Lake Laogai is literally Lake Reform by Labor. They couldn't have been more obvious about it.

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”

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

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

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.

Muh Tibet so wholesome is like one of the major things. Also like the eevvvvvuuulll north korea ba sing se thing.

It's been a while seen I watched the show, but the guru is the most egregious example iirc. It also leans heavily into "oriental mysticism" which in and of itself is gonna be difficult starting point, especially without robust connection to the cultures/religions/mythologies. In AATL, there is a bit of colonial apologia in the fact that aang is unwilling to kill the fascist strongman. I know its a kid's show but look at the monk gyatzo scene. If you are telling a story, even to kids, about the horrors of imperialism you can't shy away from killing the fucking hitler-analogue especially when there has been no apprehension for Aang to ostensibly kill a ton of people throughout the show. IMO korra is much much worse in this regard though. At least aatl doesn't explicitly apologize for fascism.

I just wrote a response addressing this here if you want to get my take.

I think two things can be true at the same time.

I can't speak for your friends or for Asian people more broadly but I'd assume that a generally-positive representation of Asian cultures which isn't repeating the worst tropes in western media that have been a mainstay since like the 1980s and, especially, which depicts Asian cultures as diverse rather than as one homogeneous blob would be well-recieved because it's undeniably progress.

Also having an Asian fantasy setting in the west is pretty uncommon and even moreso when there's a noticeable absence of a white saviour or a Dances with Wolves-style protagonist who "does a better job of being Asian than the Asians", which is epitomised by The Last Samurai.

That being said, it's my opinion that ATLA has a really serious problem with a Western Gaze and it's more a reflection of western preconceptions of Asian cultures than it is representative of something more developed and nuanced.

Take the Air Tribe for example. It's basically a gish gallop of all the western preconceptions of Tibetan Buddhism that they could cram in, to the point that they even had a character named Gyatso.

Or there's the whole scaremongering about Ba Sing Se with propaganda and brainwashing, two tropes that are invoked constantly in western discourse when talking about the East to the point that I'm surprised that people still buy into it after so many decades. Obviously today this is mostly focused mostly on China now but in prior generations it was the Vietnamese who were propagandised and brainwashed (and brainwashing Americans) and the same could be said for Koreans around the time of the Korean War (and for the DPRK even today) as well as Japan in WWII. Basically any time the west has an Asian enemy of the state there's a flurry of discourse around how their people are propagandised, brainwashed, and are attempting to brainwash good, honest westerners. So to me it was really disappointing to see this subplot in Ba Sing Se.

I guess I should be glad that they didn't have a subplot about how the good guys were simply trying to engage in honest trade with the people of Ba Sing Se to meet their demands and the leaders of Ba Sing Se cruelly and viciously attacked these traders which caused an escalation leading to a war where the good guys were simply trying to defend their trade routes but, at the same time, I wouldn't have been surprised if they did consider making that a plot point at some stage.

It's been a long time since I've watched ATLA but I remember wincing often throughout the show. I'm sure there's more that I'd be able to criticise if I did a rewatch but this comment is already pretty long.

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.

Unfortunately the writers are big ol' libs and they absolutely were trying to set Legend of Korra in a mix between '20s New York and Hong Kong, leaning more toward the New York side of things really. I mean there's a giant green full-body statue out in the bay, it's literally just new york

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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.

The Earth Nation in the original series was pretty China coded and not in good ways.

I always thought that to a very small extent ATLA was a liberal "Free Tibet (Air Nation) from China (Fire Nation)!" dogwhistle, despite the opportunism of claiming it was about Bush and the War on Terror, as soon as that finally became unpopular, but it didn't stop me from enjoying it.

people forget this, but there's a whole litany of neoliberal balkanization advocacy groups against china, not out of a sincere desire for sovereignty of nations colonized in the past by Chinese imperial dynasties, but out of a reactionary desire to reverse the development of China (this is the same trick they played with Yugoslavia and USSR, after all). The 400 year old proto-bourgeois idea of Westphalian sovereignty has outlived its progressive nature against feudalism and has become a force of reaction against Socialism for keeping nations underdeveloped and divided against each other and preventing international proletarian solidarity, collaboration, consolidation of power, etc.

So you got "Xinjiang is East Turkestan!" (ignoring ETIM and other reactionary groups funded by the CIA through the NED) and "Free Tibet!" (ignoring that Mao Zedong cracked down Buddhist clerical/monarchist slavery and pedophilia in Tibet) and "Free Hong Kong!" (ignoring that Hong Kong was literally colonized by the British until the late 1990s, and was always a bastion of Capitalism in the region) and "Free Taiwan!" (ignoring that Taiwan is basically a holdout for Guomindang bourgeois nationalist warlords, capitalists and reactionaries who lost the civil war to Chinese workers and peasants, i.e. the Chinese equivalent of neoconfederacy). So all these cries for sovereignty seem to the unacquainted like sincere cries for freedom of nations with their own capital-C culture from Han supremacism, but really, they're just cynical calls for balkanizing China so that the regions lopped off from Beijing's control can be more easily infiltrated by western NGOs and think tanks and intelligence agencies who will of course advocate for the usual capitalist nonsense like privatization, deregulation, austerity, lowering the age of consent, reintroducing child labor, legalizing gambling, bringing in foreign direct investment, flooding them with high interest IMF loans, giving money/weapons to reactionaries, cracking down on labor unions and cooperatives, etc. How do I know all this? They had an established pattern of doing this in the Yugoslav nations, the Soviet nations, and for a long time they did it to Cuba under Batista.

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America and canada were the same colony to begin with. They were a weird one as they were practically settled by political refugees from the aftermath of the civil war to begin with and those settlers lobbied for protection. The money there was with trade with the natives for furs which the settlers kept fucking up by not respecting treaties and the slave trade. Although the north american slave trade wasn't as profitable as the carribean

australia was a penal colony focused on revenue collection

I don't know as much about south africa but from my understanding the intent was to make money from ivory and precious metals.

The French in comparrison to the British intended to make everyone French. The British horrors were largely motivated by a depraved indifference to human life and love of money. So yes all those colonies were for money which makes the fire nation more like the Japanese than the British as the fire nation rarely mention revenue which would have come up a lot in British discussion of empire

America as a colony was a weird one as it was largely settled by political refugees in the initial stage (canada was the same settlement) and then lobbied for protection. The only real money to be made from a British perspective was with the native's and their fur trade but the American settlers were just liabilities in that regard as they absolutely refused to stick to any treaties. That and the slave trade of course which also began to loose money after a while as well as being politically unpopular not to mention it made the Scottish richer and more influential which isn't always what the English want

Australia was a penal colony ultimately focused on revenue

south africa I don't know as much about but my understanding is there was some intention to make loads of money off precious metals and ivory