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

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

This.

My only caveat is that it is still a kids' show on some level, so even though it pushes the seriousness boundary of American kids' programming much farther than it usually goes, it still glosses over some things that wouldn't be glossed over if they had made the same show intended for an entirely adult audience. There's nothing wrong with that, of course; but the fact that it was more adult than most kid-oriented programming sometimes gave me expectations that were not fulfilled.

But it really is a good show.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

There is that. American kidvid is amazingly skittish about even mentioning the words "kill" or "dead", so it was interesting to see the different ways they managed to imply the terms

[schizmatic.livejournal.com]

Out of curiosity, what expectations are those? I mean there's some stuff that probably needed to happen, like members of the Dai Li swinging from lampposts of Bah Sing Se after everything was over, but on the whole, I think that it more or less had the necessary level of violence for a decent story. I, for one, am perfectly happy that when Zuko and Socca infiltrated the Fire Nation Prison there was no explicit mention of folks getting cornholed.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

It is true that for a show about a full-scale world-wide war death happens with surprising rarity. But I was actually thinking of things like: the world is improbably small and they travel about it at the Speed of Plot, the politics are unrealistically simplistic, trained soldiers are routinely defeated by a handful of teenagers, and so on.

Now, as I said, I am not criticizing the show here; these are all perfectly valid decisions depending on the kind of story you want to tell. But because Avatar pushed the boundaries of "kidvid" so strongly in other ways, for metatextual reasons I developed a false expectation that it was going strive for a more realistic tone -- if that's the appropriate word for a show where many people have magic powers -- than in fact they were interested in going for.