Am I just too critical of media? Am I just surrounded by media illiterates? These are the guys that the messaging of Starship Troopers and Helldivers fly over their heads.

So, crunch, CG issues, and adaptation problems all aside (not to mention the high chance of Netflix dropping this before it gets to season 2...), the real problem with The Last Airbender as a live-action piece isn't the visuals. The bending is accurate. The plot looks accurate. Appa's there. It's all happening.

The real problem is that the main cast are children.

And, yes, they're children in the original show. But not real children, in pretty much all cases except Aang's voice actor - because Aang is still significantly younger than the other young characters. They're written by, and in many cases voiced by, adults. They're adults pretending to be children.

In live action? They are children (teens or not, they're all counted as children if they're not old enough to be weary). Children inherently cannot accurately portray adults pretending to be children, because being an adult is being a child that has been around long enough to be scarred by the world, and children have not existed long enough to be that.

The problem with acting is that, for most people, it takes skill, which takes practice, which takes time. The problem with a child is that they're constantly growing and changing. In the course of a year, they're significantly different people than they were at the start of that year, in meaningful ways. For a child to gain the skill to accurately portray an adult pretending to be a child requires... Probably exactly as much time as it takes for that child to just become an adult.

No matter what they do, live action Last Airbender will never feel right. Kids will never be able to bring across the depth, meaning, and struggle that TLA characters go through and show, and adults playing young kids will never feel right, either, because of the multitude of versimilitude-shaking disparities.