Reflection and Analysis

Avatar: Wanting the Live Action to Go Woke? (10/17/2024)

Here is a continuation of my reflection on Nardos Haile's article on salon called "'Avatar: The Last Airbender' gets Katara all wrong to make amends with the show's past sexism" with the first part only diving into the first quarter of the article which hadn't yet gotten into the writer's argument.

To start, in order to see that the article was, in fact, a quarter of the article and padding the word count, I did take a quick glance at the rest of it, and it is as I suspected, that this particular writer is about the narrative of bringing the "pigheaded men" down a peg; that, or this is wonderfully written tongue-in-cheek piece.

I personally can't get behind such narratives, that "all men are sexist pigs that need to be brought down a peg" because the reality is this isn't true, nor should we be teaching girls that this narrative is true; there are those who will argue that the work is fiction and there is no danger to such narratives, but the issue here is honestly about narratives that are fictional like this that aren't thought of as a fictional narrative, such as this one where there are individuals who believe that all men are sexist pigs.

As for the first quarter of the article that I spent 2.6k on?

The writer summarized the Avatar show as if they were writing the article not for people who knew the show either because they watched the show, or held some level of familiarity to the show, which in turn allows the writer to be disingenuous in some of the things said to the readers who aren't familiar with certain things.

For example, the writer touches upon the original live-action adaption of the show, disingenuously throwing the POC director/producer under the bus despite there being major discussion in fandom that the fault does lie with the two white men given creators credit as well as the white woman best known for causing the fall of the Star Wars franchise empire. 

The writer even disingenuously calls what happened with the original adaption whitewashing (not the case), which isn't to say that the characters weren't race-swapped based on what the characters looked like. Still, it is meant as a call-out regarding how fandom has actively ignored that 80% of the initial casting choices everyone complained about weren't white.

The writer used the words "wider diaspora" regarding the casting for the newest adaption, which is inaccurate; the adaption with the wider Asian diaspora is the 2010 adaption, which utilizes an Asian diaspora that represented the entirety of the Asian continent (including places like Russia, India, and the Middle East) while the 2024 adaption uses a narrower Asian diaspora (focused in on China, Japan, Korea, Philippines and the indigenous people of the northern areas.)

This, in turn, made the first quarter a major word salad, but what I mean by word salad is the words used fall apart on closer examination, which does include the claim, the argument, that the live-action adaption portrays Katara and Sokka differently than how they are in the original canon while also claiming Sokka's sexism holds a narrative importance it never did.

Because the crux of the argument by this writer is that "and while this may be the more politically comfortable step -- there were countless moments in the original cartoon that were heavy-handed with misogyny from the chauvinistic Sokka -- the result didn't serve Katara as a character."

Given the writer of the article openly admits the chauvinistic moments were heavy-handed, I'm going to argue that these moments did major disservice to not just Katara as a character but Sokka as well. Yet, I'll argue by extension, since this seemed focused on the Water Tribes, a major disservice to the native peoples the Water Tribes are meant to be based on.

There's no getting around the fact Sokka's sexist moments are there for comic relief, yet this is what the writer wanted to remain in the live-action series while also claiming that these sexist moments somehow in the original served Katara's growth as a character in the same way her fight against Master Pakku refusing to teach her because it is not the tradition of the Northern Water tribe to teach women to fight when it does nothing of the sort.