I want to start by saying that I do not hate M. Night Shyamalan.

I’m not some silly girl who goes with the critical flow and decides to hate on whatever it is that is popular to hate at the moment. I don’t dislike him (solely) for the mockery he made of one of my favorite cartoons, Avatar: The Last Airbender.

I’ve actually been a fan of his movies for some time; I liked The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and I didn’t even mind the plot of The Happening (I know, I know).

So then, if I am a fan, why do I think M. Night Shyamalan should stop making movies? Well, there are three reasons.

He will drive a movie into the ground in order to ensure that his original vision, whether practical, logical, or even entertaining, is fully represented.

Avatar: The Last Airbender was a great cartoon. There was so much detail and story Shyamalan could have pulled from the series, and so much that the original screenwriters for the movie actually did use. Unfortunately, Shyamalan didn’t believe that some of the things that made the show so great were things that would mold the movie into his own “directorial style.”

In the cartoon, Sokka is a lively character that serves as both the comic relief and as a prime example of the amazing character development many of the characters in Avatar went through. He goes from a silly boy to a man who knows when to be appropriate and how to be a true leader.

In the movie, Sokka starts off as a somber, serious teenager bearing the burden of having had to take care of his family. This too, differs from the cartoon, where Sokka often refers to Katara as having been a mother-figure and a well from where he could draw strength. This change of character-personality greatly weakens the overall development—where is he going to go with the character now? He’ll just be stagnant and one-dimensional.

This tendency to change things he doesn’t agree with goes with my second problem with Shyamalan: his ego has become “Kanye-esque” in it’s absolute arrogance, so much so that he is willing to disregard complete scripts if he doesn’t agree with the content and actually go as far as write the thing himself.

In both The Last Airbender and in The Happening, Shyamalan made huge changes to the original screenplays. Both films later on were widely panned critically, and Shyamalan believed it was because people didn’t “get” his style—no, Shyamalan. We get it. We got it the third, fourth, and fifth times you did the same thing over and over again.

This complete disregard for his audience’s level of intelligence leads me to my third big problem with Shyamalan: he thinks we’re all stupid.

In many interviews he has appeared frustrated with the audience’s inability to recognize what he sees as his ingenuity. He has stated many times that the problem lies in our ability to understand what he does.

The problem is that this isn’t true. I hate to harp on the same subject, but The Last Airbender was a bigoted tragedy. In the cartoon, all of the different kingdoms and tribes are asian. Shyamalan thinks that the reason we think he’s racist is because he chose his own “race” to play some of the most prominent characters in the film.

In an interview with indiemoviesonline.com, he even went as far as calling his critics racist for thinking he was racist. What? Is he delusional or something? Just because he put in a bunch of races and changed the pronunciations of the names doesn’t make him a champion for equality!

Why would he change the pronunciations to be asian, but then not make the characters themselves asian? Why would he talk about trying to be as fair as possible when it isn’t about fairness? It’s about accuracy. When you’re making a movie based on a separate original work you have to mindful of staying true to the source—he didn’t. Not even a little.

He’s a bigot in egalitarian clothing.

M. Night Shyamalan is going to keep making movies, and I know this, but he really shouldn’t. Devil, his latest “from the mind of” film will be out tomorrow, and I hope that it’s good.

I’ll be there to watch it, because in spite of it all, I know he has good ideas. And that’s the thing about Devil: it’s literally only his idea. He isn’t writing it, he isn’t producing it or directing it. This movie has a chance of actually being good, and I hope that it is.

If it isn’t then M. Night Shyamalan’s career will be completely dead in my eyes.