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

[unjapanologist]

The pronunciation for that Avatar was a bit wonky -her name is usually romanized as Kyoshi, and you can see the character kyo (same kyo as in Kyoto) on some Kyoshi Warrior parafernalia. Although one painting in the episode "Avatar Day" wrote her name as 虛子. Most voice actors do seem to say Kiyoshi.

Er. I mean, I like Avatar too! Hurrah :)

[starlady]

Ah, that makes sense. It's been a while since I watched that episode (I've been going so slowly, augh!), and I was thinking it was "kyo" like in Kiyomizu-dera, which has been a weird semi-elided diphthong since the Heian period at least. Thanks, bungo!

I love this show too! I need more icons for it.

[unjapanologist]

Bungo was never one of my strong points, I'm afraid. I'm better at random trivia ;)

[cofax7]

Korra icon! I gotta get me one of them. I can't wait!

OTOH, you will enjoy watching the rest of ATLA. I keep getting sucked into rewatching, because it's on Netflix streaming, even though I've seen it all twice through...