old spiritual man who prefers tea and hanging out with his nephew over hunting down an 11-year old air nomad'. the lu ten funeral scene was fine as an addition, but it's not something for book 1. learning about lu ten is something we do in book 2 as it compliments the developing relationship between iroh and zuko with the fire nation as a whole. also, iroh seems a lot less cool. the show commits the grievous literary sin of always telling rather than showing, and by continuously telling us 'he's the famed general iroh, dragon of the west' you're not actually accomplishing anything. let him redirect some lightning you fucking cowards.

azula also seemed to exist for no reason. any of the correspondences to azula from zhao could have bypassed her entirely and could have gone straight to ozai or even the fire sages. she exists in season 1 purely to rush through explaining zuko and iroh far too early. the show exists as a guideline. FOLLOW THE GUIDELINE. THE GUIDELINE IS GOOD. EVERYONE KNOWS THE GUIDELINE IS GOOD. also make her fire blue. cowards

aang does not waterbend for the entire season, which means the window of opportunity for him to learn to bend the other elements before the arrival of sozin's comet is even shorter than in the original show. even the original aang, who the netflix adaptation changed because he was 'too childish and always goofing off instead of getting to the point' understood his responsibilities to learn the elements better than this new live action version - part of the reason for the gang to get to the northern water tribe was to find aang a teacher (not just katara), master pakku, because katara was not capable of teaching him at her novice waterbending level but even so they were still seen practicing together on multiple occasions.

this brings me to my next point. WHERE THE FUCK IS JEONG JEONG. aang in the original series understood the urgency of defeating the firelord before sozin's comet after speaking to roku very early on, not as late as depicted in the adaptation. currently, the gang don't even know that they're on a time crunch, and yet still the show refuses to let them take their time by going on side adventures. this leads into the episode where aang meets jeong jeong and tries to learn to firebend before he's even started earthbending at all, because he's still scared that he only has a year to master the elements. he burns katara while trying, which is the reason she learned she had the power to heal with her waterbending, we see how fucking sick jeong jeong is at firebending for the first time during the fight with zhao, and aang swears off learning firebending at all, which is one of his main points of conflict leading all the way into book 3. if we skip that whole episode, we have skipped meeting one of the members of the order of the white lotus. the show could think it's slick by omitting him to just have iroh as the white lotus' firebender, but that's possibly one of the worst changes they've made. the deserter was not a filler episode.

i know a lot of people were talking about this before the show even came out, but sokka is not sokka. in book 1, sokka is three things - funny, overconfident and sexist. in the live adaptation, he is kind of one of those three things. part of why sokka's arc is one of my personal favourites from the original show is the stark change you see from the start to the end of his story - he believes himself a leader but has no real tactical or combative experience despite telling all the fighters and warriors he meets about how impressive he is. and then at the end of the show he is a definitively strong leader, shown by leading the assault on the fire nation armada - his team being two of the show's most competent female characters, who he trusts and respects with his life. by omitting these traits from sokka's character, you remove a big part of why he's even there in the first place - his arc's beginning allows him to become the fearless leader that lead his team to defeating the fire nation army.

i also hate that aang meets monk gyatso in the spirit world. a big part of aang's conflict about running away is that there exists nobody in the world who can tell him that what happened to the air nomads was not his fault, and that there was nothing aang could do to stop it if he was there. the new adaptation decides against the inclusion of one of aang's primary internal conflicts by changing the 'running away from his responsibilities as the avatar because he's a terrified child' to 'getting some air', and then throws in meeting the spirit of monk gyatso to tell him all of these things that aang needs to learn on his own. once again, telling rather than showing.

and finally, my least favourite change - the agni kai. part of the reason why i personally think the agni kai is so significant to zuko's story is the fact that zuko intentionally refuses to fight. in the adaptation, zuko fights back against his father, and his father scars him simply because zuko hesitates. in the original series, zuko bows to his father and pleads for mercy, and refuses to fight at all, and that is when it cuts away to iroh and azula's very differing reactions to the altercation, zuko screaming in the background. the setting also irritates me, because in the original, the agni kai was a public spectacle for hundreds to see in an ominous chamber, while in the new show it looked like just a regular old family gathering in the sun. zuko's adaptation scar i also hate because it doesn't even look like a scar. it looks like a birthmark, or at best, a black eye. if you hadn't seen the original, you would only know that it's a scar because the show tells you that it's a scar. zuko's scar in the animated series is a definite physical deformation of his face, his face looks red and raw, and his eye is smaller likely due to how the tissue healed, and as the show goes on you learn that the severity of his physical scars reflect the severity of his emotional ones. the original show does a brilliant job at showing how, just through the scar and the banishment alone, that despite zuko's beliefs, his father has betrayed him time and time again.

#atla #netflix atla #avatar the last airbender #avatar live action #atla live action

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