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There's a lot of different series for which the audience assumes they are in a separate universe from our own. You can only have so many first, first contacts and you would need to be living under a rock to miss all the times that San Francisco and other major cities have been nearly destroyed.
But I have the personal preference for at least exploring how competing stories can exist in the same universe. Naturally, this all has a great deal to do with timing. So to that end I have thought about the world in which we see Avatar the Last Airbender. And in briefly talking to people about it previously, to my surprise they assumed that it takes place in the past. A common motif where magic dies to make way for the modern world.
I, however, see far more evidence that places Last Airbender into the far-flung future, which is just about the easiest standing you can have with a fanciful story except for explaining what happened to us. If Airbender is in the future there has been a serious downgrade in technology. Nonetheless I believe the evidence indicates that it is so.
I shall point to the people and their territory, the animals, and finally the technology that the audience witnesses in the Last Airbender series and Korra, also, where necessary.
So first the people.
The richest generally live in long-standing stone buildings. All but the Airbenders organize the base of their societies along royal lines whereas the Airbenders appear to lack even families in favor of communal living; a society of monks. I will spare speculation on how they arrange having children.
All lack electricity.
All host people whom possess the inexplicable
power to manipulate aspects of nature.
Each society has a dominant ability, which they use to suit themselves.
This reliance on their abilities harms technological development.
On the whole each nation is markedly homogenous. This is a trait of the past, but in much smaller communities. That much larger territories should be filled with such homogeny suggests a catastrophe upon the Earth's population out of which a small pool might have hunkered down and survived. The nature of this catastrophe remains unclear. But if it gifted mutations to humanity then that might end up being a clue to answering the question.
And so in speaking of mutations we will move on to the animals.
In the course of the series we learn it is exceedingly rare to find an unfused animal. Pigs for one have been crossed with numerous species. And in thinking about evolution I have never learned of a missing link that divided itself down the middle to become two sperate species. Too be honest, before constructing the formal review it was all the fused animals that first put me on the scent that Last Airbender belonged to the future.
The reasons for this fusing might be two-fold. First, the catastrophe that essentially put the world back into the stone age and possibly mutated humanity with magical powers could then also be responsible for mutating animals into fusing together. The second option is intentional experimentation either in advance of the hypothetical catastrophe or because of it in an attempt to aid survival in the aftermath.
This intentional experimentation might suggest advanced technology we have yet to see.
Now I will move on to technology.
Alongside starkly primitive technology are sophisticated feats like the fire nation drill, tank, and airships, which most viewers trace back to a single innovator. But in Legends of Korra we have the strange combination of biplanes and mech suits and portable electrical weapons.
It's my opinion the wild disparity in technology is because it is being reversed engineered from incomplete records from the past, which if true would then suggest that the example of the mech suits are a shadow of what humanity used to be able to produce before the time of the Avatar.
I'm not sure if I'm providing you with enough evidence to buy into the theory.
And I have yet to mention the Spirit World, which the trouble is I think it could belong to all three depending on which interpretation you favor, assuming some catastrophe punctuating the separation between our time and theirs. One, many if not all of the spirit beings are further along mutated humans or even animals. Second, some if not all of the spirit portals between the two worlds were created as a direct result of late experimentation in FTL travel. Third, the spirits are exactly what everyone has assumed they are: supernatural beings that originate separate from humanity.
In a manner of speaking this is cheating, but I have evidence that comes from outside the Last Airbender story. I learned that the writers originally planned on a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
But on my honor I didn't know that before noticing the chicken-pig. The FTL explanation is merely my best guess in how an advanced society might ruin itself and be saddled with extra-dimensional portals in the aftermath.
As to how the Avatar universe shall progress into the future on it's current trajectory... I better see something soon saying that the series G Gundam Mobile Fighter shares this timeline in order to make use of those spirit weapons.
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