These instances apart, the show is littered with other subversions: Aang’s first instinct as the hero was to run away from his problems (not something you’d expect a Chosen One to do), Zuko’s first big moment of redemption becomes his biggest failure, and so on and so forth. The twist at the very end also comes not from whether Aang beats the Fire Lord (everyone and their mother knows he’s going to), but how he does it without killing him and sacrificing his pacifist ideals. There is no in-depth psychology, no Pensieve plumbing the depths of his mind and his past actions the man is pure evil, a target to be taken down, nothing more or less. What instead fills the gap as a proxy is the devastation and suffering the Fire Nation causes in nearly every place the protagonists visit. Hell, we don’t even see the man’s face till the final season. The most surprising one of them all is how the main antagonist, the Fire Lord, gets absolutely no characterization. In a surprising turn of events, this advice almost kills Aang, and in the rest of the series, he follows the direct opposite of the man’s advice (relying on his comrades instead of pushing them away), all the way to the end, and it works out just fine. Here too, we get the equivalent of Yoda teaching Luke Skywalker the old ways of the Jedi in the form of Guru Pathik, who promises ultimate power to Aang through Buddha-like detachment. Most fantasy stories also have what I call a cult of the ancient, where ancient powers/ideas/things eventually end up helping the protagonist emerge victorious. She ends up winning the tournament, and later becomes the brash, tough member of Team Avatar. The whole notion of ‘destiny’ and ‘prophecy’ is mocked. The writers were just getting warmed up.Įnter the second season, and we get Toph, the earth-bender, who’s introduced in a hilarious parody of the WWE there’s a character called the ‘Boulder’, (a clear reference to the Rock), who gets his groin torn by this seemingly frail, 12-year-old, blind girl. Then the episode moves on to a volcano that’s about to erupt, and sets up the future romance between Aang and Katara. The prophet ominously declares that Aang is at the forefront of the war between good and evil, the last hope for the world, and our hero just….shrugs it off (‘yeah yeah, we already knew that!’), more interested in his future dating life. We’ve been down this road in most other epic fantasy sagas said fortune teller gives you a rhyme that you can comprehend about 10% of currently, and then it sets you down the road to beat the villain, along with some handy clues.īut the whole thing is continuously played for laughs. It was around the third time I was watching it, and I was at the episode ‘The Fortune Teller’, which is about the trio of Aang, Katara and Sokka visiting a village where there was a famous fortune teller whose predictions were always accurate. But there’s also another not so well-discussed ingredient that makes it pretty compelling (at least to me): the show’s constant effort to subvert common fantasy story tropes in unexpected ways.