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Feb 27, 2024 00:43
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X-O posted:I think a lot of that is that live action just a brings a different weight and gravity to actions like war and children being involved in war. A number of people were lamenting the fact that Azula doesn't act like a 25 year old woman, and that's because she's literally a child. That stuff hits way harder in live action. You can't ignore that fact as easily when it's real people. Every person they come across talks about the horrors of the last century. That's gonna kill the vibe a lot of times. We get small looks at it when he meets the children on Kyoshi Island and a few other times here and there. It's one of the pitfalls of doing live action. It's the same reason they're always hesitant to do Robin in a live Batman movie. A child doing that kind of stuff is cute when it's animated, not so much when it's an actual child though. I think this is why I like this, any why I liked the cartoon. It always a balance of "the hard real world" vs an idealistic childish naivety. It's the whole show. What shapes people, what motivates them, why they live and love and fight. The innocence of youth contrasted with the realities of the world was where the show hit. For.them to be able to be faithful (especially and unexpectedly visually, but in this case thematically) to the original is laudable. I've not finished watching it yet, but the show is doing an excellent job of being true to the themes and making them more real in a difficult way. Questions of fighting with hate vs fighting with love are awesome themes to explore. We're watching children grapple with awareness and agency in a world with war crimes and genocide. Where action is demanded. This is like a more childish and nostalgic andor. *and yet more grounded (no space jokes)
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Feb 27, 2024 03:18
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Finished the Season. I really liked it and the last few episodes were particularly strong. I Definitely think it could have been better with a couple extra episodes, probably between episodes 4 and 5 to give the character development more breathing room. It felt like Katara went from ‘can barely manipulate a puddle’ to ‘full badass’ overnight without so much as a training montage, and while there was an implied time jump between episodes 4 and 5 (suddenly everyone knows about the Avatar and we hear references to things the group has done) it would have been nice to actually show that and show their skills developing.
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Feb 27, 2024 06:17
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The Lord Bude posted:Finished the Season. I really liked it and the last few episodes were particularly strong. I Definitely think it could have been better with a couple extra episodes, probably between episodes 4 and 5 to give the character development more breathing room. It felt like Katara went from ‘can barely manipulate a puddle’ to ‘full badass’ overnight without so much as a training montage, and while there was an implied time jump between episodes 4 and 5 (suddenly everyone knows about the Avatar and we hear references to things the group has done) it would have been nice to actually show that and show their skills developing. Yep, she's going to get a lot of Mary Sue comments, which is unfortunate. They could have done away with all of that by having Aang tell her she was naturally gifted like he was, because he didn't take long to pick up air bending Stegosnaurlax fucked around with this message at 06:36 on Feb 27, 2024 |
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Feb 27, 2024 06:33
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Teek posted:They mentioned events from a few of the skipped season 1 episodes, but there are still 3 or 4 skipped season 1 episodes which could feature in season 2. Imprisoned, The Fortuneteller, Bato of the Water Tribe and The Deserter from what I can figure. Bringing in Bato again may also allow them to revisit some of the adjusted trial backstory. Having The Avatar State plot occur at the Northern Water Tribe is a very elegant idea.
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Feb 27, 2024 12:07
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I think the series has a lot of room to grow. (if Nextflix doesn't do a Netflix and Netflix) Sorka and Zuko are the standouts, and Dallas Liu is loving nailing Zuko; highlight for me was little speech at the Lu Ten funeral about giving ones life to the fire nation sounded like something out of the Hitler Youth and was heartbreaking... immediately followed by him going off script from that whole fire fascist upbringing to provide comfort to Iroh. I really hope they stick the landing on his reception arc, including the stumble. I'm also appreciating the early Azula/Ozai reveal and that nasty little smile she gives as daddy barbeques the rebels - I think that was the first moment I went "oh poo poo" at the tone. I will gripe that we're going to miss out with that awesome villainous build up of Ozai in the Cartoon where you had two seasons of never showing his face (always hidden in shadow) then in season 3 Zuklo comes home and he's... just a guy? Then you realise that Zuko is his carbon copy (barring the scar) and it makes him all the more monstrous. Also regarding the tone... well, watching Katara and Sorka mother get roasted while a young Katara watches was 
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Feb 27, 2024 13:05
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where the gently caress is Bumi edit: okay phew Bleck fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Feb 27, 2024 |
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Feb 27, 2024 20:37
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I've watched 4 episodes, I cannot buy people falling form Katara's weak as poo poo water balloons.
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Feb 27, 2024 21:43
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Yeah, if there's one complaint I have with the show, it's how weak the waterbending effects feel. There's no weight to it. Azula revealing her lightning bending was great though.
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Feb 27, 2024 21:48
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Mr. Nemo posted:I've watched 4 episodes, I cannot buy people falling form Katara's weak as poo poo water balloons. Water has always been a clear 4th place in the bending hierarchy
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Feb 28, 2024 00:54
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a neat cape posted:Water has always been a clear 4th place in the bending hierarchy Which is a shame, because between bloodbending and what water can be used for IRL (water cutters etc) it should really be a lot more potent.
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Feb 28, 2024 01:37
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The elements weren't combat skill tree balanced, and that's kind of the point too. Plus ghost type has no real purpose and psychic no real weakness. The waterbenders wield far more power in the ways that would help people live, at least. Water adapts, it's fluid and easily shrugged off but in mass it is terrifyingly powerful. Pick up a 5 gallon bucket of water. Ebb and flow works on a more thematic spiritual level too, but I'm conflating the new show with the old now (two more episodes). *waters fluidity and ever presence are why it is also blood.
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Feb 28, 2024 03:09
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Yeah like airbending is pretty much entirely nonlethal moves unless there’s a cliff nearby. Vs the Fire Nation’s style where they have all but abandoned the life-giving element of fire in favor of maximum murder. With the exception of Iroh bending up some boiling water for tea.
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Feb 28, 2024 03:22
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Water bending can heal. That owns.
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Feb 28, 2024 03:31
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Airbending is nonlethal unless its used to suck the air out of people's lungs and kill them. And if that's something thats not only the domain of the most skilled practitioners then it kinda makes sense why the airbenders secluded themselves from the rest of the world and tried to suppress all violent urges, and why the firebenders didn't even try to colonize them and instead decided they needed to be destroyed. None of this was probably thought of as part of the original Avatar pitch, but in the context of lethal airbending from Korra it is easy to retroactively construct a narrative where much of their society is the way it is because air is the most dangerous element.
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Feb 28, 2024 03:53
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Ccs posted:Airbending is nonlethal unless its used to suck the air out of people's lungs and kill them. And if that's something thats not only the domain of the most skilled practitioners then it kinda makes sense why the airbenders secluded themselves from the rest of the world and tried to suppress all violent urges, and why the firebenders didn't even try to colonize them and instead decided they needed to be destroyed. IIRC there's some evidence of this in the original Avatar. Something about an airbender corpse surrounded by a bunch of dead firebenders.
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Feb 28, 2024 03:55
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Open Source Idiom posted:Something about an airbender corpse surrounded by a bunch of dead firebenders. That was Gyatso. Those firebenders were powered up by Sozin's Comet, too.
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Feb 28, 2024 05:50
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soviet elsa posted:Yeah like airbending is pretty much entirely nonlethal moves unless there’s a cliff nearby. Open Source Idiom posted:IIRC there's some evidence of this in the original Avatar. Something about an airbender corpse surrounded by a bunch of dead firebenders. Yeah; Aang finds Monk Gyatso in a room surrounded by dead firebenders. And Henry Rollins (Zaheer) straight up murdered the Earth Queen by ripping the air out of her lungs 
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Feb 28, 2024 05:52
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I think water bending really could be the most powerful kind of bending with the stuff it can do. Fire bending seems to be super devastating for an army to have, but is there anything else it can do? Like you can heat things up I guess and maybe lightning bending can be useful for power generation in the later era like in Legend of Korra when they have radios and whatnot. Air bending seems to be mostly defensive, but you can get some insane offensive abilities like sucking out someone's lungs like has been mentioned. Earth Bending seems really good. You can use it offensively, and defensively equally well. It is also useful in every day life as you can do earthworks with it, make buildings, and roads. But water bending seems to have to much available to it. It has the same offensive and defensive capabilities as earth bending,e especially in colder climates where the ice can stay solid longer. But it has its own unique abilities like water whips to drag people around. Water bending can heal. And then you get into blood bending where you could force someone to harm themselves. Was there ever an instance where a blood bender was able to control another element by making someone else bend?
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Feb 28, 2024 06:12
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I don't think we've seen bloodbenders cause their victims to bend, but they probably could. Amon's whole thing was stripping benders of their abilities by loving with their bloodflow and chi, iirc, so there's no reason to think it couldn't happen the other way. When Katara and Hama fight, they don't force each other to bend against their will and Hama doesn't try to turn the literal avatar against anyone. I wonder if that was to demonstrate that she wasn't as powerful as Katara, or the writers didn't want to go down that road. Though speaking of the other bending forms, I wonder what metalbending is going to look like (we're a looooooong ways away from stuff like the lavabender in Korra). That's assuming we get that far
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Feb 28, 2024 06:42
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Firebending is characterised in similar terms to the rise of firearms as military technology. A longbowman was individually more effective on a battlefield than someone with a musket, but it took a few weeks or maybe months to teach someone to hold a polearm in formation and to reload a gun Good Enough, rather than the decade or longer to be a master archer. Same goes with the various ways you can use bending to kill people, with earthbending being the next easiest to use to kill people but also having other obvious applications that people would spend time learning, while air/water require a combination of lateral thinking and technical skill to be used as weapons rather than for other purposes. This is, of course, because the Fire Nation is a colonial empire and the entire story is an allegory about that being bad.
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Feb 28, 2024 08:23
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I've given my general impressions of the show over several threads now and they basically boil down to "Strong moments and performances, but lots of strange, avoidable mistakes as well, and also Uncle Iroh feels like he's about to call someone a slur at any given moment" For better or for worse though, I've also made the mistake of, well, looking at general fandom reactions to this show from...sigh...various sites and came away with the conclusion that a) the internet is beyond salvation and b) people are making this out to be way worse, miles and leagues worse, than it really is. The fact that fans have been so bonkers negative about the most negligible issues just makes me feel more defensive of this stuff, probably way more than the show actually deserves. Like, there are legitimately large problems with NATLA, but at the same time, mofos be losing their goddamn minds over the actual dumbest poo poo. I saw someone go on a tirade about how this show doesn't understand the spirit of the original because they showed Iroh and Ozai interacting with each other. That's it. Some intangible aspect of the show's delicate fabric was disrupted because two characters talked to each other when they didn't in the original. So anyway the takeaway is that my complaints about the show are valid and interesting and other people's bad and overreacting 
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Feb 28, 2024 09:40
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BrianWilly posted:Like, there are legitimately large problems with NATLA, but at the same time, mofos be losing their goddamn minds over the actual dumbest poo poo. I saw someone go on a tirade about how this show doesn't understand the spirit of the original because they showed Iroh and Ozai interacting with each other. That's it. Some intangible aspect of the show's delicate fabric was disrupted because two characters talked to each other when they didn't in the original. People have long lost their minds about Avatar. In Korra people absolutely flipped their poo poo at "bad people aren't always cackling conquerors, sometimes they voice positive concepts and fight other bad people (who are in their way) so you can't just trust them by default" despite four seasons of that message all being really obvious right out of the gate. Granted, looking back to how a lot of those people have gone since, welp. I'm only six episodes in, but I enjoy it so far. It won't replace the original, but it's an interesting new perspective. And on the first episode being pretty weak, that was the weakest part of the original outside of maybe some of the filler episodes. I only really stuck with it back in the day because so many people with opinions I valued insisted it was amazing.
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Feb 28, 2024 10:52
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Three episodes in and I'm enjoying it, although my attention wandered a bit in the third. Danny Pudi's fun as the Machinist. I actually found this iteration of Sokka and Suki... kind of sweet? Suki likes Sokka but all she knows is how to be a ferocious martial artist so that's all she can do to impress him. They may have oddly sanded too many of Katara's rough edges off but I guess in this day and age if you make a woman short-tempered they get labeled with the dreaded b-word.
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Mar 2, 2024 14:48
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soviet elsa posted:Yeah like airbending is pretty much entirely nonlethal moves unless there’s a cliff nearby. Vs the Fire Nation’s style where they have all but abandoned the life-giving element of fire in favor of maximum murder. With the exception of Iroh bending up some boiling water for tea. Zaheer would like to have a word with you.
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Mar 2, 2024 16:30
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soviet elsa posted:Yeah like airbending is pretty much entirely nonlethal moves unless there’s a cliff nearby. Which is why they fortified themselves in the mountains. The ideal killing field!
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Mar 2, 2024 17:30
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You probably could just airbend someone in the face hard enough to drive their nose cartilage up into their brain tissue.
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Mar 2, 2024 17:34
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Just do the No Country For Old Men method.
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Mar 2, 2024 17:51
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A piano arrangement of Leaves From the Vine is very low, show.
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Mar 2, 2024 19:48
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Four episodes in, and I like it so far. Some character adaptation thoughts: I thought the changes to Bumi's character work in the context of the more gritty setting. Yeah he's gonna be bitter that Aang wasn't there for any of that. Maybe the change of heart was a bit rushed, but I also got the feeling Bumi wanted to have the change of heart deep down. I do think it would've been stronger had Aang chosen to run off like in the original instead of go on a ride to clear his head. Like I'm sure he feels guilt, but just really lay it on  Another character change I thought was great was Sokka being actually likeable, he really wasn't in season 1 of the animation imo. The interaction with Suki was great. I'll give it 7/10 cabbages so far. 
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Mar 3, 2024 04:32
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Some uh fast travel stuff going on in episode 6. Episodes 5 and 6 are both huge mixed bags filled with moments I liked and moments that felt extremely hamfisted and much more small scale than the animated show. Roku sure is less cool in this adaption.
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Mar 3, 2024 05:30
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Finished the second half, 8/10 cabbages I can see them turning season 2 into saving the Earth Kingdom and dealing with Ba Sing Se, basically fast tracking Aang learning water bending after a brief montage at the Northern Water Tribe (where I hope we get "my girlfriend turned into the moon" don't do me dirty Netflix  )
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Mar 4, 2024 02:09
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They’ll probably open on a shot of him training with Katara and her gushing over how quickly he’s picked up Waterbending and it’ll be dealt with in the first 2 mins.
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Mar 4, 2024 06:14
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Ideally you'd make the first episode a riff on The Avatar State and have Aang learning water bending in the North still, but have the leaders there try and trigger the Avatar State by force instead of having it be the random Earth Kingdom general. Then the Gaang decides to peace out at the end and go to the Earth Kingdom to find his master there.
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Mar 4, 2024 11:20
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They really should think about having a time skip where they've been at the North helping rebuild and learning. Because they've not even started production yet and the actor playing Aang looks and sounds much older already. It will be noticeable when it returns. Or something else like showing a small montage of adventures they've had between seasons where you can use some CG trickery to show him gradually aging in a couple shots.
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Mar 4, 2024 14:19
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I thought the first episode was awful and haven't watched any more. I didn't like any of the three lead performances or the massive amount of redundant and repetitive exposition. Is there any point me watching more or do these things stay largely the same / get worse
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Mar 4, 2024 15:10
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Tarnop posted:I thought the first episode was awful and haven't watched any more. I didn't like any of the three lead performances or the massive amount of redundant and repetitive exposition. Is there any point me watching more or do these things stay largely the same / get worse Actually the first episode is the worst one and things start improving a bit from there
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Mar 4, 2024 15:16
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I'll stick with it a bit then, thanks!
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Mar 4, 2024 15:19
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Tarnop posted:I thought the first episode was awful and haven't watched any more. I didn't like any of the three lead performances or the massive amount of redundant and repetitive exposition. Is there any point me watching more or do these things stay largely the same / get worse FWIW I thought it did not. Give the second episode a whirl by all means, but on god I struggled hard with this thing.
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Mar 4, 2024 15:26
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It's been pleasant to watch Iroh's actor not quite hit Mako's level but come close when he's finally given some more emotional stuff to do.
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Mar 4, 2024 15:36
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