You couldn’t make a show like Avatar: The Last Airbender today. That has a lot to do with the untouchable magic of the series, but 2005 was also just a vastly different time. Avatar could break every mold for an animated series because it had the freedom to. Studios seemed to believe in animation far more than they do now; at the very least, they understood its place in the ecosystem. Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino were also never afraid to push at the boundaries of the world they meticulously built — ironically, that same fearlessness has only come back to bite them 20 years later.
Avatar’s success was a double-edged sword: with the bar set so high, fans’ standards were impossible to meet. The waning respect for animated shows with similar ambition also proved nearly fatal to The Last Airbender’s direct sequel, The Legend of Korra. The next chapter of the Avatar saga should have been an even bigger phenomenon, not the forgotten stepchild that took the franchise to untenable lows. Konietzko and DiMartino defended each of their choices to the letter, from Korra’s turn-of-the-century influences, to its attempts to cut ties with The Last Airbender. But the ghost of regret hangs subtly over the Avatar World, even now. The only way forward, to the next chain in the broken Avatar Cycle, was to cleave that world in two.
