The Promise: The Omnibus (Parts 1-3)
45 pages • 1-hour read
Gene Luen Yang, Bryan Konietzko, Michael Dante DiMartinoThe Promise: The Omnibus (Parts 1-3)
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Background
Media Context: The Avatar: The Last Airbender Franchise
Avatar: The Last Airbender is an American animated television series that aired on Nickelodeon between 2005 and 2008. The series takes place in a fantasy universe in which a significant portion of the population can telekinetically manipulate, or “bend,” one of the four elements: water, earth, fire, and air. The four elements correspond to four different polities—The Water Tribes, The Earth Kingdom, The Fire Nation, and The Air Nomads—that have distinct cultures, bending styles, and philosophies, based on the element they bend. Only one person in the Avatar universe can bend all four elements: the Avatar, a pseudo-divine figure whose role it is to maintain global harmony. The Avatar is reincarnated as one of the four types of benders in an ongoing cycle.
The television series follows Aang, a young airbender who flees his home at the Air Temples after discovering that he is the next Avatar. He and his flying sky bison, Appa, almost drown near the North Pole, but Aang uses his powers to cryogenically freeze them underneath the water’s surface instead. A century passes with Aang frozen like this, and during that time, the Fire Nation wages a war against the other three nations.
Shortly after Aang’s disappearance, the Air Nomads were wiped out by the Fire Nation’s genocidal campaign, making him the only remaining Airbender. Since Aang is missing, he is unable to fulfill his role of preserving global harmony, and the Fire Nation is unchecked in its pursuit of world domination. Luckily, Aang is eventually rediscovered by young siblings from the Northern Water Tribe, Sokka and Katara, who embark on a mission to help him learn to bend all four elements and defeat the Fire Lord, Ozai. After three seasons, the series concludes with them achieving this goal, resulting in the end of the Hundred Year War.
At the time of its release, Avatar was lauded for its groundbreaking approach to heavy sociopolitical issues within the medium of children’s television. In 2010, the first season of the show was adapted into a live-action movie directed by M. Night Shyamalan, and in 2012, The Promise was released as the first of many spinoff comics. The same year, a new animated series following the next Avatar, The Legend of Korra, began airing on Nickelodeon. Korra received similar acclaim to Avatar for its nuanced depictions of difficult sociopolitical subjects, such as terrorism, social unrest, and caste systems. In addition, Korra’s series finale featured its two female leads, Korra and Asami, romantically holding hands, making it one of the first Western children’s programs to feature a lesbian couple.
The franchise experienced a resurgence in popularity in 2020, when both Korra and Avatar were first licensed to Netflix, and the global COVID-19 pandemic resulted in streaming platforms dominating the television industry. Netflix produced a live-action series adaptation of Avatar, released in 2024. Although it initially included the franchise’s co-creators, Michael DiMartino and Brian Konietzko, as executive producers and showrunners, the two left the series in 2020 due to creative differences.
In 2021, ViacomCBS announced the formation of Avatar Studios, a subdivision of Nickelodeon focused solely on the development and production of Avatar media, with DiMartino and Konietzko serving as its co-chief creative officers. As of 2024, Avatar Studios has several projects in production, including Aang: The Last Airbender, a feature-length animated film that will continue the story of the original animated series.
Cultural Context: Avatar: The Last Airbender and Asian Cultures
Despite being conceived of by white American creators, the Avatar universe is highly influenced by aesthetics and other cultural elements from across Asia. This influence can be seen in nearly every aspect of the franchise’s word-building. For example, the concept of the Avatar as a superhuman figure who exists in a constant cycle of reincarnation is derivative of Hindu avatar cycles, such as the Dashavatara of the god Vishnu. The word avatar itself is borrowed from Hinduism and can be traced back to post-vedic Hindu texts produced in the Middle Ages.
When designing Aang and the Air Nomads, the Avatar creators took inspiration from the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism, specifically its leader, the Dalai Lama (who is himself believed to be a reincarnation of Avalokiteśvara, an important bodhisattva). Aang’s childhood mentor, Monk Gyatso, borrows his name from the one traditionally used as the second name of the Dalai Lama—the current Dalai Lama, for example, is named Tenzin Gyatso. These theological references are reinforced by aesthetic references: the Air Nomads wear saffron robes much like those worn by Tibetan Buddhist monks, and Aang’s signature blue tattoos mirror the blue skin of Vishnu and his Avatars.
In the original animated series, Asian cultural influence was reflected by production’s decision to feature some Asian cast members, including notable actors such as Mako (Iroh), Dante Basco (Zuko), and Daniel Dae Kim (General Fong), though they still represented a minority of the actors who were cast. The first live-action adaptation of the series, directed by M. Night Shyamalan in 2010, received backlash for casting white actors in Asian and Indigenous roles. This controversy opened a broader dialogue about whether the franchise is culturally exploitative and reductionist. Winona Guo, a prominent advocate for racial literacy and co-author of Tell Me Who You Are, wrote in 2020:
When I watch ATLA, I feel seen. I feel that every one of the few shows which achieve this for Asian Americans must be protected. And yet, I find it hard to reconcile my love of ATLA with the sobering fact that the show has still been transmuted through the White imagination of White creators, White actors, White producers. Its empire of White profit still rests upon centuries of culture that belong to someone else. (Guo, Winona. “The Appropriation of Avatar.” Harvard Political Review, 2020).
Like many viewers of Asian descent, Guo is a fan of Avatar but struggles to reconcile her fondness for the show with the more fraught aspects of its racial politics. Gene Luen Yang, the author of The Promise, has defended the franchise, arguing that it is “quintessentially Asian American in the way it blend[s] Eastern and Western cultures” (Guo). However, the debate around whether the Avatar franchise skews more toward appropriation or appreciation remains ongoing.
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