All you need to know about Legend of Korra is that r/neoliberal recommended it as “a good show about the dangers of populism”
the dangers of populism
“AMERICA SPREADS FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY. THAT IS WHY THOSE UNRULY MASSES MUST BE CONTAINED AND SUPPRESSED.”
They really do be thinking that USA is some philosopher king of the world, don’t they?
One of the more
moments for me as a nascent leftist was realizing that the quasi-deified Founding Fathers™ were almost entirely just 1700s equivalent of today’s creepy techbros, including sus sex predator stuff.The Counter-Revolution of 1776 has some great sections about how the only people worse than the Royal African Company for a slave were the American small business hustlegrinders who tried to cut the small costs of food and proper lodging the RAC treated as the simple cost of flesh-trading.
We are living in the griftlands
Not surprised they liked it. One of the characters is a billionaire weapons dealer who worked with terrorists to sell more weapons, push a strategy of tension, and ignited a bloody war. He’s also the good guy, married his secretary, and is rewarded with a state award
Dude is just Charlie Wilson and NATO, the character
also he literally has a pablo escobar style luxury prison constructed so that when he is inevitably imprisoned for his corruption, he ends up in what is essentially a cozy hotel room. This would seem like a satire of capitalism, but it is played off like he is a clever and sympathetic character for doing this
r/neoliberal recommended it
💀
The enemy in the first season is basically just a communist, but they pretty openly compare it to fascism (the propaganda posters he puts up around the city basically have the Rising Sun in the background). Then they just kill him off. It’s very lazy.
Dont forget the comics where they decided that instead of returning the fire nation colonies back to the earth kingdom they should instead form a new nation out of stolen land
Also in the comics:
Earth Kingdom peasants rise up against the king for better conditions. The king asks Kyoshi, the avatar before Aang, to suppress them. Kyoshi won’t serve the king at first, but then some windows get broken or something and she goes full cop and suppresses them, then further goes on to establish the Dai Li secret police to prevent further protests.
The “wisdom” being that the avatar answers to no king, but destroying private property is even worse, so some weird centrism is the best . In general, the Avatar is a disgusting centrist neoliberal corruption of the original Indian concept of a hero incarnated to deliver divine justice for the oppressed
Korra had so much potential with this sort of stuff, the third season with the anarchist villains in particular. People actively challenging the idea of the avatar because they just defend the status quo and the rich and powerful could’ve been a fantastic series that actively challenges neoliberal ideas of power. Sadly we got the “pro-neoliberalism” avatar sequel.
The Airbenders went from a nation of peaceful nomads to being reborn as international cops without borders.
The Airbenders went from a nation of peaceful nomads to being reborn as international cops without borders.
They became Jedi.
Turning Toph into a cop was blatant character assassination
Toph becoming a cop is actually a materialist reading. She’s a noble who went through a rebellious phase as a child, not even a teenager. Her material conditions brought her back to her wealthy, exploitative upbringing. Her proximity to several leaders of nation states, her family wealth/status, and her literal “only person in the world” metal powers brought her to the natural conclusion that she needed to preserve the powerful elite she and her friends were part of. Naturally as an innovative, intelligent, and adventurous person she saw how the old world system was transitioning into bourgeoisie capitalism and instead of getting swept away with the old aristocracy she secured an essential position as chief defender of capital.
Jk Toph deserved so much better.
I interpreted avatar in a different way post Korra. The world would be better off with no avatar
Then the settlers used their bending powers to cast fireballs and lightning at the child rebels throwing pebbles at them
It’s funny that there’s been so much discourse on Hexbear about Avatar lately when I just started binging the show a couple of months ago, slightly over halfway through Korra now and yeah it’s pretty lib
It does the similar thing as marvel where the villain has a point but suddenly kicks an old lady or something and the hero has to stop them as the protector of the status quo.
.
The original series gets by on being very well written, but it’s still an essentially liberal story. Look at the handling of Jet. The freedom fighters are kids, yeah, but they’re also written as intelligent and empathetic characters. And their plan to rid the valley of Fire Nation is to… kill at the locals and make the village uninhabitable?
I understand the story deals a lot with obsession and doing things without consideration for the cost. But these characters were an incredible chance at the kind of nuanced storytelling that Avatar managed to sneak into a kids show and it always rubbed me the wrong way that Jet was kinda one-note in this way.
If the show was written by leftists, I can see it as a critique on Maoists and hippies blowing up libraries and boiling babies to… fight imperialism? But because it’s liberals, the moral of the story is “fighting oppressors make you the real oppressor”
Avatar was always lib, just that when they tried to do any complex storytelling it gets blindingly obvious. The bad guys in ATLA are largely just incredible dickheads and clearly in the wrong so they’re easy to write. Zhao, Azula and Ozai are all just terrible with no real ethos other than we strong you weak. They’re so clearly in the wrong.
When you try to make a villain that is meant to have some kind of point (all of them in Korra are meant to) the status quo defending and libbery gets much more obvious. Also notable that the one they bat the most for is the fascist that had wunderwaffen and concentration camps. She simply cared too much for her people.
Zhao, Azula and Ozai are all just terrible with no real ethos other than we strong you weak. They’re so clearly in the wrong.
?
I am the original creator of this meme, lmaooooo. I love how often it is circulated. It’s
Thank you for your service compa! Miss seeing you in the literature threads.
I am almost done with grad school. I’ve been trying to prune the amount of stuff I organize cause I felt like I was going insane and burning out. I miss the literature threads too!
Or, in sokka’s case, a sword
That’s a club, he doesn’t get a sword until later
and it’s sick af
Isn’t it a boomerang?
no. this is a boomer aang
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Watch Andor. The writers have stated that the characters and events were inspired by explicitly leftist figures and events, including Stalin and the IRA lol. Granted, the writer said he didn’t really care much about Stalin besides the sensationalized stories of his early life, but the results aren’t very libby compared to other Star Wars stuff.
One Way Out is such a good arc that they literally named the character Kino
One of the rebels has a laser gun that is just an AK-47.
Democracy grows out of the barrel of a blaster. :SickoSawGerrera:
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“thanos was right” ppl
I had a humanities professor who was a huge comics fan and he thought that Infinity War/Endgame were some of the greatest movies ever because Thanos was such a “complex character” and there were “huge moral questions”. And like, this was someone who acted like the stereotypical “super liberal” professor (talking about diversity, making fun of Trump, etc). Which is why it’s shocking to me that someone who’s ostensibly “woke” would think that Thanos had any point whatsoever, in a world where a device that can create infinite resources exists. It feels like the comics crowd (both the creators and fans) are afraid that people will view their media as “childish”, yet their supposedly “morally complex” villains somehow end up even more childish than before.
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Communists do not fight for personal military power (they must in no circumstances do that, and let no one ever again follow the example of Zhang Guotao), but they must fight for military power for the Party, for military power for the people. As a national war of resistance is going on, we must also fight for military power for the nation. Where there is naivete on the question of military power, nothing whatsoever can be achieved. It is very difficult for the labouring people, who have been deceived and intimidated by the reactionary ruling classes for thousands of years, to awaken to the importance of having guns in their own hands. Now that Japanese imperialist oppression and the nation-wide resistance to it have pushed our labouring people into the arena of war, Communists should prove themselves the most politically conscious leaders in this war. Every Communist must grasp the truth, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party. Yet, having guns, we can create Party organizations, as witness the powerful Party organizations which the Eighth Route Army has created in northern China. We can also create cadres, create schools, create culture, create mass movements. Everything in Yenan has been created by having guns. All things grow out of the barrel of a gun. According to the Marxist theory of the state, the army is the chief component of state power. Whoever wants to seize and retain state power must have a strong army. Some people ridicule us as advocates of the “omnipotence of war”. Yes, we are advocates of the omnipotence of revolutionary war; that is good, not bad, it is Marxist. The guns of the Russian Communist Party created socialism. We shall create a democratic republic. Experience in the class struggle in the era of imperialism teaches us that it is only by the power of the gun that the working class and the labouring masses can defeat the armed bourgeoisie and landlords; in this sense we may say that only with guns can the whole world be transformed. We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.
—Mao Zedong, Selected Works Vol. II, pp. 224-225
Avatar/Korra is the Harry Potter of cartoons
Sokka’s boomerang is a subtle nod to the blowback caused by Republic City’s roots in imperial conquest.
Avatar’s setting is just a crappy orientalist version of WWII in Asia. Imagine if some Chinese cartoon was set in a thinly veiled version of WWII europe where one of the main characters is Hitler’s Son, the thinly veiled Russia/Slav equivalents are constantly demeaned and mocked, and it ends with the Soviet Union giving up Kiev to be jointly ruled by Nazi Germany. They didn’t even try to hide it. In the Avatar Lore Republic City used to be called “Crane City”. Crane City is the nickname for an actual city in Northeastern China close to where Unit 731 was.
