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.
Oh oh also, the leftists are secretly funded by a billionaire who just wants to sell weapons! A Soros stand in.
Its funny that the leftist villains (amon and zaheer) are dead or have all their friends dead and be imprisoned and chained meanwhile fascist girlboss kuvira gets to have a redemption arc.
You mean the girlboss war profiteer heiress or the wholesome Musk war profiteer who was a literal villain in the first season but UwU wholesome redemption?
Yeah after three seasons of left allegory it was hard to ignore how well they treat Kuvira.
Zaheer :bawllin-sad:
THE IDEA OF HAVING NATIONS AND GOVERNMENTS IS AS FOOLISH AS KEEPING THE HUMAN AND SPIRIT REALMS SEPARATE. YOU'VE HAD TO DEAL WITH A MORONIC PRESIDENT AND A TYRANNICAL QUEEN. DON'T YOU THINK THE WORLD WOULD BE BETTER OFF IF LEADERS LIKE THEM WERE ELIMINATED?
There's a scene where the ability to control fire is taken away from a mob boss who burns peoples faces for fun and this is presented as wrong.
"No you can't take away stabby Johns knives he loves cutting peoples ears off it's his thing"
It made me think "was this written by 4chan or something?"
This was all pre-gamergate too, so it wasn't like they wanted to cash in on the whole Gamergate craze of 2014.
Wait until you get to the fourth season, literal nazi power fantasy/apologia.
UwU the nazis just wanted to make the Earth Kingdom Great Again and helped a lot of people, they just got a bit power crazy derailed, but it's okay cuz we gonna redeem Earth Hitler later on UwU
Liberalism and nazism, one big heart.
Kuvira is obviously a KMT stand in. she's a progressive force, regardless of Radio Free Earth Kingdom has to say. Ultimate proof is that the resolve the series by balkanizing the Earth Kingdom into it's province republics so they can never again present unified resistance against military or financial imperialism.
Thesis: Kuvira is a nazi
Antithesis: Kuvira is fighting for national liberation
Synthesis: The writers are such scratched libs that these are both true.
Kuvira as Chiang makes sense. I believe it was mentioned she was even putting down warlords to reunite the fractured Earth Kingdom.
UwU the nazis just wanted to make the Earth Kingdom Great Again and helped a lot of people, they just got a bit power crazy derailed, but it’s okay cuz we gonna redeem Earth Hitler later on UwU
The comic book is worse.
I disagree. I think Kuvira is much more a analogous to "strong man" third world anti-imperialist leaders like Nasser or Gaddafi.
In the context of being a underdeveloped, overexploited country like the Earth Kingdom, "make it great again" is different than in highly developed imperialist country. Kuvira is a modernizing force violently restructuring feudal relations and changing a kingdom into a nation-state while also militarily repossessing Earth Kingdom lands from colonizers and imperialists.
If the Fire Nation were talking about "making the nation great again" that would be just fascism.
Honestly given that Kuvira were given nazi imagery such as the superweapons and having concentration camps (that were never shown even though theres a goddamn murder suicide scene) wouldnt suprise me if they think Gadaffi is literally Libyan hitler.
Even with her giant robot, I think that's treated kinda like the WMDs the west is in constant fear of third world countries developing.
That said, you're right. The folks who ran the show probably don't see a difference. They're likely the type of libs who unironically used terms like "islamo-fascist" to describe Assad or Saddam.
You are right, BUT I can't dismiss the robots' nazi helmets that simply
Sure, the lib writers could just be saying "liberation nationalists are as bad as nazis"; but one can also read "nazis were liberation nationalist smol beans but they got meanie greedy revengful derailed"
Again, I'm now completely convinced of what @TheLepidopterists said.
Plus I don't know shit about the KMT
The equalist plotline is so fucking bad, not only is the non-benders presented as not seriously disadvantaged but their entire movement is just a corrupt bender trying to gain power by exploiting them.
And then all our girlboss has to do to collapse the movement is reveal the leaders status as a bender, because clearly the movement is not based in real structural and material inequality and disadvantages, they just hate all benders equally because of resentments. Just turns into libshit both sidesing where they are presented as essentially non-bender supremacists, realistically it shouldnt fucking matter if benders are part of the movement, particularly not if they are being violently repressed and would get a lot of help from people whos bodies are weapons.
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”.
:hillgasm:
Good post. Legend of Korra is absolutely dreadful.
Try the Rise of Kyoshi novel. This trips people up a lot, bad marketing I guess, but it's a novel. Not a comic. It's very good for YA.
The sequel is hard filler and badly concludes leftover plot threads from the first, but yea Rise of kyoshi itself is great, if only for portraying bending as deadly
It's so horrible what they did to mah boy in the second book. From a immensely interesting character to just a butthurt meanie who accepts a pact with Cthulu cuz he jelly
It actually developed from a fire nation colony, canonically. The people who lived there had been there for several generations and had kind of become a mix of earth kingdom and fire nation culturally. So they didn't just want to kick the fire nation out like most of the colonies.
So they didn’t just want to kick the fire nation out like most of the colonies.
Yeah settlers generally aren't fond of kicking themselves out.
I'm also watching it currently and I also just have to say even the characters aren't that fun?
I'd take any of the main cast of ATLA over the people from Korra any day IMO.
bolin is the only person on the avatar team i think is really likable, the rest of the characters i liked were either direct descendants of the gaang or like literally the gaang like seeing zuko and katara or like older sokka on the flashback really carried that whole show than the new characters, like tenzin or bumi are objectivelly more fun to watch than korra being sad about the responsabilities of her choices and they even made a an avatar ancestor for this series and learning his story is the better part of season 2, like wan is the reason i didn't give up on season 2, i could not care less about the kaiju battle that ends that season
Bolin rocks and JK Simmons as tenzin is cool. Everyone else on team avatar sucks
It takes a lot for a show to make me dislike John Michael Higgins, and these fuckers pulled it off.
I think Korra is the strongest character in the show, seeing her go from so headstrong and whiny to traumatised to a lot more wise and mature is my favourite part of the show. I feel like Bolin doesn't come into his own until season 3, he's kind of just replacement Sokka for the first two seasons. Mako is pretty dry and boring, but I think Asami is far and away the worst, most boring and under used character in the entire show. Korra and Asami's romance would have a lot more impact on me if Asami wasn't so generic
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.
Yup, it's a common anti-communist myth in the same vein as "they want to make everyone use the same toothbrush!"
Communism is when there's only one giant toilet and we all have to use it at the same time.
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.
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.
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
Sounds like you didn't make it through the first season. You might be interested to learn that a different political ideology set as the antagonist for each season. You think the season about communism is fascist propaganda? Wait till you see the season about fascism!
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOH8e00C92tKmamWumsPVJuHnremKXtDT
These videos are pretty good, or at least I thought so a few years ago
The villains of LoK by season: Civil Rights, uuuuh weird magic?, anarchism, fascism (but it’s okay she’s just trying her best and went a bit far)
Season two is about how environmentalists are all crypto-satanists.
I've heard theocracy too lol. S2 is really just about big Godzilla fight, retconing atla to have Christian themes*, and Bolin becoming a movie star, the rest is too incoherent to say yes this is what it means imo (unless the creators ever said)
i really wish they had stopped making every character a cop
Also competence porn and she's the one who visibly bathes out of all of them
I was about to link the JackSaint videos myself. His perspective is good because I think the critique is as profound as it needs to be, so not very deep.
Kay and Skittles also did a series on Korra which was aight
https://youtu.be/ModX151Ipgs
Oh crap I was actually thinking about Kay and Skittles, but still... Good vids.
I hate how the airbenders are basically portrayed consistently since the first show as a successful mainstream anarchist society for ages and the one guy who studies them and is the leader of an organization that wants to change the status quo turns into a government bad :libertarian-approaching: because the creators are libs who probably think Ron Paul is an anarchist. The fact that the air nation was conveniently returning and they didn't even seriously try to do a :maybe-later-kiddo: "this is what proper socialism looks like tankies." is baffling. The fact that he just screams "chaos" into a crowd of peasants and they don't just move to ignore him and keep working as the next monarch is crowned and instead start breaking things until the kingdom is mad max is just :agony-shivering:
The economic structure of Ba Sing Se was depicted as a bad thing the entire run of both shows, until the moment the inner city walls were brought down.
The Earth Queen is depicted as evil and willing to kidnap and conscript children into an experimental race-based army, but we're supposed to feel bad for her when she's taken down.
It's the liberal writers of the show going "Oh of course poverty is bad, but trying to solve it would mean total anarchy and poor people living in my neighborhood and that's a hard no."
Fun fact, r/neoliberal once recommended Legend of Korra as "a good show about the dangers of populism"
Mfw I actually really love the series especially season 3 for the anarchists, but yeah it’s very Obama Era neoliberalism-y and the second season sucks bad
But do you empathize with the "villains" or the hero? Cuz first and third season I couldn't not empathize with the villains.
Second season sucked in its own bad written way, instead of sucking in the horrible-message way
I can only assume the point of the entire show was to make the viewer realise that having an avatar sucks and frankly they should put the avatars back on ice
Season two basically made the avatar the embodiment of good. aka :jesus-cleanse:
It sort of did but it also failed to address why the world still needs an avatar
The problem is that you think the world means people in this analogy. The world is literally the world here and it says it needs an avatar people be damned.
Ok but there was no avatar for 100 years with no real issue on that front. Stick em in ice and bring them out whenever there's a spirit world issue
Do things without a god given chosen one? But that would actually be interesting. Also it was the energy of his past lives that kept him alive and it shorted his lifespan I think. So I think there would have to be some willingness on the avatars part. At that point why are they even in ice? Wait wasn't this the Fire Nation's plan? :thinkin-lenin:
