#oh lord shitty discourse tw

[jyndor]

Cop-thing-anon here:

(I don't believe in the blue lives matter thing by the way)

I do get where you're coming from. I guess I see the thing about cops and cop AUs differently because the police is different and not as fucked up in my country. The thing about the fanart is just..I think you're reading too much into it. I don't think the artist really focused on the skin colour of Sokka, I mean, it's a kids show. Skin colour was never really mentioned or important in atla. But Sokka's personality is most likely why the artist was inspired to draw him as a "gangster", with azula (the villain) being a cop. It is kind of insensitive to draw that with the events going on, but I think that a lot of people in the fandom take some things way too seriously, for a kids show back in the late 2000's anyway.

hey anon, I say this with love and I am being sincere. I'm gonna need you to rewatch the show if you think skin color didn't matter. and it doesn't matter where you live because there is no part of the world, no culture, that isn't shaped by colonialism. I don't mean to be condescending so please bear with me, I truly believe in educating people as a part of allyship and anti-racism.

Anon, please know that I am not angry or anything but sincere in what I’m about to say. Just bear with me because I know that unlearning shit is difficult and can be painful, but we’ve gotta do it. I do appreciate you wanting to have this conversation at all. And I’m not writing this just for your benefit - this is for anyone who wants to learn about why A) race is a part of ATLA’s narrative and B) why critical analysis of mass media is actually important. So I’m not assuming you don’t know basic things about this stuff, I’m not trying to be condescending.

Now we’re gonna fix colonialism and imperialism XD wee okay here we go.

No matter where you live in the world you have some awareness of skin color. Your understanding of race might be different than mine, in fact it probably is. Race as we know it today is a social construct that stems from many things (and I wrote several hundred words on it but it was too much and too far removed from the point I’m trying to make so I edited all of that out. Yay.)

You don’t usually see imperialism, one of the major themes in Avatar, without colonialism. Imperialism is slightly different than colonialism - you can think of it like the ideology behind the practice of colonialism.* Imperialism can be used to describe expansionism in general - which has been going on since the bronze age lol humans, I stg - but usually when people today refer to colonialism and imperialism they’re talking about imperialism starting in the 17th century.

Now imperialism is not just a European concept. ATLA is set in a world that we know is supposed to be like a combination of different Asian cultures (with some influences from the Americas). And the Fire Nation is clearly influenced by Imperial Japan. So briefly:

Japan had a policy of sakoku (chained or closed country) which kept it mostly isolated (out of concerns that Japan would fall victim to something like the Opium Wars in China, among other things) from the rest of the world for a couple hundred years until the 1850s when a US Naval commander named Matthew Perry (I am not kidding) forced Japan to open its borders for trade to the United States by gunboat diplomacy, an oxymoron if I have ever seen one before.

Japan ended up signing unequal treaties with a lot of Western countries, and this bred xenophobia and hostility in Japan. The Emperor who signed these treaties died of smallpox, and after some internal conflict his son decided try to renegotiate these treaties. The US and European countries were not interested in renegotiating dick but the mission wasn’t unsuccessful because the diplomats A) exchanged some islands with Russia and B) were inspired by western economic policy and society to “modernize” Japan. Japan began industrialization and it converted to a market economy with the help of the US and other western powers.

So over many years, Japan went to war with China, Korea, Russia (and took back some of the land they exchanged with them), and others. From wikipedia:

Using its superior technological advances in naval aviation and its modern doctrines of amphibious and naval warfare, Japan achieved one of the fastest maritime expansions in history. By 1942 Japan had conquered much of East Asia and the Pacific, including the east of China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma (Myanmar), Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, part of New Guinea and many islands of the Pacific Ocean.

But ATLA is not a Japanese story. The Fire Nation is not Imperial Japan. The Earth Kingdom is not China or Korea, the Air Nomads are not Tibetan monks, and the Water Tribes are not Inuit. The creators definitely drew heavy inspiration from all of these places and others, but ATLA is a story written by American people in the United States for American kids. It is an American story.

And it was created at a time when the United States was victimizing people in Afghanistan and Iraq (and other places) in many similar ways to how the Fire Nation victimized people. In fact, the show starts in the Southern Water Tribe, which represent Inuit people, indigenous people in Alaska, Canada and Greenland, I think it’s safe to assume that the genocide being referenced here is not one by Japan but rather by European colonizers and later by the United States and Canada.

Imperialism is in the show’s DNA. 

And so is racism. In our world they are inherently connected. And visual cues from the show along with things the characters say suggest that we are meant to make the comparison between our world and the ATLA world. Every story has a purpose - it doesn’t have to be political, but for Avatar it is political, it is anti-imperialist.

In this article about how ATLA resonates with us in 2020, Aina Khan of the Guardian interviews Professor Ali A Olomi about using ATLA to teach at Penn State. “One of the things we see with the Fire Nation is the ideological justification for what they’re doing. We are a glorious civilization. We have abundance, we have wealth, we have technological advancement; we need to share it with the rest of the world. That’s almost word for word European colonisation.”

Zuko and Azula both call Katara a peasant. In fact, Azula calls her a dirty peasant. This is one step away from calling her a s*vage I mean come on. While peasant might just be purely classist (lol no) because Zuko and Azula are royalty, um it’s clearly racialized classism because of real life context. There is real history with colonizers calling indigenous people this, dismissing their cultures as primitive and barbaric.

Add into the mix colorism, which is bias against darker skin and privileges fair skin (which is a byproduct of imperialism) and you have clear race shit happening in Avatar.

When I saw that fanart, I was immediately reminded of black lives matter of course, but mainly of the fact that indigenous peoples are also at high risk of being victimized by police. Not just in the US. And how gross it is to depict a colonizer like Azula as an angry cop (representing the state) turning her gun on an indigenous man who is dressed like a gangster which... yike.

Mass media influence everything we do. The messaging we get, our politics, what we want to eat for dinner because we’re hungry and have been writing this stupid essay for three hours LOL. It’s important that people think critically about what they consume. Otherwise you get the goddamn United States with half of our population stanning a racist fraud. You want to know why US Americans are so ignorant? Because our education system sucks, because we don’t have any real media literacy. But apparently the rest of the world has some fucking nerve making fun of Americans** because all of us suck at it. No one is thinking critically about media.

A really terrifying thing about people is our ability to take whatever message we want from stories, even if it is in direct contradiction with the narrative of a story. There’s a movie called American History X which is explicitly anti-fascist, but because it’s a drama and Ed Norton is cut and looks badass and uncucked or whatever LOL, the iconography in that movie is fairly popular with neo-nazis. Yike. This is not at that level of course, this is some random niche fanart for a rare pairing.

For better or for worse, US media and entertainment gets a lot of attention and people around the world eat it up. Maybe you don’t need to know every little detail about US American shit, and I know we tend to dominate media, but black lives matter is not just a 2020 thing. People have known about it for years, since it started. If that fanart was created in 2019, which I think it was, the BLM movement had already existed for six years. If you’re watching an American show like Avatar and you’re making fanart on social media but you don’t know what BLM is in 2019... well educate yourself lmao.

Considering that Black fans have expressed frustration and discomfort in fandoms over and over again, and I am sure indigenous fans have too because fandoms are racist sometimes, it’s important that white fans help make fandoms better. And I am a white fan, and I consider myself an anti-racist. Which means I have to be active about racism when I see it.

btw I found this great essay by @cobra-diamond which you should read if you want more details about the similarities between Japan and the Fire Nation.

* that is very reductive but it’s fine lol

** I am kidding, unless you are english feel free to make fun of americans for non-gun, non-trauma related things pls