Avatar: The Last Airbender

They could pull it off...

@ randomness4

I was responding to another person, Pichu-kun, who was asking if it would be fine seeing a romance between a 12-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl in live-action.

Yep. Totally fine with that.

And even if others proved me wrong about 14-year-olds getting married in real life history, others have also said that 16 is the legal age in the original series.

You're allowed to court before coming of age.

Edited by BrightLight on Oct 11th 2018 at 12:43:49 AM

Not ALL child actors are awful, you know.

Yeah but there’s a reason they say not to work with kids or animals.

They could find someone but they would need to look really hard, and not cast based on physical ability over acting like last time.

Funny enough, I just watched The House With a Clock in Its Walls and was thinking through half the movie that the child actor is not bad, he was just not very well directed and at times played the character broader than Jack Black, who is SUPPOSED to be the broad character.

And that's the main problem, child actors are heavily dependent on good direction. The Nostalgia Critic even pointed out how much he hated the performance of the child in The Smurfs 2, only to learn the actor got many awards two years later for his role in Room. Even the Harry Potter kids, most of whom became fine actors in their own right, were very raw in the first few films. The secret to dealing with child actors is to give them veteran actors to play against while learning to cut around them breaking character.

That's why it makes sense to age up the kids from Avatar just a little, get actors who are a little more experienced and can carry the show by themselves. When so much of the show is a group of teenagers on their own, that is almost unfair to them.

Edited by KJMackley on Oct 10th 2018 at 10:35:26 AM

Can't they just watch the original series to get an idea for how they should act?

The original main cast were children themselves (bar Zuko and Suki).

Voice acting is radically different, it's unlikely they will just transcribe the episodes frame by frame and mimicking performances tend to be their own form of bad acting.

Though I would love to see someone replicate the foaming mouth guy in live action.

Zuko was 16, Suki 15 in ATLA. So yes, they were definitely still children.

Edited by Redmess on Oct 11th 2018 at 12:33:43 PM

No no no no no no.

I wasn't insinuating that they should do a Shot-for-Shot Remake.

Just that the new child actors can get a feel for the personalities of the characters by watching the original series and listening to the performances of the cast.

And of course, I wouldn't watch an adaptation if it were a literal remake of its source material. I want some originality and creativity. Unless the original was perfect source material, but hey, lots of people think Avatar was excellent - but not perfect.

No. The only things that should get a Shot-for-Shot Remake are the most iconic moments of the series (Katara finding the frozen Aang in the iceberg, Aang getting shot by lightning, Aang defeating Ozai, Aang and Katara's kiss, etc.).

To clarify, I was talking about voice actors.

Jack De Sena (Sokka), Mae Whitman (Katara), Zach Eisen (Aang) and Jessie Flower (Toph) were all child actors during the show's run.

De Sena was the only one to come of age, which was during the show's third season.

But Dante Basco (Zuko) and Jennie Kwan (Suki) were most definitely not kids when they voiced their characters.

Nor, for that matter, were Grey De Lisle (Azula), Cricket Leigh (Mai), and Olivia Hack (Ty Lee).

Actually, now that's been said, pretty much not even half of the prominent child characters in Avatar were voiced by kids.

Still, I'm sure everyone would want the actors chosen for the live-action series to be faithful to their characters' appearances.

And even if their original incarnation wasn't voiced by a kid, they can still take notes on good (character) acting by watching the originals at work.

That's still assuming they are good enough actors to know the difference between inspiration and emulation. Regular people love quoting their favorite movie lines and stand up comics, not realizing that the smallest differences is what separates a comedian from someone trying to be funny.

Just get the child actors to emulate the personalities while finding inspiration from Character Tics (Sokka's voice cracks, Aang's Cloudcuckoolander antics, etc.), give them dialogue inspired by the original series - but refined from any flaws that were critiqued - and then you've got potentially good character reboots.

Plus, half of a character's appeal also lies in the writers' own hands.

Why the insistence on child actors?

There's no real reason to have them.

@ LeGarcon

As stated by other tropers in previous posts, one of the key themes/concepts in Avatar is childhood during wartime.

Making the Gaang (and the other kids) older nullifies that theme, especially since 16 is the legal age in that universe.

So don't and just get older actors and put them in some makeup.

We do that shit all the time with stories who's themes are also about growing up and it works out most of the time.

And absolutely nobody in Avatar acts like they're 14 or around there anyway. Or look like it.

Edited by LeGarcon on Oct 20th 2018 at 8:09:01 AM

... Aang and Toph look and act 12. Ditto Katara and Azula (14), Sokka and Zuko (16).

I have yet to meet a 12 year even half as coherent and understanding or mature as either of them.

Hell most 16 year olds aren't even there.

12 years old is a hell of a lot younger than people think.

You're looking at things from the finished perspective.

Look at how things were Pre-Character Development.

Aang was an immature, foolish, unfocused, ill-disciplined, goofball boy.

Toph was self-centered, arrogant and bratty.

Katara was naive, disobedient towards Sokka, and had a tendency to get jealous and wrathful.

Sokka was misogynistic, incompetent, and overconfident.

Zuko's actually spot-on. Edgy, emo, impatient, Skewed Priorities, etc. Plus, he's a banished prince and a victim of Ozai's parenting, so there'd be some sort of disconnect between his behaviour and normal 16-year-olds.

Azula, given Ozai's parenting, seems like a standard case of a villainous Daddy's Girl. She's not unbelievable either.

Edited by BrightLight on Oct 21st 2018 at 2:40:23 AM

Yeah, all of the characters matured greatly over the course of the series, but they all basically started in fairly realistic places for their ages.

Also, my nephew is 13 turning 14, and my niece just turned 12. I used to teach high school sophomores (ages 15-16). I’m familiar with how kids at that age act. The show is pretty on the nose.

Bump. I came across this interesting video last night. :)

I don't even need to watch that to know the answer. He would have been killed along with the other air nomads. The main show was pretty clear about the whole complete genocide thing.

Yeah, the answer to "What if Aang hadn't run away?" is less of a question and more of a fanfic premise: in essence, what would your Water Avatar growing up in the early years of Sozin's war have been like, and how would they defeat the Fire Nation and restore balance to the world?

I mean, technically he could have run away from Fire Nation army instead of his responsibilities?

x3

Well actually the video comes up with a couple plausible scenarios using evidence from the show:

• Aang goes to the Eastern Air Temple to train. When the genocide happens he's captured but not killed because the Fire Nation doesn't want to have to look for the Avatar all over again.
• Aang and Monk Gyatso run away together rather than Aang being sent away to the Eastern Air Temple. They hide out in the Earth Kingdom (For reasons the full video goes into.) and Aang survives the genocide. Because Aang didn't have to freeze himself this time around, he now has years to become a full fledged Avatar.

Has it ever been made clear if the Avatar can sire benders from nations other than their native one? Let's say a waterbender gets together with the Avatar that's a native waterbender? Would that Avatar be able to sire firebender children or earthbender children?