So, The Last Airbender is good. Korra is also good, in a lot of ways. Animation? Brilliant. Choreography? Yes. Anything beyond a surface deep reading of its representation as politics? Well....
Its so weird, how did they go from AtLA, to this show where every good guy is either a cop or a CEO or literal royalty and every single villain is some caricature of a leftist? In the last season, theres a king whos demonstrably dumb, vain, and in no way should be in charge but hes just still played as the good guy and anyone who doesn't want him to be king is evil???
The Avatar, protector of the people, seeker of balance, coming in just to restore the status quo leaders every single time. Its the definition of liberal politics. Just made this thread to bitch, but lets all complain about how many times the heroes in these stories blindly return everything to how it was because "any change = bad"
Eh, I mean Amon is right that it’s really a social injustice that like half the population of this world is naturally disadvantaged by not being born with literal super powers. However idk if literally ripping away the super powers of those born with against there will is really the best way to address that inequality.
Plus I don’t think the show did enough to establish that there’s a true “bender supremacy”, thought both shows we see very unfortunate benders and very fortunate non-benders. The Royal dynasty of the Earth Kingdom is made of non-benders so it’s apparently not THAT much of a social disadvantage. Plus I don’t think they did a good enough job of explaining how bending is bestowed upon people. Is it genetic? Clearly there are families with both bender and non-bender members (Sokka and Katara) but are their families that are totally non-bender? Wouldn’t most benders having close non-bender family members be an incentive against benders grossly disadvantaging their own kin?
Idk the world building around that conflict wasn’t the best fleshed out.
There's also the question of benders who never develop their bending.
One thing I liked about Star Wars growing up was that there might be people who were strong in the Force, but there was also a sense that the Force was something you could cultivate by intense spiritual practice. With the right training and instruction anyone could become a force user, or even a Jedi. Some people might have a natural advantage, but it wasn't genetic.
Turns out I was just reading that in the material and they pretty much made it all genetic determinism ooooops.
Yeah, that’s another thing I didn’t like in Korra. Metal and lighting bending were supposed to be high level skills and hardly anyone could do. In Korra you got a city powered by dudes lighting bending in a power plant, and where the whole police force are metal benders.
Maybe if they were clever they could have done a like, some commentary on how industrialization meant there was better communication technology and institutionalized bending school, so now instead of having to seek out a bending master by traveling the wilderness, anyone with money and free time could learn high level bending. Maybe that would have been too complex for a kids show.
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I mean if metal bending wasn’t that crazy difficult you’d think... what’s his face? Earth bender dude in Korra, wouldn’t have struggle with it so much.
I could’ve sworn that your interpretation was canon at some point, but of course SW had to keep coming back to the tiny group of important bloodlines and making the universe smaller and less interesting
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Wasn't it implied in ATLA that all the air nomads were airbenders became they were really spiritual or something?
Yeah that was never really address. Thing is you can’t live as an air nomad without air bending. I mean you could but you’d have a high risk of falling to your death all the time.
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The whole electric gloves things hinted at a better idea. Don’t bring down benders, use means of modern technology to elevate non-benders.
Also in terms of class, there’s poor benders and rich non benders (one in LoK is financing Amon’s Equalist movement), so perhaps class solidarity between working class people of the four nations is possible.
Idk punishing people for something innate to them that gives them an (seemingly in the Avatar world, only slight) advantage seems cruel and unjust.