Starts off a bit shaky, feeling very stuck in place with the plot jerking forward in spurts, with plot points not so much developing as being ignored for a few episodes and then brought back up as if they’d been central the entire time. But it picks up a lot as the stakes escalate and the true form of the story starts to take shape.

A lot of the east Asian influences and aesthetics have been left by the wayside, with a made up writing system replacing Han script and a lot more generic scifi vibes along with some more Arabic-influenced architecture for the post-apocalyptic desert setting, but inversely I feel that the show seems more comfortable than its predecessors to casually drop in small cultural details like food in a non-exoticising way. I don’t think that previous Avatar shows ever mentioned congee.

Centring chakras as part of the avatar journey this time rather than the elements seems like it could be interesting and potentially bring in those elements of spiritualism more seriously than the original show did, and that with the eponymous havens seems to signal that the show is planning on seven series, which is very ambitious but if they actually have a grand plan for that I am interesting in seeing where it goes.

🧘🏿‍♀️

Avatar: Aang, The Last Airbender ★★☆☆☆

Caoimhe ⬥ 18th of April 2026

The animation is fantastic but it has very little else going for it. These characters’ journeys were already complete and they don’t really have anything much to do other than repeat old lines in new voices and look good while doing flashy moves and do the obvious, expected thing at every turn.

One X per year

Caoimhe ⬥ 19th of February 2026

I previously posted lists I’ve made picking one game and one film per year since 1990. 1990 acted as a good arbitrary stopping point as it’s a nice round number, it’s the year I was born and the number of games I’ve played at all from before then is pretty small, and it would be be fairly difficult to pick out shows for each year before then for me too. I’ve made a dedicated page on the site for these picks, made a few substitutions, added a pick for each for 2025 and added one series of television per year as well. All put into one table with the ability to toggle off which media you want to see selections for as well as some dynamic rearrangement based on screenspace, all done with (a horrendous mess of) Cascading Style Sheets and no Javascript.

These are not necessarily my favourite from each year. I have tried to be deliberate to give a spread of different styles and series I like as well including some weirder picks. Especially with games I spent a lot of time weighing choices for particular years based on what series I wanted to include and some years are just packed with formative games for me. 2001 has Metal Gear Solid 2, Silent Hill 2, Commandos 2 and Halo (and Grand Theft Auto 3 and Advance Wars and Worms World Party…). I eventually gave the year to Metal Gear Solid 2 after weighing up that I could have Resident Evil 2 and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories covering some bases for Silent Hill 2, Shadow Tactics was spiritually taking up a place for the Commandos series and there’s already plenty of shooters there to justify dropping Halo.

Similarly Prey is spiritually covering for System Shock so that I can have a childhood favourite Soleil for 1994 and Half-Life would probably beat out Resident Evil 2 in a head-to-head but there’s already two Half-Life games on there and I wanted it to carry the survival horror water for both the aforementioned Silent Hill 2 and for the REmake that got booted out from the previous iteration to make room for Robot Alchemic Drive. And yes after going on about carefully spreading out my choices I did give three picks to Sonic games, one to another Sonic Team-developed game and two more to Sonic-inspired indie games (and four different series of Doctor Who for the TV list). I will not be taking feedback on this.