Aang’s Map of the World: early Avatar world map concept art revealed for the first time!
Today Bryan Konietzko revealed these early world of Avatar concepts on his Instagram (1, 2), showing Aang’s personal map featuring his favorite animals around the world! There’s a rough draft and then the version included in the famous “series bible” pitched to Nickelodeon. It’s extremely cute.
There’s actually a lot of cool series development stuff hidden away here too, notably:
- the “Earth Nation” in the early draft became the “Earth Kingdom” as we know it in the later one
- the Air Temples were referred to as “Air Temple South”, “Air Temple East”, etc. rather than “Southern Air Temple” etc.
- Aang still had his futuristic staff at this stage, indicating that at this point in development he was probably still from one thousand years ago rather than one hundred, from an ancient technologically-advanced civilization
- as early as this, “something” was hiding in the central Earth Kingdom’s West Lake, a plotline that would come to fruition in Book Two: Earth, Chapter Twelve: The Serpent’s Pass. Dat continuity.
One of the things that didn’t make it into the show can be seen just to the left of the Si Wong Desert: Aang’s “favorite inchworm lives in a log here.” Bryan actually singled this one out, saying “I wish that inchworm had made it into the show…🐛”, and considering he found this map while packing to move to Netflix’s offices for the new live action ATLA series… we may just be getting that inchworm yet…
Anyway, this was just really cool to see because it was always one big thing absent from the ATLA artbook, so yay! If you’re into this, we also got some early Republic City concept art a few months ago. 🗺️
🍓🧀 (archive) 