more high-budget Avatar media
What, Shyamalan's 2010 adaptation not good enough for you?
It was bad enough that I think my friends and I walked right out of the theater and agreed to forget what we had watched. I couldn't tell you much of anything about it.
It was a shame. As a general fan of Avatar and Shyamalan, I’m glad I never saw it in theaters. The trailers were dope but the movie was such a let-down.
korra has a fun depiction of anarchists tho, korra tries to get help killing kuvira and all the libs said no it was wrong, and imprisoned anarchist volcel airbender zaheer said hell yeah lets kill some fash
Ehhhh, gonna be the odd one out and say I kind of liked Korra because it was ambitious and broke new ground, and was willing to tackle issues like fascism which the original ATLA never really wanted to touch.
Okay raise the eyebrows back into the neutral position I was joking, but jokes aside, I did like Korra because politics aside, I liked how they made major changes/alterations to the setting (as plot) which I felt like many shows in general are usually too scared to do. It's been years since I watched it but among the things I liked about it was how they brought the spirit world into the real world and kept it like that rather than make it go back to the way it was like many shows do because they're cowardly. It's been a while, but I think it was during Korra as well that they erased the link between the avatar and the previous avatars, a major alteration to the setting which again, many shows are too scared to do. It's been years since I watched it, but its willingness to alter the setting permanently in a way that would affect any stories going forward was a breath of fresh air honestly.
Obviously the show's politics are very liberal and they repeat the 'romanticized' view of fascist nations (for example the villain at the end actually having a powerful mechanized military when real life Nazis actually had very few tanks, or that the threats she dealt with were actually real instead of a fabrication, etc.), but at the time I wasn't able to view it in a critical lens and just focused on the story, and for myself the show's willingness to make major permanent changes was quite welcome.
it was ambitious and broke new ground, and was willing to tackle issues like fascism which the original ATLA never really wanted to touch.
I mean in ATLA there was a genocide on aangs people
In this one theres people pointing at someone saying "she's doing an authoritatrianism and jailing dissenters!" and has 'anarchists' in it. Its all pretty baby brained
I thought Korra was entertaining, but it lacked a lot of the internal consistency that ATLA had, in favor of superficial explorations of something vaguely resembling political ideology. ATLA dealt with issues of poverty, non-violence and resistance in the face of oppression, while still being a show for children with magic martial arts and beautiful music. I think Korra did a few things very well, but everything else felt like squandered potential.
As for the portrayal of fascism on LOK, i recommend this video to see better why it doesn't really work because of the very clear limitations the show runners have.
Aang, hero of the revolution. Korra, the status quo must be preserved.
LOK is a travesty but the original series was fairly lib too. The Tibetan monks being the nation of peace and the Da Li secret police was anti-China
On the cultural-philosophical side it was somewhat chauvinist too: the concept of an avatar in Indian religions is a divine being taking on a responsibility which often involves justified violence against evil. Rejecting this with some "both sides" nonsense felt like a slap in the face to me as an Indian and socialist. Ofc we need to put some people to the wall, fuck those ideals of self purity
yeah, I love TLA but the fact that we just end the show with a 'good firelord' is so absurd
oh yeah absolutely, the original series is only better insofar as liberalism had a better criticism of what it replaced than of itself.
one thing i like about the final fight in ATLA is
spoiler
Aang choosing not to kill the fire-lord needlessly endangered the entire world. He had the opportunity to kill Ozai when redirecting lightning, but he didn't, and if he didn't get some insanely lucky miraculous acupuncture rock shit the entire world would've been lost to the fascist fire nation because of Aang choosing not to kill the firelord.
I don't know if the show really fully endorses Aang's "killing is never justified" worldview. A lot of important characters disagree with Aang, but since the show ended immediately after Ozai was defeated there was never a scene where Aang talked about the needless risk he took. Wondering if a planned season 4 would've addressed that.
We’re really excited about one of the main villains that we added to the show, Lord Joraj Boosh and his band of imperialist warriors, known as the See Eyaye. We really don’t want to have to make another one of these things, so we’re pulling out all the stops.
Anytime ATLA and by extension, Korra comes up, i'll bring up the seminal youtube video essay series by Kay and Skittles. It's so good at dismantling lib ideology in it.
cute, liberal thinking there’s no difference between imperialism, capitalism of a regional power, and socialism
now show me where PRC is “expansionist” and what that nebulous term even means in this context. the US engages in neocolonialism, extracting wealth from the global south and entrapping them in structural loans they can never pay off, while the PRC engages in fair trading and regularly forgives loans that build hospitals, schools, infrastructure, and industry
