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I love how Sokka absolutely knows correct fighting stances since he was trained by Suki, but he intentionally takes a bad one to help Aang prove his point.

The Fire Nation should have said this to the Earth Kingdom guards: "Attention, Earth Kingdom! Please remain calm. This is only a drill."

9:40 Azula's spinning wheel kick might be my favorite attack in the whole show, just so powerful and flashy. Not just the attack either, but the fact she has to deflect the first couple rocks from Aang's wall/punch, recognizes him overusing the same move, instantly and brutally punishes it. Genius villain

"Azula couldn't reasonably be angry with him, right?"

Yes, but she sure could be unreasonably angry!

I feel like Mai is so useless because her style using knives and arrows has the same problem with those dang archers. They can't kill on screen with bladed weapons which just leaves them having to have their attacks blocked or dodged a bunch of the time. It sucks cause Mai's weapon of choice is lethal whereas Ty Lee can just... hit pressure points and win.

I think after "Bitter WorK" Aang and the crew take more fights, because Aang now has the "Stand your ground" Mentality that he needs to be an Earth Bender, he knows these issues and fights aren't going to go away. in Book One and early Book Two he still has the Air/Water Bender mentality of avoid conflict and look for a way to use the enemy's momentum against him. By the halfway point of Book Two he learns that running away or looking for new angles won't work on their own anymore.

It's worth noting that Sokka is Toph's seeing eye on places she can't "see": in the desert, on Appa, on ice. Toph, on the other hand, is Sokka's seeing eye on dark places: the invasion and entering the drill.

Whoa it’s interesting how he suddenly Aang starts to face his problems head on right after learning Earth bending. The essence of earth bending is to stand your ground and face your issues.

I've only just noticed a tiny detail myself just now, at 5:38 you can see a woman and her kid in the background react to Iroh being disappointed with his cold tea and finding it hilarious.

I like that Iroh being dismayed by the tea’s quality in Ba Sing Se is the first step in his arc toward opening the Jasmine Dragon 🐉🫖

Comics Azula was disappointing because she didn't have her ding sound cue

1:15 Just rewatching Overanalyzing Avatar and listening to him talking about the midpoint shift Aang and team avatar make to taking things head on made me realize that this change happened right around the time that Aang was able to get the earthbending mindset and that's brilliant writing

I'd like to think given the length of the drill, the plan was to park it halfway through, then march troops through the steel-protected body of the drill after it breached the other side. That way the Earthbenders couldn't just chuck rocks at any troops moving through the breach. Heck, once the slurry tunnel was cleaned out, it'd be the perfect tunnel to march the troops through.

Also as an Engineer, I can tell you EXACTLY why that one pipe had 2 valves on either side of a 90 degree turn. That's what happens when somebody screws up and you find out one of the pipes you ordered was 6 inches too short halfway through the assembly process. But you're on a timetable and you don't REALLY need all the valve-pieces in that box yet, so you stick a spare valve between the short pipe and its intended socket and put in a work order for another valve later. We call this phenomenon "F**k it, I'm not delaying this critical job over a bad manifest"

I just realized that Jet is actually the only one of the Freedom Fighters that heard Iroh complain about his tea being cold, so it makes sense that he's the only one who puts it together that they're firebenders.

01:46 It's even cooler that it happens after "Bitter Work" when Aang internalizes the earthbending mental state of facing shit head on

To be fair, when Mai pins a person to a wall with a knife by their shirt, she isn't missing; that takes the same amount of precision as hitting them in, say, the throat. She is choosing to take prisoners rather than lives.

Mai's problem, I feel, is that throwing knives are too gruesome a weapon for a kids show. Other weapons can feasibly be animated to be non-lethal and not cause any major injuries, but you can't have a throwing knife actually hit a person without there also being blood at the very least, and a corpse in the worst case scenario. I feel if she had a different weapon or fighting style, she'd have gotten to be less useless.

8:10 actually, “slurry pipes” are a common way of transporting ore in the real world. It’s not so much a river in a tube that floats rocks, rather a strong enough flow that pebbles and grit are washed along with it, but essentially the mechanic is sound.

Imagine a more hard-core version of avatar where people could actually get injured and die. It would make for an interesting take on the story especially with Aangs pacifism.