obsessed with the guy who just won gold in windsurfing
Wasn’t there a whole thing in the comics about aang getting offended over some air nomad super fans using the arrow since you have to be a master to get your arrow tattoos? And basically the super fan group was doing a cultural appropriation by having arrow tats? I feel like that was a whole ass thing in the comics.
well i have great news that will ease your mind. air benders aren’t real
this is more of a ramble then an ask but I was wondering how u felt about how it’s set up in atla that the world is intristically all connected together and that the ideas of bending aren’t political in nature and they’re taught by the animals in the world but even tho the show talks about how they’re all the same and stuff it never seems to really expand on his ideas and the perfect world seems to just be the four nations living together in harmony without really questioning the systems of having specific elements to nations?
this is a really good question because i've discussed how much i appreciate the way atla illustrates how nationalism is heightened and borders are reified during wartime (perhaps almost paradoxically, considering how colonialism reshapes and removes previous borders) and how resisting that ideology through uniting the nations and dispelling the myth that they are ontologically discrete is crucial to ending the war.... but then lok kind of drops the ball on exploring how that would restructure a postwar world.
i will say that i like how the novels, which explore the world of avatars past, explore geopolitics in a way that challenges the claim that "long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony." we see that in yangchen's time, there is more cross cultural exchange in terms of (im)migration, but there are also sanctions placed on the water tribes and fire nation by the earth king as punishment for supporting an ultimately failed coup. we later see in kyoshi's time how despite there being an alliance across the four nations, there is political unrest within each nation, further problematizing the notion that if the four dominant cultures are internationally allied, intranational peace must also follow.
with lok, they had the chance to imagine a world in which the dominant imperialist power is successfully dismantled, and what that kind of world would look like 70 years after the fact, but the liberal imagination is, by definition, extremely limited, so we ended up with. well. you know. intermingling families without exploring the ramifications of how various politicized traits (in this world, bending even more so than physical appearance) would affect different members (firebending being celebrated as a tool for imperialist supremacy vs earthbending being stigmatized, for example)... a city built on colonial violence, expected to be a melting pot but its oppressive origins are only ever addressed by the fascist villain... even the red lotus, an anarchist terrorist organization, dress according to the international color code.
and don't get me started on the red lotus lmao. they basically have the same ideology as atla's heroes except we're expected to believe that they're unhinged and irrational because they randomly decided that it was in their best interest to kill a teenage girl and held the fragile remnants of a genocided people hostage to do so. zaheer's philosophy is an extremely warped and reductive view of anarchism, but it's also the closest viewpoint anyone holds to the central ideological conceit of atla, which is actually crazy if you think about it.
atla establishes that despite ostensibly insurmountable cultural differences, the world is fundamentally interconnected, and understanding that relationality across humanity as well as the nonhuman world is crucial to achieving balance. lok explores what a world without borders and unjust hierarchies would mean, but comes to some flawed and downright bizarre conclusions. national borders are rearranged but nonetheless affirmed, however the border between the spirit and material realms is dissolved. but also lok declares that actually the best way to fix an unjust hierarchy is just to put "good people" at the top of them and hope that they continue to be nice even once they're given absolute power.
i do personally think that if lok had better explored the conflict between the red lotus (anarchy) and the white lotus (liberalism) as the central ideological clash across the entire show, instead of merely presenting an extremely problematic and illogical liberal value system as, somehow, the only viable method, despite its myriad noticeable flaws from the very first episode, with the smug yet blatantly fallacious assumption that any other framework is inherently inferior, the setting being a neocolonial neoliberal "melting pot" would have made much more sense and worked far better overall. i would still have issues with how they handled the water tribes, the air nomads, the (lack of) fire nation, the characterization, etc etc. but it would have made for a far stronger central plot, instead of what ultimately appears to be a set of scattered, unthorough explorations of various status-quo-challenging ideologies that korra must fight with her liberal arsenal of cops and capitalists. (but i'm realizing now that a scathing critique of the ideological underpinnings of lok may not actually have been what you were looking for in my response. so i'll stop, for now.)
ultimately, i think it's impossible to truly critique atla's approach to this philosophical quandary as a standalone work, since the show ends with the war, and thus the postwar decolonial imagination cannot be truly explored. that is why i am obligated to turn to lok if i want to criticize this idea, but i also feel like critiquing lok is pretty futile at this point, considering i've done so so many times on this blog by this point that i don't think i have anything more to add on to my already expansive laundry list of complaints. but one day i'll write a thorough outline for my vision of a postwar atla. at which point i will explore the secretly radical ideas presented in atla with far more care and nuance than those spineless libs ever could.
lok was truly so crazy for being like yeah the season 1 villain is an allegory for maoism?? except he’s literally not a communist in any meaningful way bc he never once even mentions the issue of uh. class. and season 2’s villain is ostensibly a theocrat who exploits his religious/spiritual authority to exert neocolonial control over a recently independent territory/people but all he really wants is to fuse with the personification of chaos and plunge the world into darkness for ten thousand years. and season 3’s villains are an anarchist terror cell who do have clearly defined goals and advocate for proletarian rule but also they’re fucked up little sadist freaks who love chaos and torturing teenagers. and season 4’s villain is a fascist ethnonationalist dictator and she’s gonna be the ONLY character in the entire show to mention that the ostensibly independent city state where most of the show’s plot has taken place is literally a fire nation neocolony proxy state on stolen earth kingdom land. the famously anarchist character who values independent personal freedom and hates nothing more than being told what to do and telling people what to do is now the agent of said neocolonial state in the form of being the literal chief of police. who gives a shit about her arc as an abused disabled girl who fights to assert her power and autonomy while also learning to accept her own vulnerability around the people she loves, and how that narrative might be personally meaningful to many disabled people. she’s a cop now. oh, and the firstborn son of the pacifist monk who had to fight tooth and nail to assert his values as the sole survivor of the genocide against his people is now a military general, again, for the army of said neocolonial proxy state. the kid who was orphaned as a child and grew up on the street fighting to survive another day is helplessly stupid and naive and his only purpose is to chew the scenery in increasingly less funny, more obnoxious ways. if you were expecting the even remotely coherent politics of atla, a story fundamentally about the struggle to resist imperialist violence both as a target of it and from within the imperial core while grappling with your identity and the impetus to preserve your cultural heritage in the face of genocide, then you’re shit out of luck, because that show was made in the bush era, back when liberals protesting the iraq war and implicating americans in their role in upholding imperialist agendas was acceptable. but this is the obama era, so of course you can still deport people at staggering records and drone strike civilians and worship at the altar of capitalism, as long as you remember that reinforcing the status quo through implicit violence is good as long as you’re a queer disabled brown woman!!! more woman of color chiefs of police!!! more bisexual woman ceos!!!! more indigenous war profiteers!!!! more hot girl ethnostates!!! absurd fucking show…
Avatar AU where Aang wakes up like 3 days before Sozin's Comet returns and he has to speedrun the entire series.
The south pole and north pole exist on the same map file so if you break out of bound you can get from one to the other without having to travel the world.
Zuko's redemption stat and hair stat are tied to the same variable, so if you put the right wig on him he becomes automatically redeemed.
Toph's Earthbending allows for ample sequence breaks. If you create a ramp next to the Ba Sing Se wall you could launch yourself straight into the season 2 finale.
Unfortunately you have to complete Bato of the Water Tribe because otherwise June won't appear in the finale, softlocking from you beating the Fire Nation.
It's not actually necessary; but everyone always stops at the southern air temple to pick up Momo. It's become a tradition, where the speed runs are automatically invalidated if you didn't get him.
If I see you doing a Momoless run I’m unsubscribing.
Look it's called Any%. Momo% is it's own sub category, which is just how fast you can get Momo, and FullMomo% is Any% but you have to pick up Momo AND do all of the mini-game sections with him.
Momo% runs in 2005: Using the infinite glider glitch to fly straight to the southern air temple
Momo% runs in 2024: Modulating Sokka's SPM (sexism per minute) rate to manipulate the RNG for a favorable spawn in the underground Momo matrix
Well one would assume yes.
At the end of the show Team Avatar defeats the Fire Nation by defeating Fire Lord Ozai and crowning Zuko as the new Fire Lord. Any further details of the Fire Nation defeat are explored through the various comics, with the main topic being the decolonisation of the Fire Nation colonies of the Earth Kingdom.
But if you take a look at how the comics ultimately resolve this issue, it becomes clear that actually the Fire Nation kind of won the 100 Year War.
to me, the funniest thing about “that’s rough buddy” isn’t the fact that sokka says something patently insane with zero context seemingly out of nowhere, or the fact that zuko clearly doesn’t know how to respond. it’s the completely incorrect use of the word “buddy.” zuko would obviously like to be friends with sokka, but sokka is not, in fact, his friend. this is the most time they’ve ever spent together, and it’s because zuko invited himself to tag along on sokka’s suicide mission. at this point in the episode, sokka still hates this guy, perhaps less than he did a week ago, but he still hates him enough that he didn’t bother forcing zuko to stay home, which means he still didn’t really care whether or not zuko lives or dies. which, considering that he had tried to kill zuko multiple times in the past, is not all that surprising. this entire episode is essentially just zuko forcing his friendship onto sokka while sokka is legitimately too depressed to care. so when zuko calls sokka “buddy,” there’s a spirit of dogged optimism characterizing that epithet, because in no possible realm would sokka consider zuko his buddy at this point in the episode. and that’s something we miss when noting the iconicness of this exchange, simply because, by the end of this episode, they are buddies, so in our minds looking back on these lines, the implication of friendship doesn’t feel out of place at all. and really, it isn’t out of place, but only because zuko’s tenacity and determination (in this instance, his determination to befriend sokka) has always hugely outweighed his ability to read the room.
how fucking strong is Zuko like why do you even bother with your bending when you could just wham bam snap Aang’s spine with a kick
she said i’m about to end this man’s whole career
The greatest illusion of this world is the illusion of separation. Things you think are separate and different are actually one and the same. We are all one people, but we live as if divided.
AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER (2005 - 2008)
The most important NPC in Baldur’s Gate btw
He has bonus dialogue if you're playing a monk!
GOOFY !! UGLY !! OFF MODEL !! BAD !!
This isn’t really a question but more of a musing, but after years of holding it off, I’ve finally started watching tlok and I have to say, while the show has its good moments (the first avatar’s backstory was fascinating and fun to watch), I feel like the show pales way too much in comparison to atla. I’m having trouble believing and please correct me if I’m wrong, that this was the same team who pulled off ATLA.
Im not calling out tlok for being the worst, but at the same time I’m just shocked is all. It had so much potential. Is there some kind of explanation why it feels like it’s a shadow of what ATLA was?
no you're absolutely right. compared to atla, it is shocking how deeply, noticeably flawed it is. as far as i know, some of the writers stayed to work on korra and some changed. i know that korra struggled with network constraints more so than atla did, which is why every season feels more self-contained with the exception of books 3 and 4, which were ordered together. iirc, initially book 1 of lok was meant to be a standalone miniseries, and when another season was ordered, they had no desire to extend book 1 into an overarching narrative, and instead decided to use book 2 as an opportunity to deconstruct book 1, which only sort of worked. (book 2 barely works as a season of television, let alone a deconstruction of its former, somewhat more coherent season.) however, the explanation of "nickelodeon fucked them over" will only get you so far, since the politics of lok are markedly worse in every way.
the way i see it, if atla is very obviously a bush era text, lok is an obama era text. for american liberals who opposed the bush administration's invasion of iraq, resisting us imperialism from within the imperial core had not been so trendy since the vietnam war. atla presented a quite radical text, condemning colonialism, imperialism, and genocide and promoting direct revolutionary action against oppressive governments, that also had the benefit of being very topical and of its time. however, lok was created during obama's years in office, which were marked by progressive neoliberalism, more covert modes of exerting us imperialist power (think obama's staggering record of drone strikes and deportations), and a very heavy emphasis on the importance of identity politics.
lok is a very liberal text, in which centrism, capitalism, and progressive social values are celebrated by the narrative. lok is more ostensibly feminist, as women of all ages and relationships between those women are foregrounded, but even though i do love many of those female characters very deeply (i would never deny how much korra/korrasami means to me, as much as just seeing milves, i love milves), it is a type of girlboss feminism that in its celebration of capitalism, fails to meaningfully, materially condemn patriarchy. (look at this female chief of police! women can do anything a man can do, including being an agent of state violence! yaasss queen exert your power over the working class in your colonial city!) i think it's very difficult to create an excellent, coherent narrative if the politics of the show leave a bad taste in your mouth at best, and actively defile the legacy of its predecessor at worst.
ultimately, while lok does have its moments, characters, and scenes worthy of praise, very few episodes in the show overall are free of its political cynicism and clunky writing. if i brought up every facet worth critiquing i'd be here all day (and i already have plenty in my #lok crit tag), but you are not wrong to consider it a shadow of what atla was. the very venture was doomed to fail. and while i have often considered how i would rewrite lok to make it a coherent extension of atla, the fact of the matter is that atla works best as a self-contained story. it was lightning in a bottle that could not be recreated, and even if lok had been given the proper resources and planned for accordingly, atla was a product of its time, and trying to ignore this fact only leads to a failed attempt to revive its bloated corpse. over and over again.
@narrativelysignificantturtleduck's tags on this post
these tags are interesting, because what is it that sokka needs to hear, exactly? i think what he needed to be told from hakoda is simply “you are fundamentally important and your life has value because you are a human being. you do not need to be powerful or exceptional or to be worthy of existing. you deserve a full life regardless of how well you are able to conform to certain standards or prove yourself to others.” it is also what katara needs to hear, even if her dehumanization also involves her lionization. (as does aang, obviously.) but hakoda cannot say this to his children, because like his children, the genocide of their people is all he has ever known. the colonized subject cannot envision their right to exist as a given under a system that violently denies their humanity.
katara and sokka represent this struggle acutely: both are completely alone. katara is the last waterbender of her tribe, tasked with upholding the sacred heritage of her people; sokka is the last warrior of his tribe, tasked with providing for and protecting his people at all costs, at the cost of his own life. (and obviously aang’s isolation is defined by the very name of the show.) their struggles are, of course, a product of fn imperialism. they do not have the luxury of enjoying their own humanity, it has been robbed from them. “the southern raiders” helps katara understand her own humanity (by gaining a more nuanced picture of the stories she was told and told herself to survive), just as “the boiling rock” helps sokka understand his (at the very least, he learns that he is worthy of protection and support and that he is not alone), but as we know, this process of even beginning to accept their fullness of self beyond the colonial limits of their identities is a long and grueling road.
hakoda is of course not responsible for the dehumanization of his children, the fire nation is. he is also a victim of imperialism. and there is nothing he could have done differently to change the fact that katara is the last southern waterbender. but he is responsible for sokka internalizing the patriarchal logic that led to him adopting the role of sacrificial protector. he clearly thought that leaving sokka behind was the best way to keep his thirteen year old son safe from the fire nation, but sokka, who (correctly) assumed that it was only a matter of time before the fire nation returned to their shores, internalized that his father and all the other men of his tribe abandoned him to protect his people all by himself, expecting him to die for katara when the time came for it, just like his mother.
I’m so glad you asked! A caveat before we get going – ATLA is a children’s television show and is not designed for geopolitical analysis. That said, I do think it’s possible to do it with a bit of inference and squinting at maps. So, my argument is that the Fire Nation began the Hundred Year War (HYW) as a maritime campaign of colonial acquisition and geostrategic defence, but their war goals steadily totalized – especially in the late war.
To expand that out a bit, I’d identify three core phases to the HYW from the Fire Nation perspective:
1. A largely littoral effort in the early parts of the war to seize outlying Earth Kingdom territory.
2. A stalemate imposed by geography and distance.
3. Attempts to break that stalemate through various escalating means, culminating in the Sozin’s Comet attack.
To explore this, let’s go back to Sozin. Why did Sozin start the HYW? We see on screen that part of it is a ‘civilizing mission’ (quotation marks very much deserved) to share the riches and wealth of the Fire Nation with the rest of the world. Now, that’s him explaining his cause to Roku, so he’s certainly couching the effort in a particular rhetorical stance – but the idea of some sort of ‘Hotman’s Burden’ (to bastardise Kipling) would make sense from what we know about Fire Nation culture.
But it’s not just that, of course. Part of it is simply colonial expansion – the western coasts of the Earth Kingdom were up for the grabs, so Sozin took them. But I think, perversely, the war can be better understood as a pre-emptive forward defence. Why? Because a strong, united Earth Kingdom is the Fire Nation’s worst nightmare.
To take a brief trip into British history, one of the core tenets of British foreign policy from the 1500s onwards has been to avoid a single country dominating the coasts of western Europe. If this were to happen, invasion attempts against Britain would be in the offing – the Spanish tried this, Napoleon tried this, Hitler tried this.
I think Sozin thought similarly. We know from the Kyoshi books that the Fire Nation takes the threat of the Earth Kingdom very seriously – Rangi notes that the Fire Army plans and trains for a war with them, on the order of three centuries before the outbreak of the HYW. However, this was not a major concern because the Earth Kingdom was in frankly shambolic straits. It could not police itself, individual powerbrokers operated fairly independently, and the risk of some sort of invasion of the Fire Nation by the Earth Kingdom was very low.
However, then Kyoshi (who, incidentally, is awesome) comes along and starts fixing the Earth Kingdom. She scours daofei and defeats warlords like Chin. The Earth Kingdom, under her watch, starts to stabilise – and centralise, too (for example – refugees in the HYW were expected to run through a fairly complex bureaucratic system to get to Ba Sing Se. That points to quite an advanced level of governmental development).
If I’m a Fire Nation strategist at this point, I am starting to get seriously concerned. A centralised Earth Kingdom would have access to far more resources than I ever would. In addition, while the Fire Nation enjoys a technological advantage, it’s not out of the question to assume that the Earth Nation would begin to catch up – certainly we see in the post-HYW era that industrialisation is very swift in the western Earth Kingdom. I need to either attack now while I’ve got a chance or watch while my neighbour becomes a continental superpower able to impose demands or conquer me. Or try diplomacy but let’s be honest, the Fire Nation’s government wasn’t set up culturally or institutionally for that.
(Incidentally, this is almost to a tee German logic about the First World War – Russia was developing rapidly, and the German military felt that they were going to go to war at some point; and so the sooner, the better).
And so, Sozin decides to pull the trigger and invade. This also necessitates the removal of the Avatar as a precondition, hence the timing and scope of the – utterly barbaric – genocide of the Air Nomads. But this invasion appears limited in scope.
Our evidence base on this is exceptionally patchy, but when we look at maps of the Fire Nation’s advances, they are largely confined – even after a century of fighting – to the western edge of the main continent. They have a secondary front down south in Chameleon Bay and have at points lunged eastwards to positions like Pohaui, but their landwards expansion isn’t very big. Omashu is very close to the Fire Nation and didn’t fall; and General Fong’s fortress is similarly nearby, albeit to the north. Gaoling, too, is untouched by the war.
My thinking is that this is partly a matter of simple logistics – sustaining armies advancing deeper into the enemy heartland, away from sea lines of communication (SLOCs) is very difficult. But I also think this was strategic intent. The Fire Nation can’t govern huge swathes of the Earth Kingdom. Even their very limited footprint at the end of the HYW is unruly. Rather, Sozin hoped to bite and hold a small part of the coast, demonstrate the weakness of Ba Sing Se, and hence encourage other parts of the Earth Kingdom to splinter. This would end any threat to the Fire Nation and net some neat and prosperous colonies into the bargain.
But they didn’t. The Earth Kingdom stayed more or less coherent – see, for example, all their soldiers being equipped similarly which points to state-run arsenals – and fought back. So now the Fire Nation is left with a real problem. They can’t advance too far from the coast without facing major challenges, but they also can’t defeat the enemy without such an advance. They could retreat, but honour and national prestige means they can’t. So, they’re stuck in a stalemate through much of the war.
By the late-war period, and as Iroh’s generation – the second generation of military leaders born into the war – comes to prominence, patience is running out in the Fire Nation. Decades have passed and the Fire Nation is no closer to victory. Negotiation is unthinkable in a militaristic and honour-bound society. So, the obvious choice is to escalate and break the stalemate by main force.
Iroh’s first up to bat, waging a conventional campaign against Ba Sing Se. He does well – very well – clearing the path to the city and breaching the Outer Wall. But the tyranny of distance, logistics, attrition, and the loss of his son prevents a final push to victory. Zhao turns to spiritual means, hoping to kill the Moon and break the enemy will (or he’s just a bit insane, it’s not entirely clear). Azula and Ozai opt for technological solutions – a giant drill, and then a fleet of airships.
We are also seeing, increasingly, the barbarisation of the war. The Fire Nation clearly look down on the Earth Kingdom, and harbour supremacist sentiments going all the way back to the Age of Kyoshi. But Ozai brings this to the forefront, no doubt informed by decades of tit-for-tat atrocities and pointless, bloody stalemate; imperial powers and resistances to them both have quite lax rules of engagement around civilians. This is what allows Ozai and Azula to propose genocide as an ultimate war winning tool – and what turns a large enough coalition against the Fire Nation that they lose.
So…yeah. There you have it. Fire Nation grand strategy starts as quite sensible, but under the pressures of war and tyranny becomes an increasingly total and barbaric effort which culminates in the attempted extermination of the entire Earth Kingdom, vis a vis the mere countering thereof.
PS: From this perspective, the creation of the United Republic as a pro-Fire Nation power on the western coast of the Earth Kingdom represents a strategic victory for the Caldera. No wonder Hou-Ting and Kuvira are both so revanchist!
the thing that is so crazy about sokka and yue is that obviously they are foils, like yue is specifically narratively constructed to parallel sokka in terms of prioritizing their duties to their fathers & tribes, sacrificing their own agency and life to serve their communities by fulfilling their role in the patriarchal order.. but yue herself doesn’t even know that. because sokka never talks about anything. so even when she’s like “you don’t understand, i have duties to my father and to my tribe,” sokka isn’t like “actually i understand your situation very intimately, as it is an exact mirror of the circumstance that has defined my entire existence.” because if he said that, he would not be sokka. so he’s just like “but have you considered not making yourself miserable? i think that’s something you, as a person, could do. obviously i could never do that, but your situation is totally different. because you don’t deserve to be miserable. whereas i do.”
and because sokka never talks about anything, i also feel like yue was probably quite surprised by the way it must’ve felt to her like the second sokka saw the black snow, a switch flipped inside of him and he turned into a whole other person. like she already liked him so much when she thought he was just a goofy nerd who had charmed her with his awkward earnestness, but then he goes into War Mode and suddenly he is all determined and efficient and ruthless and she’s just like. okay who is this scary guy…… and why is he kind of hot😳
