Brief thoughts on A:TLA Book One: Water

[starlady]

# One of the little things I love is all the fauna and how they're remixed rather than copied straight from our world. Turtle-seals FTW!

# Star Trek actors doing voices so far: George Takei, Rene Auberjonois (twice!). Did I miss anyone?

# I don't think it's possible to get any more Daoist than the Ocean and Moon spirits giving up their immortality to become fish. Zhuangzi would be pleased.

# Can we all take a minute to appreciate the flying Cat Bus homage of awesomeness that is Appa? Also, in the last episode of this season, the Mononoke-hime shoutout that is Aang in his "Avenging the Moon spirit" form? I have to say, I enjoy these Ghibli homages, they show that the A:TLA showrunners have done their homework (obviously).

# On the other hand, apparently whoever directed the voice actors was incapable of teaching them the proper way to pronounce characters' names. Case in point: everyone's favorite villain, Zhao. Even his own voice actor can't say his name correctly! Yes, this is me in my corner being pedantic, I am getting hung up on a tree, but it niggles.

# However, I am not missing the forest of awesome that is this show for that tree. This show is the best! ♥ ♥ ♥

Comments

[noldo]

It seems terribly meet to link you to the following: um --!

Also, the name pronunciation issue reminds that there's perhaps some interesting meta to be had re. why all of the Avatar-verse speaks the same language with approximately the same accent, and I really must prevent myself from working through it if I want to do useful things ever again.

[starlady]

I have seen the Cat Bus/Appa thing, though not for a while. I think it primed me to see the connection? But Appa looks like the Cat Bus!

*nods* I can explain the same language thing as a result of some past historical contingency reenforced by everyone traveling around a lot, but the lack of accent is kind of baffling. Unless we take lilacsigil's suggestion above and see the variant pronunciations as remnants of distinct accents?

[recessional]

The language-thing is one of the few items of this world that I just write off to "fantasy story conventions obeyed by people who didn't want to deal with all the narrative quirks that come from trying to wrangle more than one language, especially without a magical McGuffin to make all the main chars understand each other."