The writer spoke to three friends about their love for the show “Avatar: The Last Airbender.” The following may require some previous knowledge of the show and contains spoilers. This is the first half of a two-part piece.
K. is lying belly-up, cocooned in a blood red floral comforter. She flicks past memes on her phone to the swift rhythm of her words.
“We should’ve gate-kept Avatar a little more,” she announces. “‘Cuz there are crazy people on Twitter. Stupid White boys going off: I think this, I think that, I think the real villain is Katara or some shit — I’m like, you’re annoying. All of you are wrong. You make me tired.”
She peeps over at me, perched on the edge of her bed. According to K., there are two types of “Avatar: The Last Airbender” fans: the casual kind and the kind that allows it to take over their existence. Like those who run an Instagram fanpage with 272k followers. “That’s not me,” she clarifies. Her eyes glimmer with triumph. “But I am more knowledgeable than the average.”
***
“I’m a little bit of an ATLA trivia machine,” F. murmurs bashfully, brushing aside his dark floppy hair. We’re by the park, and our blankets flatten the grass — his pearly white, mine honey mustard. Test me, I say. His smile dazzles like the sun. “There are only two main characters voiced by the same person. Who are they?” I shrug. “Appa and Momo,” he says. “Dee Bradley Baker.” I listen for a hint of disappointment. There is none. He did not expect me to know.
I followed your fan page, I tell him. The Instagram’s namesake is the saber-tooth moose lion that Sokka befriends in the “Bitter Work” episode: Foo Foo Cuddlypoops. He looks amused. “Yeah, my friend and I made a ton of memes when ATLA came out on Netflix. It was completely silly. We had a good laugh.”
He grins at the grass. I wait.
“It was this era of nostalgia,” he says. “For the first time, I was able to share ATLA with my college friends. I was so excited. And proud. The first time I watched it, I was what, 7 years old? I watched each episode as it came out, on my little iPod brick. It was like I got to live that all over again. I became that annoying figure on the group call, pausing a scene, breaking it down. Look at this thing. Look at that.”
Any characters you particularly liked as a kid?
He looks at the sky, his eyes bright, pure. “Zuko,” he determines. His lips are pursed, and I get the impression that pulsing behind them is a tsunami of feeling. Why? I ask.
He pulls his legs in and crosses them, wraps his hands around his knees. “I’m more like Aang — fun-loving, and childlike, and all about moral integrity,” F. ruminates, rocking back and forth. “But I felt this overt angst in Zuko. I was a very solemn, depressed kid, and then Zuko had this deep inner strife that he could violently express — emotionally, that is. Like scream at the sky, yell at his uncle, things I wished I could do.”
But you never did them.
“No. I was the older child in a somewhat tumultuous family. I always felt like I had to stay level-headed, to internalize my grievances when others couldn’t.”
Did ATLA actually help you grapple with those grievances?
“To an extent, yeah. I was afraid to ask questions for myself, so I would ask them in Zuko’s shoes.” F. laughs lightly. “I know this all sounds a bit sensationalized, but it’s completely true. I would live in this crazy fantasy of being Zuko, a child of the Fire Lord, with all these expectations, and breaking free. I would act out scenes with my friends, my sister, and sadly” — he is bashful again — “by myself in my room. ATLA became the drama that I was living my life through.”
You didn’t like Zuko because he turned good? You were just, like, let me be free?
“Of course I did. I always had this tension of doing things because I was supposed to, versus doing things because I believed them to be right. That’s why Zuko is my favorite character in seasons two and three, but not necessarily season one. His anger comes from his strife of choosing good. That strife is the same reason I felt the need to repress myself in my family.”
Departing from parents’ dreams is so hard. We idolized our parents.
“Yeah. Like I’d be watching an episode after doing my math workbooks, or practicing violin — all these routines my parents had me do. I never internalized this notion of creating an identity for myself until I lived vicariously through Zuko. I hate to bring Nietzsche into this, but he has this phrase: “amor fati,” love of fate. The act of embracing what life throws at you as necessary. Zuko struggles against that when he tries to create his own destiny, placing all the blame for his turmoil on the world. I’m struggling with that now.”
I pause. You’re right, I say. Even the Fire Nation as a whole is very Nietzschean — the way emotion is released, the “yes” they give to life.
To my surprise, F. leaps to his feet. “That’s the entire show,” he says, unfurling his arms to each side. “Life-affirming in all ways possible. And passion is baked into the element. That episode when Zuko can’t bend anymore because his drive changes, and he discovers the true meaning of fire-bending — it points to the fact that these deep seedlings of emotional strife and moral responsibility, that’s the root of bending — and it’s all shown out there, in this beautiful, chemical show of passion, this intense, raw power!” His arms shoot to the sky, and he twirls to the left, kicking the earth with a swoop. “It’s so freeing,” he shouts, and I hear him echoing in my ears and from the trees and the cosmos, as his white blanket goes flying across the grass.
***
I am sprawled across a cozy rug when the wind hisses a warning, and stones take flight. Q. rubs her blue blanket and sips La Croix on the all-white corner couch. Behind her are floor-to-ceiling windows: pine and pear and pickle greens shake beneath the fury of the rain.
“You have to understand,” she tells me, earnest. “We didn’t have laptops. No phones. Just the one family iMac. Your parents had to input the password. You had to type in, google. dot. com. And when the quiz results came” — her eyes bulge as she mimics a fearful look over each shoulder.
Outside, lightning cracks. The room flashes light and dark. She doesn’t seem to notice. She laughs. “I loved those quizzes. I took them raw, and every time I was Fire Nation. Every time. Now, people think it’s cool to say you’re Fire. As kids, it wasn’t. We were supposed to be pure and good. Not salty. Not pessimistic. But I was like, can’t beat the quiz.” She throws her arms up. They fall, uselessly.
Most of Q.’s sentences carry an emotion and a motion. “That was some Real. Shit.,” she stresses. A hand chops down twice on the other. “The neighborhood kids who didn’t get the bad guys on their quizzes would want to be them for Halloween, but for me, being Fire Lord Ozai or Azula was a threat.” She stabs her chest with her pointer finger. “I can’t be seen zapping people with neon blue ribbons; I might crack into pure glee if I do that.” She taps her nose, grinning wickedly. “So when they called out” — suddenly she is solemn — “for Momo or Appa, I’d be like, yup. Yup, that’ll be me.” Her left hand shoots up.
Did the quizzes make you think you were a bad kid? Or were you actually proud?
“Oh, no. Not proud. I mean, complexities are supposed to arise in adulthood, right? Only then can any weird nastiness or ugliness be explained and justified.”
And now that you’re twenty-one?
“Now I openly say I’m Fire Nation. Because first of all, nobody knows what the hell I’m talking about. And second, I don’t camouflage myself as much as I did when I was younger.”
But what does it mean to be Fire Nation? To you?
She hesitates. “Maybe the word is intensity,” she says. She asks me to toss her a book, H is For Hawk. “Let me find a quote that describes it.” She flips a few pages and reads: I hate him — actually hate him and am outraged by his existence. She looks at me for a second. “Wait,” she snickers. “That’s not it.” She finds me another paragraph, which ends like this: I smile. It’s a thin smile. The smile of the placater. It is a smile that is a veneer on murder.
Um, I say. I scratch my head, amused and uneasy. So how does that relate again?
“In the sense that those in the Fire Nation have an intensity of emotion most times,” she explains. “Which I also do, and my life has been a long practice of placating that. Obviously, people don’t fit into boxes.” She chews over a thought. “But if I was to be real honest with myself, it’s even this sense of violence or aggression. I mean, that’s an ugly truth. It’s inarguable, with fire. You can’t hide it. It’s clear, and open, and honest. If I was male and big and strong, like my brother, I could be a danger to myself and others.” She pauses.
“I just — sometimes I get anxious.” She blinks, and her eyes are big, round, melancholy moons. “About a poorly-worded email, or my family, or the human condition, or various men in my life. I just feel like screaming. So I close my eyes and have a dream where I’m surrounded by soldiers or people, then I let out one of those dragon fire breathing things they do. It’s like that scene where Zuko teaches Aang, and his fire reaches toward the sky out of his mouth while he just stands there, fists clenched. My go-to dream is that I am Azula, and I am doing that: spitting flames. It’s a default. A screensaver. It’s therapeutic — to be thought of as powerful, and dangerous, and wild, and crazy, to be accepted and feared. It’s probably messed up psychologically. But even imagining that, I let out steam.”
You let out real-life steam? With Q., the show and her life have begun to feel inseparable.
“Yeah. I mean, I’d like to think I wouldn’t be like Azula in real life. It’s a worry. It’s a fear. But there is one scene where she’s Fire Lord: she’s got her powers and her throne; she’s sitting in front of a mirror, laughing and crying, and she cuts her bangs. I have literally done that before. And when Katara chains her to the gutter in the final battle, and she’s sobbing — yeah, I felt that.”
When?
“Constantly. I feel that constantly. And then Katara goes away, all nice and happy.”
You literally look angry.
Q. smiles, a crooked smile. A smile that is a veneer on murder. She stares out the window silently. “She’s so powerful,” she whispers finally. “She’s more powerful than her brother, Zuko, you know? She’s so wicked. And so unloved and neglected — especially by her mother, which I don’t feel, largely. But when I was growing up with all these kids that looked so much Whiter than me, I felt angry, and sad, and twisted, and I had this idea like, maybe my nature is ugly and cruel. Stuff had already happened by then that made my life complicated, too complicated for a six-year-old. So when Azula’s chained down, just trying to breathe, to inhale, and Katara just goes off with the other good guys — I felt like I was Azula, and these other kids were Katara. Kids who had an easier time positioning themselves between evil and good, dirty and pure.”
She rubs her blanket for a while. Then she looks at me, again earnest. “But I do like Katara. I really do,” she says. “I’m rewatching the show now, and I feel that moment when Katara goes to kill the man who killed her mother, and all the water crystals suspend in the air, and her hand is shaking, and she’s about to” — Q.’s hand pulses madly. “There’s no dramatic, climactic moment in which I could reassure myself that I would be like Katara: To let my hand fall down and let ice fall to water.” Her hand goes limp. “But I’d like to think that I would,” she says. Her voice fades away. “That practice of placating.”
Continued here
Image Credit: “Fire on the Breath” by R’lyeh Imaging
