How “Avatar: The Last Airbender” helps us contextualize the choice between Biden and Trump

Like “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” some animated series are timeless in execution and messaging, propelled by stories untethered to a single epoch that speak to the human condition — especially our arrogance, our adaptability and our willingness to evolve for the better.

That said, I understand why remaking “Avatar” for a new generation with a flesh-and-blood cast would be a draw. There will always be aspects of animation that can’t be replicated by real people and vice versa. Indeed, some of the 2005 series’ themes may be too juvenile to effectively translate into Netflix’s live-action version.

Believing in others comes down to the persuasiveness of Aang (Gordon Cormier), the story’s namesake Airbender and the last of the Air Nomads. Aang is a being of balance, hewing to a childlike optimism while tapping into an elder’s wisdom and learning how to fight in a world divided between Northern and Southern Water Tribes, the Fire Nation and the Earth Kingdom, that has lost patience with diplomacy.

As the Avatar, Aang must master wielding the elements, something he was too young to achieve before he was accidentally frozen in ice. His abilities were intended to keep warmongers in check. Without his intercession, the Fire Nation plunged the world into a century of bloody conquests that began when they wiped out Aang’s entire culture, hoping to kill him, too.

People neglect to factor in Aang’s emotional age when they blame him for vanishing for 100 years. Many are even less charitable in their comprehension of the burden he will inherit, which has only become weightier with time.

Most durable fantasy isn’t developed as a direct allegory for a particular war or political era. Nevertheless, it’s hard to avoid drawing some parallels.

The original “Avatar: The Last Airbender” premiered early in the Iraq War and George W. Bush’s second term in the White House. Bush, however, lacked the cunning and overt egomania Fire Lord Ozai demonstrated, recreated by Daniel Dae Kim in the new “Avatar.”

Bush was a touch closer in loopy behavior to Bumi, ruler of the Earth Kingdom city of Omashu. But even that would be considered a compliment: Bumi is wise and clever; Bush, not so much.

Bumi was Aang’s contemporary, which means when they meet again, he looks all of his 100-something years, whereas Aang hasn’t aged a day.

The animated Bumi was optimistic to the verge of revolt: “Instead of seeing what they want you to see, you gotta open your brain to the possibilities!” his younger self tells Aang in the Nickelodeon version.

Netflix showrunner Albert Kim’s take on the character, played by Utkarsh Ambudkar, is darker. Ambudkar’s Bumi, introduced in the fourth episode, isn’t the “mad genius” rooting for Aang whom we met almost 20 years ago. He’s dangerously angry.

Daniel Dae Kim as Fire Lord Ozai in “Avatar: The Last Airbender” (Netfix)In both series, Omashu is among the first places where Aang stops with his traveling companions Katara (Kiawentiio) and her brother Sokka (Ian Ousley), a pair of Water Tribe teenagers. It’s through this encounter that Aang realizes how much the world has declined in his absence. While Aang used to have friends all over, the nations now keep to themselves. Omashu, like the Earth Kingdom Capital Ba Sing Se, is walled off and exclusionary.

Mistrust is rampant. Spies are everywhere.

The animated series pitches Aang’s refusal to entirely abandon his innocence as a gladdening luxury in a world ravaged by war. The live-action turn frequently positions this as a liability, especially through the eyes of his old friend.

Both stories force Aang through a series of tests meant to teach him a lesson, with the original animated series concluding that solving most problems requires thinking differently.

In the 2024 version, however, the Omashu ruler’s philosophy is guided by resentment and a will to survive. “The world is on fire, people are dying and you got to sleep through it all!” Bumi tells Aang. A few scenes later, when Aang demands to be released so he can save the Northern Water Tribe, Bumi becomes wrathful.

”Have you been fighting the same fight for a century?” he asks. “Have you watched your whole world burn down around you? Let me tell you something, Avatar: You may be 100 years old, but you haven’t lived for 100 years, especially not these hundred years.”

Their encounter ends with a duel in which Bumi moves Aang into a position where he must choose between saving himself or killing his now elderly friend by letting a huge rock crush him. It’s Bumi’s way of teaching Aang that leadership entails making impossible choices.

“Do I save this town or that? Who gets the last of the food scraps: the orphanage or the soldiers?” he asks. “You have to make choices like that day after day, year after year — and that’s just to save this one city. You have to save the whole world.”

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As was the case with the first “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” there are few clean and precise political parallels between the live-action Omashu king and, say, Joe Biden, save for the common perception of both being doddering old men. “Avatar” plays this as a ruse when the agile Aang faces Bumi, thinking his youth gives him an edge, and the king reveals the mountains of muscles he’s hiding under his cloak.

Likewise, the only qualities Donald Trump shares with Fire Lord Ozai are a thirst for power and a lack of respect for life, the environment and the sanctity of the parent-child bond. Ozai may be repugnant, but he has a clear plan to secure his nation’s supremacy. The GOP’s leading candidate doesn’t.

The “Avatar” nations aren’t democracies, but if you place Bumi and Ozai side by side, it illuminates the choice American voters face this November.

Between Biden and Trump, we’re being asked yet again to select the proverbial lesser of two evils.

One is a leader holding together a kingdom that is crumbling on multiple fronts. We’re being asked to re-elect him even though his administration has provided weapons and material support to an ally that has bombed civilian centers and reportedly killed nearly 30,000 people, most of them women and children, under the guise of hunting terrorists.

Then again, his opponent is purportedly plotting to wield the power of his office against critics and opponents and carry out militarized mass deportations.

As such, the debate surrounding the ages of Biden and Trump, though somewhat valid and impossible to downplay, is a ruse meant to distract us from the larger moral questions at stake. Eventually, our choice candidate will come to down to judging the proportional harm each does — or might do — versus the evil already done.

In our tale of two leaders, will we choose the one who can preserve only part of the Earth, or the one who eager to burn the whole place down?

“What’s the point of tests if you don’t learn anything?” Bumi snarks, which we should maybe take as a warning about forgetting the years between 2016 and 2021 and, more to the point, consistently settling for less than ideal over outright terrible. In the long run, that political compromise is unsustainable. But when it comes to the decision lurking before on the horizon, it’s what we’ve got.

Both the live-action and animated versions of “Avatar: The Last Airbender” are streaming on Netflix.