floral decay

because everyone needs to watch "carrot in a box" at least once

So I noticed in A:TLA, and it’s carried over in LoK, that Airbenders always seem to have an advantage in a fight. And at first, it felt like plot armour, particularly in A:TLA.

But when Aang fought Bumi, he lost most of that advantage. And I realised that this wasn’t just plot armour. Someone had sat and worked it out: nobody has had to fight Airbenders for generations. 

None of the other nations have had to train to face them, or practised sparring with them, or anything. Apart from Bumi, no bender in the show has ever even met an airbender before Aang comes along. And in LoK, for the most part people still haven’t. We never see fights between those who have (for e.g. we never see Tenzin and Lin fight); when Korra and Tenzin use airbending, its a unique fighting style that people aren’t trained to manage.

It’s a really small detail, and it fundamentally works to give the heroes an advantage (and make up for Aang’s young age and lack of combat experience), but I love how it’s an advantage in combat for completely logical reasons.

aang straight up says to the fire nation guards on zuko’s ship “you’ve probably never fought an airbender before”, because he in-universe figures out that, if what everyone around him is saying is true, and airbenders have been extinct for a century (or at least have gone to ground enough to make people think that) then he is a totally unknown figure in anyone’s calculations

this has been brought up before but it’s also one of the reasons why hama is so thrown in her fight with katara - waterbending is about energy exchange, keeping things flowing, throwing your opponent’s power back at them and we see katara and hama do this in their fight. however, when katara is faced with a powerful blast from hama, she stands her ground and blows it apart:

[image ID: a gif of katara in the puppetmaster. she is a teenage girl with dark skin and hair and blue eyes, wearing a red outfit. she turns and throws her hand out, stopping a blast of water and turning it into a huge shield. the background is a dark forest. end image ID]

why do i bring this up?

Animation for show was done almost entirely at a studio in Canada called MERCURY FILMWORKS. They did ALL of the centaurworld stuff, with a Korean studio (Red Dog Culture) doing the Rider/Horse world. If you’re going to talk about the animation in this show, PLEASE PUT CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE. The show was animated by, again, MERCURY FILMWORKS, and it was animated in Harmony. As far as I know James Baxter didn’t animate anything on the show itself, but he probably served as a consultant occasionally, and it’s important to read that in this quote itself: He did a Masterclass on drawing horses, which may have helped the designers in LA and maybe some of the animators at Mercury (though they already had a sizeable amount of experience with 4-legged creatures and horses thanks to Tangled and Lionguard). Animated shows produced by Netflix are not actually animated AT Netflix.  Why does the animation on Centaurworld look so beautiful? BECAUSE THE ANIMATORS AT MERCURY ARE EFFING TALENTED and have EFFING TALENTED ANIMATION DIRECTORS THERE. At MERCURY. You’ve seen their Mercury’s stuff before, they’ve been around for like 20+ years, but here’s some other shows Mercury’s done (animation, BGs, FX).

Animation, particularly 2D animation, is rarely done in the States. Most of your faves were animated in Canada or overseas and the studios responsible for the animation rarely get named which is frustrating, especially since not all shows or studios will fully credit the hundreds of people who work on the production side of things (Centaurworld did though, which is really cool!!).  Anyway, yeah, just wanted to clear that up. James Baxter is an incredible animator and I’ve seen a couple masterclasses myself and they’re just amazing. But credit where credit’s due, animators don’t need to be Baxter to be incredible, and the many animators who worked on Centaurworld are the ones responsible for how beautiful it is.

1. It’s a recognised phenomenon that if you’re working with some of the more intelligent critters, sometimes they’ll figure out what you’re testing for and start deliberately providing the “wrong” response to every single test.

Others are…not 😂