I knew almost nothing about this show going in, but I enjoyed The Last Airbender so I decided to check it out. I heard it had problems, but no one told me it was straight-up fascist propaganda.
What I'm about to rant about isn't me reading too much into it, because the points they're trying to make are about as subtle as a horse pissing, and this is a popular franchise that all ages watch and are influenced by.
Republic City is clearly supposed to be America.
The Equalists are clearly supposed to stand-in in for a leftist group fighting against oppression. Their posters are even designed like leftist posters.
The Equalists are disadvantaged minorities, similar to MLKs civil rights movement or the woman's suffrage movement. Except in this show, these people have harder lives because they are born without superpowers, and because of this they are jealous and bitter of those who do have superpowers and want to take everyone's powers away because of jealousy.
This is akin to saying minorities aren't really oppressed, they're just genetically inferior and not 'special'. Korra straight up tells an equalist that they want to be whiny and oppressed. Our Hero, everyone.
Can't wait for the episode where Korra tells someone who can't afford cancer treatment that they're just jealous of healthy people. Hell, considering how hamfisted the Equalists as an expy for leftists is, this is like saying that leftists are jealous of healthy people and want to make everyone sick.
This isn't subtle, the way this show misrepresents the left is straight out of the Nazi propaganda playbook.
Even if you can look past the pro-fascist morals, the show is just boring. Gone is the adventure and unique fantasy setting of The Last Airbender. The show now spends most of the time focusing on a boring love triangle and an uninteresting sport. It was actually this that made me stop watching because it was so slow-paced and the characters were so unrelatable/unlikable.
I mean, The Last Airbender could be lib as shit sometimes (the Ba Sing Se episode comes to mind) but it at least was a fun adventure about defeating a fascist empire. In The Last Airbender, the hero wins by taking away the superpowers of the leader of the evil empire. Making the pro-power, pro-empire morals that The Legend of Korra is trying to put forward seem even more hypocritical and hollow.
Another thing that sucks is that I've seen most criticisms of this show are hand-waved away as people just not liking it because Korra is a "strong female lead".
Neo-Liberals hiding fascism behind progressivism, name a more iconic duo.
Anyway, that was me shitting on a show about 10 years too late, but fuck it. I had no idea it was that bad.
Communism is when your genetically superior superpowers are taken away from you.
You see this trope a lot in children's fiction.
I know My Little Pony had an episode about this.
But what does that actually translate into in real life?
It's not like expropriating someone's property or restructuring how an economic system works. It's more like ... Communism is when all the tall people have to be reduced in height so we're all equals heights ... or something.
The fact that Sato, the stand-in for Henry Ford, is one of the Equalists tells you everything - that "Equal" just means "Evil" and has fuck-ton nothing to do with economic structures, just magical genetic individual superpowers.
there's this short story, Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut. I must have been assigned it as required reading at least half-a-dozen times over the coarse of elementary, middle, and high school. This was over several different school districts. If my anecdote is anything to go by, it's probably more widely read than 1984. It helps the teacher can make it through the whole thing in, like, fifteen minutes -- tops. And it's sooo dumb. Like, the Vonnegut absolutely-wrote-this-in-one-sitting-and-forgot-about-it, dumb.
I think that short story encapsulates everything Americans really and truly believe about communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular.
Am not reading that shit so tell me the story pls
If I remember right people are kept "equal" in all aspects by handicapping those smarter, stronger, faster, etc than average. If you're smart you have a speaker strapped to your head to interupt your thoughts so you're on the same playing field as dumber people, shit like that. And the title character is a super special genius strong boy who has to wear the biggest weights etc to keep him down. then I think he breaks free, gives a Randian speech on tv, and is shot.
Haven't read it for years so that's prob not accurate but I don't care enough to look it up
Good.
Vonnegut had a lot of conflicting ideas, but identified as a socialist. I think he was in the somewhat confused vein of psuedo progressive we see today that is for lefty economics but is anti-political correctness, and the ease that Bergeron maps onto American antocommunist beliefs shows exactly where that particular strain of thought comes from.