10 Darkest Episodes in The Avatar Franchise
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Avatar: The Last Airbender may be geared toward younger audiences, but that does not make it an innocent and carefree viewing experience. For all its goofy humor and relatable young characters in the Gaang, Avatar is deceptively deep, heavy, and worldly as a cartoon about the Hundred-Year War that has all but destroyed Avatar Aang’s world. Given how there’s a century-long war to finish and how Aang is the last of his kind, new viewers can expect some dark episodes and storylines.
Some episodes are fairly light and fun, such as “Avatar Day” and “The Ember Island Players,” but even those episodes can get serious at times, and other episodes are almost entirely serious and dark. Those episodes focus on weighty topics like grief, guilt, the struggle for redemption, and trauma both past and present. Such episodes show how the narrative and its characters grew up over time.
In the first two episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Aang became aware that he was the last of his kind, having lost all his people in the Hundred-Year War, but the full reality hadn’t hit him just yet. After Aang fled the Southern Water Tribe to escape Zuko’s attack, Aang returned to his old home, the Southern Air Temple.
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