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

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Lee Ratner rebuts, noting that most of the audience (at least the vocal) part *perceived* the characters as Asianish, and that's what really matters. Also notes the anime influence and the odd Caucasianing of Japanese in anime; in a way, Avatar's characters look more Asian than many anime characters do. (Part of this may be the whole "big round eyes to look cute and show expression more dramatically" thing. Or, if you're going to slap green and purple hair down everywhere, why get picky about epicanthic folds?)

Juuni Kokki/the Twelve Kingdoms takes place in a fantasy world which does have some connection to Earth, but people show up (explicitly, in text, not just some animation convention) in almost every combination of skin and eye color. Non-hereditary too, due to divine changes in biology. There's no races, just scrambling everywhere, though blonde hair is unique to the kirin. (I've imagined fic about some blonde American soldier who gets swept off Okinawa and initially mistaken for the human form of a kirin. Soldier is extra ironic due to the pacifist nature of the kirin.)

[bwross.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Juuni Kokki also has the fact that people are born as fruit on trees (and thus everyone is adopted like cabbage patch kids). So it's not too surprising that things could be scrambled.

There's also shapeshifting furrys (which do experience racism in some of the kingdoms).