Again, But With Feeling

Last year my family was rewatching Avatar: The Last Airbender. (I know it’s a kid’s show, but it also has some of the best character development on TV and a surprisingly developed stance on colonialism and intergenerational trauma, and one day I will write a post about repentance primarily by talking about Zuko and it will bring you to tears.)

If you haven’t seen it, the general plot is that there are four nations, each characterized by different “bending” or control over the elements (fire, air, water, earth). One hundred years previous to the beginning of the show, the fire nation began taking over the other nations, which it was able to do partly because the Avatar, the one person each generation who was able to do all four kinds of bending, disappeared. In the first episode, Aang, the Avatar, comes back and begins his quest to restore balance to the world.

One day, my mom and I were analyzing an encounter she’d had earlier that week, and I said, “I think the problem is that you were trying to firebend, but you’re an earthbender.”

She stopped what she was doing. “Say that again,” she said. And thus, Avatar Conflict Analysis (ACA) was born.

When I was seventeen, I took a mediation class, and I had to write a paper about a conflict I was in and analyze it using the theories we’d been learning. This professor was a family friend. I’d known him for years. We went to the same potlucks. We ran into him at Costco. He knew my family. So when I told him I wanted to write about my sister for the paper, he laughed and said, “How could anyone be in conflict with Elle?”

I pointed at him. “Exactly.”

If you don’t have the benefit of knowing Elle, I’m sorry. She has freckles and blue eyes that I absolutely covet. She is magic with little kids and pets. She likes puns and indie pop and clothes and immigration studies. Her first words were “no thank you,” as in we’d say, “Elle, time to go to bed” and she’d say, “No thank you.” I’ve known her her entire life, and she’s never been anything but delightful.

At the time, Elle was twelve. She was known for being happy and sweet, neither of which were very good reflections of the complexity of her personhood. (To this day, one of the fastest ways to make Elle upset is to call her sweet.) Professor Ford couldn’t imagine anyone getting on her bad side, because he couldn’t imagine her having a bad side. He couldn’t imagine us being in conflict, and that was the “exactly,” because we weren’t in conflict. We were almost never in conflict. That was the problem.

Mastering the Elements: Avatar Conflict Analysis

Conflict Isn't Contention, A Love Letter to Elle