The original series gets by on being very well written, but it’s still an essentially liberal story. Look at the handling of Jet. The freedom fighters are kids, yeah, but they’re also written as intelligent and empathetic characters. And their plan to rid the valley of Fire Nation is to… kill at the locals and make the village uninhabitable?
I understand the story deals a lot with obsession and doing things without consideration for the cost. But these characters were an incredible chance at the kind of nuanced storytelling that Avatar managed to sneak into a kids show and it always rubbed me the wrong way that Jet was kinda one-note in this way.
If the show was written by leftists, I can see it as a critique on Maoists and hippies blowing up libraries and boiling babies to… fight imperialism? But because it’s liberals, the moral of the story is “fighting oppressors make you the real oppressor”
The original series gets by on being very well written, but it’s still an essentially liberal story. Look at the handling of Jet. The freedom fighters are kids, yeah, but they’re also written as intelligent and empathetic characters. And their plan to rid the valley of Fire Nation is to… kill at the locals and make the village uninhabitable?
I understand the story deals a lot with obsession and doing things without consideration for the cost. But these characters were an incredible chance at the kind of nuanced storytelling that Avatar managed to sneak into a kids show and it always rubbed me the wrong way that Jet was kinda one-note in this way.
If the show was written by leftists, I can see it as a critique on Maoists and hippies blowing up libraries and boiling babies to… fight imperialism? But because it’s liberals, the moral of the story is “fighting oppressors make you the real oppressor”