I notice that old Avatar Fandom used to equate the Fire Nation with Japan for extremely obvious reasons but in more recent years people have started saying its a mix of Japan and China (because China also bad, obviously).
Yeah like never mind the Earth Kingdom being extremely China-coded, right down to Qing-era isolationism.
Lake Laogai is literally Lake Reform by Labor. They couldn’t have been more obvious about it.
Redditors don’t know literally anything about China. They couldn’t tell you if “Fang” was a Chinese or Japanese surname. Very high probability they say it’s Vietnamese or whatever the first Asian country that comes to their mind is
Yes, the fire nation has japanese architecture and names, it is an small isolated island and it invaded the rest of the asia coded world to fuel its industrialism, but have you considered that they are evil and therefore chinese?
Yeah the fire nation is very obviously imperial Japan, the earth kingdom is late Qing dynasty China, and the fire nation colonies are very obviously a parallel to Manchuko/Korea.
It’s not that deep. It’s just pulling from history to flesh out its world building. The show has plenty of interesting things to say, but that’s not among them.
Libs trying to retroactively make the fire nation be a metaphor for China, give me the same insane vibes as evangelicals trying to make… IDK biblical references to Babylon actually be references to modern Russia or whatever.
Well cartoons, Marvel, and Harry Potter are basically the Bible for libs so it makes sense they’d try to make these kinds of dumb, half-literate comparisons
It fucking sucks too, because I’m all for thoughtfully reading texts and parsing interesting meanings and interpretations from them, to see what’s being said.
But holy shit, libs, I’m begging y’all, please stop making the most shallow, nonsense readings. No, Vladimir Putin is not Voldemort, this isn’t what your highschool English class was trying to impart!
