The first line anybody speaks in the “Avatar: Seven Havens” trailer is “my whole life I was taught to hate the Avatar,” and the girl saying it is about to find out she is one. That is the whole show in eleven words. The official trailer went up on the franchise’s own channel on 10 September, just under two and a half minutes of it, and the thing that comes across is not the usual sequel-series reassurance that the old magic is intact. It is that being the Avatar has become the worst news a person can receive.
“Avatar: Seven Havens” premieres on Paramount+ on Friday 9 October, and it does not trickle out. Three episodes land on day one, three more on the 16th, three on the 23rd, and the last four on the 30th, which puts the whole of Book One on the shelf inside a month. Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko created it, the same pair who made “Avatar: The Last Airbender” and “The Legend of Korra,” and it is set 225 years after Korra in a world that an apocalyptic event has already broken. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the “Seven Havens” trailer, including the twin reveal, what the dialogue says about Korra, and the exchange the trailer saves until after its own title card.
The thing that comes across is not the usual sequel-series reassurance that the old magic is intact. It is that being the Avatar has become the worst news a person can receive.”
It opens on a wide shot of a city built into a canyon, coral-coloured towers under a sky running with green and violet aurora, and the palette alone tells you this is not the Earth Kingdom you remember. DiMartino and Konietzko have said the art direction leans on the French comics artist Moebius and on 1990s anime, and the animation comes from La Chouette Compagnie, a French studio. It looks different in a way that is deliberate rather than cheap. The camera finds Pavi (Saheli Khan), an earthbender living in the city of Ellora, and within thirty seconds she has seen something she was not supposed to see. “Jae, what did you see?” somebody asks. Then “look out,” then a beat later the line that changes her week: “you can airbend?”
From there the trailer moves fast and mostly through overheard dialogue rather than exposition. “Word of the Avatar’s return is spreading,” a voice says over an aerial shot of a market packed with people. “No one can know what you saw.” A sky bison, the one unmistakable franchise object in the whole cut, banks through an orange dust storm with a saddle on its back. And then the trailer plays its biggest card early, which is the choice a lot of sequel shows would not have made: two girls stand facing each other, and one of them asks, “why do you look like me?” The answer arrives flat and immediate. “So we must be sisters.”
That is Nisha (Aishu Devan), Pavi’s twin, and the series has been open about her since July, which is why the trailer can spend her so casually. The detail that has not been front and centre until now is where she grew up: separated from Pavi young and raised in captivity by the Order of the White Lotus. Hold that thought, because the trailer comes back to it in a way that reframes about forty years of this franchise’s mythology. Meanwhile the screaming starts, somebody delivers “okay, well, this has been fun” in the exact register of a person watching a plan collapse, and a voice promises, “I will severely punish whoever is hiding the Avatar.”
The centre of the trailer is a refusal, and it is the most interesting thing in it. “I can’t be an Avatar,” Pavi says. “I’m no warrior.” Then the part that made us stop the video and run it again: “and the last one doomed the world.” The last one is Korra. This is a show whose protagonist has been raised to believe that the previous Avatar, the hero of the series a great many people in the audience grew up on, is the reason civilization collapsed. Nobody is hedging it either. The official premise has Pavi “hunted by both human and spirit enemies and viewed as a destroyer instead of a savior,” and the Seven Havens of the title are described as the pillars of civilization that rose from a world already shattered.
What the trailer does not do is tell you whether that belief is correct, and there is a line planted to make you doubt it. “The world isn’t as black and white as you’ve been taught, little one,” an older woman says, which reads less like wisdom and more like a warning that Pavi’s entire education has been someone’s version of events. There is a second voice pushing the other way: “you were born for this,” and, from a companion, “no matter what we discover, we’ll face it together. Promise.” Between them sits the funniest line in the cut, delivered by somebody clearly not coping: “uh, I am processing all of this, uh, fantastically.” The spirit world is the other pressure. “Something’s going on in Ellora,” a voice says. “The spirit world has unleashed its wrath.”
And then the trailer does something worth calling out on its own. The end card arrives at about two minutes and ten seconds, Nickelodeon logo, title, streaming October 9, the full stop. Except it is not the end. Fourteen seconds of footage run after the card, and they carry this exchange: “what do you know of the Order of the White Lotus?” The reply is “freaky underground cult that worships the Avatar.” The White Lotus is the ancient society that protected the Avatar across both previous shows, the organisation Iroh belonged to. Two centuries later it is a cult, it is underground, and the girl describing it that way is the sister it raised. Putting that after the logo, where roughly half an audience has already clicked away, is either enormous confidence or a joke at the expense of anyone who stopped watching.
The people behind it are not strangers to this. Jeremy Zuckerman, who scored both earlier series, is writing the music again, and Ethan Spaulding, a story artist and director on both, executive produces alongside DiMartino, Konietzko and Sehaj Sethi, with Alexandra Chiu supervising direction. It is made by Avatar Studios and Nickelodeon Animation, which exists because DiMartino and Konietzko walked away from Netflix’s live-action remake in 2020 over creative differences and Nickelodeon built them a division instead. Twenty-six episodes are ordered across two books of thirteen. One more thing the calendar is quietly doing: 9 October was the date the “Aang” animated film was originally supposed to land, and instead the franchise is spending it on the show that says the last Avatar broke the world.
What Do You Think? Is making Korra the villain of the next Avatar’s backstory a genuinely bold swing, or is it going to read as the franchise apologising for its own most divisive lead? Does the White Lotus turning into an underground cult that raised one of the twins in captivity change how you read Iroh’s old order? And does dropping three episodes a week give a post-apocalyptic mystery enough room to breathe, or is Book One going to be over before anyone has worked out what happened to the world?
See you on the next binge!
