• Tankiedesantski [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    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.

  • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    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.

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      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.

    • halvar@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      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.

      • SpookyGenderCommunist [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        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.

  • Othello [comrade/them, love/loves]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    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.