Last night, I spent three hours on a phone call with my dear friend, Diannah. Half of that time was spent dissecting the live action Avatar: The Last Airbender. 

Now, some people may ask, why do you care so much? It’s a freaking cartoon, for heaven’s sake! It’s a children’s show!

I have rebuttals. 

One, I care about good storytelling and lately, most of what has been coming out of American entertainment has been remarkably bad storytelling, not just boring, but bad. As a writer and American myself, I am dismayed at our inability to create dynamic, warm characters, complex plots, and challenging narratives. 

Additionally, in America, we just came off of a weekend full of crazed fans passionately cheering on their favorite football team in the Superbowl. If people are allowed to be stupidly passionate about sports, then I’m allowed to be stupidly passionate about my wheelhouse in the arts. Just because sports consistently seems to win the popularity contest, doesn’t mean the arts are less important or meaningful.

As for it being a children’s show, I think this is the laziest argument on the planet. Children’s stories, good children’s stories, are meant to be enjoyed by both children and adults. They are supposed to be simple enough that a child could understand it, but complex enough that adults can look at it and pull out themes that are far above kids’ heads and apply it to their lives. 

And Avatar did that. As a teen, I loved the reunion between Iroh and Zuko, because yay, the family was back together again. As an adult, I cry every time I watch that scene, because it is a beautiful picture of forgiveness after deep betrayal, of an unconditional love that earnestly desires the best for the person who has been doing deep harm. 

Good children’s stories don’t talk down to children, don’t spoon feed them information, but give them deep and complex topics that they may not fully understand yet. When they are older, perhaps they will look back and say, “Oh, I may not know how to handle this problem, but my favorite character so and so faced something similar. I didn’t like how they handled it, so maybe I can do differently.”

Storytelling has the ability to help us build empathy, think deeply about topics we wouldn’t otherwise engage in, and adds nuance to difficult life situations (like hey, maybe all the firebenders aren’t evil and all the earthbenders aren’t automatically good because they fight against the Fire Lord). Personally, I want children to be challenged by what they watch or read or listen to, but today’s entertainment seems to think that everything has to be told to them in bite-sized portions. They’re not idiots, but if you continue to treat them like they are, you may reap what you sow. 

This means as adults we also cannot be lazy. We have to put in the effort to make memorable storylines and stir up our creativity to make new things, instead of endlessly regurgitating past classics into worse narratives (like why is everything that is made today a retelling, remake, revamp of something that was genuinely good?). I’m not saying everything has to be deep (™) – but can we at least put a little more effort into making something new and different? 

I don’t leave myself out of this category. I am currently working on editing a completed collection of short stories that I’ve been writing for the past year or so. Do I think that my cranky vampires working at an iHop is some groundbreaking piece of work that is going to shape lives hereafter? Of course not and some of you are wondering why I put the effort into such an absurd idea. But I haven’t heard a story of vampires working at an iHop before or tales of Dullahan who desperately wants to be a stand up comedian, so by golly, let’s try it and see what happens. (I’ll let you all know when I actually finally get through the self-publishing process and then you all can tell me what a terrible idea it was, but at least I tried something new and different).

We gotta get out of our own way. Try new ideas, even if they fail miserably. Show kids that we’re not afraid to do something creative and new and flop hard, because who knows? The next time, we might make the new Avatar. Or maybe we’ll inspire them to try something different and they will come up with the next Avatar.  

But this dull regurgitation of old classics is just killing me. Or…maybe not, since watching all of these failures has kicked my butt into gear to say, “I could do better than that” and to actually seriously work on publishing because we gotta give our kids more than what’s currently on offer….even if it’s cranky vampires pouring syrup on pancakes. 

Good golly, this was supposed to be a review of the live action Avatar. I promise the next post will be on topic and I’ll give you a little taste – I didn’t absolutely hate it. I’ll even give it a 5/10 stars. There’s some diamonds in the rough. 

In the meantime, I hope I didn’t lose you on my little soap box. You can blame Diannah – she kept me up until midnight and then I couldn’t stop thinking about all the writing, creativity things. (Just kidding, Diannah, I’m so grateful you’re just as passionate about these things as I am!)

I can’t think of a sign off, so I’ll just say, go, be creative, do something different and new even if it fails. Because at least you tried.