By mid-March, Toronto was emerging from a somewhat underwhelming winter (thank you, global warming!) into a full-bodied spring. By the end of one particular mid-March, not-cold, not-dreary day, UofT had announced that all remaining classes of the semester would be held online. By the weekend, thousands of students like myself were back in their hometowns, in the childhood bedrooms that our parents were morphing into storage units, half-hearted offices, or severely underequipped gyms.
As per government guidelines, I was required to quarantine for at least two weeks. On the second day, as other friends from high school trickled back into the city, group chats that had been dormant for years began to fire up. Everyone agreed that while it was nice to be back to mothers who delivered painstakingly cut guava slices to our rooms during online classes and fathers who had finally figured out how to change the TV from HDMI to cable, it felt…wrong. We were taking advanced courses wrapped in the blankets we’d had since primary school, coordinating meeting times with project members now scattered across time zones, and pretending the world wasn’t crumbling into apocalyptic chaos. In hindsight, it was much crazier than I gave it credit. To deal with the new, terrifying situation, I fell back into my old, comfortable, childhood habits: oatmeal with bananas for breakfast, napping twice a day, swapping my usual caffeine fix in favour of cardamom milk, and obsessively watching the hit Nickelodeon series Avatar: The Last Airbender.
When I was growing up, few things were as exciting to me as Avatar . I had two helicopter parents who thought encyclopedias were a suitable substitute for being outdoors, and two much-older brothers who passed down a medley of media from the heavily trodden territory of 70s Bollywood comedies, 80s Hollywood blockbusters, and 90s animated Disney features. I loved those things as an eight-year-old, and I still love them today, but they always felt like recycled toys—hand-me-downs that I was never fully able to imprint on because they’d already been claimed ten years prior. When Avatar started airing in our living room TV in 2007 (Pakistani syndication lagged a couple of years behind, go figure), it felt like a godsend—I finally found something that was entirely mine.
Not only was it novel, but it was incredible. Its fantasy setting was inspired by the South and East Asian cultures I was familiar with and instinctively understood. It had the coolest fight scenes, likeable characters, a believably fantastical magic system, and a narrative so intricate that I always watched the reruns, no matter how many times I’d seen them before, until a new episode aired and left me in just as much awe as the previous one. Avatar took its audience seriously and delivered moral lessons seamlessly without ever feeling preachy. It is beautifully animated, impeccably scored, and written with a nuance that most other shows only aspire to attain. It was pure comfort for my younger self, and it delivered flawlessly on the same promise more than a decade later, when I needed to escape the unpredictability and horror of a year marred by political unrest, environmental disasters, Justin Bieber’s inexplicably terrifying marketing campaign for “Yummy,” and the literal plague.
It has been more than eight months since lockdown started, and I am still at my parents’ house, wearing tie-dyed t-shirts from summer camp and eating candy for breakfast, all while attending classes remotely from a completely different part of the world. It’s not easy living in a semi-permanent state of instability whilst preparing for a future that you’re not sure is coming. When, as a young person, you have been forced into this situation, sometimes Avatar: The Last Airbender is exactly the kind of comfort you need.
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