‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ Fans Wanted More Diversity. So Why Are They Still Mad?

One of the worst offenses committed by the 2010 live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender was its whitewashing. The three leads were all played by white actors in the movie, though the original cartoon coded them as Tibetan and Inuit. Whenever Asian actors were afforded a moment of screen time, they were dark-skinned villains in the Fire Nation or unnamed East Asian background characters in the Earth Kingdom. Director M. Night Shyamalan’s attempt to map racial groups onto fictional kingdoms backfired, rendering it a microcosm of Hollywood’s typical racist casting: White actors were the protagonists, while dark-skinned actors were reduced to villains, East Asian actors never broke out of the background, and Indigenous actors didn’t appear at all.

So when Netflix announced it was producing a new live-action adaptation of the beloved Nickelodeon series, this time casting more Asian and Indigenous actors, fans reacted with a mix of hope and hesitation. Would this finally be a chance to remedy the M. Night mistakes of Avatar’s live-action past?

The answer is “no.” If the memes and social media comments are any indication, fans aren’t particularly happy with the casting of Fire Nation sibs Azula and Zuko, their blade-throwing friend Mai, or the ethereal Princess Yue of the Northern Water Tribe. The gripe? They’re not hot enough.

Read more at The Daily Beast.