Tropunkal Flair

[Oh hai Mark]

Written, directed by and starring Tommy Wiseau, The Room is at the centre of a very important question that I want to explore in this video. It's a question you yourself may have an instinctive gut reaction to, and that's fine, but I hope you'll indulge my interrogation of it anyway, and I hope that, together, it will lead us to examine and improve our own creative skills in the process.

My question is this: What is “bad” art?

I'm going to be a bit pretentious here, but I think it's important to say off the bat that obviously, there are no objective standards for art. There is no universal qualifier for what makes a creative work “good” or “bad,” and I generally avoid using these terms for that reason.

The Room is quite famously considered a “bad” film (so bad it's good, in fact). But my goal with this video is to improve as a storyteller myself, so these terms aren't especially useful for me. It's far more productive, I think, for us to measure the success of the art by looking at what the artist was TRYING to achieve, and what they ACTUALLY ended up doing.

For instance, Tommy Wiseau's The Room does not achieve its presumed goal of creating serious emotional intensity and drama, so I think it's fair to call the film a failure from that perspective. But the film SUCCEEDS in capturing the interest of viewers to a point of such infamy that they made a film about this film, so calling The Room a “bad” movie really isn't sufficient in describing its place and influence in modern culture. And – lots of people genuinely enjoy watching The Room, for a variety of reasons! They watch it for leisure, they watch it to laugh, they find it compelling, they like experiencing the film. Can we honestly call a work bad when it entertains its viewers and provokes lasting discussion? In my opinion, we can't. It's certainly not good, I think there are lots of warranted criticisms to be made in both the technical and creative aspects, but saying it's “bad” doesn't really do it justice. This film is weird, it's surreal, it's ridiculous, it's self indulgent, and it is very, very, funny. From where I'm standing, yes The Room fails in it's intended creative pursuit, but that doesn't mean the art is without value.

[Hi doggy]

I take this tangent not just to out myself as someone who spends too much time in their own company, but to convince you that I'm typically quite reluctant to call any piece of art just “bad.” Yet that is the word that comes to mind more and more often when I see big budget new releases.

I've observed, and you probably have to, a growing common sentiment online in discussion of films and television series, that there's been a general decline in writing quality over the last decade. I myself have felt increasingly demoralised by some of the work coming out of major mainstream outlets in recent years. It seems to me we're getting more “content” than ever before, but less and less actual storytelling. It's a fairly common, if hyperbolic gripe that half of new releases are reboots, remakes, spin-offs and sequels. Now, the truth is there's lots of great original films and shows being made every year, but I think these “Bad” remakes are disproportionately present in conversations about film quality because they are deliberately targeting nostalgia. They're remaking beloved classics which a huge number of people are already attached to, so they subsequently invite a lot more scrutiny and discussion than new films coming out which nobody has had a chance to get invested in yet.

Lots of people have lots of theories for WHY these remakes keep getting made, and made so poorly, and most of them have far more insight and experience than me so I'll gladly defer to their analysis, but whatever the WHY, the RESULT that we are living through right now is an incredibly powerful industry sinking eye-watering sums of money into BAD stories – or rather, stories that are being told BADLY. And to qualify what I mean by “bad” here, I mean “stories that don't really try to achieve anything” - except to take your money.

There's a really simple litmus test, I think, to find the artistic merit you personally might place in a written work. Ask yourself the question, “What is this work trying to say?”

There's never a correct answer to that, obviously. Art is subjective. What a creator sees in their work will be different from what a viewer sees. What two viewers see will be different from each other, and so on ad infinitum. And some people will give that question a simple and straight forward answer and some people will have a dozen different answers for one work, and they may overlap or contradict one another, but as long as the question has AN answer, as long as the work is trying to say SOMETHING, then there is something worth saying about the work, whether you liked it or not.

Wiseau's The Room may not be technically competent and the lines may be silly and the performances alienating, but there is an earnestness to the film that I think is hard to deny. This film is TRYING to achieve SOMETHING, it mattered to the man who created it, and that, if nothing else, is worth our consideration as fellow artists.

And this personal philosophy I have about bad art, this crusade to understand what a piece wants to say and why it isn't working, is what unfortunately leads me to the subject of this video.

[AVATAR TITLE SEQUENCE]

RECEPTION

It seems needless to start by telling you the Netflix adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender (NATLA from this point on) was not received well. Discussing Film's review went so far as to say it made the Shyamalan film feel like a comparative mercy.

[clip from Shyamalan film]

Fans are generally unhappy, myself included. And I'm not especially interested in hashing out all the problems with the show – I expect plenty of Youtubers have already beat me to it. Instead, I want to treat this as an opportunity to examine the craft of storytelling, and how we can apply the lessons of this failure to our own writing. Obligatory disclaimer that I'm not a professional screenwriter, I'm just a weirdo with a webcomic, but I do feel quite strongly about treating this AS a craft, especially when we're not discussing the passion project of a single artist here. This show reportedly had a budget of $120 MILLION, this is a massive expenditure of creative resources and a reasonable case study for the state of our craft in its most profitable industry today.

So, yeah. I will now be a bit mean about NATLA.

RELATIONSHIP WITH THE AUDIENCE

Let's start with a question that really shouldn't be so difficult to answer. Who is this show for?

It can't be for existing fans of ATLA because the show is so offensively direct with its exposition.

[CLIP from Ep 1, Katara's grandmother]

There is no clever re-invention of lore delivery, no effort expended in letting the world unpeel itself layer by careful layer in a way that would reward astute fans while informing new viewers of how the fictional world works. And it can't be for new viewers, either, because the show is so dependent on disjointed references to the original material that have no cohesion whatsoever when presented in this new format.

[CLIP - the song sequence -_-]

If this was ATLA for new viewers, then they would be focused on telling the story as cohesively as possible, with unnecessary references to the animated show relegated to easter eggs or small inclusions. And I don't know what the target age of this show is, either. The violence has been Game-of-Thrones-ified, to some extent. You see people burned alive and fall to their deaths – a welcome inclusion, I think, that complements the maturity of ATLA's more intense themes of war and imperial violence. Yet simultaneously the entire show has been dumbed down, stripped of any subtext or nuance that would allow the viewer to draw their own conclusions or theorize about the greater motives at work behind this war. When I watched the pilot, I honestly had no idea if this script was written with very, very young children in mind due to the aggressively bland dialogue and overstatements of plot relevant information.

[CLIP from literally any scene. They're all like this.]

But, if it's written for very young children, if it's hand-holding the audience through tactless exposition because it expects its viewers to have extremely short attention spans and poor connective reasoning, then why did they amplify the violence to appeal to a more mature age group?

This point feels so obvious I almost feel silly making it, but I do think it's important just in case any younger writers are watching this and have been led astray by the corporate obsession with making art "marketable" to the broadest demographic possible: you should know, or at least give some thought to, who your desired audience is BEFORE you begin your work. It can be hard, as creatives, when so much of our work is deeply personal, to confront the reality that not everybody is going to like it. Harder again to accept that MOST people will not like it. It is a statement of fact that you cannot cater to every taste with one single piece and still expect it to feel complete and consistent. It will benefit your story much more in the long run to identify the narrow demographic you want to aim for, and maybe you'll be happily surprised to find that a wider viewerbase also enjoy what you're doing. But you cannot aim for everyone.

The original ATLA knew who it was for: Children. And it treated that target audience with respect, carefully negotiating how to broach difficult topics like war and grief in a way that age group could understand.

Let's do a quick and dirty side-by-side comparison of a scene that makes it into both versions, as a way of deconstructing how these works of art communicated with their respective audiences. In ATLA episode 3, The Southern Air Temple, Aang returns to his home after a hundred years of being frozen in ice. He knows, on some level, that the airbenders are gone – he's been told that they're gone, the audience has this fact in their back pocket. But Aang, like the intended audience, is a child. Rather than confront this obvious absence, this hole in the centre of his home, Aang wants the comfort of how things used to be, he wants familiarity. Sokka recognises this and offers to play a game to distract Aang. Then this happens:

[CLIPS - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vONGgQT9Auo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7zv9rS3m7A ]

-pause-

Okay so remember when I said it's helpful to ask the question “What does this say?” when examining a work? When applied to an overall piece, like a television series, that question is useful in exploring themes and morales, but when applied to a brief scene like this, it becomes an incredibly useful tool for strengthening the smaller moments of your story and making them cohesive pieces of a whole. Let's ask that question of this moment; what do these specific choices the writer has made tell us about this story? Obviously, I can't tell you what they say to you personally, but to me, this moment communicates several things at once:

Sokka is a compassionate character, and his compassion manifests through goofing off and having fun – even when the fun is at his expense.

Katara is a compassionate character, and she's willing to obstruct the truth when she feels it's necessary.

Aang deflects from facing difficult feelings using childish antics and games

This is also our first visual confirmation that the Fire Nation have been to the temple, and have some connection to what happened to the airbenders

I know these observations are obvious when pointed out, but consider just how much story is being built in this small moment. We're gaining character insight; now, when Sokka uses humour to be a comforting presence to his friends later in the show, or Katara tells a lie that she feels will have a positive result, these are consistent character choices, we are seeing a full, multi-faceted character being built in front of us. The character never has to TELL us their personality, we absorb it piece by piece, and the writers trust us to retain those pieces without having to spell them out too plainly. And these pieces of characterisation influence the action:

Now we KNOW Aang will have to find out the cruel truth of what happened to his people in some other way. The fun will have to stop, this child will have to stop and face something he doesn't want to face. We have a sense of anticipation and dread for when that will happen and how he might react. This is setting up a domino that has to fall later in the episode, and when it does, it feels powerful, inevitable, and heartbreaking.

Now, let's compare how this moment appeared in the Live Action:

[CLIP - NATLA arriving at the southern air temple. It's not on youtube so cut from Netflix directly]

Again, I ask the question. “What is this trying to say?”

Okay, obviously this is a shorter clip which has no dialogue, so you might think I'm being uncharitable to the remake for cutting it this way, but I have been careful to include the entire visual sequence of arriving at the air temple and finding the first sign of a firebender being present. Perhaps a more fair question is “what is this trying to DO?” because really it's a translation of something that's already been SAID, so what we're looking at here is not necessarily the point of the scene – we already understand its place the broader narrative – but rather what the writer was trying to achieve by changing the scene in the way they did, including or excluding the elements they did, and what consequences those changes have for the story at large.

So, what does it do to remove Aang's fond reminiscences of his home? What does it do to strip away his reluctance to face the hard truth and his determination to be a kid for just a few minutes longer? What does it do to remove Sokka and Katara's acts of compassion? What does it do to have Aang see the helmet right away?

I can't tell you what the writers of this episode thought it would do, I can only tell you what it does for me, in my viewing experience. It flattens the characters, gives them no distinction in how they as individuals react to things like stress and grief. It shows us blanket devastation, confusion, and disbelief – and while I think that could definitely work in giving this moment a more mature and serious tone, the lack of character building makes it all feel bland. Aang does not react differently to this discovery than Sokka or Katara, there is no unique commentary he gives on what the temple used to be or what it meant to him, no denials he makes of the gravity of the situation or misguided optimism that there's been a mistake, that the airbenders must have escaped, that he cannot possibly be the only one left. There is only silent sobriety, rendered dull by the lack of contrast to any other emotion it could have interrupted.

In the animated show, when Aang discovers Gyatso's body, it comes on the heels of the laughter and goofery of chasing Momo about the temple, so there's a potent DROP in the tone. This is the writers cleverly using juxtaposition, contrasting one tone with another, so that the viewer and Aang experience this shift in reality together. The suddenness of it, the cruelty of it, is made so much worse by the fact we see what it takes from Aang: it takes the laughter. It takes the childhood. The airbenders are no longer a conspicuous absence, they are corpses, people Aang knew and loved who died surrounded by enemies.

In the Live Action, there is no juxtaposition, just somber silence after somber silence, so Aang's outburst lacks the same bite it had in the animated version. Aang wasn't laughing before, he was already serious, already accepting of the devastation that happened in his absence. It functionally takes nothing away from him, because he already accepted that it was gone.

I want to be as fair as possible to the Live Action here, so I have to add a little asterix to my analysis of this moment. In the Live Action, we see the extermination of the airbenders happen on screen at the beginning of the pilot episode, and this, naturally, HAS to change the scene of the air temple discovery when Aang gets there later. The mystique of what happened is gone, we SAW it happen, we saw Gyatso die, we know what waits for Aang when he finally makes it home, so it would be redundant to tease that out in the same way it was done in the animated show. And credit where it's due, I really like the inclusion of the airbender massacre. It's great to see airbenders besides Aang in combat with firebenders, I think it adds a lot of grit to the reality of Sozin's genocide. It's memorable and devastating to see Gyatso die protecting a group of air nomad children, and knowing that, based on the very title of the show, those children will also be burned to death. That's harrowing shit, that adds a lot of layers to the show, and it's really disappointing that they never followed through with using that change to fullest potential.

In the animated version, Gyatso's skeleton functions as a stand-in for airbenders as a whole, he is a symbol of the eradication of an entire culture, which makes sense, it's for children, one skeleton is enough. The Live Action wasn't limited by this, though – in fact they show that eradication with explicit violence, so it's strange that Aang's later interaction with the loss of his people is still limited to Gyatso's skeleton. Remember earlier when I talked about this moment-

[CLIP - Sokka and Katara find the firebender helmet]

-and I said this was a domino being set up to fall when Aang finally had to face the truth? Well, that same domino is set up in the Live Action when the airbenders are being killed on screen. We know that Aang discovering their deaths is an inevitability now, so the firebender mask no longer carries any of the same weight or foreshadowing it did before. We know Gyatso's skeleton is lying in the temple because we watched him burn to death, so discovering him no longer carries the weight of that big reveal, either.

But we never saw those children die.

When I was watching this scene unfold for the first time, I was wondering how exactly they were going to follow their changes through to their ultimate conclusions; after all, if you strip the weight from the helmet and Gyatso's skeleton, then you need to supplement that weight with something that will provoke an equally extreme emotional response – a reveal that would compound all of what we've seen so far and deliver a final blow to tip Aang over the edge, that would justify the darker, self-serious tone the series seems to be striving for. I became a little convinced that after finding Gyatso, Aang would raise his eyes and see a cluster of bones in the corner, perhaps not shown explicitly, but suggestive enough to tell the viewers exactly what Aang is realising in that moment. These children were his peers, after all. He knew their names, played games with them. He was one of them. The night this happened, he should have been among them. A symbolic and literal extinguishing of Aang's childhood.

I expected that final domino to fall, I expected a consolidation of the mature tone and a gut punch that would give Aang license to lose control of his powers in the way he does in the original; Gyatso no longer needs to be the symbol of loss, after all. We watched the loss. Let us now feel the weight of its brutality.

But, that didn't happen. Aang loses control because he finds Gyatso's skeleton, exactly how he does in the original, and the story moves on, and I felt... Confused, I think. Like the scene was incomplete. Like I'd been short-changed on a really crucial transaction, like Aang had not been given the catharsis he needs to embark upon his journey in earnest. In the end, this scene didn't have anything new to say, and what it chose to DO was remove most of what the original had to say.

ECONOMIC STORYTELLING

I have seen a lot of criticism of the Live Action revolving around the perceived contempt for “filler” episodes, and that makes sense. It's self evident that the NATLA writers have less real estate on their page to work with, they're trying to tell a 20 episode story in just 8, after all. But I do take a lot of issue with the simplicity of this criticism, in specific because I think it gives that 8 episode teleplay far more credit than it deserves. Economic storytelling is one of the major tenets of writing a screenplay, you have a very limited window of time to tell your story, and it is a challenge, but I believe a joy, for a writer to figure out how to do that.

Further, I object to what seems to be a common misunderstanding in just what a “filler” episode is. I've seen people describe these episodes of ATLA as not plot-critical, padding even, or just breaks from the more serious side of the story to enjoy a whacky little adventure. And while there's certainly merit to the latter, I think it's really important that we, as storytellers, understand these “fillers” as carefully crafted subplots that exist to serve the wider narrative. They aren't breaks from the plot, they ARE the plot, and specifically, they are the gestation period for character development.

Again, I feel that it's almost needless to point this out, but Aang's character arc in season one is about a child coming to terms with the burden of being a Chosen One; Aang's role in the story is to save the world. So, wisely, the animated series invests a LOT of time and care into showing us the world that needs saving, and the people that inhabit it.

ATLA understands, fundamentally, that ending a violent regime of imperialism has to be more than one grand stand-off between the forces of good and evil, and that Aang must be the embodiment of peace, healing, and mercy in order to achieve his ultimate goal. And the way to BE those things is by having him meaningfully interact with the everyman: small, seemingly irrelevant characters whose lives can be improved by his intervention. It's kind of the basic principle of “Save The Cat,” isn't it? The mighty hero must care as much about Doing Good as he does about Defeating Evil. When Aang has a funny little side adventure, what we're really watching is the Avatar being galvanised from a mythic, all-powerful figure destined to battle the wicked king, into the personification of hope itself, a walking act of kindness that can be repeated and paid forward by the people he helps.

The Live Action clearly understands this as well, because they tell us the Avatar is hope incarnate all the fucking time, but they never bother actually showing us. We're going to compare two scenes again, this time Aang's interactions with the children of Kyoshi island – since it's one of the only times Aang interacts with members of the general public in the Live Action.

[CLIP – ANIMATED ABRIDGED https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wnJMikYnfo ]

So obviously I cut that down for time, but let's ask our new favourite question about this sequence: What is it trying to say? Aside from being a bit of fun to entertain the children watching, there are once again layers of plot and character being woven into the story here:

The Avatar is a celebrity figure, and this gets Aang lots of attention.

Aang has fun with that attention. It's fun to be the Avatar when it's all reward, no responsibility.

Katara has to assume the role of responsibility when Aang won't. This sets Katara up as a grounding presence who will help Aang stay focused on his mission later, and it also adds depth to the way her own childhood has been interrupted by the war, forcing her into performing maternal responsibilities, emotional and practical, from a young age.

Aang would like Katara to faun over him in the same way the island girls do. This contributes to their romantic arc in the series overall, and Katara's resistance to it.

So, this moment is doing several things at once, packing as much story and characterisation as possible into the sequence – but to be fair, it's also a pretty long scene, and I would agree that when trimming the fat for an 8 episode adaptation, there's a lot that can be cut down here. So, let's look at how the Live Action cut it down:

[CLIP not on youtube. take from Netflix - Aang "playing" with kids]

Okay Jesus Christ. So aside from just not being very fun to watch, I don't even know that it's worth asking what this moment is trying to do with this change, because it's self evident. They wanted to tell us that Aang is a symbol of hope and unity as quickly as possible, so they scrapped any actual material that would show us that, and instead just had Katara say it while Aang runs around with some kids. I don't even think of “show don't tell” as a hard and fast rule in writing, but this- this is pretty egregious in how lazy and boring it is. To make that worse, we never stop to get a sense of these kids as actual characters, so when they come under attack later, we feel no stakes. Nor do we stop to give Aang lines that might explore his emotions here and expand who HE is as a character; is he showing off because he's flattered by their amazement with him, is he actively trying to cheer them up and bring them hope, is he procrastinating his responsibilities by goofing off like a little kid – we don't get to know that, because the episode thinks it's unimportant. And we scrap Katara assuming the role of the responsible grounding voice, a pretty big aspect to her relationship with Aang in the animated show, so now we have to question what the writers plan to replace this with to achieve the same level of closeness and friendship between these characters in the Live Action.

[SPOILERS – THEY REPLACE IT WITH NOTHING]

So, okay, the Live Action sequence is significantly shorter, and they got out the information they obviously felt it very necessary to get out, so this version is doing a better job at economic storytelling, right? Well, no. But to explain why we need to see what happens later in the episode.

In both versions, Aang is unconscious when the firebenders arrive, leaving the village – well, ha, not “defenseless,” but Avatarless. In the animated version he's unconscious because his reckless and childish antics got him battered by the Unagi, and rightly so, and it is Katara who has to rescue him. There is clear creative cause-and-effect here: Katara is vindicated and Aang has learned a lesson, and their relationship has grown closer because of it. Aang is forced to face the reality that his presence on the island, which he thought was fun and games, has brought real danger into the lives of these people. The Avatar cannot just be a celebrity, there is a risk tied to him. This is Aang's character arc in microcosm: a child who must stop being a child to become a hero. But, something very important happens at the end of this episode. As the gaang are fleeing to draw the firebenders away from the village, Aang decides, No actually, that's not good enough for me, and uses the Unagi to put out the fires HE (metaphorically) started.

I really want to emphasise how this is more than just a feel good happy ending to an episode. This is the groundwork for the type of Avatar Aang will become, one that refuses to abandon optimism when faced with two bad choices. This ending would not have been possible if Aang weren't determined to include “having fun” in his Avatar philosophy – the childish fun is tied to the theme of hope and perseverance, and that will become one of the central components of Aang's journey going forward.

There is no wasted space here, each choice contributes not just to the arc of the episode, but to the story as a whole. This is incredibly economic storytelling, and it all feels connected and like it makes sense, and that generates a feeling of satisfaction and investment in the viewer.

In the Live Action, Aang is unconscious because he is communing with Avatar Kyoshi for advice. Gone is the subplot of the reckless child determined to have fun, that part of Aang's character no longer exists. In its place is a child who has already accepted his responsibility and takes the role seriously, actively trying to be the hero.

And I have to be honest, I love these bold changes in theory – I love the reveal that Aang is not insecure about his powers because they aren't strong enough but because they are TOO strong, and he's afraid of causing harm. I love seeing Kyoshi, she's so cool and I'm in love with her, I love the entire fight scene in the village, and I love that Kyoshi's advice to Aang essentially boils down to “you are GOING to hurt people, come to terms with that and join the fight.” And I think this would have been a really exceptional episode, if any of those changes had ANY impact on ANY scenes moving forward.

I want you to put away your passive viewing brain and insert your writer brain, slot! Okay. Think of this from a narrative perspective. If Aang is concerned about having to hurt people as the Avatar, what does it do to remove him wholesale from the fight with the firebenders and make it Kyoshi who does all the hurting? If Aang is concerned about his powers being too destructive, what does it do to remove him using those powers against a meaningful threat, where he might have to take chances and risk losing control? What does it do to remove Aang needing to make any choice at all in whether to stand and fight, or flee to draw the enemy away? In a single question, what does it do to change the story so that Aang never needs to make a hard choice here?

To be polite about it, it makes Aang a passive character, which is a dangerous thing to do to your protagonist, especially in a “hero saves the world” story. In the original, we SAW Aang make choices all the time to protect other people, and even better, we saw his perpetual optimism refuse to let him settle on a bad choice – Aang is ALWAYS looking for the kindest way forward.

To be less polite about it, it renders the entire conversation with Kyoshi unimportant, a waste of valuable script space that has no further bearing on the story. Yes, Kyoshi is super cool, but if the point of the conversation is to say “HEY you gotta hurt these fuckers” only to immediately go “ACTUALLY let me hurt them for you,” then you haven't really justified that dialogue – and before some pedant gets up my ass about how not every line has to serve the story, 1. You're wrong, all dialogue serves the story even if it doesn't advance the “plot” in any obvious, immediate way, because all dialogue expands our understanding of the character's worldview and objectives, and this understanding influences how we perceive their actions in the plot going forward, and 2. This is a scene of one character giving ADVICE to another character. It's purpose IS to affect Aang, by putting him in a position to either take or reject that advice. So following it by rendering the advice irrelevant, by making it so Aang never has to make a choice on whether to cause harm or not, means this IS wasted space.

And there are ways to keep the Kyoshi fight in the episode and still tie it back to Aang's character arc, it would be so easy to include a short scene of Aang looking shaken by the the possession, by the power Kyoshi exercised on her opponents, and seeing just what harm an Avatar can cause. Easy as well to show him looking relieved or emboldened by Kyoshi's power, depending on what effect the writers want this to have on Aang. Look, I'm not trying to say that I have the “right” answer for how this scene should have gone, I'm only saying that the fact the scene goes no further, has no meaningful effect on how Aang behaves going forward, renders the conversation useless. The only part of this interaction with Kyoshi that textually or even subtextually effects Aang is the vision of the North pole, and I find that pretty damning.

To bring this back to Economic Storytelling, yes NATLA is far more conservative with the time it takes to establish important plot points, but they establish them one at a time, in scenes that have a single expositive purpose that don't integrate well into the broader narrative. While the ATLA scenes take longer, they are always establishing several plot and character points at once, and they take the time to show how characters are effected by the action happening around them so we never lose track of what the major themes and objectives are. In this scene, NATLA doesn't show us any of the relationship dynamic between Katara and Aang, so now we have to write a new scene to show that later. NATLA doesn't show us how Aang reacts to a difficult choice, so we have to write a new scene to show that later. NATLA doesn't show us how Aang fights when there are civilians he might hurt with his too-powerful powers, so we have to write a new scene to show that later. NATLA doesn't show us what kind of Avatar Aang will become, so we have to write a new scene to show that later!!!

I hope you can see my point here, so that when I say this storytelling isn't economic, I don't mean that the scenes are too long or that the conversations aren't snappy or that the plot isn't moving fast enough. I mean they used the time they had so, so poorly that I cannot accept the excuse of them shortening 20 episodes to 8 being the reason the show feels so disjointed and strangely paced. It WAS possible, I believe, to do a strong adaptation in 8 episodes, but not with this single purpose dialogue, not with scenes that are cool as standalones but fail to integrate into the wider narrative, and certainly not with these passive characters.

And speaking of characters-

[MY BOY!!! (ZUKO)]

Call the police. I just witnessed an assassination.

CHARACTER

If I was a little impolite about the Kyoshi thing, now I'm going to be a bit of a bitch.

I think it is genuinely embarrassing that this project obviously began with a pre-written recipe for complex, entertaining, emotionally rich characters and yet somehow, went out of their way to reduce them down into this bland, unseasoned sludge that they tried to spoonfeed me with heavy handed dialogue about how I should interpret them.

[CLIP – Katara about Aang bringing hope everywhere he goes]

Does he, Katara? Does he??

This is where I think the adaptation fails most spectacularly. With the exception of Sokka, Suki, Azula and Ozai, it feels like the script simply doesn't CARE about exploring who ANY of these characters are, and even Sokka, in my opinion the clear favourite of the live action script, is on pretty thin ice as far as characterisation goes. I have SO much to say on SO many of the characters, but because I want to get this video done and move on with my life, and because he's my specialest baby boy favourite, I'm going to use Zuko as a case study for how this adaptation assassinated its characters with radical changes, but absolutely REFUSED to confront the textual repercussions of those changes.

As a fun little exercise, I challenge you to go and watch, or more like re-watch, the pilot episodes of both ATLA and NATLA back to back, asking yourself what each scene with Zuko says about the character, how he thinks about himself, how he thinks about others, and what his dialogue and actions can tell us about his values and objectives. If you're a writer and you really want to benefit from this exercise, write your thoughts down in a list so you can compare the two versions side by side.

Now, I'm going to go ahead and assume that you gleaned quite a lot from both versions of the story – it's not that NATLA doesn't have anything substantial to SAY about Zuko – rather, what it says has substantially different implications for what kind of character he is. I'm not going to go through every little change here, I'm not trying to sell you my reading of these scenes as an objectively correct one, but I do think it's crucial to put one particular moment under the microscope, because to me, this is the moment that NATLA Zuko became irrefutably an entirely different character to his ATLA counterpart:

[Clip – who needs an army now

https://youtube.com/shorts/BJnoKL0ZZO0?si=OYfBW9_rsQLuvgus]

So. You know. Aaaaaah!

I need to be clear with you that this, in my eyes, is not just a deviation from the source material, it is a fundamental coring of the character, hollowing out his insides and replacing them with something ideologically different. With this one, single moment, they have obliterated several of the defining traits of the original character and replaced them with their philosophical opposites – that's why I call this a character assassination. It's not a small change to condense the character arc, it's not an added quirk or a cut detail or an interrogation of the source material, it is a showcase of values that completely redefine who Zuko is in this story.

In ATLA, Zuko is arrogant, imposing, snide, and short tempered, but the primary pillar of his character, the backbone which keeps the proverbial body of traits and motivations upright, is that Zuko is honourable. His objective in the narrative is to regain his honour, it is his purpose for being, and that honour infiltrates every single interaction Zuko has in the show. Zuko initially does not use firebending in his fight with Sokka, because, we can see, he is competent and confident in his hand-to-hand combat.

[CLIP - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGJs7s_FdEE ]

There would be no honour in duelling Sokka with firebending because Zuko does not perceive him as a threat, as evidenced by how calmly he disarms him. It's only when Zuko is embarrassed, that he loses his temper and we see any fire. Zuko does not deploy his men to fight on his behalf because Zuko is an honourable leader who always puts himself on the frontlines. Zuko does not harm a downed opponent, even one he hates, because that would be dishonourable.

And, I would argue the ATLA pilot is carefully scripted to convince us of Zuko's other positive attributes: Zuko is intelligent. He is waiting for Aang in his chambers, as if taking the staff were a test of his opponents abilities. He is adaptive: he says he will not underestimate Aang again. He is determined, unwavering his resolve. And these positive attributes never tread into the territory of making him seem like a Good Guy, at least not in season one – on the contrary, Zuko is a more menacing antagonist BECAUSE he is driven by honour, intelligence and determination.

The NATLA Zuko never mentions honour, he mentions the Throne. He mentions his destiny. He would deploy a squadron of troops to dispatch Sokka, a single warrior, and has to be taunted into accepting a one-on-one fight. He firebends at him immediately, not, it seems, out of any perceived necessity, not because Sokka is a threat to him, but because Sokka ISN'T a threat. The firebending is a demonstration of pride and superiority, no longer a meaningful fight but an exercise in bullying. And when this obviously inferior opponent is defeated, helpless on the ground, Zuko GLOATS. He prepares to fireblast a prone opponent, and gloats, as though he's proud of what he's doing.

Something Zuko says just before this fight really stuck out to me.

[Clip – from Netflix "where's the glory in that"]

“Honour” and “glory” are two words that are often used side by side in fictional works. They aren't synonyms, exactly, but they are certainly buddies, and it's not hard to imagine the surface-level logic in a writer subbing in the word “glory” instead of “honour” here. But, in the context of this scene, it is a devastating substitution. If Zuko had said “where is the honour” in sending a squadron to dispatch a single warrior who had challenged him, we would have seen a character with integrity, wouldn't we? We would have seen someone who has a stringent personal morality that compels him to face his opponent as an equal. But, saying “where is the glory” does something different, at least to me. It prioritizes vanity over integrity, it makes the battle a spectacle of ego rather than a ruthless but necessary removal of an opponent.

You could make the argument that this change to Zuko's core characteristics was necessary to achieve a darker, more threatening tone. And I would disagree with that, in part because I just don't believe an antagonist must showcase brutality to be threatening, as I said earlier I think the original Zuko was sufficiently menacing through his intelligence and persistence. But I would go further to say that I don't believe this show even WANTS Zuko to be darker and more threatening. The script is overly eager to mine sympathy for Zuko even in these earlier episodes, unwilling to commit to their own choices depicting him as ruthless. There is no consistency in what his personal code of ethics are.

In one episode Zuko is ready to fireblast a helpless Katara on the ground, in the next he pontificates about how fire nation soldiers would never disgrace themselves with acts of terrorism. The result is a Zuko who never gets to be a villain OR a sympathetic character, always on the knife's edge of one or the other. And, again to be fair, I think conceptually that's a pretty excellent idea for how to write Zuko. The problem is that this pendulous interpretation of the character varies so much on a scene-by-scene basis rather than feeling like a gradual progression from irredeemable to sympathetic, so the audience is left perpetually unsure of how we are supposed to feel about him. I think “restraint” is the word I'd use here. The writers know, and let's be honest, so does 99% of the audience, that Zuko ends up as a good guy, so they aren't using a lot of restraint in pumping that sympathy in NOW. The problem is that they ALSO wrote a character who is far more vainglorious and violent than his cartoon counterpart, so the extreme variation between these two aspects never solders together successfully, in no small part because of that single-purpose dialogue we talked about earlier.

To put a point on it, I want to talk about two Zuko scenes that happen immediately one after the other in episode six. They are, respectively, my least and most favourite scenes in the entire adaptation. The first scene is when Zuko wakes up, after he and Aang escape Xhao's fortress and Aang has dragged him to safety. This is an expansion of the source material, one where Aang and Zuko have a long conversation where they find some common ground and even smile together, which only ends when Zuko gets triggered by the suggestion he could be compassionate.

I absolutely despise this scene, for a handful of reasons. For one, Zuko and Aang have a similar kind of conversation earlier in the episode, where Aang asks Zuko why he's doing this, why can't he let him go blah blah blah, essentially it's another appeal to Zuko's humanity – and for the record I also really don't like this earlier scene – but its inclusion defangs the profoundity of having these two communicate later, on a very similar topic: why are you doing this, why can't you do something else, blah blah blah. But secondly, and I think more significantly from a writing perspective, this scene is tonally weird. Zuko really sits there with the object of his obsession discussing how he used to practice his pen strokes, he actually engages with Aang as if he sees him as a person and not a target, the way he says the quiet part out loud when he tells Aang "compassion is a sign of weakness," as if Zuko would ever feel it necessary to justify his motives to his enemy – maybe you won't agree with me on this, some of my friends say they thought this was one of the stronger changes in the show, but to me it stripped something away from the dynamic between Aang and Zuko. It felt shallow and wrong and I'm sorry that I can't articulate that better, but when I compare this scene to its original counterpart, I do feel something pivotal was lost in the translation.

In ATLA, there is no conversation. Aang mourns the loss of a world he knew, where there was no war to interfere with the cross-cultural friendships of children. He asks Zuko a very poignant question: if we had met back then, would we be friends? And Zuko, after a pause, responds with a wordless attack. He does not pursue Aang, he does not give chase. He attacks to end the conversation before it begins. To me, the ambiguity of Zuko's silence, the reason he lashes out, the effect this question has on him is so memorable and profound. We don't need to hear the answer, all that matters is the question, and the fact Zuko couldn't face it. In the entire animated series, right up until Zuko finally joins the gaang, he refers to Aang as “The Avatar.” The Avatar is a mythic opponent, a quest to be fulfilled, an object to be retrieved. He is not a boy with which Zuko can empathise – he CANNOT be that. It's not just that I find the conversation between Zuko and Aang in NATLA to be unearned and premature, but I feel it damages the legitimacy of Zuko's obsession with capturing Aang, and by extension, it takes something from Zuko's growth when he abandons that obsession later.

The scene that follows this – my favourite scene – is the Agni Kai between Zuko and Ozai. In this retelling, Zuko fights back. It is visually excellent, it adds so many degrees to his character, I love seeing more of Ozai, and it is heartwrenching to watch Zuko get his scar, not because he wouldn't fight, but because he wouldn't HARM. And I'm going to be a bittova bitch again when I say that THIS scene, THIS change, was their opportunity to make Zuko's more violent character actually make sense.

Again, for the sake of fairness, I will include the fact that the words Ozai says when he burns Zuko, “compassion is a sign of weakness,” are the same words Zuko says when he lashes out at Aang, but because these scenes are literally happening back to back, within MINUTES of each other, the most charitable thing I can say about this is that it shows an INTENT to justify the changes to Zuko. The idea of compassion is not emphasised or explored or challenged in any of Zuko's scenes in the five episodes preceding this, there is no foreshadowing of this moment we can call back to and say “ah, now it all makes sense.” It again shows a pretty cool, surface level decision, that was never successful woven into the larger story. That seems to be a habit with this show.

I'm going to make a suggestion here, a way that I think they could have used this moment to better storytelling effect. My suggestion is not me saying I have the right answer for how this scene should go, rather I only want YOU, as a storyteller, to consider how small changes can radically effect the overall structure of your story.

Let's pretend that, in episode one, when Zuko gets Sokka on the ground, and stands over him, Katara rushes forward in a panic screaming “stop! You've already won!” We see Zuko's face, a moment of consideration as he stares down at the helpless Sokka, before Zuko says, “a downed enemy is still my enemy.” His fist lights up with flame, and Aang stops him just before he fireblasts Sokka, and the scene moves forward the same way. Then, in the next episode, when Zuko has Katara helpless on the ground, standing over her he says,

[Clip from Netflix “I warned you”]

so functionally this scene hasn't changed one bit, but NOW Zuko's words have a secondary meaning, he is calling back to the previous episode. This also strengthens the animosity between Katara and Zuko, it makes their relationship that bit more personal, and that can intensify their later fight in the North Pole.

Then, in episode 6, let's say Zuko gets a good kick in and manages to get Ozai on one knee before his moment of quote unquote “weakness.” When Zuko hesitates and Ozai overpowers him, this time he says, “you think you show compassion, but it is weakness. A downed enemy is still your enemy. I will make sure you remember that.”

This time, Zuko is the downed enemy, and Ozai's punishment is a demonstration of this principle which will come to define Zuko's morality in season one. It re-enforces the fire nations regime of imperial genocide: wiping out the airbenders, hunting down waterbenders, Ozai's later plans for the Earth kingdom, all of these are functionally downed enemies that cannot simply be left in defeat, they must be obliterated, removed until there are no enemies left. And this complements Aang's campaign to be merciful, the strength in his compassion.

In the Live Action, Zuko is not rescued by Aang after he attacks him in the North Pole. Now he is fetched by Iroh, leaving Katara under a pile of rubble. But can you imagine if it was the other way around? Can you imagine if, radicalised by his father's abuse and believing wholeheartedly that you must slay a downed opponent, Zuko had to live with the fact that Katara and Aang had spared him when he was downed? Wouldn't that have left his character on a stronger footing for the inner conflict and confusion his redemption arc requires?

This was just a five minute fanfic, or as the youtube boys would say, “script doctoring,” and to be clear, if they had done something like this it would have only fixed one facet of a larger problem with narrative follow-through. I do hope, however, I have convinced you that it was not impossible for them to make radical character changes that would still feel earned and consistent. The important thing is that those changes are placed with measured intent, pieces of a bigger puzzle. After all, in my little fanfic the action remains identical, it only requires a few lines of dialogue to form the connective tissue between broader narrative ideas.

To summarise, I am not inherently upset that they made changes to these characters. I do not subscribe to the idea that an original text is sacrosanct and should not be altered in adaptation. I am upset, however, by the carelessness with which these changes were made. They feel cosmetic, surface level, like they belong in a first draft where the purpose is to jot down some cool new ideas before interrogating how those ideas might impact things like plot and character arcs.

Like, okay, if you want to change Katara from being motherly and responsible, if you don't want her to have to deal with casual misogyny, that's not a bad change in and of itself. But if you don't interrogate how the absence of those details will interact with her character arc, how she was forced to become her mother to look after a brother that doesn't take her seriously, how that positions her as a voice of reason and discipline within the gaang, which in turn positions her as a focused and determined self actualiser, which in turn means she trains constantly to become a better waterbender, which in turn means she is already almost a master by the time she faces off with Master Pakku, which in turn culminates her arc of soundly disproving the misogyny that would hold her back... Well, if you don't realise you're taking all those things out of her character with this one change, then you don't supplement those things with anything new, do you? And you end up with a Katara who gets told to grow up by her now-responsible and always-vindicated older brother, and in this version, he's right! Because Katara is pretty empty of characterisation, Sokka's words ring true, and you know, what does that say about the show? By trying to remove the theme of misogyny, they accidentally made a dynamic between Sokka and Katara where she is the foolhardy, overly trusting, underpowered little sister and he is the wise, responsible, even tempered older brother. I don't think it's the feminist power move they think it is.

Similarly, by changing Aang from being a silly little goofball into a young man ready to face the full brunt of his responsibilities, but not interrogating what those changes would mean for the plot, they accidentally forgot to show Aang BECOMING the Avatar. We don't ever see him co-mingling his perpetual optimism and childish philosophy into his mission to spread hope and peace. Instead it's like he's a blank slate, constantly listening to other characters tell him what they think he should be like, without ever actively participating in the action in a way that would show what he CHOOSES to be like.

When I first heard they were making NATLA, I remember thinking, you know, the ONE make or break aspect of this show is going to be the bending fights. They already have such a brilliant story to tell, so it'll come down to how well the martial arts and bending effects translate to live action. And, I gotta say, I was wrong. The fight scenes in NATLA are really excellent, I love watching them. By my own standard the show should be wonderful. But it isn't. Because even at my most skeptical, I still thought the characters would be. You know. “Good.”

CONCLUSION

I first decided to make this video when I was watching the NATLA pilot. It is inarguably the weakest episode of the adaptation, and it was admittedly quite fun to pick away at perceived flaws in the show, having my own private game of CinemaSins as I cringed through most of the dialogue. But just saying a change is silly or creates a plot hole or doesn't make sense has never really been the type of interaction I enjoy having with art. I said this at the top of the video, but I have a personal pursuit in understanding what a story wants to say and even more so in how it might have failed at saying it. The NATLA pilot made me think this show was going to be BAD, that it had nothing to say at all, that it was a soulless imitation of a beautiful story that came before it. But the more episodes I watched, the more I came to terms with the fact that this show ISN'T bad. It's definitely not good, either as a remake or a standalone piece, but there's so much in it that hovers on the threshold of something really compelling.

Episode 3, Omashu, was the first time I really sat up and thought to myself, “Okay, they're really going somewhere with this!” It deviates entirely from the source material, re-imagining several subplots to take place in conjunction with one another and I think it really works. That Jet is now targetting the mechanist for being a fire nation spy, that this would drive a wedge between Katara and Sokka for their respective allegiances, that Aang and Zuko face off in a crowded marketplace, that Iroh gives himself up for Zuko's escape – I loved these changes, and even though the persistent flaws with dialogue and structure remained, I was having fun watching the show. I really wanted to see what came next. For the first time I felt like the writers might be having fun too.

By the end of this episode, Aang has realised that being the Avatar has to be about being there for the people of the land, listening to their problems and investing effort into solving them. But then episode 4, I guess, forgets that he said this, because Aang spends the whole episode trying to survive King Bumi, in probably one of the worst inclusions of the entire show. What was the value, I ask you, in placing Bumi here rather than have Aang follow through on his commitment to serve the everyman? Since Bumi seemingly no longer belongs to the secret society of Daddies that impact the war later, since he no longer serves the purpose of teaching Aang to use lateral thinking, wouldn't it make sense to give Aang a different task for this episode, like actually looking for the fire nation spies that are conveniently rounded up at the end of the episode, or helping the citizens who feel demoralised by the terror attacks? It's a really unfortunate juxtaposition, following an episode as promising as 3 with one as scattered and ineffective as 4.

And this is, unfortunately, the way the show would continue. Interesting ideas and changes that could have made for stand-out sequences, followed by scenes that contribute nothing to the new story but are written-in seemingly out of obligation to the source text.

It's an interesting change, for example, that Katara and Sokka are the ones who get trapped in the tunnels and have to resolve their issues as siblings to escape. I think the writers had something they wanted to explore here. I think that change is justified by a new idea.

But an example of a strange change is, in the next episode, Haibai is no longer the reason the villagers are going missing, it's Koh taking them – so why include Haibai, then? Is he only part of the episode because that's how it was in the original? Did they think Aang planting the acorn in like a 2 second shot held adequate weight to cover the theme of The Avatar's relationship to nature? It's not that it was bad to change this, it just feels like they changed it without any thought.

And because the Badger Moles now “sense emotion,” we can't make Koh respond to emotional expression, so his whole shtick becomes about wanting a family.

[CLIP Ep 6 Masks]

This is also poorly explored, so why include it? Is it not enough to know there are malevolent spirits that can cause harm? Does Koh need this complex backstory that interrupts the primary plot?

And now Yue – oh, God, I gotta talk about some narrative crimes against women – now Yue is a fox in the spirit world, and she can casually refuse her arranged marriage to Hahn, which would be fine if it didn't undermine the central thrust of Yue's arc being how stripped of agency she is. And the absence of that arc intersects pretty significantly with Katara's Death To Misogyny fight against Pakku – which they obviously wanted to keep in the show, since it's one of the best fights in the series. So now you have these arbitrary waterbending restrictions on women that aren't part of any larger cultural attitudes. The theme about how harmful gendered restrictions are and how valuable social change can be is snubbed for the sake of Manic Pixie Dream Girl Yue. Whereas before we could easily accept that women weren't allowed to do certain things because that's just the misogynist culture, NOW we are forced to question for what reason waterbending specifically has a No Girl's Allowed rule, when women are given the respect and freedom to decline important political marriages.

It seems to me like the writers want their female characters to be empowered without ever engaging with the reasons female empowerment exists as a concept – it is a challenge to disempowerment. They don't want their girls to seem weak and complacent in the face of things like arranged marriages, ignoring the fact that this provides the narrative conflict through which these same girls can demonstrate strength and action by challenging those social customs. They don't want Yue to be a weepy victim who must cull her own desires in service to a deeply patriarchal community, BUT they need that community to stay patriarchal because without it, Katara can't have her Girl Power moment, BUT they've removed any actual gendered struggle from the narrative so that Katara can always be empowered, SO the fight feels toothless. Like. Listen. I'm a dirty feminist myself, I'm a card carrying member of the Woke Mob, I want to see bad bitches on my screen. But this is genuinely less progressive in how it depicts women than a 20 year old kid's cartoon.

I'm not trying to argue that the original Yue plotline was some feminist masterpiece – on the contrary I don't really like the Yue plot in the animated show – but at least it knew WHY Yue could not have agency over her marriage. She lives in a patriarchal society, her existence revolves around self sacrifice in service to that society, she literally gives up her life out of duty, and it's tragic. When Pakku finds Katara's necklace, and realises that the misogynist culture he upholds has cost him something, has cost him genuine love and happiness, it forces him to confront that misogyny and change his mind. Yue is effected by this because she yearns for the courage to stand against that same culture and find love and happiness. You could argue that her sacrifice to become the moon spirit is a reclamation of agency, that it FREES her. OR you could argue that it is a fulfillment of her disempowerment, a final act of self suppression in service to the world that suppressed her. It KILLS her. But either way, it's clear WHAT put Yue in this position: she has no agency. So giving her agency over some things but not giving agency to women over other things creates a bizarre question over what the point of this was. What are the writers trying to say about this?

There is a moment in the show that I found unintentionally poignant. When speaking to Roku, it's explained (in a way that doesn't really contribute to the story but okay) that Koh may be persuaded to return the people he's abducted in exchange for a totem that represents his mother, the mother of faces. It's never explained if this totem has an actual function or if its value is exclusively sentimental, it's never explained where the mother of faces is now or if the totem is a conduit for Koh to be close to her, and it's never explained WHY Avatar Roku took the totem to begin with. This is already a lot of open threads to dangle in front of a McGuffin you've made plot-critical, but even ignoring that none of it made sense, underneath it all is a sliver of accidental gold.

The mother of faces brought “identity” into the world, and she is Koh's mother, a creature without identity, a creature who exists to steal the faces of others. In a way, I feel there's something poetic to be mined here, a meta-commentary of sorts, because this show, this Avatar, has no identity. It wears the face of its predecessor, it switches between the severed emotions of the cartoon as it tries to emulate various plot points, almost showing its true form when it dares to make a bold change, but inevitably retreating back to behind the mask, unable to commit to being itself.

Throughout this video, I have been careful to describe the creators of this adaptation as “The Writers,” a sort of nebulous, anonymous title. There are, obviously, individual writers for each episode, part of a team of writers for the show overall, and I don't mean to obstruct their names from receiving any credit or criticism here by simply calling them The Writers. On the contrary, I give them this amalgamous title out of cautionary respect. You see, I don't doubt that the writers listed in the credits penned the scripts, but I do not know that they “wrote” this story.

For starters, these writers are ADAPTING someone else's story, meaning that on the most basic level, none of them have complete creative freedom over the direction of the project, none of them are telling a story that they came up with and have a strong, original vision for. And the original writers of ATLA, Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, also didn't have the creative freedom to tell the story they actually DID come up with, which is why they left the project in 2020. In a blog post published at the time, DiMartino wrote that “whatever version ends up on screen, it will not be what Bryan and I had envisioned or intended to make.” (The Verge)

I don't know what happened in the writer's room when this show was being developed. I don't know who decided what changes should be made, and I definitely don't know WHO had the authority to make them. Because it certainly wasn't the people who came up with the story in the first place.

In 2023 the Writer's Guild of America went on a monumental strike. The agreement they rattified with several major studios – including Netflix – focuses mostly on making sure they get paid fairly, have opportunities for career advancement, and minimum terms of employment... You know, the grown up stuff. But I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that studios who have treated their writers with this level of disposability and disrespect contractually, are disrespecting them creatively as well. You and I will never know what proportion of the final NATLA show was the vision of professional creatives or professional business people. We will never know what choices were motivated by earnest artistic vision and what ones were a consequence of market research. Though we may know who put these words one after another on a piece of paper and called that a teleplay, we will never know with any guaranteed certainty who “wrote” this story.

So there is one last important question to put on the table, one that I suspect some of you have already asked.

Does it matter?

Does it matter that The ATLA Live Action Attempt Number 2 wasn't as fun to watch as the cartoon that came out 20 years ago?

When every day it feels like our planet creeps yet another inch closer towards oblivion, I think it's tempting to say, No, this dumb shit doesn't matter, this is just a lazy cash-grab meant to exploit childhood nostalgia and it's not worth caring about. And if NATLA was a solitary offender, I could agree with that. But it isn't, is it? The reality is that, powerful and profitable as the entertainment industry is, there's still a finite pot of funds available for creative professionals to create professionally. And when massive studios have the power to buy out their smaller competitors, shut down their projects and re-direct that funding towards more “marketable” avenues, then it's really important as both artists and audiences that we are open to conversations about where those funds go. If NATLA really did cost $120 million dollars, then that's $120 million dollars that won't be going towards other stories, potentially original stories that a writer might truly want to tell because they have something they feel is worth saying. In other words, these lazy cashgrabs come at the expense of new art, art that could be beautiful or terrible, art that could be the next Avatar: the Last Airbender or the next Tommy Wiseau's The Room. Art we cannot experience because the money is eaten up by these sorts of unfeeling remakes.

The second reason I care, and I think you should too, is that stories are important. Okay, yeah, it's risky business to suggest that any facet of human behaviour is universal across all cultures and history, but I think it would be difficult for anyone to argue that storytelling, the experience of crafting and listening to stories, is not a compelling candidate for one such human behaviour. It's why we have myths and religion and poetry and paintings and theatre: a human being wanted to SAY something, wanted to translate some thought or emotion inside of them into the outside, into a piece that can be experienced by another human. Film and television is just another medium for that translation to occur.

And while I would never suggest that storytelling itself should be gatekept by any set of professional standards, when your profession IS storytelling, I don't think it's too much to ask that some level of care and thought is put into the piece, especially when it costs people money to interact with it. Also important to add, but stories don't NEED to be saying something grand and meaningful to be well crafted – one of my favourite films of all time is Tremors (1990) and I would find it difficult to parse any philosophical or edifying subtext from that film beyond “Wouldn't it be fucked up if Jaws happened in the Nevada Desert?” But when I watch Tremors with my writer brain slotted in, it's clear that every line is crafted with careful intent – to make me laugh, to make me scared, to make me invest emotions into the characters and the consequences of losing them. I don't think that's such a high bar to set for a professional storyteller: that they care about the story.

If you ask me what Avatar: The Last Airbender is about, I would tell you it's a story about imperialism and war. It's a story about loss and healing. It's a story about the power of friendship and the cowardice of evil. It's a story about cool martial arts fights and magic elemental power. It's a story about a child, the last of his people, who has lost everything and inherited a cruel responsibility. And it's a story about how that child chooses mercy.

When I ask myself what NATLA is about, I feel adrift in my own thoughts. Ostensibly, it HAS to be about the same things as the original, it's functionally the same story in its major plot beats, the same war is happening, the same responsibility exists, the same alliances and rivalries are presented. Yet I cannot bring myself to say NATLA is about these things. Something inside me simply objects, something tells me I have not been told that story. I don't know what story I've been told. I think that's what bothers me the most about the show. I think that's why my heart broke a little everytime there was a scene that worked well and felt purposeful. I can't call it Bad with a capital B, it's definitely not saying Nothing. I just don't think it knows what it is trying to say.

I don't think this problem can be solved, at least not any time soon. As long as there's profit to be made in these strange, sad re-tellings of beloved classics, I don't think the profit machine will stop making them. But that doesn't mean there's nothing we can do. WE can write stories that say something. WE can do the work, ask ourselves what we mean by the words we choose, interrogate our own ideas, craft something that matters to us on the page. It doesn't have to be marketable or popular or profitable, it doesn't even have to be poetic and philosophical, we just have to care about it. Think about it. Feel some pride in it. That will be enough.

The craft of storytelling isn't going anywhere. I really do believe it's a part of being human, an extension of imagination itself. It belongs to each of us, and that's comforting to me. No matter what Netflix is shitting out, there will always be an infinitely increasing bank of stories in the world, and an infinite number of people who might enjoy being told them. If nothing else, I hope this video encourages you to consider writing something yourself, or looking for writing from small, independent artists who don't have millions of dollars to produce their work. Self published novellas, books you find in a charity shop, fanfiction, indie games, ARGs, youtube videos, Cough Cougth webcomics. A lot of people don't realise there's a wealth of stories out there to discover made by ordinary Joes who actually give a shit about what they're making. It helps restore a little faith, for me at least, when I feel a bit of despair over how things are going.

So. If you're still watching, uh, amazing, this video was supposed to be a quick and dirty little whinge about my issues with NATLA's writing habits and it sort of turned into this behemoth and I'm a bit embarrassed about that now. If you liked it, like it, this is my first ever video so that would help me get a feel for whether or not anyone is the same sort of crazy as me and can actually bear to listen to my rambling. If you really enjoyed NATLA, by the way, that's fine, we don't have to be enemies about it, I just felt this was a really disappointing missed opportunity for a potentially cool adaptation. I saw ATLA for the first time as an adult during the Covid-19 lockdowns, and I remember being just blown away by its depth and complexity and how they managed to deliver it all in a package that a child could follow and enjoy. I really think it's a masterpiece of storytelling and I find it really inspiring in my own work. Um, so I guess that's probably why I had so much shite to say about it.