On February 24th, exactly nineteen years and three days to the day that the first episode of Avatar: the Last Airbender aired, Nickelodeon and Paramount announced what in my opinion is the greatest entertainment news I could have ever hoped for: more content from the Avatarverse.
But everything changed when Netflix attacked.
This week I’m talking about something a little different.
There are two things in this world I consider myself an expert on. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that the first one is Walt Disney World. The second is Avatar. For the past nineteen years, anytime one of my friends has wanted an opinion or information on Avatar, I am who they come to.
February 21st, 2005 was a Monday. I came home from the stable for disabled riders I volunteered at and flopped down on the couch in my parents’ basement to watch a cartoon that would change my life. If you think saying a cartoon changed my life is an exaggeration, I would remind you that I gave up my entire life in Tennessee to come work for a Mouse.
Pretty soon I had to make sure I was home every Friday night at 8:00 pm for the new episode. Avatar was the first fandom I ever joined. This is back in the day when online forums and fan sites were at their peak. If you were ever on the Distant Horizon Avatar boards, hello, XSeabiscuitX here. I wrote FanFiction (that hopefully no longer exists out there in internet land). I made friends both online and in real life. I started getting into other Anime and Manga. I actually wrote two papers on the series while I was in high school. One was a general essay we could pick any topic on for tenth grade, and then senior year I had to pick an antihero to do an analysis of. My teacher was not happy when she realized Zuko was from a cartoon.
In 2008, I was at Writer’s Camp the week the series was ending. My mom picked me up from Clarksville and we sped through the four-hour drive for me to get home in time to see it. For some reason, they had decided to air the last six episodes in one week leading up to the two-hour finale Saturday night. Fortunately, I had already seen episodes twelve-fifteen because they had been released on DVD before airing on television. My mom had recorded episodes sixteen and seventeen on VHS for me, but I only had time to watch one before the finale started. So, I watched episode sixteen. Based on clips and information released at New York Comic Con earlier that year, I knew that episode seventeen was a summary episode and it wouldn’t be essential to the plot. So, I watched the amazing and powerful series finale then when back and watched the insanity that is the greatest summary episode of any series I have ever seen: the Ember Island Players.
My senior year of high school, I wound up buying a 1985 Chevy Astro Van from the church my mom was going to. It was a beat-up rust bucket that we dubbed the Blumobile. A year later, in 2010, I joked about painting it to like Appa, and then actually went through with it, turning the Blumobile into the Appamobile. We decided to put ourselves on a deadline to have it finished by the time the live action movie came out, and debuted it that night at the big theater in Knoxville. The movie may have been one of the WORST things ever made, but I loved my car.
Thanks to Appa and another Avatar related project that I failed spectacularly at, I met Polly. (She goes by Pink now, and she knows as much about Keytars as I do Disney, but I was specifically told that I personally was to keep calling her Polly.) For the past ten years, she has been one of the best friends I could have ever asked for, and we’ve only ever met once in person.
Then in 2012, The Legend of Korra premiered. A lot of people hate on this show compared to the original. It is not as good as Avatar: the Last Airbender, but ATLA was also planned out more or less form start to finish. Korra (LOK) was originally a mini-series with only one season consisting of twelve episodes. Then an additional twelve were ordered, followed by a second “season” of twenty-six episodes. The two seasons were broken into four books with fifty-two episodes versus ATLA’s sixty-one. The inability to plan left the show less cohesive overall. Also, for the same reason Rey took more hate than Anakin, Korra was judged more harshly compared to Aang, because being a female character makes everything you do subject to deeper criticism.
Avatar: the Last Airbender is the superior show. It is absolute perfection. There is no doubt in that. It’s the one long running series that had a powerful ending that actually tied everything together and came full circle. (Looking at you Star Wars, Game of Thrones, the 100, Arrow). However, Aang was always my least favorite character. I loved watching him grow from the naïve little kid to a powerful Avatar who was ready to save the world, but I always found him slightly annoying and selfish. I couldn’t relate to him at all.
Then along came Korra. From the very first episode, I was in love.
So strong and eager to prove herself, hiding her insecurities with over confidence, quick to start a fight and quicker still to finish it, speaking before she thinks and not always saying the right thing, terrified of failure, the list goes on. She wants to do the right thing, even if she’s not sure what the right thing is, and when she messes up, she messes up spectacularly.
Aang couldn’t sacrifice his own spiritual well-being for the sake of the world and his duty as the Avatar, but Korra was willing to give up her life to save the new Airbenders. While she survived, she was left unable to walk and it took her years to get her life back.
The best compliment I ever received was when my friend Cat told me Korra reminded her of me.
Later that summer, I wrote and filmed my second parody: “I’ll Make an Avatar Out of You”.
On my Disney college program, my roommate bet me I couldn’t sneak an Avatar reference into my Jungle Cruise spiel. I won that bet. Only about one out of ten boats got it, but when they did, it was the biggest laugh on the cruise.
Once I was putting a couple of guys on a boat late at night and one said, “Aren’t you the girl who owns the Appamobile?” How anyone recognized me there I will never understand, but the most viral photo of my car isn’t one I took. It was taken at college program housing.
I remember standing on dock in the summer of 2014. We were down for weather so we were all standing around talking. The topic turned to what kind of Bender would we be. We got the usual answers and then I said, “Waterbender, but technically I’m the Avatar.” A new kid said, “Well that’s kinda conceited.” My friend Tyrell broke in, “No, you don’t understand, she is the Avatar.”
In 2015, I planned a trip to California to go to an Avatar art show at the Gallery Nucleus in order to meet the creators of the show, Bryke. (Their names are Mike DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, hence Bryke.) This adventure was interesting to say the least. When we arrived four hours early, the line was already around the building. By the time we got in, word had spread that the creators weren’t meeting anyone else. When they walked onto the crowded show floor, they were swarmed and I was knocked out of the way by a guy twice my size. Defeated, my friends and I were about to leave when someone stopped me for a picture of my cosplay. The next thing I know, the woman who asked for the picture and the friend who’s couch I was sleeping on were hugging and squeaking. They were friends, and she was one of the series directors’ wives.
When she found out I had come all the way from Orlando, she had me follow her to Bryke and then proceeded to shove me at them saying, “Look, Mike, Bryan, my friends came all the way from Orlando to meet you!”
Words would barely come out of my mouth, but I got a picture! I also wound-up playing body guard for them later, and blocking them from being swarmed by other people. (If the guy twice my size hadn’t hit me from behind, he wouldn’t have knocked me over.)
Over the years I have cosplayed seven different versions of Korra: Book One, Book One Coat, Book Three Avatar State, two versions of Jedi Korra, Gryffindor Korra, and Pokémon Trainer Korra. I’ve gone to Magic Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, Universal, SeaWorld, and MegaCon in costume on multiple occasions. I really like crossover cosplay, and Korra is super easy to do because her hairstyle makes her instantly recognizable.
Chelsea, you’ve been rambling on about Avatar for three pages, are you going to get to the point?
We’ll get there when we get there, but I’ll skip ahead. I can talk about my memories with Avatar forever.
In 2018, it was announced that Netflix was making a live action series of Avatar: the Last Airbender. I remember it vividly. It was the same day the Captain Marvel trailer had dropped, and I had just gone to look at my first house with my realtor. My brother was also staying with us after evacuating from Hurricane Florence. I literally went from being excited about Marvel to not caring about Marvel because HOLY S*** AVATAR.
Like everyone else, I was desperately waiting for more news. I had to break it to a couple friends that the live action trailer they found wasn’t real. In August last year, Bryke announced they were leaving the project due to creative differences. I remember getting into arguments on Facebook with someone insisting they left over money instead.
There is not a world that exists where I believe Mike and Bryan would walk away over money. This world is their baby and they would not leave it for something as simple as that.
In a world where Disney is remaking all of their animated features into live action movies, I wasn’t overly excited about the idea of a remake. I was excited that Bryke were visiting this world again, and I thought now we’d see more of things that were hinted at in the original series, like Iroh’s trip to the Spirit World or how his son died, and see a broader connection to Korra, like the first Avatar Wan, or Aang connecting with Raava. Wan and Raava weren’t introduced until LOK, and I would have loved to see how Aang, Mr. Spiritualness-Above-All-Else, interacted with them. However, now, without Bryke’s involvement, I wouldn’t and couldn’t consider anything canon. It would purely be fanfiction. I was disappointed, but I knew I’d still be watching the series whenever it eventually came out.
Well, if you’d told thirteen-year-old Chelsea that nineteen years later she’d be sitting at her dining room table and would have to ask her Mom to stop talking so she could read an article about “Avatar Studios”, she would have never believed you. She also wouldn’t believe that she was married or owned a house in Florida, but the Avatar news would still be pretty shocking.
For a long time now I’ve said that were ten thousand years worth of Avatars between Wan and Korra. We only know a handful of them. Instead of a new series going to the next Avatar, show me what happened five hundred years ago, or five thousand years ago.
I’m happy to say that that seems to be exactly what they are doing now. Of course, I would love to see more of Korra, or Zuko, or Aang, or Wan, or any of them. But new characters, new lore, that’s what I want. That is the definition of shut up and take my money.
Ironically, I’ve actually been a CBS All Access subscriber for years, so Paramount Plus isn’t really a big deal to me, and they can’t get more money from me until they raise their prices. Why does everything have plus in the name now anyway?
Most everyone has complained about WandaVision’s weekly schedule and having to wait for new episodes. As much as I enjoy binging a show, you swallow your content without tasting it instead of savoring it. My favorite part of Avatar wasn’t just the fandom, it was the ride. It was talking about theories between episodes, and counting down the days until Friday. Crowding around my parents’ computer to watch the comic con trailers. Texting each other with “HAVE YOU SEEN IT YET!?” “NOT YET DON’T TELL ME!”
So, what you’re telling me, is now, nineteen years later, after a year of strangeness and stress with lost friendships and unemployment, my favorite show is coming back? The greatest ride I have ever been on?
This is the best news I could have ever asked for.
Yip yip.
Also, on the off chance anyone from Avatar Studios stumbles across this, I’ve been out of the game a while but I’m currently out of job and have a degree in video production and a RIDICULOUS amount of Avatar knowledge. Just throwing that out there.
