The Avatar: the Last Airbender Netflix Adaptation Should Have Color-Conscious, Diverse Casting
Nickelodeon is working with Netflix on a live action adaptation of Avatar: the Last Airbender, and as a longtime fan of the original show, I‘m apprehensive. Live action remakes have a track record for being overwhelmingly bad, whether they’re big-budget Disney films with all-star casts or a low-budget anime remakes that are inexplicably white-washed. I have no reason to expect the Avatar remake to be any different.
But considering the quality of the source material, I can’t help but have high expectations. It’s imperative that the Netflix show avoid the mistakes that M. Night Shyamalan made with his disastrous 2010 live action film. In this article, I’d like to take a deeper look into identity as a concept in the world of A:TLA and how best it can be translated into a live action form.
Book 1: Observations on Disney’s Live Action Films
I just want to start with a disclaimer: I resent the live action remake trend. I hate that we live in a world where existing IP is favored over original work. I also hate the implication that flesh-and-blood filmmaking is visually superior and can “upgrade” an animated work, when in fact the opposite tends to be true. Animation imparts a level of beauty, fluidity, and vivid color to films that can rarely be achieved under the constraints of our physical world, even when CGI is thrown into the mix. 2D animation is beautiful and spellbinding, the equivalent of paintings coming to life. But unfortunately, even despite the existence of shows like Bojack Horseman, Rick & Morty, and The Midnight Gospel, animation is still viewed by many as a children’s medium. Profits abound from the live-actioning (or rather, adultifying) of animated media, so the trend is unfortunately here to stay.
Disney is at the forefront of this trend, and there’s little mystery as to why. Nostalgia is a powerful selling point, so remakes, reboots, and sequels are a quick and easy cash grab. Remakes also serve as a convenient way for Disney to improve brand optics amidst our rapidly-changing sociopolitical landscape. The original 1992 Aladdin film, while lovable, has several undeniably racist elements. While the 2019 remake managed to right some of those wrongs, it still mistakenly conflated Arab culture with Indian culture by heavily leaning into Bollywood tropes. Also, the original still exists in all its Orientalist glory, which begs the question: is there value in re-writing the past, or should do a better job now, by hiring more POC to helm original projects with better research and sensitivity?
Disney did something similar with The Lion King. While the original film owed its scenic beauty to the natural landscapes of Kenya, the voice cast was mostly white. One of the 2019 remake’s major selling points was its all-Black cast, an easy yet expensive way for Disney to perform racial sensitivity. I don’t believe reparations were the first thing on Disney’s mind when pitching the remake— I think they mostly wanted to flex their CGI and rake in some nostalgia cash — but marketing-wise, attaching Beyonce, Childish Gambino, and a slew of other Black celebrities to the project was a deliberate move. Justice was seemingly restored, until the movie flopped for its complete lack of originality or beauty. Critics lambasted the remarkably realistic yet utterly emotionless faces of the characters in the film. Was the project wholly unnecessary and a total waste of everyone’s time? Yes. Did it make a lot of money regardless? Of course.
On the other hand, the critically-acclaimed Lion King musical continues to achieve what the remake could not, not only by employing a visible all-Black cast, but by paying homage to various South African cultures with its creative costume design and larger-than-life dance sequences. A Black writer would have leveled up the musical even further (the presence of POC in writers’ rooms is equally important as the presence of POC on-screen) but the fact remains that the musical had more of a cultural and emotional impact than the live action film in every way.
Recently, Disney announced its decision to cast Halle Bailey, a young Black R&B singer, as Ariel for its upcoming remake of The Little Mermaid. Some fans were outraged by the decision and communicated their discontent via the hashtag #notmyariel. Other fans pointed out that Ariel’s skin color has no real bearing on the story, and also that she’s a fictional mermaid. Making her Black is in many ways a Hamilton-style move that creates opportunities for actors of color in an industry that’s generally disadvantageous for them.
I remember how disappointing it was to discover that Tiana, Disney’s first Black princess, would spend a majority of her screen time as a frog. The Little Mermaid remake may be an attempt by Disney to right that wrong, or it simply may be a PR tactic similar to Aladdin that’s intended to win social justice points for the studio’s brand.
Again, while I would prefer that Disney create new content with Black characters than try to rewrite the past, I’m happy with Halle Bailey as Ariel. Young Black girls deserve to see themselves as princesses, not frogs. I’m happy that The Little Mermaid will provide representation for Black girls today in the same way that the TV musical Cinderella (1997) did in the 90s with its multiracial cast. And I would much prefer a Disney princess that can sing well over one who merely resembles her animated counterpart, so that we don’t have to suffer another autotune situation like with Beauty and the Beast.
With regards to A:TLA, however, there are no white roles that need to be handed over to people of color; the characters themselves are already either Asian or Indigenous. It seems like more of a Lion King situation here, where the purpose of the remake may simply be to flex some cool special effects, bring the show to a wider (ie adult) audience, and perhaps, as a bonus, atone for the white-majority voice cast of the original show. This brings us to the disastrous 2010 M. Night Shyamalan film, a film so universally reviled that most fans prefer to believe it doesn’t exist. There is no war in Ba Sing Se, and there is no live action A:TLA film from 2010 directed by M. Night Shyamalan. But as I re-watch the original show, I can’t help but think about why Shyamalan, an Indian-American like myself, cast his adaptation the way he did.
Book 2: Addressing the Elephant Koi in the Room: M Night Shyamalan’s Disastrous 2010 Film
Shyamalan’s first mistake was to cast white people. There are no white people in A:TLA, just as there are no Asian people in the Lord of the Rings universe. A:TLA is an Asian-inspired universe. I would be alright with maybe one or two token white characters — maybe a few cameos from the original voice cast — but to cast a whole tribe of people as white in an Asian-Inspired universe is completely unforgivable.
But what bothers me more than the existence of white people in the film is the assignment of highly specific racial groups to each of the four nations, a decision which likely came from a desire to achieve some sense of realism. The theory goes that in ancient times, nations were not as racially diverse as nations are today, and that you would be hard-pressed, for example, to find a Black person in the middle of Ancient Greece. This is why all the Ancient Grecians in Julius Caesar (1953) are white: the audience was White American, so the cast was White American (never mind the Black and Brown American audiences at the time). Many find it unnatural to portray ancient cultures as ethnically diverse because diversity is supposedly modern and therefore ahistorical.
I’d rather not debate this idea because I’m not an anthropologist, but I personally don’t think diversity poses a threat to authenticity or convincing world-building. With regards to historical films, realism can work well as a creative choice, as it improves immersion for for historians, laypeople, and living witnesses to the culture and time period being portrayed. But In A:TLA, there’s no real-life history being portrayed. The Asian-inspired world of A:TLA is purely fantastical, with its bending and flying and glowing lights.
Still, Shyamalan assigned each nation in Avatar to a specific racial group: the Earth Kingdom actors are East Asian, the Water Tribe actors are white, and the Fire Nation actors are South Asian. Evidently, this schematic doesn’t extend to the Air Nomads, given that Aang is also played by a white actor, but the point is that Shyamalan essentially color-coded his characters. From a purely utilitarian perspective, it makes some sense: if each citizen of a fantasy colonizer nation looks one way, and each citizen of a fantasy rebel nation looks another way, audiences can easily tell who to root for and who to hate. But from an artistic perspective, it’s a boring, outdated, and lazy.
This casting schema represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the Avatar universe and of our modern world at large: there is no way to determine a person’s nationality solely based on their physical attributes. It’s the same reason that people of color in the United States take mild offense at white people asking them where they’re “really” from — the same would never be asked of white Americans, so the assumption being made here is that American identity is equivalent to whiteness.
In Book Three, Aang, Katara, Sokka, and Toph are able to walk freely in enemy Fire Nation territory simply by dressing up in Fire Nation clothes. They look like Fire Nation citizens not because of any genetic features they possess but because of their red clothing. No one recognizes them as foreign. Similarly, in Book Two, Zuko and Iroh travel undercover in the Earth Kingdom without being recognized as colonizers. It isn’t until Zuko verbally reveals himself as the banished Fire Nation prince that the villagers turn against him.
Maybe this is simply cartoon logic and I’m reading too much into it, but it allows us to envision a world where nationality trumps race, which can be a liberating idea for POC. In the United States today, people band together not only on racial bases but cultural bases, as one’s racial identity and cultural identity don’t always align. I know a girl from Delaware who’s more thrilled to meet other people from Delaware than she is to meet people of her own ethnicity. Avatar is like this, except that race and ethnicity is taken out of the equation entirely. In many ways, Avatar is colorblind.
This begs another question: if race can’t be an identifier of nationality in the Avatar world, shouldn’t all the characters more or less belong to the same racial group? This is a fair point, and certainly possible to execute in live-action. Hollywood films already cast Chinese actors as Japanese and Korean characters, and vice versa, despite the fact that this perpetuates the racist idea that all East Asians look the same and are interchangeable. An example of this is the casting of Zhang Ziyi, a Chinese actress, as the lead Japanese character in Memoirs of a Geisha. Perhaps with Avatar, the live action cast could be entirely East Asian without that choice being unethical, given that the Avatar world is broadly pan-Asian in influence — though it would be unethical to ignore the Indigenous influences in the show for the more prevalent Asian ones.
Yet under this pan-Asian theory, I find that even tried-and-true Avatar fans cling to a Shyamalan-esque one-to-one mapping of Avatar nation to real-life nation, albeit one that is better-researched. The popular theory maps the Fire Nation to Japan, the Earth Kingdom to China, the Air Nomads to Tibet, and the Water Tribes to the Inuit-Yupik tribes of Greenland, Canada, and Alaska.
I understand why this mapping is so popular. The imperialist Fire Nation, with its industrialized military and strict honor code, bears a stark resemblance to World War II Japan. The Earth King Kuei looks distinctly like the last Chinese Emperor Puyi, and the city of Ba Sing Se itself resembles the Forbidden City. The culture of the Air Nomads is modeled after Buddhist monasticism in Tibet and Southeast Asia, with Aang’s mentor Monk Gyatso bearing a resemblance to the Dalai Lama himself. And the Water Tribes, located at the southern and northern poles of the Avatar world, plainly resemble the Inuit-Yupik cultures of Greenland, Canada, and Alaska.
Although this schematic is more informed and not as starkly color-coded as Shyamalan’s, I still find it reductive. For one, it transforms the unique sociopolitical issues within the A:TLA universe into real-world issues. With an all-Japanese fire nation cast, the live action show would become a story about a Japanese military that uses not only industrial weaponry but fire-magic as well to oppress the Chinese, Tibetan, and Inuit peoples of the world. It would inadvertently become a critique of World War II Japan as a whole, which while not undeserved, is not really something I want out of this children’s TV show. Call me naïve, but I would rather A:TLA serve to unite Asians than single out Japan as some overarching Asian enemy, which it currently is not.
A:TLA is simply an Asian-inspired universe with unique, in-universe socio-political issues that introduces Eastern philosophies of nonviolence, balance, and spirituality to a Western audience. The Fire Nation commits violent genocide against the Air Nomads; couldn’t it be argued, then, that Fire Lord Sozin harkens back to any and every historically genocidal maniac? Ultimately, the Fire Nation, like most imperialist forces in fiction, is an amalgamation of all the real-world colonizers and imperialists societies that history has witnessed, not just those of World War II Japan.
Finally, this schematic is not only reductive, but also extremely limiting: it excludes the various other cultures that subtly influence the world of Avatar, including my own. I want to see South Asians in Avatar, because the world of Avatar is South Asian, too.
Book 3: Representation is Complicated
Let’s talk about representation for a moment and what it means. I’m an Indian American woman with dark skin. I’m very conscious of my dark skin because it’s something that is culturally reviled in my motherland and across the world; you would be hard-pressed to find actresses with my skin tone in mainstream Indian media. Even in Hollywood today, colorism is a major issue, where roles for Black characters often go to the lightest-skinned actors possible. So to see a dark-skinned girl as a main character and a love interest, as someone considered beautiful by everyone she encounters, was very significant to me as an Indian kid growing up in the United States. I know I wasn’t the only Brown or Black child to feel the same way. Many dark-skinned folks cosplay Katara, Sokka, Yue, and Master Piandao at conventions each year, despite not being Indigenous or Asian.
This is also where I extend genuine empathy towards Shyamalan’s decision to throw South Asians into the mix. A:TLA lore is peppered with Sanskrit words, and the root concept of the Avatar itself is derived from Vedic (ancient Indian) mythology.
The concept of four core elements is derived from the five element theory, which can be traced not only to Chinese Wuxing philosophy but to Vedic philosophy as well. In Wuxing, the five elements are fire, earth, water, wood, and metal. In Hinduism, the five elements are fire, earth, water, air, and space.
Moreover, the creators of the show revealed in an interview that the scene where Aang consults his past lives for advice was directly inspired by a Hindu text called the Bhagavad Gita, in which the warrior Arjuna calls upon Krishna, one of the ten Avatars, for spiritual counsel during the war. I must stress here that while South Asia is not singularly Hindu — South Asia is home to people of several faiths, and I have no wish to perpetuate Hindu supremacy, which is a major, major issue in India right now — Hindu culture and lore is singularly South Asian. Part of the reason I’m so deeply attached to this show is that the universe feels intimately familiar to me. Indian films have been tapping into the romantic and emotional potential of reincarnation for ages, but this was the first time I saw it portrayed in American media in a way that was respectful, beautiful, and well-written.
But despite my culture’s influences on the show’s lore, Avatar’s only visibly South Asian character is Guru Pathik, who’s essentially a caricature of Indian gurus. This is likely because the art style of Avatar is influenced by anime, a Japanese medium that reflects East Asian aesthetics in its character design, but it’s still pretty disappointing to be represented solely by a goofy trope.
My unpopular opinion is that Dev Patel, who played Zuko in Shyamalan’s film, was the least problematic casting choice of the main four characters, considering he’s the only nonwhite lead. He’s a great actor, and he brought life to what was an otherwise poorly written film. Also, Dev Patel is just as much of a teen heartthrob as Zuko is. Have you seen him in Lion? But what matters more to many fans is that the live-action Zuko simply resembles animated Zuko more than Dev Patel does, and I can’t really fault them for that.
So do South Asians have a place in the live-action Avatar cast at all, considering there are no “visibly” South Asian characters other than Guru Pathik? In my opinion, we do, but not on nearly as large of a scale as Shyamalan envisioned. I see no justification for making the entire Fire Nation cast South Asian. I think it was an overall terrible decision, primarily because of the problematic race/nationality equivalence I’ve mentioned already, but also because the Fire Nation characters in the show don’t look traditionally South Asian at all. And what I mean by that, of course, is that most of them don’t have brown skin.
But what does it mean to “look” South Asian, anyways? Are there not South Asians who have pale skin, like all the fair-and-lovely-sponsored actresses in Bollywood? Are there not South Asians from Northeast Indian states such as Assam and Manipur and Meghalaya who are sometimes perceived as East Asian? What does it mean to look East Asian, and isn’t it an oversimplification to assume that there exists a fixed set of “East Asian” features? Are not all Asian countries incredibly diverse?
Moreover, what merit is there in being overly divisive with regards to casting? What are the consequences of not being divisive enough? Sure, Princess Jasmine from Aladdin is played by an Indian woman, which is definitely better than a white woman, but wouldn’t it have been much better for her to have been played by a Middle Eastern actress instead? While the casting of any Asian or Indigenous person in Avatar is a win for people of color as a whole, isn’t it super harmful to assume that any old POC will do?
There are no easy answers to these questions. Representation means something different for every minority. I feel represented by dark-skinned women who aren’t Indian because dark skin is something that Asian culture finds shameful and ugly, but I also feel represented by South Asian women who don’t have dark skin because I feel connected to South Asian culture as a whole. Identity and representation are complex and casting directors should take great care to reflect that complexity.
On social media, it’s endlessly fun to watch people fancast their favorite Avatar characters. For example, many fans believe that Zuko and Azula should be Japanese, given the aforementioned parallels between the Fire Nation and World War II Japan. And yet others point towards the Sun Warriors civilization (a subculture within the Fire Nation) as a counterexample, given that its architecture draws design influences from the ancient Aztec, Mayan, and Incan empires. Perhaps some Fire Nation characters, therefore, could be Indigenous or South American.
Some fans believe that Toph should be Chinese, given the Earth Kingdom’s aforementioned resemblance to the Ming and Qing dynasties of China. And yet other fans notice that Song, a minor Earth Kingdom character from season two, wears a dress that resembles a hanbok, indicating that some Earth Kingdom characters could be Korean as well.
Some point towards the Kyoshi warriors of Japanese Earth kingdom characters, given that the makeup of the Kyoshi warriors is Geisha and Kabuki-influenced.
And while the Water Tribes are indeed largely influenced by Inuit tribes, there are also the Swamp Benders to consider, who some fans argue are Vietnamese, given their names. Waterbending is also based off of Tai-Chi, which is a Chinese martial art form, so couldn’t some Water Tribe characters be Chinese as well?
All of these fans are absolutely correct in noticing these parallels, which is precisely what makes Avatar so exciting. Each nation in Avatar is influenced by a wide, diverse net of cultures, and the live action remake has a responsibility to pay homage to that diversity. The answer lies in a color-conscious casting call. The creators should pay close attention to the aesthetic and cultural influence of each individual character and cast them accordingly.
Most importantly, diversity should exist not only across the Avatar world but within the four nations themselves, so as to broaden the range of people represented by the show. This means that family members, or two characters from a single nation, might differ ethnically from one another, the way that Whoopi Goldberg’s character in the 1997 Cinderella movie has an Asian son with her white husband. It’s fantasy. Real-world logic doesn’t matter, because the world of Avatar does not follow the logic of our world. Maybe Sokka could be played by a young Inuit actor while his sister, Katara, is played by a Polynesian actress. Maybe Zuko could be played by a Korean actor while his sister, Azula, is played by a Japanese actress. Maybe Master Piandao, a relatively minor Fire Nation character, is played by a South Asian actor or even an Afrolatino actor, given his darker skin tone.
Ultimately, I want to see Avatar portray a truly diverse world, like some idealized future United States where cultural ties trump race. I want every single person of color who sees themselves in the show to get the representation they deserve, representation that the Avatar universe is practically built to celebrate. The live-action trend is here to stay whether I like it or not, so I urge filmmakers and writers everywhere to think seriously about how to create opportunities for people of color in ways that are sensitive, fun, and well-researched.