The four nations avatar series#
The four nations avatar tv#

The four nations avatar tv#

The challenges of world-building plague TV and film. The Four Nations are set in fictional lands, but are inspired by various moments in Chinese and Japanese history.

The four nations avatar series#

The series follows a group of kids journeying across the Four Nations.Avatar: The Last Airbender is now on Netflix.Instances like the Painted Lady and Fang even evidence that humans and animals alike can become spirits after their death - yet almost nothing is known about the origins or reasons for differentiation among these mysterious beings. While some spirits like Hei Bai or the dragon bird spirit are inarticulate and animalistic, others like General Old Iron or the aye-aye spirit are perfectly sapient. The official description for Beasts of Four Nations even promises insight into one of Avatar's most mysterious corners, calling the book a 'collection for images and information on Avatar and Korra’s creatures large and small, including many from the spirit world!' The Spirit World is a frequent source of seeming contradictions and curiosities. Beasts of Four Nation s offers the perfect opportunity to answer exactly those kinds of questions. Does that mean there are no waterbending animals, or are there more bending animals than fans previously realized? Creatures like the Unagi or the sand shark of the Si Wong Desert display arts akin to bending, yet without encyclopedic data on those beasts, their ability remains a gray area. Waterbenders were always the odd ones out, with their own legends saying they learned their elemental art from the moon rather than an animal. RELATED: Avatar: The Last Airbender is Getting a Fan Made Musical But the key question remains: Where did the animals gain the ability to bend in the first place? When 'Beginnings' depicted the lion turtles granting benders the ability to manifest elements with energybending, the explanation was that those animals merely honed humans' ability to bend into the martial arts that would make up their forms.

The dragons taught firebenders, the sky bison taught airbenders, and the badgermoles taught earthbenders. One of the biggest mysteries involving Avatar's animals dates back to the origins of bending, depicted most immediately in The Legend of Korra's two-part episode 'Beginnings.' In the original series, many animals were said to have taught humans the art of bending the elements. RELATED: Avatar: The Last Airbender, SpongeBob SquarePants Launch Podcast Series When it comes to the world's fauna, so seldom a central focus in the series, that lack of information is all the greater. Despite its richly textured and varied cultural landscape, only a thin slice of Avatar's history has ever been detailed. Since the series' debut in 2005, only eight Avatars have even been named among the hundreds that existed in the world's 10,000-year history. The trend for worldbuilding in Avatar has always been to tease a few fascinating details to whet fans' palettes and then only give enough information to keep their appetites hungry for more. But the recently announced Beasts of Four Nations guidebook may be the chance to change that.

With the series' central focus on mythology, history and politics, one other aspect to its fantastical world is too often ignored: the animal kingdom. Fans of any engaging fantasy setting are bound to have a million questions, and Avatar: The Last Airbender is no different.