A real post I found in the wild
A real post I found in the wild
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i blame m night shamalan for his part in making the fire nation Chinese in the live action movie, I knew a lot of kids who argued that the fire nation was purely Chinese because of the movie.
Citing that movie for ATLA canon is an act of pure desperation
middle school boys will stoop to any level.
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.
yeah he hired a bunch of Indian actors, which is a weird choice, but I dont know enough about indian history/culture to know of thats a good switch. Maybe it is, maybe shamalan just wanted more indian representation but that doesnt make sense because he made them the BAD GUYS while making the inuit charterers who should be played by indigenous people WHITE. so like the bad guys are now brown and the good guys are now white, how is that a good choice? and he took out a lot of the Japanese aesthetics in my opinion.
im no fashion historian but this doesnt even look a little Japanese anymore or at least a lot less. i could be wrong though.
edit. after much googling this says indian/chinese to me no Japanese. so i guess he replaced the japanese elements with indian. such a weird choice to me. earth nation with indian influences would have been much better.
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
in definitely down for more indian elements! that would have been so cool. what really gets me about that choice is that it paired with the whitening of the good characters literally made the movie the good white characters vs the evil brown characters quite literally
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me and the other brown kids definitely noticed because there was a little race war about who looked like katara and sokka and this was a win for the white kids.