Completed LoK last week. Just thinking about all villian philosophy.
Wasn't Amon an Bloodbending gangster using a populist ideology to foment a rebellion? I don't think he was really "all about equality".
this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
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Avatar: The Last Airbender
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Yeah arguably the former three villains all sucked.
Amon was a criminal exploiting social unrest for his personal gain, and didn't really care about the cause.
Unalaq was the wuxia fantasy equivalent of an Ecofascist. "We are the virus" type shit
And Zaheer as an anarchist didn't really have a project or care about uniting the people, he just killed some powerful assholes and considered himself a hero for it, not even caring that killing a powerful asshole and fucking off basically just opens the door for other powerful assholes to do powerful asshole things. -- Which they did.
The telling part, to me, however, is that only Kuvira got a last minute redemption, where the other three fucking died. Because ultimately neoliberalism considers "violent warmongering and conquest (aka mostly it's the poors dying)" to be less destructive than social unrest, violent environmentalism, or anarchist movements that target the powerful.
Yes but also no, earth kingdom had despot monarchies for so long kuvira had enough, only to become one herself
One thing that has always bothered me is that the first series clearly showed that the Earth Kingdom was decentralized enough to survive years, if not decades, with minimal help from the "capital", and even other cities had other kings. It makes no sense that the kingdom would fall into such chaos after the assassination of the monarch in the "capital".
Those smaller satellite cities might be relatively autonomous but if the big guy in charge just got taken out, now it's fair game to take power for yourself.
Yeah LoK is a bit of a centrist liberal backpatting session, political philosophy wise, including the corrupt billionaire apologia.
And then kids-show Hitler, so fair enough.
It's all pretty blatantly anti-authoritarian which is a nice lesson for kids.
Korra is basically a neoliberalist propaganda piece in a cartoon's clothing.
It shows us a world that is chafing as technological advancement and social change causes conflict with long-standing traditions -- Which is a great premise, actually -- And ultimately arrives at the answer of "replace all traditions with Capitalism. That will fix literally everything".
A billionaire known to be a crook is depicted as a dashing rogue who is an ally of the heroes. Of the three villains, only the fascist-adjacent one gets a redemption arc. Our protagonist deletes all previous incarnations of the Avatar and doesn't even get a slap in the wrist for it.
My hottest take? Korra would have been an awesome show if instead of trying to one-up TLA's stakes (and failing) -- It instead embraced being a low-stakes thing and became all about the Fire Ferrets' professional bending career. Just four seasons of wrestling-esque shenanigans at the ring.
did you just call me a bad villain?
I'll never forgive the fact that Korra murdered every single past life of the avatar
It's been a while since I've watched it, but what was the context of this?
After Unalaq destroyed rava from Korra body. All past avatar's got destroyed. It means now Korra and next avatars can't contact their past lives including Aang.
So why are they saying Korra murdered all the past Avatars if it was Unalaq?
Yea, I am with you. People just hate Korra because canonically they can't see Aang again.