Fandom In Context: The Netflix Adaptation Comes For "Avatar: The Last Airbender"

It's beginning to look a lot like 2010 for fans of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Earlier this week, Avatar creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko announced their departure from Netflix's much-hyped live-action adaptation of the beloved animated series. Originally pitched as a faithful reworking of the source material from the people behind the cartoon, the creators now say the production created a "negative and unsupportive environment." Many fans have been down this road before.

Netflix has a fraught reputation among many fan communities. In the mid-2010s, the streaming giant rushed to start live-action adaptations of properties with enormous fan followings, like Death Note, The Witcher and Avatar: The Last Airbender, to mixed results. Fandoms have always raised concerns when Hollywood comes calling. In the 1980s, audiences rioted over the casting of Michael Keaton for Tim Burton's Batman, afraid that Keaton, known at the time for comedic roles in Mr. Mom and Beetlejuice, would make the character too funny. While many fans today consider Batman '89 a classic, and Keaton one of the best to don the cowl, the underlying fear that Hollywood will misinterpret the material lingers.

Avatar fans are now in the Keaton-casting phase of this adaptation. While DiMartino, Konietzko and Netflix chalked their separation up to "creative differences," rumors about those differences stormed through Twitter. FandomWire, in an article that doesn't even offer a name in the byline, capitalized on the news by reporting that Netflix wanted "a mature tone with more romance, sex, and blood." The report, which claims to be based on anonymous sources within Netflix, says that the company looked to open casting to white actors, a mistake made by the 2010's much-maligned M. Night Shyamalan adaptation. Even though these reports have not been confirmed nor reported by other outlets, the rumors were enough to put fans on edge. The hashtag #CancelNetflixATLALiveAction spread on Twitter as fans saw their dream of a decent live-action Avatar turn into a nightmare.

Fans who were once optimistic about the series, now saw themselves flashing back to 2010, when M. Night Shymalan's The Last Airbender, with its whitewashed cast and lumbering pace, associated the series with what some consider one of the worst films ever made. Netflix threatens to, once again, misinterpret Avatar for the masses, and that worries the series' base supporters.

"I was cool with it until Netflix tried to add more violence, sex, and age up the characters," said a moderator on the White Lotus, a Discord server with more than 10,000 members. "It defeated the whole idea and purpose of ATLA. Having the kids so young made a younger audience feel that they were something and that they could be heroes or special."

This wouldn't be anything new for Netflix, which has a reputation for whitewashing fan favorites. In 2017, Netflix took a stab at Death Note a popular manga and anime series, with a film cast with mostly white actors that crammed 15 years of material into a tight 101 minutes. The lackluster response to the series, coming on the heels of a similar backlash to the casting of Scarlett Johansson in a Ghost in the Shell adaptation, helped popularize the Netflix Adaptation meme, which mocks live-action depictions of characters that fans feel significantly deviate from the original. The opinion of fans was clear: Netflix did not have their interests in mind.

Even though the response to Death Note from fans was mostly negative, the "impact was huge," says Redditor Psychopauser, a moderator on /r/deathnote subreddit. The group, which he started more than a decade ago, has more than 61,000 subscribers, but in the weeks following the premiere, "There were only comments/memes about the film." However, the film left little to no footprint. "Nowadays there aren't any posts about it." Despite Netflix saying a "sizable" number of people tuned into Death Note, the sequel languished in development, with no news about a followup in the last three years.

"There was a huge increase in posts, but I don't think there were many new subscriptions to the subreddit besides some lurkers deciding to express an opinion. I don't think the film created new fans but just gave an incentive to old fans to join the community."

The problem stems from a lack of connection to the source material. "Deathflix" as Shikushi, a fan who spoke to us on Discord calls it, earns points for going its own direction, but barely justifies its existence. "You can do things differently, but that doesn't mean it's gonna turn out well," says Shikushi. "In contrast, fans, myself included, seem to feel more positively about the Japanese live-action Death Note films, or at least the first two. Those are very faithful to the original, in terms of both plot and characters, but some things are, of course, changed."

"It's a combination of both how much you change, and what the changes actually are."

At a certain point for fans, the adaptation ceases to be the thing they loved, and the fandom rejects its existence. That's what happened with 2010's The Last Airbender. Fans might meme a scene or two, but the movie is a relic from the past and a warning for the future. Netflix's new product might share the same name, but if it lacks the elements the community celebrates, it's done for.

Other adaptations fared better, but even in those cases, the source material remains vital. Tigran Asatryan, the founder of the Witcher fansite Redanian Intelligence recalls that fans were divided on Netflix's adaptation of the Witcher novel series. Still, it helped bridge the gap between fans of the franchise's video games and the book series' fans. Even disagreements among the community fostered new conversations about Witcher and helped bring new people into the fold. The success of Witcher helped the community grow. "Both Andrzej Sapkowski's books in The Witcher saga and CD Projekt Red's Witcher games had big spikes in sales around the time The Witcher's first season released," says Tigran Asatryan. "And now thanks to the show there's this entirely new branch of the fandom along with the gamers and books readers."

The same could not be said for the Death Note and Avatar, which saw a brief renewed interest in the series before everyone moved on. A bad adaptation doesn't kill a fandom, but it does set it back if the goal is to proselytize the works of artists they love. The "lasting impact of a bad adaptation can scar the community," writes Luke W. senior admin of the White Lotus. "It could also potentially create a rift in the community, with some people liking it and others disliking it."

So what happens to a fandom after a Hollywood adaptation tanks? In the case of Avatar, it means going back to basics, focusing on the source material and ignoring the adaptation that ever existed, using on the animated series as an entry point for new fans. "The adaption is sort of a scar on the series, most people try to forget about it or use it as a good lesson for how NOT to adapt ATLA," says Onrywan, a former admin on White Lotus. But scars don't fade, and with another adaptation stumbling down the same path, old wounds can reopen.