Was this legitimate, or a cop out? If the latter, how do you think it should've been handled. Discuss.
Was this legitimate, or a cop out? If the latter, how do you think it should've been handled. Discuss
Christian Reyes
Jaxon James
Cop out, just stop being selfish and kill that motherfucker
Liam Richardson
Correct solution for Aang who was determined to not sway from his principles no matter what. BUT, since it was compressed into only a handful of episodes, with NO foreshadowing (a drawing is not foreshadowing), it BECAME a cop out. Good idea, executed like shit.
Dominic Gonzalez
who cares it was 400 years ago
Alexander Russell
I think being a god among men reduced to a muggle would be a fate much worse than dying honorably in battle.
Xavier Ross
>he doesn't read another book
Anthony Brooks
I thought it was good.
A kid determined to stick to his practice and was rewarded with the skill needed for it.
Angel Richardson
>Unironically uses the word muggle
Ouch man.
Charles Clark
It would have been quite good if we'd gotten more buildup to it. The reason it's shitty is that we literally find out about energybending AND lion turtles within the last four episodes. It feels like a cheap asspull because it's not appropriately built up and foreshadowed.
Also, fuck Bryke for trying to cover their asses later and say lion turtles were foreshadowed. They were fucking not. A few drawings and statues here and there is not enough for something that becomes a major plot element.
Jack Torres
It really is a shame they pulled such a huge Deus ex machina for the ending when the story had been so exceptional up to that point. I guess Bryke really did use up every last bit of creative steam making ATLA, cause they clearly had none left by the end.
Jaxson Jackson
Honestly, yeah, looking back it was probably the biggest black mark on an otherwise awesome finale. I think the idea behind Spirit Bending is cool and makes a certain amount of sense with the worldbuilding we'd gotten up to that point, but its implementation in the story is pretty poor. And I'm not even just talking about how quickly it was introduced. It just gave Aang such an easy solution to what was set up as a major moral dilemma for him.
Not swaying from your principles is an admirable thing, but in real life, you have to be prepared to deal with the consequences, which oftentimes isn't easy to do (and you could argue that it *only* counts when it's not easy). If Aang wanted to spare Ozai because his principles wouldn't allow him to kill someone unarmed and defenseless, then that's something I can respect even if I don't necessarily agree with him, but the story basically just let him sidestep the issue altogether.
I probably would've been more accepting of it if learning Spirit Bending had required some great sacrifice on Aang's part. Off the top of my head, I think the ending of FMA (manga/Brotherhood) is a good example of this, where Ed achieved something thought impossible, but at the cost of his Alchemy. And I'm not saying the sacrifice had to be his Bending, but that's the sort of magnitude I'm talking about.
Thomas Cruz
Yeah, did even the comics cover that? Like Ozai being alive leads to a bad thing?
Ian Lee
>it was probably the biggest black mark on an otherwise awesome finale
Even more than that stupid fucking rock?
Daniel Reyes
Why Aang only showed reluctance towards the idea of killing ozai in the final episodes?
Luis Bennett
Probably because he didn't really think about it until then. During the eclipse you could at least make the argument he was going to just capture him while he was defenseless or something, and had he had to fight he would have choked
Cameron Mitchell
Duuuude, I completely forgot about that. Aang would've been royally fucked if it wasn't for that huge ass stroke of luck.
Josiah Foster
Unless he had something like the thing holding down Bumi, that’d be dumb
Elijah Carter
When Aang mentioned that Azula's lightning had stopped up his chakras, I assumed this was setting up some profound spiritual quest to unblock them. I assumed we'd get an entire episode devoted to him recovering the Avatar State, possibly involving some sort of journey to the Spirit World. Or, at the very least, I expected a certain amount of spiritual journeying.
I certainly didn't expect him to get it back through getting smacked in the back in just the right place by sheer dumb luck.
Jeremiah Wilson
I guess the idea is that, without his Bending, Ozai was harmless. He was easily one of the strongest Benders on the planet, and Bumi demonstrated how tough it can be to imprison someone on that level. But this way, Ozai can be jailed and he isn't likely to gain much political support now that he's just a normal guy.
Yeah the rock was pretty dumb, I'd forgotten about that.
Hudson Gutierrez
It was sort of something that didn't really come into the equation in the earlier episodes. Aang's fighting style always seems to be nonlethal, and the Air Nomads were at least quasi pacifistic monks, with no standing army. They always talked about Aang needing to defeat the Fire Lord, but it wasn't until late in the series that they started talking about the fact that that might mean Aang might have to kill him.
Jayden Gonzalez
I think towards the end they rapidly realized they had a bunch of loose ends they forgot about, so all of them get solved by incredibly convenient circumstances. "Hey we never addressed him not being able to use the Avatar state!" "Oh right... uh... Just have him get hit by a rock, or something." Makes me think a critical writer got booted somewhere along the way in this season or a previous season.
Nathaniel Smith
Anthony Gray
Dominic Murphy
Jacob Cooper
The problem is that it was kind of a cheat that he couldn't even access it earlier in the season, like during the Day of Black Sun anyway. He'd DONE all the spiritual components already, he'd earned that control over his power, and then Azula hit him with a physical injury that cut that off. There's nothing to learn or grow from, and there's no reason Katara's healing shouldn't have been able to fix it, except that they wanted to keep tension during the fight until that moment by giving Aang a handicap.
David Peterson
Jaxson Robinson
The plot up to the end may have become bad, but mannn, those fighting scenes still gave me chills. Made up for the bad plot, at least somewhat.
John Brown
ATLA fans are the Harry Potter fans of animation. You guys only watch this cartoon and act like it's great when there's so much better Wuxia movies you could watch.
Bentley Nelson
I really think that not killing the Fire Lord was necessary to the story. It was a nice touch that even the air nomad avatar also told him to just to kill Ozai.
James Taylor
It's a cop out in every sense of the word, but I wouldn't call it disappointing. It's annoying that everyone is telling Aang that he has to be willing to kill the Fire Lord, and then the story magics up a way that he doesn't have to make a hard choice. It was a cool finale though.
Easton Walker
If there had been an episode earlier where the Gaang shared a story where a bender had their bending taken away, it would have worked. The story could have been dismissed by the Gaang as just an allegory.