In Avatar: Seven Havens, the Avatar’s role belongs to two sisters, something the franchise hasn’t done before. Pavi (Saheli Khan) and Nisha (Aishu Devan) learn that they share the mantle amid the remains of a civilization changed by a mysterious catastrophe.
South Asian cultural influences receive greater attention as the series expands Avatar’s visual vocabulary. Co-creator Michael Dante DiMartino says those changes don’t abandon the world audiences know from Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra.
“It’s more just adding to the world than taking anything from the other parts,” DiMartino told Polygon at NYCC 2026. “As we go into the other Havens, we’re gonna see all the different cultures represented.”
At the event, Polygon spoke with executive producers Ethan Spaulding, Sehaj Sethi, Bryan Konietzko, and DiMartino about the creative ideas and cultural references behind the characters and the places they inhabit.
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Expanding the world of Avatar
As Pavi and Nisha make their way through the seven Havens that survived, they face three connected problems: their divided world, what earlier Avatars left behind, and unanswered questions about their remarkable bond as twins.
For the artists, a world altered by catastrophe opens up new possibilities for Avatar’s scenery. In the concept art, rough orange peaks rise near wide deserts while green storms gather in the distance. An immense white shape draped in moss appears, in one picture, to be a rock formation. A closer look reveals that it’s actually the skeleton of an ancient creature.
Polygon finds the scenery eerie and unsettling, a landscape littered with the remains of life before the catastrophe. Destruction on that scale and the repeated appearance of green storms invite a climate-change comparison, though Konietzko said the setting began with a different idea.
“It wasn’t like a ripped out of the headlines, let’s do this. We actually had this kind of post-apocalyptic idea right after the original series,” Konietzko said. “So the seeds of this series were from 2008, but obviously, you know, climate change was already in discussion even back then, but early, early days.”
Still, he recognized how hard it is to separate the two: “So while it was not the kind of creative impetus, those parallels are impossible to ignore. It’s hard to do something like that without it reflecting what’s going on in our world.”
Konietzko welcomed the comparison as a way to think about how fragile civilization and the environment it depends on really are.
“I think it is a worthwhile thing to look at. You can’t take society and civilization for granted, and you can’t take your environment for granted,” he said. “And choices that humanity makes could have a really irreversible impact on your world. We all need to be thinking about those things and talking about them and acting on them.”
Putting a new spin on the Avatar(s)
The creators didn’t develop a devastated setting and then decide to add twin Avatars. According to DiMartino, the shared mantle was among the early ideas that gave the project its identity.
“When we initially came up with the show, that was kind of one of the first big hooks of, you know, why this would be different than the past series,” he said.
That premise was also part of their response when the network asked, “how is this different than what you guys did before?” DiMartino described their approach: “The idea of jumping ahead in time, new environment, new seven havens, the new landscape, and the idea of these sisters being twin avatars.”
Seven Havens doesn’t introduce a hero to restore balance so much as place its leads among the inescapable results of earlier events. Polygon reads this as a continuation of Avatar’s long interest in the friction between humanity and its environment, only with stakes bigger than one generation’s mistakes or a regional conflict. Understanding what brought their world to this point could matter as much to Pavi and Nisha as discovering how the Avatar might change it.
Bridging South Asian culture into the world of bending
New scenery comes with a shift in the series’ architectural and cultural sources. Although earlier shows drew from a range of Indigenous, Arctic, and East Asian traditions, Konietzko felt they “didn’t do enough” with South Asian representation, “especially with the Avatar word and concept coming from South Asia.”
“That was one of the earliest decisions: Pavi is going to be South Asian coded,” Konietzko said. “And we’re gonna go to a corner of the map that we haven’t spent a lot of time in other stories. The Avatar world is very big, and the Earth Kingdom’s huge. So it gave us a cool opportunity to dig into that stuff more.”
Sethi enjoyed drawing on her own background. She also pointed to an argument already present in the lore for a larger South Asian cultural presence: the importance of chakras to Aang’s story in The Last Airbender.
“That was a really big part of Aang’s journey and that’s a South Asian concept,” she said. “If we’re going to have that be a big part of Avatar lore, that culture really needs to be brought in as well.”
Ellora gives those references a tangible setting. The principal Haven, where viewers are introduced to Pavi and Nisha, takes both its name and architectural inspiration from ancient South Asian history.
“The name Ellora is actually from an ancient Indian underground city that has temples from Buddhist, Hindu, and Jainist influences,” Sethi said. She was referring to India’s Ellora Caves, carved into basalt cliffs in the Charanandri Hills of Maharashtra.
For Sethi, that choice both pays respect to ancient Indian culture and conveys how the Havens function. Bending philosophies formerly divided by national borders now coexist in Ellora and the other settlements.
Polygon interprets this mix of traditions and wider set of visual references as a way for Seven Havens to envision a transformed world while retaining its roots in Avatar mythology. Together, the ruined settings and blended philosophies point to a society building again with whatever remains, making something unfamiliar instead of merely restoring the past. For a franchise that examines the ways people, cultures, and environments influence each other, the article considers that a natural progression.
An appearance by Aang hasn’t been confirmed as part of those links to earlier stories. When asked whether he might appear, DiMartino answered with a wry smile: “You gotta keep watching for that one.”
