Curate, connect, and discover
Hearing Aang over explain how bending works each episode is genuinely so annoying. Now listen, I know the original show also has info dumped about bending. But at appropriate times!
It feels like whenever Katara is bending with Aang around he just takes the time to say how air bending works. And then Katara can magically do the move. It doesn’t draw this obvious distinction between the bending forms, if he had said that for air benders it's about blah blah or if he had mentioned how a friend used to do an exercise where they follow the push and pull of the ocean that would be decent. It would show the difference, show how Aang as a bending master can be helpful, but also how he isn’t a stand-in for an actual water bending master and also explain why HE can’t just start water bending like a genius.
I think a lot of the issue stems from making Katara an idiot when it comes to water bending. She couldn’t even draw a water droplet up in the live action, yet in the animated show she was teaching aang during the first few episodes what she DID know. This allowed for the two benders to play off each other, to explore Kataras own self-worth issues when it comes to being the last bender of her tribe, and also explore how Aang's inability to self regulate because he is 12 can unknowingly hurt his friends. But in the live action, Katara isn’t skilled, she can’t do anything, they literally remove the entire fighting scene of Zuko's ship which is SUCH an important moment for Katara and her bending! It's frustrating. Honestly if she can’t even teach herself to lift a water droplet on her own I don’t have that expectation of her growing into a master bender status once she DOES learn the actual forms. It's her determination, her natural ability, her attempts to use her bending to help that make her a really interesting and powerful character in the early episodes of season 1. She doesn’t have that in the La and any sense of natural talent or personal experimentation is replaced with Aang going “well the monks said-”.
No Aang, the monks didn’t say anything because Air bending and water bending are different bending forms!