Review: The Two Big Problems with ATLA (Spoilers).

Yesterday, I posted about everything that was good about the show Avatar: The Last Airbender, however, I failed to talk about the problems that I had with it. If you haven’t read my last post, go back and read it, but for those of you who have, you know that I have no major grievances with ATLA. It’s a good show with awesome worldbuilding, characters, and animation. However, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have issues. All works of fiction are bound to have plot holes here and there and being able to recognize that is a good thing. So here are the two big problems I had while watching Avatar: The Last Airbender

#1: Ozai is Kinda Meh

For the big bad of the series, he was the villian that I was the most bored by. In season one of ATLA, Zuko and General Zhao were the main baddies but you were mostly interested in Zuko since you understood his backstory and why he was acting the way he was. In season two, the big bads were Long Feng – the cunning leader of the Dai-Li – and Azula. Both were clearly villians, but were entertaining to watch. You had a clear knowledge of Long Feng’s motivations to take over the Earth Kingdom and Azula, though you didn’t know much about her backstory at the time, was peak entertainment value as she was always one step ahead of everyone. Finally in season three, we finally meet Ozai and he’s just kinda…there. He just seems to be chaotic evil for the sake of being chaotic evil.

Why’s he like that? We don’t know.

You could say that his motivation is greed and a lust for power, but there’s still the question of why. What happened to him that made him want that power that badly? Was he just kinda born that way since he was likely always raised with a silver spoon in his mouth? Or did something happen to him that made him want to wipe out the other benders so that fire could reign supreme?

It’s this lack of background for our big bad that makes him such a boring character to watch and makes us want to watch the other villians in the show more. In my opinion, the season three main villian wasn’t Ozai; it was Azula. She is a dynamic or round vilian. Her backstory was slowly revealed throughout the show and we get to see how she was always favored by her father over her brother, which would clearly put a lot of pressure on her to be perfect to an unhealthy extent for the sake of pleasing Ozai so she would become the Fire Lord in his stead. This pursuit of toxic perfectionism also leads her to reject anything that might make her feel weak, all for the sake of power and that is what makes Azula so evil and a far more interesting character, to the extent where there are hundreds of YouTube videos that do deepdives into her psychology. If the writers had even put a little bit of thought into Ozai’s backstory, he would’ve improved as a villian a lot.

To sum up: Ozai is an example of a flat villian. He is there to serve as the main antagonist and that’s pretty much it, which stands in stark contrast with the other antagonists we had met in past seasons.

#2: The Power of the Earth Kingdom is Way Understated

Throughout the series, we are constantly reminded how powerful the different nations and the Avatar are. The Avatar is a 10/10, the Water Tribe is maybe a 5/10 on the threat scale, the Airbenders are maybe a 3/10 when they don’t have Avatar powers, the Kyoshi Warriors are a 5/10, the Fire Nation is basically a 8 or 9/10, and the Earth Kingdom is portrayed as being a 5 to 7/10 when it – in reality – would be much higher. You can argue that the Earth Kingdom is actually super powerful and should be rated higher, but the reason why I would rank them that low is because every time the Fire Nation attacks them, they somehow always get defeated unless they’re the bad guys. I realize that not everyone in the Earth Kingdom is a bender, but when the majority of your military know how to Earthbend, use it!

Realistically, if you had a group of people who could rearrange the terrain, control magma, move literal mountains by just doing some karate stances, can control metals and ores (later on, at least), and build giant cities by raising them out of the ground, you would not want to piss them off. Even though the Fire Nation is very industrial and does have war machines that can deal a lot of damage, much of its army still walks instead of riding in heavily armored vehicles. When you take that into account, they would be easy pickings for the Earth Kingdom.

Fire Nation’s attacking you? Just get a bunch of Earthbenders and instead of yeeting boulders at the heavily armored vehicles from your wall, just take the ground they’re standing on and flip it over. Congratulations. You’ve just buried several hundred people alive and your capitol is safe.

In fact, you could take that power even further and use that to attack the Fire Nation capitol and all of their prisons and provinces. You probably wouldn’t even need that many people. You could send some people to the capitol, throw down the walls and – since the capitol is on a volcano – flood it with magma. The reign of the Fire Lord is over and you’re now the ruler of the world because no one’s going to go up against the Earth.

Why didn’t anyone think of this?

Until next time,

M.J.