Failing to stick the landing

 Wendy, Pinkie Pie, and I have been watching Avatar:  The Last Airbender for months now.  We have a pizza and Avatar night every week, and tonight we finally finished the series.  Wendy and Pinkie Pie are way more into the show than I am, but I am definitely still enjoying it so far.  

Unfortunately, like many shows, this one failed to wrap up the series in a way that satisfies me.  It actually stumbled into what I consider one of the most common and unfortunate issues in entertainment - failing to resolve a difficult, tense choice properly.

One of the key things the show highlights about Aang is his conflicted feelings about killing.  He wants to defend the world, and it is made clear that his destiny is to fight and kill the Fire Lord.  He wants to fight, and to win, but not to kill.  In many places in the story this is a major source of issues and angst for our hero, and in fact there is a whole short arc devoted to him trying to resolve it.

Aang's decision to kill or not could be a powerful climax to the series.  He could kill the Fire Lord and regret it, saving the world but costing him personally.  He could refuse to kill and watch the world burn, which would be devastating in a different way.

Instead they decide at the pivotal moment that he doesn't have to make this choice.  He can just win without killing because magic.  Yay!  What a relief!

The problem is that all the tension in the scene falls completely flat.  What did training matter?  What did Aang's struggle over killing affect?  He just went straight to an answer he could have used in the first season, removing the need for much of the story so far, making many of the struggles of the protagonists entirely moot.

It seems as though the writers were desperate to have Aang not kill people, so desperate that they were willing to throw away half of their story.  It isn't as though a refusal to kill makes a story bad, far from it, but making that moral choice a cornerstone of your story and then just abandoning it is sad.  Thing is though, if Aang isn't willing to kill, why was there so much killing in the series?  Smashing ships, crushing tanks, exploding aircraft, there is no end of mass killing of bad guys by the heroes, Aang in particular.  Aang and his gang, without any sign of moral quandary, murder huge numbers of people throughout the series.

The people they murder without worry are the unnamed randoms, the soldiers without stories, the poor, the low.  But murder a lord?  We can't do that!  Killing the highborn *matters*, in a way that killing the lowborn does not.

Let me be clear - the murders of soldiers aren't shown on screen.  Avatar doesn't explicitly show the grisly deaths, but tossing people in the middle of the ocean, or crushing a vehicle they are in to nothing, is definitely lethal.  You can't ignore the fact though that the gang will kill without worry so long as the victim isn't someone important.  As soon as the victim is important, powerful, known, suddenly they will risk anything and everything to keep that person alive.

It manages to be both classist and cruddy storytelling at the same time.