Help, Kuvira stole my egg monopoly. Prince Wu, please Balkanize the Empire and liberate the oppressed Yi province.

Kuvira fanclub thread.

  • TheLepidopterists [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    IIRC the camps were for "dissidents" not "racial minorities."

    Also empire is maybe what they called it, but who exactly were the colonizing? The settler colony state set up on their previously colonized land, which was actively attempting to plant a puppet monarch in their country ( I think even in concert with the nation that originally did that colonization, but it's been a while, can't remember for sure if the fire nation was involved in the puppet king plot)?

    The lady who served as a reaction movement to the Red Lotus efforts to establish a people’s government after assassinating the tyrant Hou Ting?

    The Earth Queen got what she deserved but when you say "people's government" surely you don't mean all the bandits preying on villagers when the Earth Kingdom was balkanized and leaderless?

    We've talked about this topic before in Hexbear, and I stand by what I originally said: Kuvira is a Mao analog, and an analog for bourgeois nationalists in a third world country, and ALSO a Hitler analog, because the writers are such turbolibs that they see "Colonized people militantly opposing their exploitation" and "Nazis" as the same thing basically "totalitarian."

    • HarryLime [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      IIRC the camps were for “dissidents” not “racial minorities.”

      They showed a firebender and a waterbender who escaped form the camps and they explicitly said they were targeting everyone not of Earth Kingdom origin.

      • TheLepidopterists [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Looks like you're right, it's been a few years since I watched it. I will say that I still think she's several analogies mixed together though.

        • HarryLime [any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Yeah, I think so. Chiang mixed with Hitler and maybe some shades of an American caricature of Mao.

      • Chapo_is_Red [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        They showed a firebender and a waterbender Rhodesian who escaped form the camps and they explicitly said they were targeting everyone not of Earth Kingdom Zimbabwean origin

        Edit: thinking about it more, doesn't quite fit cuz waterbender. But most of the fire nation folks in Earth Kingdom were settlers

        • HarryLime [any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          But most of the fire nation folks in Earth Kingdom were settlers

          I mean, we also see a lot of mixed families. I don't want to sound like I'm pulling out calipers, but the Firebender could be more analogous to a mestizo than a Rhodesian.

          • Theblarglereflargle [any]
            ·
            2 years ago

            This. The comics make it clear that a HUGE amount of intermarrying and culture mixing went on to the point that it was common for the same family to have both earth bender and fire bender kids.

            Hell there is an assignation attempt on Zuko by an earth bender for his support of returning the colonies to the earth kingdom. They go out of their way to make it clear this isn’t an Israel-Palestine/ Rhodesian/Zimbabwe situation as much as it is the equivalent of the anglos and the Norman’s becoming a unified English identity (with all the hierarchy and messiness that came from that as well)

          • Chapo_is_Red [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Such populations are targets cooptation by unscrupulous imperialist. Look at the US military's cooptation of the Hmong in SEA. Those that are radicalized against Earth reunification, in service of the imperialists, can't just be allowed to freely work to overthrow the reunified Earth Kingdom.

            This has obvious real life parallels. In Vietnam, and more so in Laos, this led to actions against Hmong that were quite bad, and not always justified, but happened for reasons. This doesn't mean we reject the Vietnamese or the Laotian anti-imperialist struggles.

        • Poison_Ivy [comrade/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Yeah but in the show they explicitly said that they did, and showed people who escaped from the internment camps