*This is not financial advice. All content should be considered opinionated. We are not responsible for any of your gains and losses. I am neither a licensed or registered financial expert. Please see a financial advisor before making investment decisions.

*This is not financial advice. All content should be considered opinionated. We are not responsible for any of your gains and losses. I am neither a licensed or registered financial expert. Please see a financial advisor before making investment decisions.

Background

For the past 6 days (including the day of writing), I've been rewatching Avatar the Last Airbender, making this the second time I've watched the whole series. The first time I saw the series was back when Netflix first released their streaming service. This anime series is my favorite series and while I can talk a lot about the series, there is a lesson many can take away when it comes to branding. 

The Avatar series was doing great with its first series, which was the one that I rewatched. After that series, the makers of the series decided to create another series called The Legends of Korra. Because the quality of the series wasn't as great as the previous series, the Avatar brand halted the production of content for the Avatar brand. 

With Netflix bringing back Avatar the Last Airbender, the show's popularity surged and became popular once again. While it's been a long time since the Avatar brand has received a lot of buzzes, now might be a great time for the brand to make a comeback and eventually create another series within the brand to bring viewers back with new content. 

If the producers can find a way to make the new series similar in quality as the first series, then viewers can be hooked and ViacomCBS will have a new brand that they can monetize. With all the buzz going on for the Avatar stories, by giving fans more content to look forward to, the brand can take off and become a household brand like Star Wars. Having one strong brand and being able to monetize it correctly can yield tons of riches for media companies. With ViacomCBS owning the Avatar brand (because they own Nickelodeon), ViacomCBS can become as powerful as Disney and provide better returns for its investors. 

Lessons from the Avatar series

A lesson many can learn from the Avatar brand is that brands are valuable and fragile. The first series of Avatar performed strongly, creating a cult following for the Avatar brand. When the second series of Avatar came, it didn't perform well, causing the Avatar brand to lose a lot of its cult following and caused the value of the Avatar brand to plunge. Viacom could've had a monetizable brand that would've given them immense riches similar to what Star Wars provided for Lucasfilm. 

For all the Avatar fans out there, these are my thought and feelings about finishing the series for the second time 

Finishing the series for the second time made the whole run of the TV series more enjoyable. The first time watching it, I got the general idea of the whole story, and watching it for the second time gave me a deeper understanding of the series. While my first time watching the series was a long time ago (probably when I was around 8 years old), watching the series again gave me a lot of memories from my childhood. 

Having a lot of life experience, I made plenty of connections between the things happening in the Avatar series and in the real world. The weird things happening in Ba Sing Se reminds me of the talk that is going on regarding China hiding their COVID-19 numbers. The two groups of people that hated each other for generations because they believed in a different version of a historical event reminds me of the feud between Sunni and Shia Muslims. There are many parallels between the Avatar world and the real world. 

Each episode of the Avatar series came with its own life lessons. While the morals in each episode are subtle, having immense life experience allowed me to identify those lessons sooner than my eight-year-old self could. Plus, the series gave me many perspectives on life. 

I'll admit, I felt really sad after finishing the series. The series was so good and because it was really good, it inspired me to watch its sequel, The Legends of Korra. I decided to watch the first episode of the series after a break from finishing Avatar the Last Airbender and honestly, the show wasn't as bad as I once thought. I look forward to continuing with the show and completing it.

Something that I liked about The Legends of Korra that I didn't like from Avatar the Last Airbender is that the first few episodes of Avatar the Last Airbender were kinda boring but the first episode of The Legends of Korra wasn't. After reading about the series further, I learned that the series has a lot more substance than I once thought, making me excited to watch the series.

The characters of the Avatar the Last Airbender series were so lovable that when the Legends of Korra didn't have most of them in the series, many fans (including me) were sad. Any glimpse or mention of those characters and events from The Last Airbender series made me excited. While I loved the first series of the Avatar series so much, I should learn to love the new characters in the Korra series. 

But, when you look at the Star Wars series, the characters from the old series weren't completely gone in the next series. Look at the Clone Wars Jedi like Kenobi and Yoda. Those two Jedi were in the Rebellion trilogy. In the Rebellion trilogy, our beloved characters like Han Solo and Luke Skywalker were in the final trilogy where you had the First Order and the New Republic. By having the beloved characters from the previous trilogy/series in the new trilogy/series, you're able to help your fans adore your new characters. It makes loving the new characters a lot easier. 

As I go to bed in sorrow over the ending of my favorite anime series, I look forward to completing The Legends of Korra series and a new live-action Avatar series.

While I don't normally like to express my thoughts on things outside of finance in my finance blog, I decided to do it as a way of therapy for my sadness over the great ending of the series (even if the series ended a long time ago). If you read my thoughts on the series, I appreciate it.