I’ve just finished watching The Last Airbender, a 2024 live-action TV series. It’s part of a franchise started by Nickelodeon back in 2005. As you may know, Nickelodeon started as a pay TV channel owned by Paramount back in 1979 and is aimed at children. I’d previously watched a number of episodes, perhaps a whole season, in an earlier animated version of the Airbender story.
Whew!
Here’s how Wikipedia glosses the current series, which is set in an Asia-inspired fantasy world:
The series is set in a war-torn world inspired by various Asian and Indigenous Americans cultures where certain people can “bend” [telekinetically manipulate] one of the four classical elements—water, earth, fire or air. Aang, the "Avatar" and the last living Airbender, is the bridge between the mortal and spirit worlds, and the only one capable of bending all four of the elements instead of just one. The Avatar maintains the balance of the world and nature to bring peace, and Aang is now faced with the responsibility of ending the ambitions of the militaristic Fire Nation to conquer the world. With his new companions Katara and Sokka, Aang sets out to master the four elements while pursued by Zuko, the exiled crown prince of the Fire Nation, who seeks to regain his honor by capturing him.
That’s the basics.
Now, what’s it all about? I’m not asking that question in any deep sense. I’m certainly not aiming for an interpretation of the whole story, not here, not now (& probably not never).
I’m interested in the fact that the story is obviously aimed at tweens, children between, oh, 11 and 15. It’s a bit too violent for younger kids and just a bit too simplistic for older ones. It’s fairly clear-cut. It’s a coming-of-age story involving good and evil, with some gradations in between.
Coming-of-age? Then central character, Aang, the Avatar, is 12. His close companions are a couple of years older, but not so powerful. His nominal opponent, Prince Zuko, is in his mid or late teens. These kids have various adult mentors helping and guiding them.
A key fact is that it is a story that is about the Whole World. It’s not a story that takes place within a world whose boundaries are never indicated. This world is divided into four nations, nations characterized by four traditionally recognized elements: fire, air, water, and earth. That creates a closure for the world. The Avatar’s role is to learn the four powers associated with the four elements and thereby unite the world. The overall scheme is simple and clear cut. The important point it seems to me, though, is that there is a scheme, and it is graspable.
It’s the intelligible wholeness that’s central. Are stories for younger kids like that? I’m not sure, but at the moment I’m thinking they’re not. They may involve fantasy elements, creatures and worlds, but we’re always fully within some world. We assume, by default, that it is the world; but we’re never shown the scheme. Here we are.
Similarly, stories aimed at adults, give up the idea that there’s an intelligible scheme. Gravity’s Rainbow may span a large swath of earth, it may be riven with signs and portents, but there’s never map of the whole. The Star Trek universe may be divided into quadrants, but none of them is fully known, or knowable. And so on.
In the course of the story our hero, Aang, has various adventures, undergoes various tests, meets various earlier Avatars (of which he is the current incarnation). I’m sure there is an order to all that, perhaps not one that’s been consciously schemed out, but an order nonetheless. It would be worth working it out, but not here and now, for me.
More later.
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