Netflix Avatar seems to be fanfiction-flavored. And that’s not even necessarily an insult.
But it is soooo common in ATLA fanfiction for Toph to wrestle with her identity as nobility, while in canon it wasn’t much of a theme beyond the protectiveness her parents specifically had bc of her handicap.
It is soooo common in ATLA fanfiction for Iroh to wrestle with his guilt over participating in genocide (including my own story, WMTE)
The paralleling of the Blue Spirit and The Painted Lady has also been done to death.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I actually enjoyed seeing all of these on screen. Just because something is a miniature, fandom-specific trope, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad.
Iroh should feel this way.
Toph would feel this way.
In fact, coming right off the heels of the Aang movie, which did ZERO, count it ZERO work to forward Toph as a character, I was all the more retroactively delighted, my already-existent excitement enhanced, for her mother to play a role instead of have it be Xin Fu and The Boulder.
But I get the sense that this drastic alteration of lore (Aang and Toph bonding over their love for their respective guardian animals, which I don’t recall being in the original series, and the Bei Fongs being friends to the Avatar, and the compare/contrast of being born into that name and born into the Avatar role)(inserting the Blue Spirit into the Lady Ursa backstory) is setting up Toph/Aang and Zuko/Katara. Especially since there was that season 1 red sash thing that the Z-tara shippers were getting super animated about. With the Blue Spirit doubling up thematically like this, it seems very likely.
I probably wouldn’t mind Taang with these two. It doesn’t have as much of the internalized misogyny and femmephobia flavor that cartoon!Toph did
But Zuko and Katara …? as much as I’ll probably roll my eyes if it turns out that way (I’m not gonna be that kind of salty Kataang shipper tho) or there’s a love triangle or it’s left ambiguous, having a 20 year old actress make out with a 16 year old on camera would be pretty awkward.
Both Katara and Azula are such baby faces that it’s easy to forget just how old the actresses actually are.
I liked the Blue Spirit play thing pretty well, and how they incorporated it into his dream, but Ursa’s overall handling was soooo ham-fisted like … you’re a wife of a warlord family in a pan-Asian historical setting, there is NO way you didn’t know what you were signing up for when you took this marriage contract.
There is no way this was the first time this discussion had taken place, either, even if the story was gonna insist on playing it this way.
season 1 absolutely butchered Buddhist values too, when Gyatso was talking to Aang, and I still low-key want to do a re-write of it
They should have made it more about her lineage derived from the Avatar (c’mon we all know that you can go ahead and make it a plot point) and have Ozai parallel his present-day daughter and be suspicious of his wife’s loyalties, and her trying to subtly steer Zuko away from his fathers’ values while being secretive (not vocal!) about it because wives and concubines that step out of line realistically get beheaded.
I mean even in canon Azula was full on going to slaughter her two best friends because of fascist programming.
(That was brought to the forefront much earlier in NATLA.)
(which I enjoyed having this Azula be even more psychopathic than in canon. Genre-savvy bc she’s in a series of a pre-existing series. I hope that winds up relevant and Azula sees the betrayal coming, and there’s some differently derived drama because of it. Have Mai sweat some, or- have to course-correct. Else, why would they set it up this way? I also liked the characterization of Mai as equally cool-headed and calculating. Even though I do miss how she and Ty Lee play off of each other as Light Feminine and Dark Feminine trope as foil characters. But, I recognize that cartoon contrast was a bit shallow in season 2 and to have them both be equally as brutal and on-board with Azula being on the warpath is more fitting to the tone of this show.)
(TBH I wrote original!Mai as absolutely having killed people, given her skillset)
The trite conflict between Ursa and Ozai felt like it was ripped straight from a series for kindergarteners, an even less mature audience than the original. (Although it does bring back fond memories of a fic called Morality Chain where it postulated what canon would’ve looked like if Zuko and Azula did actually consider each other siblings in a conventional sense. Storgic shipping yay!) WHY can’t we ever see Mike and Bryan’s original vision for Ursa, who loved Ozai and was on board with everything, but then things gradually splintered … why do we have to have these stupid handed-off graphic novels and adaptations that make her look more like an anachronistic and Western values type woman.
And why do you have to steal Zuko’s spotlight by having his compassion so overtly cultivated by Ursa. (original concept Ursa, never the twain should meet) This makes it such that the prince’s intervening in the war council and his mangling was practically her fault. For failing, in a meta sense, to recognize the setting. For setting her son up to fail, rather than teaching him to be discreet in his disagreements, and using charm or machinations as would be more fitting for the royal court. His care for the soldiers is derived directly from her. Instead of being a shining character moment for Zuko.
This back and forth between Ursa and her husband- you’re begging the literal Brother of the future Blood Emperor by Divine Right to ease up??- do you know where you are??- took me so far out of the story that the cultural trappings of a puppet play can only rescue it so much. And then, THAT didn’t even make much sense either, bc there’s no way OZAI of all people would allow his children- of all the blatant propagandizing we’ve seen that the Nation does to its own citizens- to watch any story where a fire user was the bad guy.
It would’ve been cooler if Ursa had taken her children to see such semi-blasphemous content in secret a few times, perhaps as her family was Avatar-derived, flanked by a couple of Fire Sages to be a nod to the one loyal one in the original- so when she came to collect the two siblings in the middle of the night, that’s where they thought they were going.
Only for it to take a darker turn.
