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
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?
Yes, but have you considered: China bad? 
At this point they could remake it but literally call it “Japan” and 
would collectively go “well ackshually it’s a metaphor for GYNA”
Orientalism and its consequences... 
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
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
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.""
Liberals using their fiction to both label and define their political beliefs and where they stand in them is something else to add to the evidence pile against "my entertainment has zero effect on me" extraordinary claims.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Garfieldception
"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
It's the dunk tank.
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