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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm starting a reread of The Count of Monte Cristo after recent mentions here. I don't remember a lot of the details and perhaps it will seem more profound this time around. The political aspect of Danglars' accusation wouldn't have drawn my interest in the past.
Still on Hurewitz' The Struggle for Palestine.
I just finished the Kyoshi novels which are official media in the Avatar: The Last Airbender universe. They're more at the 14-18yo maturity level, with sexual tension but not actually sex and people getting stabbed to death, compared to the show which was a more standard children's cartoon violence. I really enjoyed the first half of the first book, but after that it became a bit of a slog. I think I had two major issues with it. First, it felt like it was pretending to be a morally grey serious book akin to Game of Thrones where lots of the villains make good points and the heroes are forced to do bad deeds for the greater good. But the protagonist never really does anything that bad- she just kills a few extremely dangerous criminals/war lords in self-defense that she wouldn't have been able to bring in peacefully, and those criminals more than deserved death anyways. And the antagonists try to justify their actions claiming that they're just killing even worse bandits and are the only things upholding order, but they're far too needlessly cruel and violent for them to really have much moral justification.
The second issue I have with it is related and is that Kyoshi always felt incredibly guilty about having killed some of the antagonists and she'd always be beating herself up over it in the narration. But again, she really didn't do anything wrong, so the guilt just annoyed me instead of making me care more about her. I had a very similar issue with the web novel The Practical Guide to Evil as well. This stands opposed to the show Bojack Horseman, where the protagonist also is constantly feeling guilty over his past actions, but is also an actually shitty person, so it makes me sympathize with him instead of just rolling my eyes.
A third more more minor issue I had was that the spirit world never felt as mystical and otherworldly as it did in the original show. Instead it was more like a place that just contained some evil monsters and was travelled to with extreme adversity. It was similar to Legend of Korra in that way. As opposed to the original show, where spirits cared about their narrow interests like a forest, or the balance between moon and ocean, or protecting knowledge, or trying to steal people's faces, and didn't care about the rest of humanity beyond what they were the spirit of.
The original show was superb but I feel like that magic's never been recaptured in any media since, although I haven't read many of the comics.
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