Netflix Avatar is a Disaster - Part 1 

I still can't get over the fact that they dumbed down a LITERAL GENOCIDE all so they could have a "cool action scene."

Moral of the story: JUST LET ANIMATION STAY AS ANIMATION.

In the their valiant quest to rid the series of sexism, Netflix lobotomized Katara…

The part where Aang went into the Avatar state and said, "The Air Nomads had their chance!" and then broke Monk Gyatso's neck made me cry.

Netflix Avatar doesn't even try to work for it''s payoff, yet acts like it deserves it. What pisses me off is that the REAL version didn't have to explain every bloody thing to get it's point across and hit those narrative gut-punches. It used good dialogue, great characters, and excellent animation. It didn't have to talk down to its audience like a teacher in a head injury ward. Just like every single live action adaptation, it guts itself to appeal to an ungrateful demographic that probably weren't going to appreciate it in the first place. Now they suddenly don't have an audience at all and scratch their heads thinking, "Well if we try it AGAIN it'll work this time!"

The thing hurting this show the most is nepotism. This affected the writing (the head netflix writer is a sports journalist) But also the direction. (Again, rookies) You can tell the young actors were left unsupervised and with minimal number of takes. Thus the bland katara and overserious aang. There are also a lot of basic mistakes in filming (lighting is médiocre, dutch plan wasn t mastered, same for dialogues) This lead to an overuse of small sets with greenscreens. You can tell they are on one in any scene where they end up doing the walking- while-talking thing... It s a sad waste of a great cast, lots of money and a waiting fanbase. With 150millions dollars, one can imagine what good writers and directors could do with such a cast.

The air nomads all gathering at the southern air temple to pay reverence to the newly-discovered avatar would’ve made way more sense than them gathering to that particular temple-where the newly discovered avatar came from-than simply going there for the comet festival. And even that would’ve still be unnecessary. In the cartoon, Sozin explains he hit all the air temples to leave no stone unturned. They didn’t have to all be in one place for the genocide to occur.

The "All airbender will be here" is such an easy thing to solve. Just a single like of Giazo saying, "This time its souther temple's to hold the celebration"

Yours is the first video I’ve seen where someone actually mentioned the idiocy of Sozin’s plan, specifically regarding the probability of some airbenders going to help the earth kingdom, which throws a huge wrench into his whole plan. I was starting to think I was imagining that detail…

the whole “Wolf Cove” thing honestly bothers me a lot ‘cause in the cartoon, the fact that there’s literally only half a dozen women, some elderly women, and a bunch of kids under like, 8 max, is genuinely important. You feel how utterly vulnerable they are and can understand why Sokka is so excessive with his warrior attitude and drills. Heck, he has *lived* through a Fire Nation raid and lost his mom from it. The possibility of it happening again is very real to him. Then with Katara, we can imagine how she probably felt over the years, hoping that one of those little kids would turn out to be a bender….and then it never happens. Now all the men are gone and there’s no more chances for another bender to be born in her tribe until the men get back from the war or those little kids grow into adults and either have kids with each other. Not to mention marriage and child prospects for Katara! She obviously can’t marry her _brother_ (not *that* kind of Game of Thrones, please I beg) and her only other option is to either wait for one of the kids to become an old enough adult (ew, I know) or the men come back and she becomes one of _their_ wives. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t remember the men of the Water Tribe being particularly on the young side. Same thing goes for Sokka in the marriage department. And until either of them find lovers or the men come back from the war, the village is stagnant in number. It cannot grow-it can only lose. But in the live action, there’s a bunch of people, they feel far less vulnerable and weakened as a tribe, and there’s fellow teens and tweens around their age that could be future prospective lovers (and therefore, future prospective *fellow waterbenders* especially for Katara) which means that the village can continue to grow in number much faster than it could in the original show. It’s just a completely different state of war-torn and affected that I don’t think conveys the extent to which the Fire Nation _devastated_ the Southern Water Tribe, especially since by calling it “Wolf Cove” you’re implying it’s not the only village-so are there no waterbenders in other villages? Implications are such an important thing to consider when writing a narrative.

I'm so glad to see someone think to the future and bring up how tf are they gonna handle things like the final agni kai if _that_ was the commet boost?

You know Netflix truly effed up when you have to praise some points of M. Night Shyamalan’s movie in comparison to the Netflix series lmao

Idk. calling it "Wolf Cove" just makes me think: "What kind of wolf? In this world animals usually are always hybrids...with few exceptions. " I have not seen anybody talk about hat one yet.

Ty for calling out the firebending in the genocide. It looks like regular fire bending. It shows such a lack of understanding on how bending works. There was a few moments like this. Aang flying, aang holding up two giant boulders with no movment, the carts in omashu traveling upwards. The list goes on.

The scipt is awful but the worst thing about this show is the direction. Period. Literally every dialogue scene is just the characters stiffly standing around spouting exposition at each other without any camerawork, no motion, no emotion. It honestly felt like I was watching an armature high school play or something…

during ww2 in FOUR YEARS they manage to kill an estimated of 6 millions jews and had 5 million prisoners…now, why is so hard for netflix to graps the concept that there is not a single Air Nomad left AFTER 100 YEARS OF HUNTING, even in the comics of ATLA general Zao tells Aang that Sozin and Azulan dedicated their reign to kill air nomads along side with southern water bender (in case the avatar was reborn) and taking earth kingdom Territory

They were so worried about adding the characters to cool scenes that they forgpt to add the characters _to_ the characters

A little tid-bit I learned from another video that had insider info: The exposition dump was intentional. The target audience during test screenings were people that knew nothing of Avatar, and were confused by the original story beats. This was supposed closer to the original pacing, went through several drafts, and was changed so that those people had no question on what was going on. Instead of focusing on the fan base with their story, they essentially tried to dip into fans and newbies at the same time. This show is entirely built around telling the audience what's going on.

My favourite review channel making a video about my most hated show of the year?? Today is a good day

Ember island players have more accuracy and emotions than the netflix adaptation. Also why are all the air nomads gathering in one place? Aren't they supposed to aid the earth nation since sozins attack plan is leaked?

Hey this isn’t a creepypasta

There is no Avatar the last Airbender live action adaptation in ba sing se

False flag? I guess you could say those Firebenders really… Glow in the dark?

It's interesting that you’re pointing out stuff the movie did do that the Netflix show didn't, because that was my thought as well when watching it. I mean, the movie is still bad, and objectively the Netflix show is better, but I still found it fascinating that certain things in the live-action show got me praising things in the bad movie. :P

There's so much lore and potential with other parts of the Avatar universe that could be adapted, but they keep trying to remake the same thing. Say what you will about Korra but at least it tried to tell its own story, however divisive it may be. I'm just tired of them trying to remake something that's already phenomenal as is.

And when the world needed him most... he made a video talking about Avatar of Thrones

i personally cannot get over how bad sozin's beard looks

God damn, can ANYBODY make an actual faithful adaptation of this fantastic show? First we got that awful movie, and now we get this show that was built up for so long to be some great achievement, but every single news story about it made it sound worse and worse lol.

I always felt the attack on the Air Nomads was more then just about this incarnation of the Avatar. I thought it was Sozin trying to break the cycle.

The original creators said that the fire nation used the dragons to find the air temples and ambush them from the back of the dragons

You know it's going to be an "interesting" show when a Shyamalan adaptation is compared positively to it.

LoK has a lot of script issues specially season 2. But I still think season 3 and korra herself save that show

It's so interesting seeing the amount of things this show gets wrong that the Shyamalan movie somehow got right. It must have taken actual effort to get that wrong.

Imagen if the Firenation conducted four simultaneous raids on the four Airnation temples. We woudnt even need a close up fight, it would have been way more epic if we just got wide shots of the four tembles, but just waves of fire exploding from the windows and courtyards, under a blood red sky. The wight of the genocide has been completely snuffed. The fight with Boomie has more of an umpf, and it would save on the budget.

I was taking this screen writing course and the instructor said one of the signs of a skilled/experienced writer is his ability to have budget in mind. Your video has given me a glaring example of the truth of his statement.

I love it when Netflix saya It's Avatar time, and proceeds to ruin yet another live action avatar

This is the most mortifying creepypasta you've reviewed yet! Luckily it's as real as revenge of the jungle trap!

Yeah, Sokka and Katara no longer make any sense. Because Sokka's character arc has been deleted from the bloody story.

And aang flying is just not good. You have to let go of your earthly attachments and like Yangchen said the avatars soul duty is the world

What's worse is that the pilot for the netflix series covers the events of the first 3 episodes of original animated series, with almost the same runtime between the two. Netflix wastes SO MUCH time in this series, when the original animation had little to no problems with this.

The Harry Potter 1 level of CGI character rendering in the exposition sequence was painful to watch

It is impressive and concerning how often you brought up the movie understanding what the cartoon did at points and keeping them instead of changing them like the Netflix show did

I really want to see an actual critique from someone who's never seen ATLA before because it can't POSSIBLY just be the ATLA fans who see the issues with the actual quality of the show. It seems like everyone who likes NATLA hasn't actually thought that deeply about it. I do think there are some things to like, but I'm tired of people acting like fans are overreacting when they critique the show heavily.

I've said this in another RU-vidr video but I would have LOVED it if the water tribe village was a migrating tribe because they were so small. At least on their own land. That and it would have been really cool to learn that they followed their food source. Using the fire nation wreck as a land marker would have been nice btw. All they would have to show is Katara help set up camp and sombody mention that they'd be moving within a few days, to a week or whatever. Then that could give reason to why Sokka and Katara go out fishing and essentially finding Aang. Added note I wish we could see how they got sea cucumbers. Like they are attatched to sea weed or something?

Glad to see fish is making up for not posting on Halloween last year

They should have altered his intention to be to flush out the avatar, and that the genocide continued because the avatar never showed.

Amazing breakdown comparison! Most in depth analysis I’ve seen so far! Great video!

Saw this coming a mile away, like look how bad they treated one piece

Unnecessary changes baffle me

I don’t know if it’s just me, but from the moment I saw the cold open with the earth kingdom spy, it instantly felt like a straight up rip off of the spy scene from Rogue One. Really bizarre.

Good writing could have made the genocide scene heart breaking and powerful. Your point on it just being an action scene is so valid I can't believe I didn't think of that. With good camera work and proper dialogue, the writers could have connected us to the airbenders and shown the tragedy of their genocide much more effectively.

The issue with controlled flight without glider is, **WHY DO WE EVEN HAVE A GLIDER ??**

Paku could be sexist but Sokka couldn’t? That’s weird

I love how in depth you are going with your takes on this show (that was dumbed down to a point of pain and contradicted and caused unnecessary plotholes for itself) and I love the snark. also… yay, a fellow disliker of Legend of Korra! (love ATLA to death and have watched it multiple times, but gave up on LoK somewhere in the middle)

Hey, fsoas, have you thought about creating a gaming channel where you could do stuff like tell people how to use not good TF2 wrapons?

When ppl say it’s a good show hadnt seen the show

Someone said this feels like if the ember island players made a new play about it like 20 years later when they started unpacking the facism of the fire nation before ozai's defeat, and honestly i think that's my headcanon for what the hell is happening here

That's a beautiful music selection you got going for this vid, Donkey Kong Country Music rocks. Also Route 216 hell yeah

Bro.....this analysis is BRUTAL!!!! And also completely deserved. 😂

Avatar State Yip Yip!

also in the original, the fire nation colonised earth kingdom territory ehile Roku was still alive and no one went to help

Thought I’d been recommended an E:R vid, instead a pleasant surprise to see this channel uploading.

Re: Sozin's plan regarding the avatar. I think he and Jiao had different ideas and different concepts of their abilities. Ultimately Jiao is a small man who wants to leave his mark on history. Sozin was the Fire Lord. I think Sozin's plan was to sort of "chase " the avatar back into a fire incarnation, which he could then control . We do know, after all, that after he thought he might have killed the air nomad avatar, he kept up raids on the Southern Water Tribe, which is where the Avatar was supposed to be born next in the cycle (it seems the avatar shifts from both element to element and tribe to tribe), and seemed intent on capturing all the waterbenders. He was looking, essentially, for Korra. Not realizing Aang was still alive.

Damn the explanation at 23:51 gave me goose bumps 😅. Such a great way to express the power boost!

When the world needed him most he returned

Man even as a standalone series this would suck. Like the visuals are awesome imo, if it had even half decent dialogue it could be good

Ngl I didn’t expect you to make a video on this. Nice to get a notification from your channel after so long tho 😂

Bro i didn’t realize you had this channel

The problem is not that you can’t make live action from a beloved animated series. The problem is doing it right. Better call Saul is on par with the original Braking Bad, because the creators took something that was great and tried to make it even better.

This is the first person I've seen who thinks the movie was better

Netflix avatar “a Marble Hornets Story”

The way they claimed they were making the show 'less sexist' and their way of doing that was removing the scene where Katara angrily points out she does the chores for him and STANDING UP FOR HERSELF and changing it to Sokka essentially telling her to get back in the kitchen instead of waterbend lmao

My dude went from critiqueing Creepypastas to Netflix adaptations... nice

Right off the bat I was HEAVILY CRITICAL on my watch. Like for example why WAS there a earthbending soldier in the fire nation's capital city? That meant somebody sent him there "TO" spy or his party he was with had been taken out in a ambush. That info was left out so I'm guessing on that idea. I don't think he would have gotten far to begin with but the guy was not even trying to escape. Like creating a wall BEHIND himself instead of in front. A small self-preservation would have been nice. 4:24 I have to ask... Wouldn't they ALREADY know? I mean the airbenders wouldn't susspect a betrayl coming before so wouldn't they have mentioned to the fire sages that the next avatar HAD BEEN FOUND? That they were just waiting for him to grow up?

I don’t even know why you would try to make a live action The Last Airbender adaptation. It’s hard to think of a worse ip to do a live action adaptation. Best case scenario, you get an inferior and redundant version of an already existing show and, worst case scenario, you get the M. Night Shyamalan film.

Korra doesn't suck. At least that's what I believe now that this is out.

I had a headcannon that you and OverAnalysing Avater are relatives, now this has become true

when I sat down and watched this with my mom and little sister, I suddenly realized who's intended audience this was aimed at. This show were for people who, like my mom specifically, refused to watch the original due to it being a "cartoon for children" (my mom strays away from a lot of goated media aimed at children despite her love for Marvel and DC comics. Its for kids afterall; theres no serious themes going on for adults to enjoy... obviously... 🙄🙄🙄). She likes the show. Kinda. She did say it was confusing and hard to follow, and thus, with her having untreated and undiagnosed ADHD, she lost interest in watching the show very quickly. My sister too lost interest for being confused... which is funny in hindsight for all the expo dump they do throughout the first few episodes 💀 The majority of the time watching I had to fill them in on scenes that didn't make sense because they took out parts that would've been perfect had they did a 1 to 1 recreation (like how they showed the ice orb but not Aang inside of it, so my mom was confused as to where he appeared from, thinking he spawned from the light that came from it. She was also confused where Appa came from since they didn't show him inside the orb with him either. During that iconic Aang talking to himself scene my mom was like "...Well that was weird. Who the hell was he talking to, us? Was that supposed to be a 4th wall break?"). Now, that being said, I don't mind adaptations not copying beat for beat of the story they're based off of. I encourage a retelling, thats what makes it cool to watch for viewers who already know the story after all! ...But god damn, *make it make sense* 😭 I'm on my knees begging.

23:41 holy crap, that was great "it's like the air itself is screaming in pain" 😂

25:44 I think the way Gyatso dealt with those firebenders is that he kept himself hidden in the room while dozens of those firebenders are looting the place. And since even he doesn't stand a chance against comet-enhanced firebenders, his only way to defeat them is to suck the air out of the room and let everyone suffocate, including himself.

Gotta chase that algo, bro!

Honestly Sozin's comet looks kinda week in the live action ngl

Netflix is on a streak

THANK YOU! Sozin's misdirection, and the genocide overall made no fucking sense. I couldn't get over the show starting this way. And it is alarming how many positive reviews liked this change, even though the logic of it doesn't work. And it's alarming that we can literally point to scenes the atrocious movie did better. This essay is nailing all the problems (big and small), perfectly.

I looooooooved this one. Even though they did King Bumi wrong. But I understood the need for exposition.

27:16 I believe the name was actually revealed a few years ago in Avatar Legends? (I definitely remember finding the name on wiki before the show released). I think it is the same roleplaying game that people were saying confirmed that guns existed in the Avatar universe

I love all the begrudging bits of praise you give the movie for getting some things right. Just adds to the fact that the supposed redemption is in some regards even worse than the previous try. I'll add one of my own as i prefer the movie costumes. Sure they aren't as colourful as either version of the show, but they look more like actual clothes, not cosplay pieces. The winter clothes in this version bother me especially cuz they just look so thin and flimsy, where both the og show and the movie had them looking all warm and thick. Also the wigs, especially Yue's, movie did it 100 times better.

The firebending was so weak during the comet in the live action. It just looked like normal firebending. It seriously took 3 firebenders combined to take out 1 air nomade smh

Cant wait to see part 10!

Vibing with the sotn back track

Why does it seem like everything animated MUST have a live action adaptation? Do studio executives assume something is somehow better purely because it looks realistic?

Take a Shot whenever Fishstick says a varient on "The Movie was better!"

Your back!!!!!

Missed ya fishstick. Glad to see you uploading a new video on this channel!

I watched this show with rose tinted glasses I am now realizing... I just saw that some characters were similar to the originals, some scenes were faithful or at least competent, and I had just gotten done watching the original show over the course of 2 days when I was more sick, so I was craving more Avatar. I kinda feel shortsighted..

Father's back with the milk

I don’t know why I think them copying the man of steel scene is so funny lmao

It's not like fingers in the pie, it's like order a pie and finding a bunch of fucking hair in it. Why the fuck didn't the pie come the way I expected it, It's like ordering french fries, and watching the manager grab the fucking french fries, rip them in half, place them in front of me, look at me and have the balls to say, have a good day.

Honestly this show did one thing really well ,it made me rewatch the original

Okay, I didn't watch this series, and I hadn't seen much clips from it, but now I saw this video, I finally can say: what the heck did they do to firebending, again? It seems like no one can do it. No, not the CG. The movements. Suddenly firebenders mostly do open-handed firebending now? The original show didn't hire a martial arts expert to make the movements of each element bending distinctive. My favourite movements from firebending are the fire-shooting fist punch and fire-shooting feet. I am probably wrong, but open palm fire in the original series usually used as a statement of power rather than usual fighting. I didn't want to repeat this all over again because I turned away from the first live action adaptation as soon as I saw firebenders there, and yet here I am again.