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Among your generation _where you live_ maybe.

1984 is a very popular and influential book.

I fairly confident that if you asked the authors of Avatar The Last Airbender they would tell you straight that they’d based that idea on 1984.

I’d be willing to bet people will be quoting 1984 long after ATLA has been forgotten.

Frankly... among my generation of roughly 30 year olds, I'd expect Avatar the Last Airbender to have higher cultural impact than 1984 (which was written in 1949).

Most of us were forced to read 1984 and didn't really enjoy it. ATLA however, is something that we organically grew up with through high-school / college and actually paid attention to.

My group of friends would be aware of 1984 concepts... such as "Big Brother is Watching" (phrases / concepts which have escaped the book and become a thing of their own). But I don't think we'd recognize the phrase "At War with Eurasia".

Honestly, the only reason why I remember "At War with Eurasia" is because I was a quiz-bowl player and was forced to memorize key phrases from many books I barely read. Even if I did read 1984 in my high school classes, it never actually stuck with me.

I feel a little bad doing this plug, but I strongly recommend Avatar: The Last Airbender when you feel he's old enough. (Seven seems to be a reasonable time to introduce it.) If you haven't seen it, see it for yourself first. It is perhaps the deepest and most nuanced "made for kids" thing I've seen at all: it provides a lot of discussion fodder.