• muddi [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    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

    • Llituro [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      oh yeah absolutely, the original series is only better insofar as liberalism had a better criticism of what it replaced than of itself.

    • BadTakesHaver [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.