I knew almost nothing about this show going in, but I enjoyed The Last Airbender so I decided to check it out. I heard it had problems, but no one told me it was straight-up fascist propaganda.
What I’m about to rant about isn’t me reading too much into it, because the points they’re trying to make are about as subtle as a horse pissing, and this is a popular franchise that all ages watch and are influenced by.
Republic City is clearly supposed to be America.
The Equalists are clearly supposed to stand-in in for a leftist group fighting against oppression. Their posters are even designed like leftist posters.
The Equalists are disadvantaged minorities, similar to MLKs civil rights movement or the woman’s suffrage movement. Except in this show, these people have harder lives because they are born without superpowers, and because of this they are jealous and bitter of those who do have superpowers and want to take everyone’s powers away because of jealousy.
This is akin to saying minorities aren’t really oppressed, they’re just genetically inferior and not ‘special’. Korra straight up tells an equalist that they want to be whiny and oppressed. Our Hero, everyone.
Can’t wait for the episode where Korra tells someone who can’t afford cancer treatment that they’re just jealous of healthy people. Hell, considering how hamfisted the Equalists as an expy for leftists is, this is like saying that leftists are jealous of healthy people and want to make everyone sick.
This isn’t subtle, the way this show misrepresents the left is straight out of the Nazi propaganda playbook.
Even if you can look past the pro-fascist morals, the show is just boring. Gone is the adventure and unique fantasy setting of The Last Airbender. The show now spends most of the time focusing on a boring love triangle and an uninteresting sport. It was actually this that made me stop watching because it was so slow-paced and the characters were so unrelatable/unlikable.
I mean, The Last Airbender could be lib as shit sometimes (the Ba Sing Se episode comes to mind) but it at least was a fun adventure about defeating a fascist empire. In The Last Airbender, the hero wins by taking away the superpowers of the leader of the evil empire. Making the pro-power, pro-empire morals that The Legend of Korra is trying to put forward seem even more hypocritical and hollow.
Another thing that sucks is that I’ve seen most criticisms of this show are hand-waved away as people just not liking it because Korra is a “strong female lead”.
Neo-Liberals hiding fascism behind progressivism, name a more iconic duo.
Anyway, that was me shitting on a show about 10 years too late, but fuck it. I had no idea it was that bad.
The equalist plotline is so fucking bad, not only is the non-benders presented as not seriously disadvantaged but their entire movement is just a corrupt bender trying to gain power by exploiting them.
And then all our girlboss has to do to collapse the movement is reveal the leaders status as a bender, because clearly the movement is not based in real structural and material inequality and disadvantages, they just hate all benders equally because of resentments. Just turns into libshit both sidesing where they are presented as essentially non-bender supremacists, realistically it shouldnt fucking matter if benders are part of the movement, particularly not if they are being violently repressed and would get a lot of help from people whos bodies are weapons.
Fun fact, r/neoliberal once recommended Legend of Korra as “a good show about the dangers of populism”
I hate them so much
Lmao of course
Oh oh also, the leftists are secretly funded by a billionaire who just wants to sell weapons! A Soros stand in.
Wait until you get to the fourth season, literal nazi power fantasy/apologia.
UwU the nazis just wanted to make the Earth Kingdom Great Again and helped a lot of people, they just got a bit power crazy derailed, but it’s okay cuz we gonna redeem Earth Hitler later on UwU
Liberalism and nazism, one big heart.
UwU the nazis just wanted to make the Earth Kingdom Great Again and helped a lot of people, they just got a bit power crazy derailed, but it’s okay cuz we gonna redeem Earth Hitler later on UwU
The comic book is worse.
Kuvira is obviously a KMT stand in. she’s a progressive force, regardless of Radio Free Earth Kingdom has to say. Ultimate proof is that the resolve the series by balkanizing the Earth Kingdom into it’s province republics so they can never again present unified resistance against military or financial imperialism.
Thesis: Kuvira is a nazi
Antithesis: Kuvira is fighting for national liberation
Synthesis: The writers are such scratched libs that these are both true.
I disagree. I think Kuvira is much more a analogous to “strong man” third world anti-imperialist leaders like Nasser or Gaddafi.
In the context of being a underdeveloped, overexploited country like the Earth Kingdom, “make it great again” is different than in highly developed imperialist country. Kuvira is a modernizing force violently restructuring feudal relations and changing a kingdom into a nation-state while also militarily repossessing Earth Kingdom lands from colonizers and imperialists.
If the Fire Nation were talking about “making the nation great again” that would be just fascism.
You are right, BUT I can’t dismiss the robots’ nazi helmets that simply
Sure, the lib writers could just be saying “liberation nationalists are as bad as nazis”; but one can also read “nazis were liberation nationalist smol beans but they got meanie greedy revengful derailed”
Again, I’m now completely convinced of what @TheLepidopterists said.
Plus I don’t know shit about the KMT
Honestly given that Kuvira were given nazi imagery such as the superweapons and having concentration camps (that were never shown even though theres a goddamn murder suicide scene) wouldnt suprise me if they think Gadaffi is literally Libyan hitler.
Even with her giant robot, I think that’s treated kinda like the WMDs the west is in constant fear of third world countries developing.
That said, you’re right. The folks who ran the show probably don’t see a difference. They’re likely the type of libs who unironically used terms like “islamo-fascist” to describe Assad or Saddam.
Communism is when your genetically superior superpowers are taken away from you.
You see this trope a lot in children’s fiction.
I know My Little Pony had an episode about this.
But what does that actually translate into in real life?
It’s not like expropriating someone’s property or restructuring how an economic system works. It’s more like … Communism is when all the tall people have to be reduced in height so we’re all equals heights … or something.
The fact that Sato, the stand-in for Henry Ford, is one of the Equalists tells you everything - that “Equal” just means “Evil” and has fuck-ton nothing to do with economic structures, just magical genetic individual superpowers.
there’s this short story, Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut. I must have been assigned it as required reading at least half-a-dozen times over the coarse of elementary, middle, and high school. This was over several different school districts. If my anecdote is anything to go by, it’s probably more widely read than 1984. It helps the teacher can make it through the whole thing in, like, fifteen minutes – tops. And it’s sooo dumb. Like, the Vonnegut absolutely-wrote-this-in-one-sitting-and-forgot-about-it, dumb.
I think that short story encapsulates everything Americans really and truly believe about communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular.
Vonnegut had a lot of conflicting ideas, but identified as a socialist. I think he was in the somewhat confused vein of psuedo progressive we see today that is for lefty economics but is anti-political correctness, and the ease that Bergeron maps onto American antocommunist beliefs shows exactly where that particular strain of thought comes from.
Am not reading that shit so tell me the story pls
If I remember right people are kept “equal” in all aspects by handicapping those smarter, stronger, faster, etc than average. If you’re smart you have a speaker strapped to your head to interupt your thoughts so you’re on the same playing field as dumber people, shit like that. And the title character is a super special genius strong boy who has to wear the biggest weights etc to keep him down. then I think he breaks free, gives a Randian speech on tv, and is shot.
Haven’t read it for years so that’s prob not accurate but I don’t care enough to look it up
gives randian speech and is shot
Good.
Sounds like you didn’t make it through the first season. You might be interested to learn that a different political ideology set as the antagonist for each season. You think the season about communism is fascist propaganda? Wait till you see the season about fascism!
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOH8e00C92tKmamWumsPVJuHnremKXtDT
These videos are pretty good, or at least I thought so a few years ago
The villains of LoK by season: Civil Rights, uuuuh weird magic?, anarchism, fascism (but it’s okay she’s just trying her best and went a bit far)
Also competence porn and she’s the one who visibly bathes out of all of them
Season two is about how environmentalists are all crypto-satanists.
I’ve heard theocracy too lol. S2 is really just about big Godzilla fight, retconing atla to have Christian themes*, and Bolin becoming a movie star, the rest is too incoherent to say yes this is what it means imo (unless the creators ever said)
i really wish they had stopped making every character a cop
I was about to link the JackSaint videos myself. His perspective is good because I think the critique is as profound as it needs to be, so not very deep.
Kay and Skittles also did a series on Korra which was aight
Oh crap I was actually thinking about Kay and Skittles, but still… Good vids.
Another thing that sucks is that I’ve seen most criticisms of this show are hand-waved away as people just not liking it because Korra is a “strong female lead”.
:hillgasm:
An argument could be made that Amon is an Obama figure, tbh.
Wut
Korra s1 came out in 2012, 4 years with Obama as president. And he betrayed the narrative of his 2008 campaign. Bailed out wall street, put down or allowed the suppression of OWS. So to some extent the authors might have been critiquing the idea of good governments and even worse so called Charismatic Leaders.
Amon being a bender is like Obama being a secret wall st guy.
There’s a lot of cynicism on how the way things change the more they stay the same.
This feels good, but its far too smart a critique to be what the very bad writers of Korra thought of.
It would require a more subtle and nuanced understanding of politics and populist movements to make such a critique and the writers fail almost every season when it comes to nuance, so yeah.
Good post. Legend of Korra is absolutely dreadful.
Try the Rise of Kyoshi novel. This trips people up a lot, bad marketing I guess, but it’s a novel. Not a comic. It’s very good for YA.
The sequel is hard filler and badly concludes leftover plot threads from the first, but yea Rise of kyoshi itself is great, if only for portraying bending as deadly
Its funny that the leftist villains (amon and zaheer) are dead or have all their friends dead and be imprisoned and chained meanwhile fascist girlboss kuvira gets to have a redemption arc.
Yeah after three seasons of left allegory it was hard to ignore how well they treat Kuvira.
War profiteers are also cool and good if they help the magic destiny kween once in a while. :capitalist-woke:
There’s a scene where the ability to control fire is taken away from a mob boss who burns peoples faces for fun and this is presented as wrong.
“No you can’t take away stabby Johns knives he loves cutting peoples ears off it’s his thing”
It made me think “was this written by 4chan or something?”
This was all pre-gamergate too, so it wasn’t like they wanted to cash in on the whole Gamergate craze of 2014.
Politics of the show fucking blows, but imo, the worst thing the show does is Korra.
Korra has a problem in that the show sells her as a competent badass with a small oversight in her abilities in being unable to airbend, and achieve the actual avatar state. But throughout the first book she’s constantly losing every fight, unable to bring her mix of bending abilities to bear in an interesting way and achieve victory. All she has to do at any time is win one fight, or merely have the enemy escape from her. But for the sake of plot and being a fighting show, the writing becomes contrived so she must fight and have a scene where she loses.
Contrast this with atla, where Aang’s significant ability to airbend leaves him a capable and experienced fighter, but airbending is a pacifistic art that relies on pushing your opponent back. And in atla Aang isnt concerned with stopping some big bad immediately, all he really ever needs to do is live to fight another day. Aang primarily relies on his airbending for this reason, even when he has the other bending abilities he doesnt need to incapicate anyone by dropping rocks on their head or fireball anyone.
Korra never gets past this key writing problem. Around halfway of book 2 you will realize Korra never wins a fight that isnt relevant to the plot (season finales) or where shes heaped out of it by whatever bullshit of the season. Even after mastering all the elements, she still never activates the avatar state and wins fights. I also really hated the death of the avatar spirit in book 2, it felt like a huge fuck you and loss of the remembered cultures of the world since man conquered the elements. Korra just really sucks ass. She isnt the avatar, she has none of the spiritual connection and neither the ability or competence to protect it even after being trained as a child to do the job.
terrible show, the fights suck, 2/10
Don’t worry, it gets worse
I hate how Amon is given a sympathetic backstory that gets no exploration at all. He’s supposedly orphaned by benders who his parents couldn’t fight.
That’s legit what happens to Katara before the start of TLA. But instead of exploring that trauma, the story focuses on what it feels like to bend and how losing that is a profound loss.
It could’ve been a cool exploration on the themes of powerlessness and coping with that, but instead it’s just that benders are just better and if you don’t bend then you need to get out of the way.
In stories, it’s easy to assume you’d be a character with powers or knowledge, but the reality is more likely to be you’re the one on the outside of power in these fictional settings
Isn’t it a straight up lie also? Like Amon is actually a bender himself just doing shit for power and tricking the gullible moronic commoners?
It’s more complicated he’s a bender himself whose dad was abusive about bending by bullying his younger brother who was less powerful than them. And he does actually believe in what he’s saying
the show however ignores the sympathetic parts of this backstory
That seems even worse somehow, at least if hes just power hungry that makes sense in this dumb setup they did, but if he genuinely believes in what hes talking about wouldnt he just shape the movement to allow sympathetic benders to be part of it?
Hate when you can just obviously detect the hands of the authors making their characters do dumb shit and not think properly so that their intended story works no matter what.
Pretending to be a non bender does make sense as his dad was a wanted mob boss and not being known as a bender helps conceal his identity and avoid attention.
The main way the show ignores this sympathetic backstory is by narratively treating this kind hearted character who wants to help people weaker than himself as a power hungry monster. Despite the obvious fact that if you are power hungry you would cater to the interests of the powerful not the powerless
Despite the obvious fact that if you are power hungry you would cater to the interests of the powerful not the powerless
:parenti:
Korra has a deeply unsympathetic look at power of both herself as the avatar and the people that comprise the systems, just like AtLA. But in AtLA the simplicity of the narrative Good people are good even if they act bad sometimes, is replaced with there are not a lot of good people. This also happens in the YA novels, Kyoshi and Yangchen have wonderful internal politics and intrigue that would have eaten Aang alive.
