Linguistic Analysis
Avatar projects have become a very important part of our global media culture. This is due to many of the themes present within the show and also a lot of cultural references.
Not only that but also because it has some of the most beloved fictional characters that we have seen on screen.
This section will show a brief linguistic analysis on the textual corpora of Avatar: The Last Airbender (ATLA) and
Avatar : The Legend of Korra (ATLK).
For ATLA, thanks to @rfordatascience, we already had a dataset. For ATLK, we used a python script to extract the corpora from subtitle files.
Initial Analysis
First we will look at the first project in the Avatar universe.
After cleaning some things within the corpus, we fetched the most common words used in the corpus:
We see that there are a lot of action words that repeat like go, know, get, think etc.
However, we see that there are words like fire and aang occurring in a large number which just goes to show that dynamics of ATLA still revolves around the Fire Nation and Avatar Aang.
Now, let's take a look at the second Avatar project:
Here we see somewhat of a similar pattern with the action words.
However, the use of the word fire has disappeared because the focus of the show now is instead towards the Avatar itself, which is why we see avatar and korra repeating in such a high number.
We also look at words that tend to appear frequently together i.e collocations, to get an idea of the textual corpus. We look at bi-grams and tri-grams.
For ATLA:
Similarly for ATLK:
Judging from both the analysis, we can clearly see that ba sing se which is the capital of the earth kingdom remains important and relevant in both the projects. Another major hint that this analysis gives us is towards the overall focus of each of the project.
ATLA mainly focuses on world building and introducing the viewers to different nations/locations.
In ATLK, we see a similar pattern when it comes to introducing new locations in the universe such as republic city., but there is a major shift in this series which focuses on words like avatar, bringing balance and mastering elements.
Dispersion plot
In this section we will look at some of the words that appear across the timeline of the corpus for each of the AVATAR projects.
ATLA
ATLK
As you can see from the above two figures, WAR is a recurring subject that is a common theme AVATAR projects try to deal with. The first series, i.e. Avatar: The Last Airbender, however, has war as a recurrent topic throughout the series at the basic plot is to end a war after a genocide was committed.
ATLA
ATLK
PEACE as a term is common throughout both the series as well. However, you can see that ATLK addresses it more as the series itself focuses more on holding peace after the war has ended in ATLA.
ATLA
ATLK
Another recurrent word is the term BALANCE which is one of the main themes of the Avatar projects. However, we see that in the ATLK project it is much more recurrent as the show itself focuses a lot on it as compared to the first one
Since ATLK is a prequel to the series ATLA, it is important to know how both the stories still stay connected as they share a single universe. The use of the term aang, which is the name of the main lead from the last series, is seen not just one or two times but throughout the latest series showing how well the two universes are connected.
Sentiment Analysis
In this section we will do some basic sentiment analysis of the two series as well as some word cloud visualizations.
First we will look at the overall sentiment of Avatar: The Last Airbender
Similarly, for Avatar: The Legend of Korra
It is quite apparent that from both the series ATLA has a good balance when it comes to these three sentiments. The show itself is popular because it talks about gruesome topics of war and genocide but also is light hearted and uses comedy quite often. In compared to that ATLK turns out to be more neutral then its predecessor when it comes to the overall sentiment of the show.
Following are the overall and sentiment based word clouds for ATLA:
ATLA - Positive
ATLA - Negative
ATLA - Overall
As we can observe from the visualizations above, ATLA positive word cloud shows words which had common recurrences in positive contexts and vice versa for the negative word cloud. For positive sentiment, the most significant words are action words. What more interesting to see is that there is quite a significant count involved when it comes to negative sentiments for word like fire, avatar, nation etc.
ATLK - Positive
ATLK - Negative
ATLK - Overall
For ALTK we see that avatar, aang etc. are quite significant words when it comes to positive sentiment which is a big shift in change from the last series. In terms of negative sentiment we see that fire is still a common word occurring in a negative sentiment in both the projects. We also notice words associated with negative sentiments recurring more as well like sadly, doom, end etc. which was not observed in such a significant number in the first series.
Context of characters
Aang
Common words
Sentiment
Aang is certainly one of the most popular character from the Avatar universe. When we look at some of the words he uses the most its quite clear they are the people he most cares about, one of whom he ends up marrying.
When we look at the sentiment of all his dialogues in the series, we see that his negative sentiment is quite low (the lowest from our analysis as well) which just goes to show how pure hearted this main character is.
Collocations
When we look at the collocations in Aang's dialogues, we see that things related to Air temples and Avatar are a recurring combination. Which is again very central to Aang's own identity. Of course there is also Ba Sing Se mentioned here as well which remains the central city of this universe.
Uncle Iroh
Common words
Sentiment
Uncle Iroh is unanimously the most beloved character from this universe. Even from his most common words used, we see that his nephew is still the most important to him. Apart from that he had the highest positive sentiment from our analysis which just goes to show his pure nature as a character.
Collocations
Zuko
Even from the collocations of Iroh, we see how important Zuko is to him where a lot of his dialogue revolved around him which greatly development Zuko's character.
Common words
Book 1 & 2
Book 3
Sentiment
Book 1 & 2
Book 3
Zuko has one of the most well written redemption arc on screen. This is one of the reasons we have separated his analysis in two segments, as he starts out in Book 1 & 2 as a misunderstood antagonist and later on in Book 3 redeems himself. From the use of his most common words, we can see that he is still very close to his uncle and at the same time has an obsession with the Avatar, but with the progression of time, he focuses more on his actions.
From his sentiment, we see that even though he is highly neutral, he becomes more positive as he reaches the final chapter of the series.
Collocations
Book 1 & 2
Book 3
After looking at his collocations we can see the difference in shift from the first books and the last.
Words like going home, restoring (honor), and uncle are more common in the earlier books.
Later on we see restoring balance, Ba Sing Se in the second focus on his actions within and also outside of his surrounding.