Avatar Studios‘ first movie will focus on Aang and his friends after the events of Avatar: The Last Airbender. What questions might be answered?
Aang and his friends will be the focus of a new Avatar: The Last Airbender movie, and it may be able to answer some key mysteries left by The Legend of Korra. Avatar: The Last Airbender ended after three seasons with a striking series finale that saw Aang defeat Fire Lord Ozai, meaning Aang could begin to broker peace between the Fire Nation and the rest of the world. The Legend of Korra was a direct sequel to Avatar: The Last Airbender, taking place 70 years after the events of the original show. However, the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender had drastically changed between the two shows.
The Legend of Korra did give audiences a glimpse as to what some of Aang’s friends had done in the years since the events of The Last Airbender, such as Toph having children and later sequestering herself far away from the civilized world, or Katara, who had raised a family with Aang and was now living with the Southern Water Tribe. Yet, the time jump between The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra left a lot of questions to be answered, mainly regarding what Aang and his friends had been up to between the two shows that had managed to change the world in so dramatic a fashion.
Other media, such as graphic novels, have provided some answers to these questions. One such graphic novel, Avatar: The Last Airbender – The Search, takes place soon after the events of the original cartoon and relates to the search for Zuko’s and Azula’s mother. There are many more graphic novels detailing the adventures that Aang and his friends embarked on after the end of the Hundred Year War. It has now been confirmed that the first Avatar: The Last Airbender movie – which will be helmed by Avatar creators Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino – will focus on Aang and his friends; any number of these graphic novels‘ storylines could be adapted. DiMartino did state recently, however, that they would be treating the comics as „mostly canon“ and that the movies likely wouldn’t be „visual retellings“ of the graphic novels (via Looper). This means they might turn their attention toward other questions left in the wake of The Legend of Korra instead.
Questions That Avatar Aang’s Movie Can Answer
Many of the Avatar graphic novels deal with events directly after the end of the Hundred Year War, when Aang and his friends are still relatively young – teenagers or young adults, at most. This means that the upcoming Avatar movie will have the chance to explore a different part of Aang and his friends‘ lives, namely when they have become fully grown adults. Setting the movie when The Last Airbender’s core cast of characters are a little older would go a long way to explaining their effect on the world as it was in The Legend of Korra. How quickly Republic City developed into such a modern society, the progression of Aang’s and Katara’s relationship and how that led to the re-emergence of air bending, how Sokka became Chairman of the United Republic Council, and how Zuko dealt with leading the Fire Nation in the aftermath of his father’s violent legacy are all big questions the new movie can answer. Some of these topics are explored within the Avatar graphic novels, such as industrialization and political shifts, but there is more there to delve into, and it would be interesting to see all this development from adult Avatar Aang’s point of view.
It is, of course, still a possibility that the Aang-focused movie will center on when Aang and the rest of his group were young, as that’s what audiences identify them with the most. However, considering the large time gap between Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, it would be interesting to see Avatar Studios tell a story that has a direct link to Korra’s series, both to expand upon the drastic shift in worldbuilding, and the lives that Aang and his friends led after the Avatar cartoon originally ended.
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