The Last Airbender almost had a brutal death scene

Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender came out on Paramount Plus this weekend, and many longtime fans are probably still processing the series’ first new animated installment in more than a decade. The movie packed a great deal into 99 minutes, reuniting us with Aang and the rest of Team Avatar while bridging the gap between Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. One of the film’s strengths is great action animation, something that would have been even more punchy if a certain deleted scene stayed in.

An animator who worked on Avatar Aang, Tom Barkel, recently posted an unused animatic (a preliminary version of a scene using animated storyboards), and it is a lot. If you don’t want spoilers for the movie or want to avoid seeing your beloved blorbos treated with extreme violence, you’ve been warned. Barkel has deleted the X post, but fans saved the video.

The sequence is an alternate version of the battle between Tagah and Team Avatar that takes place as Aang retrieves Sonam’s staff. In the final version of the movie, Tagah betrays Aang’s friends, destroys their airship, and then attacks Katara. After Katara holds Tagah off alone, Toph, Zuko, and Sokka join the brawl. Despite being four versus one, the airbender still overpowers them, hitting each with concentrated gusts of wind that leave them incapacitated. Later, we learn Tagah’s strikes actually killed them and that Katara had to bring her friends back to life using water with enhanced spiritual properties.

The outcome is the same in Barkel’s version of the scene (the bad guy wins the battle), but the main difference is that Tagah dispatches Aang’s friends far more brutally, making it explicity clear that he killed them. Tagah fights with an obvious rage, blasting his foes so hard that they cough up blood before collapsing with vacant eyes. There’s enough time for both Aang’s friends and the audience to process each death, which makes it all the more horrifying — in particular, the part where Tagah executes Sokka in front of Katara is very uncomfortable. As one X commenter noted, the air nomad seems to go after the Gaang based on their nationality, prioritizing Toph and Zuko because of what the earth and fire benders did to his people.

Admittedly, in both versions of the scene, these characters cannot canonically die. Avatar Aang is a prequel to The Legend of Korra, where the rest of Aang’s friends are either alive or passed on much later in life. Still, Barkel’s version of the scene is a fascinating (and fairly uncomfortable) look at the way this fight could have gone.

Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender is now available to stream on Paramount Plus.