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A real post I found in the wild

https://twitter.com/loonytully/status/1700289514642526304?s=46&t=jTPa0Or7KxNb9KmQ-BCKhA

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  • 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.

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    • 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.

        • Korra doing the both sides thing was fucking intolerable

        • 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.

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