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Originally Posted by mrpawn
The main problem being him not thinking of the air nation and water nation being different nations, or it not mattering. Instead he made the water tribe white and aang white. he probably was being pressured into stronger diversification so he hired a famous person of another ethnicity: Dev Patel. So then he cast him as prince zuko and made the fire nation dark skinned and it all went down hill.
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I heard he was pretty hell-bent from the outset on the girl he cast as Katara, which probably screwed up his options from the beginning as then he was more or less forced to make Sokka Caucasian too. Whether or not he bowed to pressure later is one thing, he might have done but more to the point is that the official story of Dev Patel's casting is he was called in by chance only because the guy Shymalan originally wanted couldn't make it to the actors training camp due to prior commitments. So even there, he's ~admitting~ his only ethnic protagonist actor was only a substitute and not his first choice.
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Originally Posted by PockyMePink
For me, the races of Avatar are complete opinions.Many people interpreted their races differently, including myself. I saw the Asian influences, but evertime I saw Aang, I didn't think "Asian boy", I thought "Air Nomad". Their races were always speculation, but the real races of these characters were just like the Avatar world -fictional.
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The problem is, that's all fine and dandy if it's just in your head; it not going to offend anyone if you say, 'well i imagine that they're all X', because you're not forcing everyone else to see it the same way. I can make Harry Potter a Peruvian if I really fancy, write fanfic about it and mostly get away with it. But when it's going into a major public portrayal where the actor's ethnicity is clear cut, then that's no longer going to fly. Shymalan had all the cultural pointers in the anime, he should have followed them. Instead he insisted on forcing his head-verse, and it's backfired.
It's a matter of credibility as well; Ronin's Lord of the Rings comparison kind of makes sense; the series is heavily Norse/Anglo-Saxon in the surrounding mythos and atmosphere. Even the language. So Samual L. Jackson playing Aragon (which actually sounds kind of awesome now I write it) with Jackie Chan as Elrond is going to look incredibly odd. Also explains why there was a significant British slant to the casting as well, and even the guy who played Sam had to go away and learn a specific British dialect for the role.