Avatar: The Last Airbender

First, possibly the best show ever. Smart, funny, character development, story arcs, story resolution. Yay!

A clip of the credits to Korra has been posted. And I am excited all over again. The article says it is coming in 2012. I hope it is sooner rather than later!

I love this show!

I'm so excited for Korra. Seeing Aang and his friends in that opening made me feel all sentimental.

New trailer, now with polar bear-dog. Which, much like Appa, I would like to have one. Still no release date except sometime 2012. I hate waiting.

Korra now has an official site, which features the new trailer, plus character descriptions. (Given the descriptions of Mako and Bolin, the ship wars practically write themselves.)

The first two episodes of The Legend of Korra are available for streaming at korranation.com. Love, love, LOVED it. The series itself premieres on April 14th.

For once I was glad to live on the West Coast; I got to watch it at 9 pm last night. :D I AM SO EXCITE.

Of course, now I feel like I have to wait even longer for the next episodes. Curses!

I just watched the first two episodes of The Legend of Korra. I had to come back to sf to see who else is watching to discuss. The series looks super promising, I adore Korra so so much! I'm also enjoying the music a lot too. I can't wait to watch the third episode.

Those first two episodes were so, so good. The animation & art for this series is just amazing! I can't decide which character I like best, since they're all pretty great.

Can't wait to see where this series goes!

Pro-bending is the new quidditch, AMIRITE?? (The Korra Nation tumblr has a 20-minute video of Bryan Konietzko explaining the rules. If the game seemed confusing in the episode, such as

Spoiler:

, this video is definitely worth watching.)

I LOVED the first two episodes, and my little girl loved them as well. It's so nice to have a female hero.

My daughter is so accustomed to having the full ATLA on Netflix that she really couldn't understand why Korra couldn't just keep going!

Spoiler:

The music was different, for sure. Still getting used to it, although it's clearly been designed with great skill.

Double-posting to bring you an abbreviated family tree, which serves to answer some of my questions...but not all.

SPECULATION: because this image shows Kya and Bumi, I will go ahead and assume that we're going to meet them and that they figure into the story somehow. (As a non-bender...geez I hope Amon doesn't turn out to be Bumi...! Or that Amon is somehow related to Sokka and Suki, which was my other depressing thought.)

I like how Mako and Bolin's parents aren't named. I'm sticking with my guess that they're related to Zuko. As for Lin Beifong, I am not sure that her father is going to be a major plotpoint, but it kind of icks me out that she looks a bit like the leader of the Dai Li.

Wish they'd aged Aang and Katara to make the top of the family tree contrast a little less with the "children"...! I'm sure we'll see them in flashbacks.

Minor

Spoiler:

Ooh, that family tree is neat!

My big news is that iTunes has the first two episodes up as a single download FOR FREE, in HD, which is pretty much the best thing I heard all day.

Okay, now that Korra has her own thread, let's actually use this one to talk about Aang's show.

Just finished rewatching the whole series, and as I did I perused the web to find trivia and what not as I was reading. And you know what I found out?

People hate "The Ember Island Players".

I don't want to live in a world where loving that episode is the unpopular opinion. The episode was brilliant - the perfect "long breath" before the plunge. One of the comments I read mentioned that they hated the episode because it was the problem with the whole of Book Three - too many wacky fanservice hijinks. I want to know what show they were watching, because I thought Book Three was surprisingly serious. Not in a bad way - I liked the fact that the show evolved and became more intense as it went along. Which was kind of the point of Sokka's line about going to see the show: "This is exactly the kind of wacky, time-wasting nonsense I've been missing!" It was a last chance to relive the zaniness of Book One before the marathon series finale.

Reading trivia on the episode, I also learned that the audience's complete lack of reaction to the giant drill was a commentary on fan reaction to the episode in question. How did anyone think that episode was boring? I think overall, "The Drill" was one of the best episodes for showing just how versatile and awesome all kinds of bending can be. It was certainly more interesting and entertaining than the episodes immediately following it where we waste several watching Team Avatar get cockblocked by a slimy politician.

I also found out something more interesting on a personal level - my wife's favorite episode is "The Puppetmaster". She's a massage therapist, so in a way I guess I should have expected that.

And in a "are we sure this is canon?" moment, I also discovered that Kyoshi was the Avatar immediately preceding Roku. Apparently she lived to be 230 years old? What? I always assumed there was a whole cycle between Kyoshi and Roku, which would certainly make more sense. But apparently that information was revealed in one of Nickelodeon's online games/promotional tools.

Yeah, apparently Kyoshi was an extremely long lived Avatar, even in the line of long lived Avatars. It went Surfing Waterbending Avatar dude (I think), Kyoshi (230 years), Roku (190-ish years if I remember correctly), Aang (100 yrs in iceberg + 60-something living), and now Korra.

I can't even read fan reactions to things I really like anymore, because it just makes me sad. "Ember Island Players" was awesome. "The Drill" was awesome. I think that some fans watch with an agenda in mind, shipping or focus on a particular beloved non-main character, and when they don't get it, everything sucks. For them anyway. Also, I think watching as an adult, especially an adult with a good idea of how fiction flows, makes a big difference. You or I might have a wildly different view on what is entertaining or "appropriate" to the flow of the overall storyline than say....a 16 year old or even a 22 year old.

If Roku was 190 how old was Sozin, as they grew up together and he lived longer?

Going by the timeline of events in The Avatar and the Firelord, Roku was 70 years old when he died. He mastered the elements at the age of 28, bitchslapped Sozin at 45, and then dies 25 years after that.

ETA: Sozin died at 102. That was apparently really old for a firebender.

That would work with Kyoshi being 230 better than having a 190 year old Roku. I always figured the creation of Kyoshi Island 270 years BSC (Before Sozen's Comet) would have been early in her career.

I still think 230 is stretching things even for an earthbending Avatar. Though I did have the thought before I discovered how old Kyoshi was that earthbenders seemed to be naturally longlived - there's Bumi, old, but still vital, at 112 (a *real* 112). And something about Lin Bei Fong over in "Korra" makes me think that Toph was around forever, too - if not actually still kicking around somewhere. So I guess I can accept it, it's just right at the edge of my suspension of disbelief.

My lack of reaction to The Drill was based on the fact that it was right after the episode immediately preceding it on the iTunes copy I bought instead of listed separately (and I think that's true on Netflix too), so I had no idea it even existed until much later when I stumbled upon it and was really confused. I wonder how many people were in my boat; I don't think any of the other multi-parters were packaged that way.