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!
Evil Ruzzians: “Your time has ended, Western liberal democracy! We will destroy everything your shareholders love! Wave your profits goodbye.”
Heroic Americans: “Over Ukraine’s dead body.”
Liberals and their fucking fiction-based political analogies being passed off as insight smh.
I really dislike ATLA because it’s deeply orientalist and what’s going to break people’s brains is when, in coming generations, it’s going to get dragged for its benevolent racism and its inherent colonizer perspective.
I get that it’s kids’ fiction and all that, and that I’m taking it too seriously (heck, there’s plenty of people who will come out and defend older racist caricatures in kids’ fiction using the very same justification) but ATLA gives me the ick because it’s more representative of westerners’ preconceptions about Asian cultures than it is anything close to a representation of Asian cultures themselves. But that’s exactly why it feels so salient to westerners, I guess.
Liberals and their fucking fiction-based political analogies being passed off as insight smh.
Liberals use fiction to explain reality. Communists uses reality to explain the fiction.
When you don’t understand politics (read: can’t be bothered to delve into it) it’s easier to just base your opinion on easily digestible superhero movies where everything is reduced to the obviously good side being superior and benevolent while the other side is comically evil who kills babies for sport or does some other absurdly malevolent act that leaves no room for the viewer to contemplate whether they’re actually bad or not. It’s why people easily jump on the Slava Ukraini wagon as the western media has made Russia into some terrorist state that woke up one day and decided to invade because they felt like it, which sounds similar to a certain children’s cartoon in the mind of the tweeter in this post. It’s also probably one of the reasons tabloids like Radio Free Asia are so swaying because their gimmick is to make countries like the DPRK and ROC a laughing stock for the amusement and sense of superiority of the westnerner who can’t be assed to research the claims these tabloids are making because they already reaffirm the preconceived biases westerners hold about those countries.
The original series almost gets a pass for being pure fantasy. But then Legend of Korra came out and confirmed basically every suspicion people had about the writers’ condescending attitude towards others, especially Asian cultures.
as i understand it LoK wasn’t the same writing team, or at least did not include most of the people who worked on the original show
They honestly think modernization=become like the usa. They literally made the people opposed to a settler state the villians.
How is ATLA orientalist and in what way does it have a colonizer perspective? I’m not asking that question as an attack, I’m genuinely curious.
It’s not representative of any country or culture but more of a hodgepodge like fantasy is with Europe. I dunno where the line is between inspiration and distortion though
Muh Tibet so wholesome is like one of the major things. Also like the eevvvvvuuulll north korea ba sing se thing.
Is Ba Sing Se supposed to be North Korea though? I mean, do the location, people, clothing, etc. take cues from Korean culture at all? I don’t know but I’ve never made that connection. It seemed to me like the usual 1984 Brave New World Fahrenheit 451 schtick
It’s been a while seen I watched the show, but the guru is the most egregious example iirc. It also leans heavily into “oriental mysticism” which in and of itself is gonna be difficult starting point, especially without robust connection to the cultures/religions/mythologies. In AATL, there is a bit of colonial apologia in the fact that aang is unwilling to kill the fascist strongman. I know its a kid’s show but look at the monk gyatzo scene. If you are telling a story, even to kids, about the horrors of imperialism you can’t shy away from killing the fucking hitler-analogue especially when there has been no apprehension for Aang to ostensibly kill a ton of people throughout the show. IMO korra is much much worse in this regard though. At least aatl doesn’t explicitly apologize for fascism.
My interpretation of Aang not killing Ozai is that he wants to end the war on his own terms and in a way that aligns with the teachings of the air nomads. I haven’t seen the show in years but I don’t remember Aang having a body count, though he arguably should considering all the people he throws around.
idk I guess after Steven Universe, I’m willing to give ATLA more leeway for its ending because I don’t think it’s nearly as apologetic towards fascists.
I don’t know enough about Tibet to know whether the Air Tribe is offensive and I’m not Tibetan either so my opinion doesn’t matter anyway. I see what you mean though.
I haven’t watched the show in a long time either, but iirc Ba Sing Se is most analogous to the Qing dynasty trying to maintain its social hierarchies at the expense of being unable to defend against an invasion or provide for its citizens. The whole Earth Kingdom isn’t like that, it’s just the capital stronghold with the political elite. I think it distances itself from the racist brainwashing trope because it establishes political reasons for why it’s like that and doesn’t imply that its people are naturally obedient or uniquely propagandized.
Because the Fire Nation is pretty much the same. Fire Nation kids have to do daily loyalty oaths, are taught a super biased version of history, are sheltered from the war they’re waging, and live under martial law in all but name. I think it’s important that they’re not portrayed as liberators or as a foil to Ba Sing Se and they’re not white either.
Westerners are famously media-illiterate so I dunno how much it matters that they’re twisting the story to villainize [current enemy country]. They do that with anything and everything even when it doesn’t make sense.
Also disclaimer: I haven’t seen Korra or watched the movie or read the comics or any other stuff
Idk, I had a good amount of nerd friends when I was a kid. And when the avatar books and show were coming out my Asian friends who were nerds were really excited and loved that shit because it was a fantasy story that highlighted and promoted Asian culture. There’s obviously a ton an adult can examine and criticize, but representation in a generally positive way can mean a lot for kids who belong to marginalized groups.
I think two things can be true at the same time.
I can’t speak for your friends or for Asian people more broadly but I’d assume that a generally-positive representation of Asian cultures which isn’t repeating the worst tropes in western media that have been a mainstay since like the 1980s and, especially, which depicts Asian cultures as diverse rather than as one homogeneous blob would be well-recieved because it’s undeniably progress.
Also having an Asian fantasy setting in the west is pretty uncommon and even moreso when there’s a noticeable absence of a white saviour or a Dances with Wolves-style protagonist who “does a better job of being Asian than the Asians”, which is epitomised by The Last Samurai.
That being said, it’s my opinion that ATLA has a really serious problem with a Western Gaze and it’s more a reflection of western preconceptions of Asian cultures than it is representative of something more developed and nuanced.
Take the Air Tribe for example. It’s basically a gish gallop of all the western preconceptions of Tibetan Buddhism that they could cram in, to the point that they even had a character named Gyatso.
Or there’s the whole scaremongering about Ba Sing Se with propaganda and brainwashing, two tropes that are invoked constantly in western discourse when talking about the East to the point that I’m surprised that people still buy into it after so many decades. Obviously today this is mostly focused mostly on China now but in prior generations it was the Vietnamese who were propagandised and brainwashed (and brainwashing Americans) and the same could be said for Koreans around the time of the Korean War (and for the DPRK even today) as well as Japan in WWII. Basically any time the west has an Asian enemy of the state there’s a flurry of discourse around how their people are propagandised, brainwashed, and are attempting to brainwash good, honest westerners. So to me it was really disappointing to see this subplot in Ba Sing Se.
I guess I should be glad that they didn’t have a subplot about how the good guys were simply trying to engage in honest trade with the people of Ba Sing Se to meet their demands and the leaders of Ba Sing Se cruelly and viciously attacked these traders which caused an escalation leading to a war where the good guys were simply trying to defend their trade routes but, at the same time, I wouldn’t have been surprised if they did consider making that a plot point at some stage.
It’s been a long time since I’ve watched ATLA but I remember wincing often throughout the show. I’m sure there’s more that I’d be able to criticise if I did a rewatch but this comment is already pretty long.
Americans will learn how to read critically or we will fucking end them in Minecraft
That’s a hard sell when Legend of Korra has Republic City as the more obvious, yet superficial, analog to the United States.
Just because it’s a cool, developed city state with peace and neutrality it doesn’t mean it’s the USA. I would argue it means quite the opposite.
Unfortunately the writers are big ol’ libs and they absolutely were trying to set Legend of Korra in a mix between '20s New York and Hong Kong, leaning more toward the New York side of things really. I mean there’s a giant green full-body statue out in the bay, it’s literally just new york
Well, I can’t argue that. But as the other guy replying to me said, it’s more the looks and less the actual parallels.
This is why I don’t get why liberals treat fiction like it’s divinely inspired. Like analogs and references to real world things in Harry Potter aren’t a result of J.K. Rowling’s ideology, they’re just self-evidently correct divinely inspired metaphors. In their mind, J.K. Rowling isn’t inventing a setting purely from her own knowledge and biases, the liberal becomes immersed in the fiction and unconsciously accepts the text as Rowling merely reporting on truths of this world the way she observes. They don’t read it critically as a world created entirely from her imagination, because it gently confirms their biases
