Avatar: The Last Airbender

I started watching this on Netflix’s instant watch and I’m fairly hooked. I saw 27 episodes yesterday (yay weekends), I’ll have the rest of the series finished end of the week.

In case your not familiar, shows follows Aang an Airbender (the LAST Airbender) who happens to be the Avatar. This world has 4 tribes, Water, Earth, Fire and Air. Each tribe has people that can control their particular element, or Benders. Only the Avatar is able to master all 4 elements and he/she possesses enormous power. The Avatar is is born into one tribe and when he dies he gets reincarnated into the next tribe in a cycle that’s been going for centuries. The Avatar also has the ability to enter a ‘Avatar-state’ where his eyes glow and he has the combined power and knowledge of all Avatars who have come before, not someone you want to fuck with.

All is peaceful until the Fire Nation (it’s always Fire, Water never gets uppity) attacks in a war  of conquest. The Air Nation is annihilated (hence the last Airbender) and the Water and Earth tribes are barely holding on. Our hero Aang ended up getting froze in an iceberg for a century.  A brother/sister Eskimo duo found him and it’s off to save the world. First he must master the other  3 elements before taking on the Fire Lord and saving the world.

I’ll be honest, the cover art always looked interesting but the big ol’ Nickelodeon logo made me cringe and hesitant to take the lunge. The upcoming live action movie though, sold me with it’s trailer though so I thought I’d watch the source material before the movie (July 2nd, though it’s gonna get stomped by Twilight:Eclipse). Watching the series, wow. I can’t believe Nickelodeon did this. This is Adult Swim stuff here. War, genocide, death, love and serialized stories that can leave you lost if you miss certain episodes. This from the House That Spongebob built. I heartily recommend.

*******Update: Finished. Even the ending is kickass. Can’t wait for the live action movie. Hopefully M. Night wont screw it up.

*******Update2: Still awesome, but I did think of one very small complaint. Basically the whole series was about training Aang to become strong to defeat the Fire Lord who was the biggest badass on the planet. Every said he was badass. Everyone was scared of him. And in the end, he was a badass, but up until then… basically he was a shitty father (very shitty). Up until the last 2 episodes he never actually DID anything (well,  he beat the crap out of his teenage son, evil - not badass).

5 out of 5 Stars