Stories are a wonderful wonderful thing, with a special ability to touch us in ways few things can accomplish. Stories can captivate us, make us feel love, hatred, happiness, sadness, and all sorts of emotions. They can even teach us lessons, teach us about things we may have never known before, and can change how we view the world and ourselves forever. Typically, stories will feature certain morals and themes, views of the world, and ideas to learn from characters, contrasts and comparisons between them, ways characters face certain issues and how they affect them, and more. We often see these done for certain views and ideas of the world and the many ways characters work with them, but so rarely does a story come along with an ability to take many different ways of viewing and living in the world, and examine them so deeply in such a way that is easy to understand, and yet still be able to captivate us and tell multiple different deep tales. Really, I’ve never seen a story do this so superbly, well……until I met a little series called Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Avatar: The Last Airbender is your usual run of the mill great story, it’s got great deep characters that change and develop, a great story with nice twists here and there, a fun immersive fantasy world with lots of mythology, great consistent humor to laugh at and enjoy, great drama and evolving changing relationships between characters, great action battles and fights, etc. Like many of my favorite stories, it’s able to hit all of these marks in a splendid elegant manner, however, there’s one thing I noticed in Avatar: The Last Airbender that I’ve not seen in stories before, or at least, seen done so well.
In Avatar: The Last Airbender, we are given 4 different elements, 4 different views on the world, 4 different ways of living, fighting, governing, befriending, and more, and we see these 4 different views fleshed out considerably in ways you rarely see, and by some miracle, the show is able to flesh out all 4 so well, while never once saying one is better than the other, which so so many stories fall to and end up doing. And what’s even greater, is that these 4 different ways of functioning aren’t overly complicated. They can all be shrunk down to one simple sentence, and one simple image to symbolize them perfectly; the 4 elements themselves.
So now, I’d like you to join me, as I go through the 4 elements of Avatar, the 4 nations, the 4 different ways of living, and explore them to the smallest detail, and see how the creators of this series so beautifully crafted all 4 ideas in every little part of the TV show known as Avatar: The Last Airbender.
In this blog entry I will be listing links to each part as they release, so they can easily be kept and organized here:
Volume 2: ?????
Volume 3: ????
Volume 4: ???
No comments:
Post a Comment