"Yip Yip!" Avatar - the Last Airbender

I think what broke Azula was Mai and Ty Lee betraying her in The Boiling Rock. THAT was the turning point for her character. She tried to brush it off, say they weren't really her friends anyways, but I think that's what slowly began eating away at her and why she feared betrayal from everyone in the finale. I think even Zuko and Katara said that Azula's attack on the Air Temple, before the finale, was very out of character and reckless for her. I like the way it was portrayed, added a real darkness but also sadness to the story and her character.

 

Azula was always scared of being betrayed, you can see it throughout the entire series. The way she was raised taught her that no one could be completely trusted. So when Mai and Ty-Lee betrayed her, of course it would send her over the edge. They were the only two people she thought she could actually trust. After that she was on her own, and that's scary! Her eventual paranoia and insanity was definitely caused by Mai and Ty-Lee's betrayal.

 

To argue which element is "best" is to go entirely against the point of the show and the philosophy of the elements.

Each element has its place in the world and each counters another element. This whole thing is rooted in the element theories of Asia.

Each element is crucial to the balanced existence of the world. The whole reason there is a fight against the tyranny of the Fire Nation is because it's out of balance with the rest of the elements.

Anything a Firebender can do can be countered by Waterbenders ideally, but Airbenders could do it too. Each element's got it's natural opposite but the cycle of elements would mean that each element can be overcome by another element.

 

and dont forget Toph invented Metalbending.

 

If waterbenders could bloodbend at any time (not just full moon) they could pwn the other nations no sweat. They could just stop someone's heart instantly.

 

Or Airbenders if they learned how to the air out of others' lungs.

Or Earthbenders if they learned how to bend bones and muscles.

Or Firebenders if they took the heat away from someone's body.

 

Or Earthbenders if they learned how to bend bones and muscles.

That doesn't make sense at all. Bones and muscles aren't made of earth at all. Benders can only manipulate things that are directly connected to their element. Like waterbenders can do bloodbending, just because there is water in a persons body. Or, yes, like firebenders could bend heat out of a body, because heat is energy that comes from the sun, like fire.

Did that make sense at all? I tried my best to explain.

 

There's iron in bones and muscles... metalbending. Heck, there's iron in blood, they could bloodbend via metalbending.

 

Whatever, it still doesn't make sense to me. Considering how hard it was for Toph (the greatest earthbender in the world) to figure out metalbending, I don't believe that bonebending is possible.

 

*cries over new casting info*

 

To resume the older discussion, I understand what was supposed to be happening with Azula. It sort of made sense. It just happened far too rapidly to be realistic. There wasn't more than a month or so between Boiling Rock and Sozin's Comet, was there?

 

Yeah, that's true, but in my view she had been close the edge for a long time before TBR. Losing Mai and Ty-Lee pushed her over that edge and sparked the complete insanity, which didn't take to long to set in.

 

I've got a friend who is highly highly displeased with the latest casting news, and I can perfectly understand it. They don't even look remotely like the characters.

 

Plus that she was just as much of an attention seeker to make her father proud as Zuko was. When Ozai's like "yeah you're not coming with me," you can see how hurt she is. Even though he claims she's there to protect the city, you can see that she knows he just doesn't need her, which hurts her even more.

 

Well, I can see a lot of Sokka in Jackson Rathbone, if he was tanner, and had straight dark brown hair and blue eyes. And all those things can be fixed for the movie, so he could be good.

Nicola Peltz could slightly maybe pass for Katara, again if she was tanner, dark skinned, and blue eyed. My biggest problem is that she looks way to young as compared to Rathbone.

Jesse McCartney...??? Well, I've seen a lot of Photoshopped pics of him with the scar and even though he still doesn't look like what I think Zuko should be, I can see what M.Night was thinking. Still a VERY bad choice IMO, but I guess I'll live.

I am very impatiently waiting for a picture of the Noah kid, but (warning rabbit trail) I read somewhere that a Avatard someone knows someone who goes to the same karate academy Noah does, and that he's white(big surprise), comes to about the shoulder of someone who's 5'6, has big ears(YAY!), and looks very similer to Aang.

 

Indeed. I actually loved this moment for precisely that reason. It was not overplayed, but revealed her as very much still a young, vulnerable teenage girl who was anxious and solicitous of her father. Much like the incident with Mai and Ty-Lee, it was the kind of misstep that made the character much more human. I was, through this point, really quite thrilled with the kind of development they were doing with Azula. It was understandable at a visceral level how the same things that drove her to excellence were also generating some pretty deep seated flaws. I have no complaints there.

What I didn't like is how, randomly, in the penultimate episode of the series, they went completely over the top with it. How did we go from those sort of under-stated anxieties to full blown paranoia less than a few hours later? One moment she's as "fine" as she ever was, and the next she's having hallucinations, accusing everyone she meets of trying to kill her, and fighting sloppily enough that she would've been a painful embarrassment to herself at any other time in her life? I felt like such a drastic turn undermined a lot of the point they were trying to drive home: that her perfectionism had, in many ways, left her broken as a person. Instead, it to me looks like a brilliantly performing perfectionist was headed towards success in life, until all the sudden she had an inexplicable bout of mental insanity and was subsequently beaten by her brother.

Couldn't they have gone with a more subtle breakdown, especially when the other moments we've discussed were already so effective? Why did they feel the need to be so much more ham-fisted about it?

 

I agree with everything you just said. And the only answer I can come up with is that Mike and Brian always wanted Azula to go completely insane at the end but didn't have enough episodes to do it properly.

 

Only Aang was inspired by the idea of a Tibetan monk as a child; the Air Nomads, their Temple and their lifestyle are clearly Buddhist; and the whole concept of Avatar is influenced by the Dalai Lama. By the way, the casting for the movie have placed all White characters as the leads - Aang, Sokka, Katara and Zuko. So that should make you very comfortable.

 

Obviously Hollywood is a bit...confused (I'm purposely using an understatement) about the ethnicity and culture of the characters of Avatar.

 

I already said this in the dedicated thread, but does it really matter what the characters look like as opposed to what they actually do and say? I'm far, far more concerned with how Shyamalan is condensing a 20 episode season into a 2 hour movie than with the amount pigment in the actor's skin.

 

It's not so much the problem of what they just look like, it's that Hollywood is totally ignoring that Katara, Sokka, and Zuko aren't freaking white! Zuko is clearly Japanese and Katara and Sokka are Inuit. Now I don't have a problem with LiveAction!Aang being white, because in the show he was pretty much white. But still, like I said in the other thread, Avatar is set in a Asian type culture, and the live action cast should reflect that. This completely white cast just ticks me off.

 

I can certainly see where you're coming from with that, but I just can't help but feel people are making a big deal out of something that doesn't really matter. Most of the cast includes child actors and no names- which means that the script and the cinematography are going to have to do a lot of the work for them. When it comes to the cast fitting the characters, we're honestly going to have wait until the first trailers to really see.

Say what you want about Shyamalan's writing and directing, but there's no denying the man has a knack for picking talent- Bruce Willis, Joaquin Phoenix, Bryce Dallas Howard, the list goes on.

 

Yeah, I'm really really trying my hardest not to jump to conclusions about the cast, at least until the trailer, but it's just so hard when they're nothing like you expected.