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

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Except that plain dots or circles for eyes were not a typical unmarked state in Japanese cartooning until the 1920s, under the influence of American cartoons like Life with Father, the creepy Jiggs and Maggie one. Before that, eyes were usually cariactured by curved lines, an eyebrow-iris/lid combination, or actually drawing out the damn things, cartoonists staying closer to a print tradition longer in Japan than elsewhere.

Sloppy work by a professional academic. Also, I note that he dances around the question of Japanese cartoon representations of Africans (and 'Melanesians' etc).

As for Shati's LJ post, it greatly overestimates that depiction's universality as a face, as well as the historical development of the smiley face as "unmarked". I suspect a cartoonist from an east Asian artistic tradition two hundred years ago would view the picture in the post as some sort of skull. Ruskin once saw a similar drawing, IMS from a medieval manuscript, and denounced it as ridiculously programmatic.