Avatar: the Last Airbender As a Moral Educator by Dara Poizner

Avatar: The Last Airbender as a Moral Educator By Dara Poizner Note on the Author: Dara Poizner is in her third year at the University of Guelph, pursuing a major in English. She hopes to spend her life talking to and learning from people, and writing about the issues close to her heart. Among other things, Dara is passionate about intersectional feminism, mental health advocacy, critical TV watching, and the belief that pineapples do belong on pizza. Avatar: The Last Airbender as a Moral Educator Introduction Avatar: The Last Airbender is an animated American television series that aired from 2005 until 2008, and its young target audience is as deceptive to potential viewers as it is important. Created by Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, the show’s many virtues include compelling characters, clever writing, an attractive design, and an engaging storyline; it is beloved to viewers of all ages. But within the framework of a beautifully made television series is a morally complex educational system that uses its target audience – children – as a model for which to employ its socially progressive values. Avatar takes advantage of children’s potential receptiveness to effectively introduce liberal attitudes, and the show itself becomes a vessel for humanism. This essay will discuss how Avatar: The Last Airbender successfully instills a sense of liberal morality among its viewers. It will conduct a comprehensive sectional analysis of the institutions and aspects of society discussed within the show, demonstrating how it dismantles oppressive systems and advocates for social justice. Background: Series Premise and Key Characters This essay will first provide some background outlining Avatar: The Last Airbender, to allow for a full understanding of the moral mechanisms at work within the show. The basic premise of the series is explained in the opening sequence of the first episode, “The Boy in the Iceberg.”1 Avatar takes place in a world that was once inhabited by four 1 Avatar: The Last Airbender, episode no. 1, first broadcast 21 February 2005 by Nickelodeon, directed by Dave Filoni and written by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko. 22 groups, represented by the four elements; the Water Tribes, the Earth Kingdom, the Fire Nation, and the Air Nomads. In this world, certain individuals are born with the ability to manipulate an element to their will, a skill known as bending. The balance between nations, and between the spiritual and physical realms, is maintained by the Avatar; the only person with the power to bend all four elements. Upon the death of an Avatar, he or she is reincarnated as another individual from the next nation in the cycle (fire, air, water, and earth). The series takes place one hundred years after the outbreak of a devastating war, and the disappearance of the last Avatar. Seeking dominion over the world, the Fire Nation attacked the other tribes, and supposedly succeeded in wiping out all of the Air Nomads in order to break the Avatar cycle. In the Northern Water Tribe, teenage siblings Katara, a waterbender, and her older brother, Sokka, are out fishing when a forceful current carries them down the river, and Katara accidentally cracks open a large iceberg. To their amazement a young boy emerges from within. The boy, named Aang, is an airbender. Katara and Sokka learn that when killing off the Air people, the Fire Nation had missed their critical target; Aang is the new Avatar who vanished around the time the war broke out (one hundred years prior), and was preserved – alive – in the iceberg. Knowing that he is the only person capable of restoring harmony to the world, Katara and Sokka embark with Aang on a journey across the nations so that he can master all four elements and end the tyranny of the Fire Nation. On their journey the three main characters encounter several crucial figures who will be briefly described for context. Their initial enemy, Zuko, is the banished teenage Prince of the Fire Nation. Zuko has been traveling for approximately two years in feverous pursuit of the Avatar (who he maintains is still alive, despite being met with skepticism) in order to restore his honour. His father, Firelord Ozai, is the overarching villain of the series. As leader of the Fire Nation Ozai is the person Aang must ultimately defeat in order to restore peace. Iroh is Zuko’s elderly uncle and brother of the Firelord, who is traveling with Zuko and training him in firebending. Princess Azula is Zuko’s younger sister and the beloved daughter of the Firelord. She has great firebending prowess and a violent nature that mimics her father’s. Toph Beifong is a twelve-year-old blind earthbender who joins the group as Aang’s earthbending teacher. 23 Racial Diversity One of the most outstanding features of Avatar’s progressiveness is that it contains no white characters even though it is an American program, instead opting for a cast of racially diverse heroes and villains. A pan-Asian influence is evident in the Avatar universe, with each tribe resembling a different cultural group. The landscapes, character designs, and cultures are modeled after societies that are barely touched on in Western media. The show explores cultural tension within these diverse societies, generally portraying the Fire Nation as an elite oppressor. Firelord Ozai desires cultural and military hegemony, leading to the eventual rebellion of the heroes.2 However, the Avatar franchise drew criticism when M. Night Shyamalan released his 2010 film adaptation of the series, entitled The Last Airbender, as the characters were whitewashed.3 Hollywood whitewashing is “the practice of casting white actors or actresses in roles of colour or ethnicity,”4 and the casting of this film was widely frowned upon because of this very issue. White actors took the roles of the three main characters (Katara, Sokka, and Aang)5 despite the Water Tribes being coded as Inuit and the Air Nomads as Tibetan. Zuko, the main antagonist, as well as the rest of the Fire Nation, is portrayed as Indian or South Asian,6 while the show actually codes them as Japanese. The reversal of skin tone in the movie ignores the show’s choices and instead opts to villainize the darker skin tones. This contrasts greatly with the progress Avatar: The Last Airbender had made as an American series with characters of underrepresented races. Gender and Feminism Gender roles are explored heavily in Avatar. Interestingly, their world contains no great “patriarchy” to defeat, but the show’s approach to feminism is about presenting complex and dynamic characters of all sexes, and cleverly subverting gender roles. The disassembling of Western society’s patriarchal structure is tactical and subtle, and takes place through the development of the cultural landscape and characters. Avatar explores the complex nature and virtues of femininity – there are several “strong women,” but “strength” is not seen as their only valuable 2 Fulya Icoz, “Regaining the Power to Say ‘No’: Imprisonment, Resistance, and Freedom in Avatar the Last Airbender,” Interactions 23, no. 1-2 (2014), 113. 3 The Last Airbender, released 30 June 2010 by Paramount Pictures, directed and written by M. Night Shyamalan. 4 Lia Zhu, “Hollywood faulted on ‘whitewashing’” in China Daily (New York, 2016), 2. 5 Lori K. Lopez, “Fan activists and the politics of race in The Last Airbender,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 15, no. 5 (2011): 431. 6 Ibid, 431. 24 quality. The blending of traditionally “masculine” and “feminine” traits within individual characters is prominent in Avatar. One study quantified the qualities of male and female characters and found that the difference in depictions of “gendered” qualities between the sexes was minimal. In fact, there is a slightly higher depiction of females with typically male- associated traits such as leadership ability, strength, and independence; on average, male characters were more emotional than females.7 Avatar demonstrates a distinct ability to create nuanced characters of different genders. There are a number of positive female role models in Avatar, beginning with Katara. Though Aang is the eponymous “last airbender”, a larger portion of the story is told from Katara’s perspective, and she is an equally prominent protagonist. Katara is an example of an intersectional feminist model. A product of third wave feminism, intersectionality accounts for the impact of other factors such as race, economic class, and sexuality.8 In addition to being a woman of colour Katara comes from the marginalized community of the Northern Water Tribe, which is being oppressed by Ozai’s Fire Nation. Katara is wise, nurturing, kind, and exhibits great physical and mental toughness. The audience watches her growth as a bender and as a person. She is a complex, balanced character; she demonstrates “womanly” virtues without being stereotypically feminine, and male qualities without being one-dimensional. Toph, the blind earthbender, is also an intersectional model because she copes with a physical impairment. She is a headstrong tomboy, and has a sensibility about her that could be deemed unladylike. Toph’s earthbending ability is important, as she participates in what is known as the most “raw” form of bending (the one with the fewest female benders) and manages to harness unprecedented earthbending power.9 The storyline of the Warriors of Kyoshi is introduced near the beginning of the first season, and is an excellent vessel for feminism. The Kyoshi girls are a group of all-female warriors on an Earth Kingdom Island, who train extensively in martial arts.10 While they fight they wear the traditional makeup and dress, and use fans as weapons, which acts as 7 Megan E. Jackson, "(Gender) Bending in the Animated Series Avatar: The Last Airbender,” Fim Matters 4, no.

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