Permanently Deleted
lol we gave a narrative compulsion to a character who had a drive that was largely centered around not wanting the responsibility and fear of failure.
lol we gave a narrative compulsion to a character who had a drive that was largely centered around not wanting the responsibility and fear of failure.
They seem to have forgotten that Aang was barely a teenager when he was told “Hey, kiddo, you’re the chosen one!” “So you’ve gotta stop being a kid and be an adult immediately.”
Then later learns that him doing what makes total sense (and is objectively a correct action) as a kid, not wanting to take on the scary responsibilities of adulthood when they’re still literally a child, winds up with everybody/thing he remembers with love and fondness were brutally destroyed.
They seem to have forgotten that Aang was barely a teenager when he was told “Hey, kiddo, you’re the chosen one!”
Actually he wasn’t a teenager, that was kind of the core of the problem. He wasn’t supposed to be given that burden until he was 16 but the monks smelled the war so they dropped “you need to save the world” on this kid when he was 12.
Aang, waking up from 100 years frozen in an iceberg: “Well that happened!”
Isn’t the story beat “kid fucks around until visiting the old air temple and seeing his dead mentor causes him to freak the fuck out and realize the implications of the war”?
Why do a coming of age story without character development? Why doesn’t Korra start out as a child yelling, “I’m the Avatar! I’m gonna do my best and respect other points of view along the way!”
Isn’t the story beat “kid fucks around until visiting the old air temple and seeing his dead mentor causes him to freak the fuck out and realize the implications of the war”?
Well no actually, “let’s go fuck around with the elephant koi” is actually the episode directly after he finds his home destroyed and his guardian (and everyone else he ever knew) dead.
I think it’s important to the vibes of the show in general. The point of Aang’s journey isn’t “grr the fire nation killed my family now I need revenge.” The catalyst for his fight against the fire nation is Roku telling him that Sozin’s Comet is coming soon and that Ozai is going to lead another major invasion with it. Until that point Aang mostly just wants to help Katara learn to waterbend.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen this show, but the vibe I get is that Aang’s grasp on his power is still very rudimentary, so there’s not much he can do about it in the moment, and so he just wants to take the edge off and have some fun to keep his mind off the fact his people were all murdered after he abandoned the air temple and deprived the world of the avatar for a century.
So all protagonists must be 100% correct and good from the start and know everything and be perfect? No character or narrative growth?
Also why must everything “advance the plot”? Why can’t Aang just do things because their fun? That is a way of telling a story and “advancing the plot” in itself.
Again, if this is how they are dealing with characters, wtf are they going to do with Zuko?
I mean you need some of them, if every episode is made up of full throttle battles and major plot twists, it can get exhausting and actually diminish the value of those plot points/twists and battles. At that point, it might as well be a movie.
Though there is also the problem of too much filler, but filler episodes play a key part in pacing, and providing background information and motivations of characters, fleshing them out.
Yes, I mean it, filler episodes are good
And if they weren’t, One Piece wouldn’t have such a large audience
Counterpoint: Kill la Kill pared everything down as much as possible, eliminating filler and eliminating or truncating redundant animations, and wound up with nearly perfect pacing as a result. Meanwhile something like Hunter x Hunter turned into like 90% filler (or even worse, story progression that was so empty and slow it basically was filler) and became basically unwatchable as a result.
There’s definitely a line where paring things down goes too far, like Cyberpunk Edgerunners was Studio Trigger taking the streamlining a little too far when the story could have had a bit more in places, but in general I can’t help but feel like filler is more a negative to overall pacing and the approach should instead be to control the overall pacing with things that still advance the overall story but are more focused on a narrower tangent, instead of just throwing in completely empty and self-contained filler.
Makes me nostalgic for some series made for TV where you could jump into a random episode and enjoy it even if you weren’t following along the whole plot. Particularly I remember Supernatural having a lot of monster hunting episodes that didn’t really drive the plot but were really fun.
Ok. Between this and reading about how they toned down (or removed) Sokka’s sexism that he overcomes by being humbled by strong female characters, I am now convinced live action Airbender will be bad.
The thing that tipped me off is that they are making a live action Airbender series
the live action one piece is great though, they could have made this not shitty
