I Don't Believe There's an Atom of Meaning In It
I've always been a plot person, valuing books and movies far more for tight, clever plots than for things like beauty of language, interesting characters, or evocative settings. And I've always been downright suspicious of theme - it seemed to me when I first learned about them that pretty much every major work of fiction is about "good and evil"
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I guess I would say that Lord of the Rings is about freedom versus slavery. The Ring stands for domination, coersion and compulsion, the loss of the will in being in thrall to another. It was a conflict between an idealized simple, free, rustic life and the darkest kind of imposed, hierarchical mechanized order. Chaotic good versus lawful evil. Tolkien saw the whole thing in religious tones as well, where "freedom" flows from an acknowledgment of God and slavery is the result of man or men (or Maiar) trying to take His place.
Harry Potter is very, very, very much about death, no question about it. Since DH I've thought of the two themes of the series as being death and family, not too different from your perspective of death versus love. The deaths of Harry's parents and The Forest Again of course are the ultimate expressions of your Love versus Death dichotomy, the bookends and emotional hearts of the series that all come down to sacrifice, the ultimate triumph of love over death. The heroes try to triumph over death through love, and in their own way Lily and Harry (and Dumbledore, and Snape, and....) succeed; while Voldemort tries to triumph over death in another way, and fails.
For the Vorkosigan books, I can't disagree at all about the thematic importance of duty and honor (Miles! Cordelia! Gregor! Ekaterin! Bothari!). But I have always focused on something slightly different: to me they are a long meditation on what it means to be human. Not for nothing are there no sentient aliens. By the time we're done with the clones, the Quaddies, the mutants, the haut, the Barrayarans, the Betans, and all of Jackson's Whole... to me the series has some very profound things to say about what humanity truly is, about where people come from, how we are brought into this world, what makes us people. And I feel like she raises these profound issues very casually in the course of her stories, and yet I am hard-pressed to think of a more significant and appropriate theme for a science fiction series.
Avatar is hard. I think it is mostly classic coming-of-age stuff. Words like honor and destiny get thrown around a lot (usually in relation to Zuko, but also in relation to Aang), and what Zuko finally learns about honor from Iroh (and the world) is pretty similar to what Aral tells Miles. I think it's worth noting that pretty much every character has some kind of parent/child issues, either a loss or an estrangement or both - Aang's parents we never meet, but he loses his mentor and his entire community. I think you have to go down to Suki, who is like the eleventh-most-important character or something, to find someone who has no known familial issues. I do think the series is largely about finding who you are, what you are meant to do, and how your family is related to both. Honor and Family, I am leaning toward.
And I can add an obvious one: Star Wars, of course, is about redemption.
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*rubs hands together*
I guess I would say that Lord of the Rings is about freedom versus slavery. The Ring stands for domination ... Tolkien saw the whole thing in religious tones as well, where "freedom" flows from an acknowledgment of God and slavery is the result of man or men (or Maiar) trying to take His place.
Okay, but I'd say that "Freedom Versus Slavery" is just an expression of "Good Versus Evil." Where Rowling asserts that the "supreme act of evil" needed to create a Horcrux is murder, I think Tolkien would disagree with her and say it's enslavement. Perhaps it's a reflection of Rowling's "death thing" that she thinks that the destruction of human lives is the ultimate evil, but Tolkien clearly sees the ultimate evil as the destruction of human free will.
Since the Ring is an evil thing, it enslaves. But I think the primary question of the series is not "will I be a slave and/or slaver or a free man/hobbit/elf/dwarf?" but "how do I recognize and embrace Good and shun and defeat Evil?" The emphasis is on judgment, because it's not always easy to tell Good from Evil, definitely not as easy as rejecting the power to enslave people. Characters face tests of discernment - Frodo seeing that Aragorn "seems foul and feels fair," Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas being able to tell Gandalf from Saruman, Frodo trusting Faramir (but not Boromir), Sam's agonizing over whether or not to leave Frodo's body, Beregond's choice of Faramir over Denethor, Hama letting Gandalf in with his staff....
It was a conflict between an idealized simple, free, rustic life and the darkest kind of imposed, hierarchical mechanized order. Chaotic good versus lawful evil.
violaswamp argues below that it's actually lawful good versus lawful evil, and I think I agree. Tolkien, in striking contrast to the writers of Pirates and Avatar, has no ambivalence about authority - obedience to authority is GOOD, as long as you picked the right authority to be obedient to!
As far as I can tell, there's never a time where following Gandalf's advice - or Elrond's advice - would have been the wrong thing to do. As long as he follows his Prime Directive of serving Frodo, Sam will always make the right choice. It's more problematical if your authority has been corrupted by Evil - Theoden and Denethor - but if you keep your moral senses honed, you can detect the corruption and withdraw your obedience appropriately. Certainly there's no idea that you should privilege your own needs, desires, and values over that of your properly-chosen authority structure. Sam faces no agonizing over whether to stay with Rosie or follow Frodo; we never for a moment think that Galadriel would be right to insist on keeping her beloved Lorien as it is, or that Gimli should abandon his quest and concentrate on the Glittering Caves.
So much more to say on the other series, I'm going to need another comment.
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ITA. That's more or less what I was getting at in my comment below when I said the internal struggle of good vs. evil is as important as the external clash of forces.
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SO MUCH YES!!!
Avatar is about redemption, too, Y/Y? Redemption could include all the things you and angua9 said: responsibility to community = restoring (and maintaining) balance; honor = regaining honor; family = reconciling relationships.
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Certainly I agree that this is an ongoing concern or motif throughout the series, but I don't know if it rises to the level of a theme for me, primarily because every time the question is raised the answer is always the same. Is this being human? YES! Is this one? YES! Okay, how about this totally disturbing freak? YES, YES, YES, YES, fully human!
I dunno, I guess it seems to me that no matter how much "lesser" characters may have trouble with it, it's too easy for our protagonists Miles and Cordelia (though to a lesser extent for Mark, I guess, especially in regard to himself!) to see and treat everyone as human. There doesn't seem to be as much struggle as a true theme would have.
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So you're saying the theme of Avatar is "Quest for Identity and Destiny/Duty and Self/Family and Honor"? I don't think you're allowed to do that!
Here's what I was thinking, anyway:
To me, there are three conflicts/questions that are the most central to the series (where I'd expect to find the theme). Two of them are Aang's - the conflict he has between his chakra guru who told him he had to give up his worldly attachments (most notably his feelings for Katara) to achieve transcendence and Save the World and his unwillingness/inability to stop loving, and the conflict he has between all his previous incarnations who agree that he has to kill Ozai to Save the World and his own deeply-held aversion to killing. The third is Zuko's - the conflict between his duty to his father, king, country and appointed task (which he calls his honor) and, I dunno, the fact that his father, king, country, and task are evil and destructive (or as Iroh would put it, "No, he's crazy and he needs to go down"). I'd argue that the crux of all those issues is an individual's deeply held beliefs and true self versus the imperatives of duty, community, and family.
I'd say that DeMartino and Konietzko have a very, very different attitude toward the word "honor" than Lois Bujold does. For her (at least in the Vorkosiverse!) it's like the ultimate virtue, exemplified for me by the lovely image of Cordelia giving off honor like a fountain. But I think that Iroh (and the audience) sees Zuko's "honor" as a chimaera or red herring dragging him from his true path. A false quest. I may be misremembering, but I don't think Iroh ever uses "honor" to describe Zuko's correct moral choice, instead talking of his "true self" and maybe "true path": Zuko, you must look within yourself to save yourself from your other self. Only then will your true self reveal itself.
What strikes me is that in all three of these conflicts our young heroes end up cleaving to their own inner values and rejecting the advice of authority and the duty that is explicitly assigned to them. And in all three cases it works. Aang does NOT give up his love for Katara and does NOT kill Ozai, and yet he succeeds in saving the world. Zuko is a traitor to his father, king, and country and rejects/fails at the task that was going to regain his honor, and yet he saves his country and becomes its legitimate and benevolent king.
I see the same dynamic played out in small with the other characters, where they reject the demands of their family and community to remain true to themselves, only to end up more truly meeting the needs of their family/community. The whole gaang is basically a bunch of runaways - Sokka disobeys his father's instruction to protect the Southern Water Tribe as its senior remaining warrior and Toph completely rejects her parents' vision for her life. Mai and Ty Lee are shockingly disloyal to their leader, princess, and friend. The moral is profoundly pro-individual and anti-authority, perhaps because the entire community/world is sick and unbalanced at the time of the story.
I wouldn't call this "quest for identity" because most of them (all but Zuko and to a much lesser extent Sokka) already know who they are and what they truly want at the beginning of the story. The difficulty is in reconciling their true selves and desires with their responsibility to save the world. And that's hard, but ultimately successful.
[The only subplot I can think of that goes against this trend is the story of Yue, who totally sacrifices her self and her desires for the imperatives of community - not sure how that fits in!]
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I can't recall if Iroh uses "honor" that way, but post-redemptive Zuko definitely does. To me, it comes across as a matter of realizing what "honor" really is, not rejecting "honor" in favor of "true self".
I don't see the specific struggles Aang deals with as being that important, so much as the overall journey of him figuring out how to fill the role he initially rejected. The parallels between Zuko and Aang throughout the series are what stand out the most to me as developing the theme, starting most notably in "The Storm", when we find out how they both lost their honor (Zuko by falling out of his father's favor, Aang by shunning his duty as the Avatar), and how they plan to regain it. The rest of the series has Zuko gradually figuring out that regaining his honor is a much different task than what he expected; Aang has a more straightforward journey of mastering the elements and developing the maturity to balance his other concerns and desires with his duty. Their struggles are intricately woven together throughout the show (and plenty of other characters echo them in various ways). But the theme of redemption and reconciliation is best encapsulated by the episode "The Avatar and the Fire Lord": the friendship that was torn asunder, which destroyed the balance of the world, has to be repaired by the next generation, by Zuko and Aang. By the end of the show both redeem their past mistakes, as well as the mistakes of 100 years before.
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