Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko used their New York Comic Con panel to double the size of their newest show. Paramount+ has renewed “Avatar: Seven Havens” for Books 3 and 4, taking the animated sequel series from two ordered seasons to four. The news landed on the Main Stage on Friday, October 9th, the same morning the three-episode Book 1 premiere went live on the service. The panel did not stop there, either. A second announcement landed right on top of the first, a brand new animated series called “Avatar Kuruk: Wave of Chaos.” It has been ordered to series, sending the franchise backward into its own history for the first time since “Seven Havens” pushed it forward.
Books 3 and 4 will continue the story of Pavi (Saheli Khan) and her twin sister Nisha (Aishu Devan), the dual Avatars at the center of “Seven Havens.” Paramount+ is not saying much yet about what either season actually holds, though the official release promises more detail on Books 2 through 4 “at a later date.” What is locked in is the release math on the season already airing. Book 1’s thirteen episodes are rolling out three at a time, with episodes four through six landing October 16th, seven through nine on October 23rd, and the final four closing out the book on October 30th. Warning beyond this point there are mild spoilers for “Avatar: Seven Havens,” including one plot beat from its first three episodes.
A second announcement landed right on top of the first, a brand new animated series called “Avatar Kuruk: Wave of Chaos.” It has been ordered to series, sending the franchise backward into its own history for the first time since “Seven Havens” pushed it forward.”
That speed makes more sense once you clock how fast “Seven Havens” has already shown its hand. Variety reports that its premiere folds in the return of Vaatu, the spirit of darkness and chaos first introduced in “The Legend of Korra,” now able to possess people. Getting a franchise-level villain back on screen inside the first three episodes is not a small swing for a show barely a day old. A streamer does not usually hand out a two-book renewal and a whole second series on the same morning its new show drops, which says a lot about how much Paramount+ already believes in this one.
“Avatar Kuruk: Wave of Chaos” is the headline item, and it is a strange next move for the franchise. It does not, in fact, continue forward from “Seven Havens” at all, reaching backward instead to Kuruk, the Water Tribe Avatar who came three generations before Aang. His few scattered appearances across the franchise have painted him as one of its more tragic figures, a man whose story is tied, in older franchise lore, to losing his wife to the spirit Koh the Face-Stealer, as Gizmodo notes. “Wave of Chaos” sounds like a very different story. According to Paramount+’s own description, the series “follows a rebellious teenage Avatar” who “bucks thousands of years of tradition by choosing to learn the four elements through globetrotting adventures, staying one step ahead of his angry teacher, rowdy pirates, and chaotic spirits, all while helping the world in his own unique ways.” The Hollywood Reporter went further and called “Wave of Chaos” the Avatar universe’s first action comedy, centered on a 14-year-old Kuruk living through a rare stretch of peace, a very different register from the grim adult he becomes in the material that already exists about him.
The series is being produced by Avatar Studios and Nickelodeon Animation Studios, with Konietzko himself stepping into the showrunner chair this time. Paramount+ used the panel to release the first official images from the show, which include Kuruk alongside his pet, Nikik. No footage has gone out yet, and there is no release date attached to “Wave of Chaos” either, which tracks with how early in development a show still is when the reveal is a handful of stills rather than a trailer. Development of the series had actually leaked months earlier, first reported over the summer by Knight Edge Media, so Friday’s panel was less a surprise, then, than a confirmation of a rumor the fandom had already been sitting on.
What made the panel worth watching beyond the two headlines was how directly DiMartino, Konietzko and co-executive producer Sehaj Sethi talked about the calculus behind building yet another corner of this world. “Some ideas are really old ideas from the Avatar days that wove their way into this,” Konietzko told the crowd. He was describing how “Seven Havens” itself had pulled from material the creative team had been sitting on for years. Sethi picked up the same thread from the writer’s side. “What interested me the most was that they were so willing to evolve everything. That they were really interested in saying, we told these two different stories; what’s the next iteration? What takes us even further?” she said of coming aboard, adding, “It was really exciting to me that we weren’t just repeating… we were going to tell a whole new story.” She went further on the show’s moral architecture a moment later, laying out a deliberate choice that separates “Seven Havens” from the clean hero-versus-villain shape of the earlier shows. “There are no villains in the story,” she said. “There are protagonists and antagonists. Everyone has a side and a point of view.”
Major Curda, who voices Jae on “Seven Havens,” used his moment on stage to talk about a piece of casting with some real stakes attached. “There has been some wonderful queer representation in Avatar Legends and some of the graphic novels,” Curda said of the franchise’s history with LGBTQ+ characters. “But it’s really exciting because of how it’s not a huge deal,” he added. “Jae is a character. Here is this new character Datu (Topher Ngo) they’re boyfriend. It’s just such a wonderful exemplification of love is love.” Inside the show’s canon, Datu is confirmed as Jae’s boyfriend, and Curda’s framing, that the relationship gets to exist as ordinary rather than as a plot point about representation, is exactly the kind of thing a franchise only gets to do once it has earned enough trust to stop explaining itself.
The panel also used the floor to talk about how “Seven Havens” looks and moves, and The Hollywood Reporter described the result as an intentional old-school 70s anime style, one that reads as more serialized than anything the franchise has produced before. That, for a studio that built its reputation on a specific, instantly recognizable visual language, is a real swing, and pairing a throwback aesthetic with twin Avatars nobody saw coming is the kind of bet that only looks safe once a renewal lands the same morning.
None of this happened in a vacuum, either. The panel, moderated by Janet Varney, the original voice of Korra, also used the morning to announce a wave of smaller expansions. Together they make clear just how much of a platform this franchise has become for Paramount+. A companion podcast, “Avatar: Braving the Elements,” co-hosted by Varney and Dante Basco, the original voice of Zuko, is adding two new episodes a week alongside the “Seven Havens” rollout. Cast and creator interviews are built around each release. “Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game” is getting a “Seven Havens” expansion of its own, with new in-game character colorways and a Sonam’s Temple stage. On the comics side, DiMartino and illustrator Alexandria Monik are developing a new “Legend of Korra” graphic novel trilogy, “The Legend of Korra: The Long Game.” It digs into the origin of the Red Lotus and brings back Korra, Bolin, Zaheer and Tokuga. The Hollywood Reporter also noted an artbook and novelization tied to the “Avatar Aang” film, arriving November 10th, rounding out a slate that, for one franchise, now spans two series, a film tie-in, a game, a podcast and a comics line at once.
Taken together, the morning was less one piece of news than a statement about where Paramount+ thinks this franchise is going. Renewing “Seven Havens” on the same day its first episodes arrived is an aggressive vote of confidence. Ordering a second animated series that looks nothing like it, built around a character most fans only know from brief, mournful cameos, is a studio betting that Avatar fatigue is nowhere close to setting in. It might not, in the end, all land the same way. A tonal action comedy about a character defined by tragedy is a real gamble, and “Seven Havens,” for its part, still has to prove, across three more books, that twin Avatars and a morally gray antagonist can carry a season the way a single clear hero always has for this franchise before. But a streamer does not usually stack this many bets on one morning unless it believes the audience is going to keep showing up for all of them.
What Do You Think? Does an action comedy register work for a character as tragic as Kuruk, or does it risk flattening what made him interesting in the first place? Will Datu stick around past his introduction, or is this a one-episode cameo dressed up as a reveal? And now that “Seven Havens” has four books locked in, how many of the franchise’s older, half-explained Avatars do you want “Wave of Chaos” to eventually drag into the light?
Catch up properly: every Avatar movie and series in chronological order on our Timeline Hub’s Avatar Cycle timeline.
See you on the next binge!
