Is Avatar the Last Airbender anarchist propaganda that will teach your kids to destroy the world? Let’s look at the evidence.
Number one, I wanna go back to when the show debuted. This was the hum-drum storm known as the 2000s, an era in American history defined by emo eyeliner and bombs in foreign countries. George Bush, the son of former president George Bush, was in power, or was he? Were all his words the mark of an evil vizier?
Then, along comes Avatar.
What in the fucking gentrification is this shit?
This show is the story of Aang- a mad dog career criminal who totally escaped from Pulp Fiction. He does not obey authority to any degree, but instead breaks laws. Despite being a capital c Criminal, he is the protagonist of this story.
How does the show accept this? Well, you see, according to Avatar, we are all just giant toddlers in one great big plastic playpen in an alternate dimension where the president is actually a chud and every day is April Fools.
It was while writing that last line when I remembered: in the 2000’s, one of my brother's friends told me how Zuko’s mom left him when he was a kid, thereby damaging him for life and making his worldview so "dark" and "doom"y. This of course parallels John Lennon, who as we all know, made the song “Revolution Number 9”, a nine minute song with zero hooks and lots of strange, chaotic noises. Holy shit, did I fucking call it or what??? Once a bad egg, always a bad egg.
Zuko is a personification of the 2000’s nu-metal angst. His myspace username was "tortured_by_pain". And, yes, Zuko grew his hair long, at one point tried to dread it, wore chains and saggy pants, bought a guitar he never learned to play, and smoked behind dumpsters. What a loser. And then, the gang just what, forgives him? What is this, a bunny sanctuary?
Many episodes include characters breaking out of jail as well as resisting government authority, things we know are at best unethical and at worst illegal. The show’s fucking message is that it’s inhuman to commit human rights violations against someone. Any someone, regardless of what they’ve done to others. That is literally reinforced during all the sad music moments. How could anyone think that? Everyone knows that you lose all human rights when you do something bad, but these idiot children can’t comprehend that.
The dumb populace of this empire, like the idiots they are, love freedom. Unfortunately, they’ve never read Thomas Hobbes, so they’re too stupid to know that they have no brains!
You know what the final message the show preaches? Apparently, killing people is “wrong”. What the fuck? Gag. Me. With. A. Cafeteria. Spoon! You cannot make life cinematically life-affirming. This show should be offensive to anyone who’s ever shot someone for no reason.
Moving on, you know what’s unrealistic? In Avatar, police are portrayed as tall, muscular creatures. Have you ever seen a fit cop? Obviously not. If cops could actually run or lift heavy objects, they'd have solved all the crime by now. Alas, all the fit people in society are swallowed up by the sports industry.
The universe of Avatar consists of a variety of kinds of people: war criminals, hippies, white rastafarians, homosexual cowboys, evil teachers, all things dreamed up by the minds of wannabe philosophers like Hunter Thompson. None of these people have ever really existed, they just appear in the media often because they’re easy to write about.
The children in this show are not in school, which is where children should be. Why? Just look at what happens whenever they step outside: objects are broken constantly, there’s excessive property damage, crashes and explosions, people lose eyes, heads go flying. Oh, the humanity.
(Please, somebody stop me. I'm getting bored of being damn right all the damn time.)
Not only do our protagonists probably curl up with herbal tea and pray on crystals, they most likely exercise on those bikes that don’t go anywhere. Why do those exist? What’s the point of a bike if it doesn’t take you to a different place?
And don’t even get me started on Toph, the precious child wrestler. This kid is literally hired by the gang, for what I assume is a high paying job. Does she actually perform the expected services? No, all she does is sit around all day, farting her thumbs, while war crimes happen around her. Typical millenial.
Just look at the dead, soulless eyes on all these fire nation generals. They live for the sexual gratification of murder. Their “victims” all want to cry like little babies, but they can't break yet because - somehow - this isn't the opening scene of City of God. Though the entire thing reeks of How Could This Happen to Me?
Why don’t any of these "oppressed people” ever stop to think, “Hey maybe it’s not the fault of the government, it’s my parents, who didn’t take me to school and instead installed criminal virtues into my head.” It’s about personal responsibility, something you can’t know if you’re some snot-nosed punk who goes around breaking laws and people out of prison.
So, there it is. Despite my complaints, I do like the funny little monkey and the music, so I’d still give it an 8 out of 10. I think my biggest problem is that I hate bald children: Charlie Brown, that kid from the Matrix, the kids from Minority Report, yeah. I think it’s because, when I was a baby, I had no hair, and that was a very stressful time for me.
