Netflix's Avatar: The Last Airbender Remake Is Rewriting the Series in the Fire Nation's Favor

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Netflix's Avatar: The Last Airbender Season 2.]

Netflix's Avatar: The Last Airbender is checkered with many misguided changes to its source material, but there's one, placed right at the end of its second season, that might have just broken the series entirely.

Season 2 is a mostly messy adaptation with a muddy throughline to its titular hero, Aang (Gordon Cormier), but if you squint, you can see the loose beats of his journey to realize his destiny as the Avatar — the bridge between the physical world and the spiritual, and (in a fantasy realm where select individuals can "bend" one of the four natural elements) the only being who can control them all. He's mastered air and water already, and he's well on his way to learning to bend earth. But if he wants to defeat Fire Lord Ozai (Daniel Dae Kim), the fascistic leader of the Fire Nation, he also has to perfect his relationship to the Avatar State, a form of higher consciousness that connects him to his past lives. It makes him his most powerful and his most vulnerable — and the original Nickelodeon series showed us just how vulnerable at the end of Book 2. In that series, when cornered by Ozai's maniacal daughter, Princess Azula, Aang finally achieved the Avatar State of his own accord. It was pure, hard-won victory… that is, until Azula (one of the few firebenders who can also bend lightning) sent a bolt of electricity right into his back.

We don't get quite the same sequence of events in Netflix's reimagining, but let the record show that I'm not against change outright. Even in a perfect world, the new Avatar could never be a copy-paste adaptation of the original animated series — and Jabbar Raisani and Christine Boylan, Avatar's new showrunners, aren't interested in that anyway. "It's a completely different kind of retelling of the same legend," Boylan recently told IGN, "but we wanted to mirror that growth."

In theory, a tweak or two could give us more insight into Aang's psyche, or the ruthless aggression of the new Azula (Elizabeth Yu). But if "retelling" this story means stripping Aang of crucial internal conflict, and Azula of the very prowess that makes her such a good villain, is it really mirroring what came before? 

We get our answer when Aang taps into the Avatar State in the Netflix remake. Rather than strike him down preemptively, Azula balks — and with her on the back foot, Aang launches an assault unlike any we've ever seen from the pacifistic Air Nomad. It's only when our hero tries to land a killing blow and hesitates that Azula sees her opportunity to strike, launching her lightning into his chest instead of sneak-attacking from behind.

That all might sound like a surface-level change to anyone on the outside looking in, but tallied up with all the other small ways Avatar is changing characters like Aang and Azula, it's emerged as the show's fatal flaw. Making Aang more aggressive does not mirror his growth in the original series in any way, and making Azula more passive — rather than a warrior who relies on cunning to strike at the most effective moment — does not make her the least bit more interesting. At the risk of slipping into dramatics, it's character assassination in the guise of nuanced characterization, and it's the very reason Avatar's foundation is crumbling into dust in Season 2.

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What's happening to Azula is not a fluke for Netflix's Avatar remake; the series has been rewriting itself in the Fire Nation's favor from the very beginning. In some ways — like in the case of Azula's older brother, Zuko (Dallas Liu) — that retool feels inevitable. In the 20 years since the original Avatar took a generation by storm, Zuko emerged as an undisputed fan favorite. Avatar delivered one of the greatest redemption stories of all time through the disgraced, hotheaded prince. Scarred by Ozai in his youth and banished from the Fire Nation to search for the Avatar, Zuko spent the better part of the animated series doggedly searching for Aang. Aang's capture was the key to restoring Zuko's honor and winning his dad's approval once and for all… at least, that's what he was led to believe. It took him a long time to realize that he'd been fighting on the wrong side his entire life, and the winding path he took from radicalization to redemption was impossibly rewarding not only for the character, but for the audience watching. (There's also the small matter of his hard-won glow-up, which, paired with Dante Basco's angsty performance, made Zuko the definitive bad-boy crush for so many.)

Netflix's Avatar can't help but give some more love to Zuko. It approaches its adaptation holistically, folding every storyline, its metatextual meaning, and the fandom's evolving response into its reimagining. Season 1 showrunner Albert Kim called it the "benefit of hindsight," but in practice, that all-knowing takes the tension out of every beat. Avatar telegraphs character details that should feel a little more nebulous: It's been seeding Zuko's redemption from the moment Liu (one of the remake's most capable actors) brought the character to life. In its first season, he's less the hothead prone to tantrums and happy to abuse those he deemed lesser than him, and more a sulky, moody outcast. It's not that OG Zuko wasn't those things too, but Netflix's Avatar is all too eager to sand down the jagged parts of his personality into more palatable peaks. Whether that's all to make his redemption flow smoother down the line (when, again, it's supposed to be hard!) is a question we'll have answered in Avatar's final season. It wouldn't damn the series outright, but Avatar's treatment of Azula just might.

Azula's introduction in Avatar's first season was the first of a parade of red flags. The team was keen to bring her into the show earlier than she pops up in the cartoon: They saw an opportunity to flesh her out before she joins the search for Aang. In early episodes we watch as she trains under Ozai's shrewd eye. The Fire Lord's presence in these scenes is more than a little grating — where the OG Avatar trusted its audience (of children, by the way) to understand that Azula had been molded into a cold, unfeeling weapon, the Netflix remake has to spell that indoctrination out for us in tedious, plodding exposition. 

Azula visibly struggles under Ozai's tutelage. She's vulnerable, unsteady, desperate for his approval. There's never been a more obvious ploy to court sympathy for a character who doesn't yet need it — Azula, after all, became a main antagonist in the animated Avatar for a reason. Her ruthlessness was a main feature of her character because it separated her pursuit of Aang from Zuko's: Azula was despotic in ways that her brother never could be, because he frequently hesitated to do what Ozai asked of him. In Netflix's order of events, she's just another Zuko, but with the added disadvantage of being a woman in a court full of men. (Groundbreaking!)

The original Avatar did a lot with a little where Azula was concerned. Brief flashbacks into her childhood with Zuko packed a wallop, establishing a cycle of cold, calculated behavior — and a fraught relationship with her more empathetic mother — from an early age. When Netflix's remake attempts to bring those same scenes into live action, it's with far too heavy a hand. Avatar retains the disconnect between Ursa (Lily Gao) and Azula, but with none of the subtlety. It repurposes a remark Azula makes much later in the animated series, in which she admits that her mother "always thought [she] was a monster," during an action-packed fight with Zuko at the end of Season 2. Here, it's less a moment of rare vulnerability than a breadcrumb for audience members who might have been scrolling on their phones during other crucial scenes. 

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That Azula's admission comes just moments before the series' most glaring change to the original story — her showdown with Aang — kinda makes her feel like a puppy kicked one too many times. That might be the case for the Azula we meet down the line, an Azula who eventually buckles under Ozai's pressure and the trauma of being alienated by her mother. But that should not be the Azula we see now, and not only because that's just not what happens in the animated show. 

Well… maybe that is the main reason, but it's worth noting that the original Avatar laid a meticulous path for its characters to follow. A more sympathetic take on Azula can work: One needn't look farther than the original Avatar's iconic beach episode for proof of that. A bit more insight into her psyche wouldn't hurt either, but changes can't be made just for the sake of making a change. By bringing future context into the present, Netflix's Avatar is tripping over its own roadmap: It's striving to add nuance simply by hitting fast-forward, and it only flattens the antagonists that were pretty well realized to begin with.  

Avatar: The Last Airbender Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.