About Avatar: The Last Airbender

[james_davis_nicoll]

Over in soc.history.what-if, Doug M. says I have to point out that while the /world/ of Avatar is very Asian influenced (and in a charmingly syncretic way...love that Balinese monkey chant), the ethnicity of the characters is quite deliberately blurred. Ang has pale skin, brown eyes, and vaguely Caucasian features; Saka and Kitara have olive skin, vaguely Asian features, and blue eyes. Zuko and the other Fire Nation characters tend to look Northeast Asian, but their eyes are usually orange, red or gold. In fact, this was one of the fun aspects of the series; the various "tribes" were to some extent racially distinct, but in ways that didn't map to here-and-now ethnic groups.

I have not seen Avatar but the above makes me want to track it down. I don't see any particular reason why the particular constellations of associated features in humans in secondary worlds would occur as they do in our world [1] if the histories of the worlds are distinct (and assuming we're not talking about a world crafted by some Dull God too uncreative to avoid blatant ethnological plagiarism).



1: A special stabbity-stabbity to all those authors who have secondary worlds with nations and ethnicities unlike our world's except for the gypsies, who apparently spring up like mushrooms everywhere even in worlds where their historical roots do not exist.

Comments

Re: Would you let us know what you thought of it?

[affreca.livejournal.com]

It is an interesting question. I can't think of any American cartoons that use a lot of anime conventions, but there are American manga that are homages to Japanese manga (major difference is which direction to read from).

Re: Would you let us know what you thought of it?

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

The animated Teen Titans deliberately borrowed a number of anime-style visual gags, to mixed effect.

Re: Would you let us know what you thought of it?

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Are you kidding? That's pretty much all that's been on for the last few years.

Just off the top of my head, aside from Avatar and the mentioned Teen Titans (which went so far as to have a J-Pop title theme), and counting series that are explicitly North American in writing (even if they are animated in Japan or Korea)

Transformers Animated
Powerpuff Girls
Xiolin Showdown
Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!
Dexter's Lab
Chaotic
Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi
Megas XLR

And that doesn't count European shows like Code Lyoko, W.I.T.C.H., Totally Spies, or CG series like Skyland.