https://twitter.com/loonytully/status/1700289514642526304?s=46&t=jTPa0Or7KxNb9KmQ-BCKhA
ok
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.
And using blatantly Chinese names lol. Everything is Qin this Fang that.
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
Oh come on, this is
, they’d say it’s some Slytherin name (“Fang” … really?) with talking to snakes and all
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?
At this point they could remake it but literally call it “Japan” and
would collectively go “well ackshually it’s a metaphor for GYNA”
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!
yeah its a very obvious early ww1-2 analogy on the chinese front with some siberians/inuit and a tibetan tossed in.
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."
lmao i'm going to start replying to all sorts of things with "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.
Excellently put! I can't even count the amount of fiction works that had completely lost me after learning just a modicum of diamat
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
If you watch The Dragon Prince you'll realize that Ehasz wasn't the key either. I don't know what happened to make ATLA good despite its flaws, at this point I think it was pure luck. It was good despite everyone involved being shit lol
They honestly think modernization=become like the usa. They literally made the people opposed to a settler state the villians.
Yeah, it's kind of mindblowing that their solution to colonialism is just "it happened in the past, let's let bygones be bygones and not return the territory to its original owners and let everyone just "live in peace.""
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
There's Korean architecture in the Earth Kingdom and in the Fire Nation, though I don't know about in Ba Sing Se specifically. Ba Sing Se is definitely supposed to be Evil Oppressive China though.
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.
Absolutely, the politics of korra is utter dog shit. Somehow they managed to fuck up almost every political theme they were exploring throughout the show. Couldn't even get the gimme that is "fascism bad" lmao.
Korra even makes a reference to that shitty "Escape from camp 14" North Korea expose that turned out to be largely made up
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.
Steven Universe is not as story about fascism, it was never meant to be a story about fascism. The gems are explicitly stated to be non-organic aliens with a perpendicular relationship with and understanding of the universe. They are so incredibly naive that all it takes is one human child in the right place to utterly break their society. That premise has no use as an allegory for fascism, and it was never sold as such.
It's a story about familial estrangement, the expectations we put on ourselves, and learning to love oneself; it just happens to have a space opera back-drop.
They colonized entire galaxies though. Complete with gem slavery, a militarized society, live experiments, and (likely) genocides.
I agree that the show portrays the diamonds as an analog to an abusive family, but I think it really fumbled it by trying to have it both ways. I mean, you can't make the 3 diamonds be Steven's estranged sister-moms and turbo Hitler if you want an ending where their relationships get repaired. Did they ever even address the gigantic trillion-gem mutant they created in the Earth's core?
Gems are von Neumann born into their roles -- yes, they did all those horrible things, but they did them thinking of themselves as tools for tasks, not people. Even the diamonds though of themselves in terms of the (very privileged) task they were born into. The gems' very existence is so prescribed, the thought to re-examine their roles does not occur to them. It's more speculative fiction than political analogy.
Did they ever even address the gigantic trillion-gem mutant they created in the Earth's core?
haha no, not really. (I think Yellow dimond has a offhand line in Future where she says she wants to try and help the cluster in some way?) I'll admit, i'm pretty apologetic for this show, cus I like it a lot. Cartoon Network really screwed them over, cutting them off from new seasons after freaking out over the gay coded Ruby/Sapphire wedding. There was supposed to be a whole season spent on homeworld, fleshing things out more. They realized the mistake after the finale, and hurriedly green-lit the Future series. But by that point a lot of material had died on the cutting room floor.
I guess it doesn't matter to me that the diamonds bought into their own propaganda - they still did what they did and for thousands of years. It's unbelievable that they went from diamond supremacists to cosmic Jesuses within like a week of meeting Steven. Or at all, tbh. Bismuth was right to shatter them.
And I like the show too! It's why I was so upset that all the political intrigue got abruptly dropped without any resolution. The invasions, the rebellion, the collateral damages, gem hierarchies, and fusion discrimination... Steve just had to chat with some giant women for a bit to solve everything. It felt insulting ngl
I just wrote a response addressing this here if you want to get my take.
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
I don't know enough about Tibet to know whether the Air Tribe is offensive
I wouldn't say that it's offensive but it's definitely a heavily stereotyped representation of Tibetan Buddhism. I'd say it's benign racism, or the western gaze to be precise, more than anything.
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.
Yeah, I get that it's about the Qing Dynasty (hence my reference to the Opium Wars) but it's not just the political elite which is brainwashed and the character Jet literally becomes a Manchurian Candidate in one of the episodes.
Honestly I think you're doing diagetical handwaving to excuse the use of the trope by using in-universe justifications for it. I don't think that it really matters that there's a rationale for the brainwashing within the story because it's literally resting on the well-worn ground of invoking the trope of brainwashing in reference to Asian cultures regardless of that fact.
That's a bit like having a fantasy African culture and establishing the centrality and necessity of having caricaturised witch doctors to the story and using that as a defence for the use of the caricature; it doesn't matter if "ooga-booga" literally represents something meaningful in that universe because outside of the narrative, in the real world, it's still a racist trope. The same goes for Tikki Tikki Tembo;that story has a diagetical rationale for the caricatures but it's still racist all the same.
I'm not saying that the political elite are brainwashed, I'm saying that there's brainwashing because of the political elite. They're pushed into a corner and have turned to increasingly desperate methods of maintaining their power in the face of domestic revolution and foreign aggression. The kidnapping and brainwashing thing came about recently in the city's history. Though I suppose lore doesn't matter if the presence of brainwashing is the issue.
I don't think the trope is comparable to the other stuff you mentioned because it's present in a lot of non-Asian western media too. Like Clockwork Orange, BioShock, the three anti-authoritarian books everyone reads in high school, uh Harry Potter I think.
But yeah it pretty much is the Manchurian Candidate. I think there's less bite to it because there are no communists, liberals, politicians, or real countries involved but yeah the story would be better off without it.
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
Whether or not they ever do, the most "clever" ones will still pretend not to get it. They'll think it's cool, and brave, and make a little smirk for the news cameras, but be buried alongside the rest anyway.
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.
I can't source it right this second, but in an interview, the show runners said they based Korra's setting on the 1920s US, simply because they thought it would look cool, which is.... Horrid world building.
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.
You're telling me you can build a world with the explicit goal of capturing it's look and feel... And not capture any other parallels?
I want you as my propaganda artist, man.
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
Citing that movie for ATLA canon is an act of pure desperation
The Earth Nation in the original series was pretty China coded and not in good ways. I enjoyed Avatar but it's got plenty of liberal brainworm propaganda and Korra is worse that way
They're all a hodge-podge of Asian cultures. There's Chinese, Japanese, and Korean stuff all over, with a smattering of more eXoTiC places like Vietnam randomly thrown in.
and yeah Legend of Korra is just fucking awful in basically every regard
If AtlA is WW2-coded then the general vibe of the Earth Kingdom leadership kinda works: a foreign invader is burning half the country to the ground and they're too busy worrying about internal dissent and politicking to properly mount a defense.
Not sure who Mao and the communists would be in this though.
The Earth Nation in the original series was pretty China coded and not in good ways.
I always thought that to a very small extent ATLA was a liberal "Free Tibet (Air Nation) from China (Fire Nation)!" dogwhistle, despite the opportunism of claiming it was about Bush and the War on Terror, as soon as that finally became unpopular, but it didn't stop me from enjoying it.
people forget this, but there's a whole litany of neoliberal balkanization advocacy groups against china, not out of a sincere desire for sovereignty of nations colonized in the past by Chinese imperial dynasties, but out of a reactionary desire to reverse the development of China (this is the same trick they played with Yugoslavia and USSR, after all). The 400 year old proto-bourgeois idea of Westphalian sovereignty has outlived its progressive nature against feudalism and has become a force of reaction against Socialism for keeping nations underdeveloped and divided against each other and preventing international proletarian solidarity, collaboration, consolidation of power, etc.
So you got "Xinjiang is East Turkestan!" (ignoring ETIM and other reactionary groups funded by the CIA through the NED) and "Free Tibet!" (ignoring that Mao Zedong cracked down Buddhist clerical/monarchist slavery and pedophilia in Tibet) and "Free Hong Kong!" (ignoring that Hong Kong was literally colonized by the British until the late 1990s, and was always a bastion of Capitalism in the region) and "Free Taiwan!" (ignoring that Taiwan is basically a holdout for Guomindang bourgeois nationalist warlords, capitalists and reactionaries who lost the civil war to Chinese workers and peasants, i.e. the Chinese equivalent of neoconfederacy). So all these cries for sovereignty seem to the unacquainted like sincere cries for freedom of nations with their own capital-C culture from Han supremacism, but really, they're just cynical calls for balkanizing China so that the regions lopped off from Beijing's control can be more easily infiltrated by western NGOs and think tanks and intelligence agencies who will of course advocate for the usual capitalist nonsense like privatization, deregulation, austerity, lowering the age of consent, reintroducing child labor, legalizing gambling, bringing in foreign direct investment, flooding them with high interest IMF loans, giving money/weapons to reactionaries, cracking down on labor unions and cooperatives, etc. How do I know all this? They had an established pattern of doing this in the Yugoslav nations, the Soviet nations, and for a long time they did it to Cuba under Batista.
If you rewatch the very last ATLA episode they talk about the Earth Nation balkanizing and how great that is, even in Korra they seem to have forgotten about it but I member
That's pretty fucked. I've never seen the movie, but I'd heard he made them syncretically Japanese-Indian in the movie.
in the original series, the only Indian-coded guy we meet is a kooky but wise sage who seems to have been a non-bender scholar of air nomad culture or just a really earthly wise traveler. i always figured that some of the islands around air temples might have had some indian-ish cultures that would technically be part of the earth kingdom, or maybe he's from an island nation somewhere in the big ocean on the other side of the planet.
anyway what im getting at is i actually think it's a cool idea for an adaptation to try to place that indian-inspired culture somewhere and explore it as a little side worldbuilding thing through a couple of characters, so it's a shame that such an option was ignored over just casting a bunch of indian people in a decidedly not-very-indian existing culture
I thought the fire nation was meant to be Britain/Japan (pretty similar countries in some key ways)
it's an island nation that industrialises first and then goes on to stage a brutal empire. Admittedly Japan is a better analogy because they seek to settle and industrialise where the British were pretty much only interested in revenue extraction and the fire nation isn't shown seeking profit from imperialism so much as power and prestige
British were pretty much only interested in revenue extraction
am i a joke to you? (imagine australia, canada & south africa are in that too)America and canada were the same colony to begin with. They were a weird one as they were practically settled by political refugees from the aftermath of the civil war to begin with and those settlers lobbied for protection. The money there was with trade with the natives for furs which the settlers kept fucking up by not respecting treaties and the slave trade. Although the north american slave trade wasn't as profitable as the carribean
australia was a penal colony focused on revenue collection
I don't know as much about south africa but from my understanding the intent was to make money from ivory and precious metals.
The French in comparrison to the British intended to make everyone French. The British horrors were largely motivated by a depraved indifference to human life and love of money. So yes all those colonies were for money which makes the fire nation more like the Japanese than the British as the fire nation rarely mention revenue which would have come up a lot in British discussion of empire
America as a colony was a weird one as it was largely settled by political refugees in the initial stage (canada was the same settlement) and then lobbied for protection. The only real money to be made from a British perspective was with the native's and their fur trade but the American settlers were just liabilities in that regard as they absolutely refused to stick to any treaties. That and the slave trade of course which also began to loose money after a while as well as being politically unpopular not to mention it made the Scottish richer and more influential which isn't always what the English want
Australia was a penal colony ultimately focused on revenue
south africa I don't know as much about but my understanding is there was some intention to make loads of money off precious metals and ivory
we said "read a different book" so I guess this is halfway to making that effort but I'm still failing this post anyway for not learning from hp debacle.
"Hey folks, we're not smart, you have to actually TELL us what you are trying to say instead of hiding it behind multiple layers of irony and metaphor"
The promotion of subtext was a CIA op.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html
I thought it was less of one nation and more of industrialization and the industrialized powers (including the us)
I'm positive it could be read in many ways, but in a Western country that has pretty much viewed "Asians" either as "poor rice farmers that need saving" or "Fu-Man-Chu orientalist villians" there was a pretty good chance that us anglos would wind up thinking the Fire Nation were Chineese/Japanese WWII/Cold War analogs.
