Three things are guaranteed in life: death, taxes, and Avatar the Last Airbender discourse. Nostalgia is this really powerful drug that has us returning time and time again to our childhoods. For some people, that results in an endless examination of the art that filled their youth. How many re-evaluations of Harry Potter and Twilight have you seen? A good amount of people remain obsessed with Pokemon. Nostalgia gets a bad rap these days in that when anyone brings it up, it’s to talk about how it traps us. That does happen here. I mean, such intense focus on the things we consumed when we were younger keeps our bellies full and we can’t vore anything new into our souls. That’s not great. At the same time, I don’t think there’s anything really wrong about examining the things that are important to us and the media that shaped us growing up. That nostalgia can be bad doesn’t mean it always is.
So we never stop talking about the Nickelodeon fantasy adventure cartoon, Avatar: The Last Airbender. It makes sense. Discourse tends to be like the avatar cycle, an unending samsara that only sort of changes. It’s tempting to say it came up recently because of the new Netflix live-action adaptation, and that is true. It did add new discussions about what the show was doing, animation versus live-action, what it means to want to “adultify” children’s art, and adaptation in general. But the recurring discourse started before the show, and I haven’t watched the live-action so I can’t comment much on it. The never-ending conversation I want to talk about is the claim that Avatar is bad liberal propaganda. That’s right. Let’s talk about violence.
Book One - Icebergs in Oceans
Before we get into people’s critiques of the show and my critiques of their critiques, I want to defend them for a moment. Inevitably any time you find someone reading a text under a microscope, someone comes along to scoff. “There are no cells there,” they’ll say. “What you’re doing is useless. And because it’s useless I’m going to laugh at you.”
I find it slightly upsetting every time we have these in-depth conversations about children’s media that someone insists it “isn’t that deep.” That’s the go-to way of dismissing analysis. Most often you see it deployed against queering and other more progressive styles of analysis. But it’s not an attitude reserved for centrists and conservatives. Every now and then you’ll get a more leftist-leaning person asserting something along similar lines. Think of the film The Menu. When people were making fun of it, they claimed it was a shallow “haha eat the rich, literally” movie, a capitalist capture of the revolution. I sincerely disagree with that assessment. Or the dismissals of Hamilton without engaging with the theatrical conventions the musical deploys. But those at least engage with some form of analysis even if they regularly dismiss anyone reading deeper into certain elements than they do. This attitude is more clearly seen when talking about pop culture. I talked about this when I went over how people dehumanize Taylor Swift. There are people who assert that Taylor’s music is indicative of someone without an inner self and is enjoyed by mindless fans also without inner selves. That’s not an intellectual statement. It isn’t analysis. It isn’t valid. It’s trying to moralize your tastes and dehumanize anyone who has different tastes. It’s actively anti-art and anti-intellectual. It’s a “what if we called people NPCs” fascism but from the left. In other words, it’s nonsense undeserving of respect.
When people dive deep into children’s media, they’re often told, “It’s for kids.” That statement is meant to say the art can’t be analyzed. Think of people who insist that English classes in grade school shouldn’t assign any contemporary age-appropriate reading, insisting that if it isn’t with proven classics, it isn’t worth anything. But that’s not intellectualism and defending the act of learning. It’s the rejection of it. If you assume you can’t apply analytical tools to every text, then you don’t believe in analysis. You believe in “correct” answers for pieces that are worthy of them. To that, I say, grow up. There is no such thing as high art. There is no objective taste. Everything can be analyzed. And there is no “correct” answer, there are just answers more or less supported by the text. Insert a rant here about how we shouldn’t be forcing a Shakespeare play every single year instead of including a wider variety of work including contemporary theatre and contemporary YA.
“It’s for kids,” for these people, is synonymous with: “It’s not that deep.”
Art is not a hole that you dig where at a certain point you break into an amorphous layer of lava that’s going to destroy you and burst out the hole like a femboy at an anime convention. Art also isn’t the iceberg meme with the what you see, what there really is uh-oh obscure conspiracy time. Analysis does not exist for the goal of finding the Avatar in the iceberg. It isn’t going to save you by presenting objective truth. That doesn’t exist. Texts aren’t holes or ice. What are they? The ocean. A vast expanse that you can stay far away from, fly above, float on top, and dive into. You can swim down and down until there’s nothing else, no light, no life, no heat. You arrive at the all-encompassing. There are monsters down here. Mysteries of god. Worlds lost and yet to be.
The YA existentialist tragedy novel They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera is a pretty obvious example of YA fiction ripe for analysis. A world in which death is known and notifications sent out by an uncaring set of office workers is a bit of an absurd setting so you get to talk about the philosophies of existentialism and absurdism. You get to discuss mortality and meaning. Sexuality, homophobia, race, gender. What does it mean to live? If you knew for certain you were dying today, what would you do?
Speaking of Taylor Swift, all vocal music includes lyrics that can be dissected as poetry. How do they use meter and rhyme? Is there assonance, metaphor? In the published lyrics, where are the line breaks and how can those change readings? You can talk wordplay and pronunciation. Think of how every year people joke about “It’s gonna be ‘may’” instead of me. Well if you know the rhyme scheme, you can tell how the writer wants you to pronounce the word. You can connect that to Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Video games, much to the chagrin of nose-glarers everywhere, are art. You can do a deep dive on Ratchet and Clank, violence, heroes, sentience, racism, war, and how media narratives intersect with politics and popular action. Twilight has a lot to say about desire. Harry Potter has a lot to say about morality. The Hunger Games has a lot to say about spectacle and propaganda. Naruto is about war and the cycles of violence. Superhero movies are often also about war and justice.
The answer to the question, “Is Avatar that deep?” is “Everything is.”
Book Two - The Complaints
That out of the way, what are the critiques of ATLA that I want to talk about today? The childishness? No. The physics? I am incapable of caring less about physics in fiction. That the ending might be a tad rushed? No. That Suki needed to be in more episodes? She did, but no. Broadly, I want to talk about those critiques aimed at the ideas of revolution. In this case when I say revolution I don’t simply mean a radical change in society like you might accomplish through strident democratic reforms or a stranglehold on the art world. No. We’re talking violent political revolution, the core of Avater’s plot and the element I see the most aggravating disdain for. What specifically then? Capital punishment, violence at large, and the systems that exist when the war is over.
Capital Punishment
Right before the final battle against the Big Bad, Fire Lord Ozai, Aang has a moment of severe moral crisis. Now that the final battle is within reach, the Gaang confronts him with one simple fact: he’s going to have to kill the firelord. Not defeat him. Not imprison him. Kill him. Ozai is violent, manipulative. He’s a skilled political actor with lots of powerful people in his country and his beck and call. His fire-bending abilities are nearly unmatched. The people of his country revere him. If Aang defeats him and then imprisons him, he’ll break out. He’ll find a way back to power of some sort. The war will only pause. It will not stop. Factions will do everything they can to put him back into power. To fulfill his duty as the Avatar, to stop the war, to free the world, to bring back some type of balance, Aang will have to kill him.
Aang desperately searches for a way around this. It goes against everything he’s been taught. Life is sacred for him. Air Nomads are not supposed to go around offing people. And he’s the last one left. If he betrays the values of his people, those values die. He doesn’t want to do it. So Aang flies off on his own. He convenes with the other Avatars. Roku laments how if he had killed Souzin, none of this would have happened. Cold-blooded gangster Kyoshi is like “Yeah, murder that bitch. I would. I did. And if I’m possessing you? Girl, we’re going on a little murder spree.” Kuruk–soon condemned to torture by Zelda war crimes–was like “A worm stole my girlfriend’s face… Good luck!” No but basically he was saying he has to make big choices about the world. Then comes Avatar Yangchen. She says, “I understand.” She knows his gentleness and the morals he was raised to have. She knows why he hesitates. And she says your soul is sacrifice to the world. Your morals are not more important than the needs of the world. The implication of their words is clear: he has to kill Ozai.
Now some people argue that’s not the only interpretation of their words. If you look past the surrounding context and at what they explicitly say after “this is my wisdom for you,” none of those wisdoms directly go on about doing a murder.
Because I don’t hold the view that killing is appropriate and don’t think Aang should have killed Ozai, I went googling around for a better presentation of the argument.
Comic Book Resources has a wild listicle going over 5 reasons he should and shouldn’t have offed the Fire Lord. They go with death penalty main stay, he “deserved” it. There’s the whole “Roku didn’t kill a fire lord and that’s how we ended up in this mess.” The former Avatars told him he had to and obviously, you have to do what they say. It was the only route that guaranteed victory. And, their number one reason: that killing him would give Aang revenge for what was done to his people.
Now, uh, I didn’t find that article particularly… adept. So let’s keep going. Another not so great article comes from FandomWire. It argues that Aang should have killed Ozai because… Ozai got rid of Zuko to make sure Azula became Fire Lord? Of all the reasons… Moving on.
YouTuber Zero-Callie-Star-Zero has a video called Why Aang Should Have Killed Ozai where she states that morally, taking the bending away was the right thing to do. She instead argues that it would have been the best route for Aang’s character arc. After all, one of his main character flaws, she argues, is how he runs away from his duties and the sacrifices required of the Avatar. He tries to outrun destiny and it blows up in his face. To have him actively choose to kill Ozai, even with the option of energy bending, would show that he has fully embraced his role and the difficult sacrifices of the soul he has to make for it.
YouTuber Monkfruit also argues Aang should have killed Ozai based on the same character arc understanding. After establishing that he hates the Lion Turtle deus ex machina and thinks the show should have killed Ozai instead of taking that route, he lays out a few other ideas. His first is that of retributive justice. Given all the harm Ozai has committed, since he is the Voldemort, he deserves death because that would be the proper punishment. Aang should have killed Ozai because otherwise Ozai would have killed him. There’s the Batman should kill villains argument here.
When a twitter user asked people for their unpopular opinions on Aang, one person stated they believe the choice to have him struggle with the decision and to then choose energy bending is a choice not on Aang’s part about murder, but on the writer’s part to demonize violent resistance. Another claimed the show’s supposed embrace of nonviolence was “holier than thou” that “did long term damage to the audience’s politics.” He clarified in responses that part of what contributes to him thinking that was Ozai wasn’t killed.
Eternal dumbass “Suki’s Mom” over on Twitter quote tweeted it and said of course that was the case because it’s bourgeois media. In other words, if it was proper, moral, of the working class, then Aang would’ve ganked the dude.
I want to expand on some of these arguments a little bit. Consider consequentialism. The moral worth of an action is weighed in the consequences of it. Killing Ozai would prevent him from killing more people. It would save lives. That is a good consequence, therefore it is a good action. Okay. Consider utilitarianism: the right actions are those that result in a net gain of human good over human suffering. Killing Ozai would be murder and cause the suffering of one man, yes. It would cause Aang to suffer as well for betraying his ideals. On a symbolic level, it would also be surrendering the remnants of a destroyed culture to the ways of war. The last action in the Fire Nation’s destruction of the Air Nomads. But. Doing so take down the head of a genocidal empire before he can commit crimes against humanity on still living humans. If Ozai lived and continued his rampage, there would be more suffering. Therefore killing him is good. If Ozai lived and was imprisoned without the energy bending thing, the immediate destruction would stop, but you would be at constant risk of him breaking free and getting back to his fun war crimes game. Or perhaps his allies would continuously try to break him out. Perhaps, as their figurehead is still alive, they would cause civil war. A constant anxiety would loom over the freed parts of the world that perhaps the master firebender will return. That suffering is weightier than the suffering Ozai would experience going from Pheonix King to Ashes King.
You could make a meta argument that not killing Ozai teaches kids that when you’re presented with an impossible choice, if you simply hold your nose and close your eyes and cross your arms, a god will come out of the ether and finally offer you a third option. Typically the binary options presented are kill Ozai or he kills a bunch of people. That isn’t necessarily true, but let’s accept that as the binary and the Lion Turtle as the deus ex machina miracle. Well you could be uncharitable and show how that teaching does pop up in politics. In the United States system, you’re often really only offered one of two choices. There are a handful of leftists who see the choice of Joe Biden, who agrees with some of their policies, and Donald Trump, a disgusting person with disgusting policies that would harm far, far more people, and they say, “I don’t want to pick either one. So I won’t. This is very moral of me.” Vote Biden.
While some might turn around and say Aang doesn’t have the authority to hand out the death penalty, functionally, the Avatar exists as a vessel of God and Justice and Balance in this world. If anyone has the authority to pass judgment, it’s the Avatar. Ozai is a mass murderer who oversees colonization, torture, imprisonment, theft, murder, and so on. If you believe in the death penalty, then he deserves it. You can come to that position because you’re a utilitarian or a consequentialist. Or you might just believe in karma and retributive justice. The point of punishment isn’t that it needs to change anything about the future. The point of punishment is to punish. It is to inflict harm on those who have done harm.
Violence
Several of the people who find issue with Aang not killing Ozai framed it in a more general critique of how the show approaches the concept of violence in general. “ATLA had huge issues with holier than thou nonviolence…”
I think there are approximately five things people bring up when they show disdain for Avatar’s handling of violence. Aang not killing Ozai. Katara’s moment with the man who killed her mother. The idea, combined, of redemption arcs for Zuko and Iroh. The character of Jet. And the character of Hama.
We already went over Ozai. As a contrast to that, you see Katara seek revenge against the man who nearly killed her mother. Aang encourages her to forgive him and that doesn’t sit well with Katara. So she takes Zuko and they go on an assassination mission. When they find the man… he’s turned into a pathetic old guy. Despite her immense anger and desire for revenge, Katara decides he’s too pathetic to kill. She doesn’t forgive him by any means. In a way, it’s this moment that provides a blueprint for Aang with Ozai. There is not forgiveness, but the kids don’t choose to turn into murderers. This moment with Katara doesn’t get as much flak as with Aang and Ozai for a couple of reasons. The first is part of why Katara doesn’t carry it out: the dude is pathetic. He doesn’t present the same risk of harm that Ozai does, so there’s less to gain by killing him. The second is that Katara doesn’t whine about not wanting to gank him. She’ll bloodbend him. She was considering turning into Marie from Gen Z, pop pop pop. She doesn’t deny the idea of vengeance or violence because she doesn’t believe in them. She does. She carries the anger these people want to see. The anger that fuels their own desire for blood.
With Iroh’s redemption, he’s a war criminal. He committed heavy, heavy sins in his past. Instead of burning down the world to repair that, he chose to focus on saving his nephew. Only when those seeds were planted did he betray the Fire Nation. Does that erase the pain he brought down on Ba Sing Se? Zuko goes around causing pain and suffering as the prince of an imperial nation. He attacks innocent people and brings suffering upon them from his entitlement and view that other nations are lesser. He helps in the near-death of Aang. But then he has a change of heart, helps bring down his father, and suddenly he’s allowed to be the new Fire Lord without consequence, supposedly a good ruler. Does helping to overthrow his father suddenly fix all the damage he’s done? Is the show saying that a few acts of goodness are enough to erase countless acts of bad violence?
More importantly, does the show believe in good and bad violence or is it, as that tweeter said, wholly nonviolent?
People seem to think that’s the case based on how they talk about Hama and Jet.
“If you think Hama was evil you did not turn on your critical thinking skills…”
The Fire Nation captured, imprisoned, tortured, and dehumanized Hama, a member of the Southern Water Tribe. Eventually, she discovered that, on nights of the full moon, she could bend the blood in any creature and therefore control them. It’s this ability that grants her freedom. But she can’t return home. She’s deep in fire nation territory, agining, traumatized, and likely has some POW torture-caused disabilities. So she does what she can: Hama uses her blood bending on local fire nation members. She imprisons them in the mountain where they can be treated as the animal she was once was, and as her pet mice, they can hurt no other people in the world. Her experience as a prisoner led to her violent actions. Hurt people hurt people. Or as one tweet says, “Hama was not a villain and was not in the wrong for her actions and people don’t take time to really understand her pain and what the fire nation put her through.”
A post in the Leftist Avatar in the Last Airbender subreddit, someone posted a meme saying Hama was right while critiquing the Gaang for causing her to get imprisoned by the Fire Nation for her actions. In the comments, when someone brings up that she was torturing civilians, you get a somewhat common media criticism that it’s a choice liberal writers make in order to villainize otherwise rightful violent actors as a way to make sure their audiences don’t start developing class consciousness and go out and do a totally success violent revolution thing. It’s a two-fold criticism. The first is that adding a layer to Hama where she harms innocents is an anti-revolutionary, anti-violence, liberal, bad take by the writers. The second is that Gaang leading to her re-imprisonment is forcing the victim of horrible atrocities to live out the rest of her days potentially being subject once again to those atrocities.
A lot of people talk about how Hama was sympathetic even if her actions were wrong. She witnessed the deaths of her people, her friends. She suffered immensely, and when she finally made it out, her rightful rage consumed her. Others think she was right. A popular account said, “Can we talk about Hama, the blood bending indigenous elder who gets presented as a terrifying villain and literally demonized for her ingenuity and fighting spirit? Avatar: the lat airbender was supposed to be anti-imperialist, but was neoliberal af.” As they clarified in a quote tweet, “Hama was right and ain’t deserve to be arrested for fighting back against imperialism or the genocide of her people. … Decolonization is not a metaphor.”
LapisGoBlue asks the question, “Was Hama Really a Bad Person?” During which he says, “Her motives were actually kind of similar to Team Avatar: to get back at the Fire Nation for all that they’ve done.” He doesn’t agree with her taking out her anger on the civilians of the Fire Nation, but at the same time, he gets it. Hama’s rage is understandable. Her desire to strike back at the Fire Nation is a form of justice.
YouTuber Sage’s Rain doesn’t say that Hama is necessarily right for what she does, but he does go deep into how the Fire Nation treated her. She sees her culture being destroyed. She’s in near-solitary confinement. The only way she achieves freedom is through stealing it from others. This is going to warp how your brain functions and of course it will. Hama’s outcome is the logical outcome of what was done to her. She has been subjected to the worst. What good is morality when you are fighting against those who have none? When she forcibly teaches Katara bloodbending, yes, he argues, it is cruel. But in her mind, it is necessary. Katara is a child. Despite Katara’s traumas, she has not been subject to the worst dark places of the world. Through gifting her this new trauma, Hama gives Katara the chance to not go through what Hama did if things go south for Team Avatar. In a darker adaptation, Katara would likely, at some point, get captured and nearly tortured much the same way Hama would, and in using blood bending to save herself, the audience would find a new, gray colored respect for Hama, a deeper understanding and sympathy for her.
Now, admittedly, for those last two videos, those aren’t necessarily the creators critiquing the show. They’re exploring the character and how audiences react to her appearances in the text. But that sympathy they have for Hama is part of the core that drives the other critiques. You must have sympathy for her in order to believe what she did was right. To argue that Team Avatar should have adapted something close to her methods. To argue that it is neoliberalism that stops the show from embracing her actions.
That framework of “painting this deadly and effective resistance fighter as evil is liberal politics” drives a lot of the criticism aimed at the show’s handling of Jet as well. Jet is an Earth Kingdom orphan and resistance fighter. He’s very Peter Pan coded. He leads a group of lost boys, they live wild in the trees, they use gorilla tactics against the local evils. He fights with hook swords, very cool, based in his culture, and maaaaybe a further reference to the whole Peter Pan thing. Like Peter Pan, Jet doesn’t grow up. Why? Well, he dies. Spoiler. Well before his death he meets the Gaang and uses them to attack a local fire nation colony. They break a dam and flood the town. If it weren’t for Sokka, they would’ve killed a lot of people.
In a video called “Avatar the last airbender’s colonial problem - why jet was right,” YouTuber Marxism Culturalism is like well, of course the Gaang are against flooding the town and killing the settlers. They’re kids. They don’t understand that that would be a good thing. They haven’t read enough based theory. Sorry. Taking the idea seriously. The civilians are actively part of a settler colonial project. They likely chose to move out to the colonies. The old people were likely once soldiers. Soldiers do live there. He argues that any kids caught in the crosshairs wouldn’t be victims of Jet but victims of the violence perpetuated by their parents. Jet’s strategy of thorough destruction, he argues, is the practical way of defeating colonialism. The Gaang, he says, should recruit him or, rather, get recruited by him and continue with his methods, destroying colony after colony instead of going after some supposed Big Bad like killing Ozai would somehow fix all the problems of the world. It’s the Harry Potter issue of pointing out all these inequities of the Wizarding World, defeating Voldemort, not changing the wizarding world, and then being like, “Okay, all’s good now. Yay!” Marxism Culturalism calls this villainization of Jet “very liberal, very cowardly.”
So to him, Jet’s actions here are strategic. They make sense from a resistance, Fanon sort of view. But not everyone who critiques the show's handling of Jet as a liberal wetdream agrees there. There’s a long post in the Avatar subreddit where someone is like “Why did he do that?” over and over with the conclusion that well, he did that because when liberal writers make a villain with a good point, you have to have them kick a puppy to show that they’re the bad guy and so no one gets any ideas. Here it isn’t that he’s a freedom fighter maligned by a bunch of idealist kids. Instead, it’s that he ~should~ be an effective freedom fighter that instead does bad stuff because the writers are anti-violence pansies who don’t understand colonialism. They even provide a helpful Fanon quote at the end of their post. “Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.” As we all know, disagreeing with a writer is a mortal sin, so not being Fanon or How to Blow Up a Pipeline makes the show anti-violence and childish.
As the daily aang twitter account says, “My biggest problem with ATLA is how it depicted colonized people as villains for using violence against settlers. Characters like Jet and Hama get horrible treatment for fighting back the oppressing nation.” But they go on to point out that this only deepened as an issue because of how the show treats characters like Iroh, a man who has done vast, vast evils and still gets to work for his redemption instead of being shunted off to a prison or killed off.
I broke my long-running winning streak of never watching Vaush because there was a YouTube clip of him discussing this very tweet. Though he doesn’t have any issue with ATLA in this way and goes on to talk positively about how the show ended up handling issues such as this, he points out a common lane of criticism here. This is a common trope: the revolutionary who goes too far. These two, Lelouch from Code Geass, that dude in the wind section of Tales of Arise, apparently people from BioShock, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and The Last of Us tv show, three things I haven’t seen or played but have seen the discourse over. Danaerys going a bit insane in Game of Thrones. President Coin from The Hunger Games, a lot of the antagonists in Shin Sekai Yori. Pain and Obito from Naruto. The Quincy in Bleach, sort of. It’s a common enough trope that I’m sure you can fill up the comments with more examples. You totally should! Feed me that engagement. More. More! More!!
The argument deployed against this trope is that it inspires complacency. By overflowing the libraries with them, we tell ourselves that we may only work within the systems we’ve already imagined, the systems already in place. They call it neoliberal because the main concern is not necessarily with human rights, health, or joy, but, rather, the upholding of systems. You make a revolutionary who has a point. They have legitimate grievances against whatever system it is they’re rebelling against. And then you have them kick a puppy. They do something comically evil, designed purely to rip away audience sympathy. “Don’t you see? The strength of their conviction about X led them to Y atrocity.” Danaerys was too radical in her anti-slavery stance so of course she decided to burn a bunch of innocent people to death. Nagato was too obsessed with the idea of peace, thus he became Pain.
Propping up such pieces lets people play into their wants to LARP as heroes and then gives them an out. “Don’t actually act on your convictions. Don’t actually change things. Don’t use violence against the violent. That’s how you become evil.” Alternatively, it confirms that they’re right to sit in their complacency, to let the oppressive systems that uphold their lives while hurting others continue. Jet placed an attack on a colony. If you interpret settler-colonialism to mean that no settlers are civilians, viewing them all as violent occupiers and thereby combatants, they become valid targets. Flooding the town wouldn’t have killed innocents. It would have killed colonizers and proven that Jet’s tactics can easily strike back at the Fire Nation.The violence of the oppressors forces the violence of the oppressed. In that measure, Hama and Jet can only be considered the consequences of the Fire Nation’s actions. Even if their acts are extreme, nothing else can be expected of them. Their anger is rational. And because we can understand that anger, we have to validate its expression, otherwise we’re just doing feel-good thoughts-and-prayers-esque politics. Imagine the ludicrousness of asking someone to condemn Hama. Sure, Hama might have taken theoretically innocent hostages, tortured them, and ended up inflicting trauma on one of her own people, but critiquing Hama while being against the genocide perpetrated by the Fire Nation is the ultimate both-sides-ism. Hama is the only resistance the water… Bit on the nose, huh?
Well, let’s talk about oppression and specifically, how Avatar handles systems of oppression.
Systems
For the most part, we’ve been talking about individuals here. Sure, the death penalty is a political tool employed by many belief systems, and in the US for instance, it’s made by and for specific systemic structures. But we only really explore it through individuals. The Fire Lord wants Aang dead. Zhou wants the moon dead. The Gaang wants the Fire Lord dead. When we get into critiques of violence one way or the other, we almost always zero in on Jet and Hama because they personify the points both the show and its critics are making. But we need to zoom out.
At the start of the series, the Fire Nation is a genocidal war machine bent on taking over the rest of the world and spreading their amazing culture. They’re run by the Fire Lord, an emperor. By the end of the series, we find they’re oppressive at home as well. It’s a conservative culture that squashes the arts such as dancing for fun. Children with promise are raised as soldiers with a focus on power. We defeat the Fire Lord! And we replace him with a good Fire Lord.
Oh wait. Is a monarchy a good ending?
Ba Sing Se is run by a shadow government and secret police. When they and the Fire Nation are defeated, we replace that with… a monarchy.
There are those who can use magic and those who can’t. Benders are often the ones in power because might makes right. They underestimate and often belittle benders. Amongst the magic users exists a sort of living nuke. If you get the living nuke on your side, well… If nuclear weapons exist, best to be the side that has one than the side that doesn’t. Else maybe the nuke will go off and destroy the warmongering empire… oh. And the Fire Nation is Japan? Ohhhh… Huh.
As the unfortunate importance of AI and gaming the SEO system continues, getting useful results from Google has become a bit more difficult. But thankfully, when googling around for this script, it sent me to a Princess Weekes video. I’ll be honest. My relationship with video essays is that I’ve only ever watched a handful of creators and sort of treat their videos like I do music, playing them on repeat in the background while I work on things or when I’m going to sleep. It’s a comfort type thin I suppose. So it’s not often than I end up watching channels that are new to me. As such, this was my first Princess Weekes video and what a stupid choice on my part to not have been watching sooner. She’s got an engaging stage presence. It’s a good video. It’s called “Empire and Imperialism in Children’s Cartoons–a super light topic”. No, she doesn’t transform into a superhero made out of photons called Super Light. In it, she discusses how various cartoons handle revolutions and empires. We get Avatar, Star vs the Forces of Evil, She-Ra, and Steven Universe. I’ve only seen one of those, but it was cool to listen all the way through.
After praising the show for confronting the brutality of empire, Weekes brings up the Fire Lord replaced with the good Fire Lord thing. She starts talking about events of the comics. I’ve not read them so I’m assuming she’s accurate here. Basically, what do you do with the colonized land and the people living there? There’s a project meant to just sort kick the Fire peeps out, hand everything back over. Yes, there are Fire peeps who have never lived anywhere else. Yes, there are Fire-Earth kids who are like “Are they going to destroy our families? Where do we go?” Apparently the big solution the comics comes up with, and the one Weekes finds frustrating, is “let’s share it.” Weekes argues that if those Fire people want to stay there, they need to do some form of reparations even if, yes, they were merely born there and didn’t actively set out to be part of a colonial project themselves.
Justice in the Avatar world, based on my understanding of her breakdown of the comics, is a sort of kumbaya, hand-holding forgiveness. You swallow down the wounds and you try to move forward. But what does it mean to move forward? How do you let the wounds of the past turn into scars rather than ever-festering gashes?
In a critique of the show and its politics, you could say that’s asking for the oppressed to carry yet another burden. They’re not allowed to go back to what they had before, to punish, to get revenge. They’re supposed to forgive and adapt to a new system. Forgiveness is a wonderful power in the world, but it is not an easy one. Is it even often a necessary one? I saw an interview between Jennette McCurdy and Drew Barrymore while Jennette was on the promotional tour for her book, ~I’m Glad My Mom Died~. She talks about how part of what made it difficult to heal was her near obsession with the idea that she was supposed to forgive her mom. That’s what would be good and moral and would help her move forward in her life. She only made her next step forward in the healing process when the suggestion was made to her that maybe… she doesn’t have to forgive. Obsessing over forgiveness, searching for it, can be another way of festering a wound. When that’s the case, forcing that on the oppressed is almost another way of continually wounding them.
I’m sure there are more complaints people can make about the show from the left. There’s an obsession with spiritualism, though it also contains a rejection of it. The worldbuilding revolves around a cosmic individualism which goes against some leftist views on how that’s a bad thing definitionally, though there’s also a sort of rejection of that in the show. You could see the “bending is determined by genetics” thing as a sort of magical race science. Aang winning through a series of deus ex machinas could be interpreted as a sort of disbelief in the power of humanity and how we need cosmic intervention to save us.
I haven’t ~really~ given my opinion on these critiques so I think it’s time I do.
Book Three - The Morality of Violence
The complaints I’m most concerned with regarding the show are those centered around how it handles violence. More broadly, I want to discuss what these arguments mean for violence more generally and how it gets portrayed in art.
Before we can talk about Jet, Hama, and resistance, we need to talk about the violence of capital punishment and murder.
Murder
Another constant discourse that trends online, specifically on twitter, surrounds a form of anarchism that answers “what happens when you abolish prisons” with “we do some lynchings.” One of the ones I saw around the time of writing this script went on about how most crimes can have accidental cases. Involuntary manslaughter is an entire category of killing under most penal systems. It’s still illegal, but it’s easy to see how you can rehabilitate someone who committed that. The one crime they single out as evil beyond redemption, that no one could ever rehabilitate from, is rape.Their conclusion, then, is that rapists should be killed. When you see these viral “let’s do some communal killings,” they focus their ire not on murderers or war criminals or those who commit financial crimes. They specifically call out rapists. These, they say, are the people who must die. It’s not something that can be done accidentally. Now if you’re operating under the idea that it’s a crime that requires criminal intent, sure. If you’re thinking of it as an action, then, um, as unfortunate as it is to think about, yes. It can be accidental. Regardless, often the prescribed solution here is that the community should gather them up or the loved ones of the victim do, and then the victim gets to choose what happens, and if they say die, then die.
Now, I have problems with this. I’ve been assaulted a few times. I understand that pain and how it messes with you. It is vile for someone to take that pain and use it as an excuse to shore up their fantasies of bloodlust. Do I want any of the men who did that to me to die? No. Do I want their blood to be shoved onto my hands via peer pressure of “this is how we protect the community?” No, and how dare you try to make murderers out of people because violent retribution is your sexual fantasy. Here’s a question that plenty of others have posed these bloodthisters that they refuse to answer: How many fewer assaults are going to be reported when people think doing so is consigning someone to death? The vast majority of violent crimes are perpetrated by people who know the victim. It’s one thing to protect yourself by attempting to send the person you love who has harmed you to prison. It is entirely different to kill them. Now you may say there are plenty now that go unreported due to the messed up, often ineffective justice system and how it handles these cases. And sure. But when you change it to a death penalty enforced not by a court system burdened by evidence and procedure but instead by the community, you’ve taken away the ability to talk to your community. “I don’t want them to die, and so now this must remain a secret until my own grave.” How dare you.
But the effects of their proposed policy doesn’t matter. They don’t care how it will negatively affect victims. They roll their eyes at warnings of Emmet Till. When you say, “Hey. There’s a trend on the right of accusing queer people of being rapists just for existin,” they say nothing. When you bring up revenge cycles and the history of blood feuds, they say you just don’t get it. All of this is deflection. They don’t answer to any of those concerns because they don’t care about any of them. The crime of sexual assault doesn’t even matter to them. It’s a pretense. They ~want~ the fantasy of heavy violence. They want support for their bloodlust. They want to kill people. That’s all it is.
When it comes to debates about the death penalty, I find that a lot of the arguments tend to be bells and whistles. The evidence doesn’t support the death penalty. The logic of allowing a government to kill its civilians through a flawed justice system that has provably killed innocents does not properly flow. The morality of employing a person to commit murders is nonexistent. So why do people argue for the death penalty? Because they like the idea of killing the bad guys. They want the right people to harm. They yearn to draw blood.
You might say that’s unfair. You might say, “But I only want to hurt the baaad guys.” Hi. Are you a god? Are capable of only hurting bad people? How do you define bad and at what line does someone lose the right to live? Who earns the right to murder?
The death penalty has no right to exist. A truly civilized society would do away with it.
Baby’s first Batman critique is, “Uh, if he just killed the Joker, Gotham would be safer.” Except, here’s the thing, vigilante murder squads are, well, bad. That’s why it’s baby’s first Batman critique because it’s a critique had by those first coming to media analysis and critique. Or it’s held by edgy big boys whose takeaway from The Boys is “haha it’s edgy.”
The broad left position in the United States leans toward the abolition of the death penalty. That is the morally correct position. There is no crime worthy of the death penalty.
Much like the United States, leftist darling and supposedly progressive country China has the death penalty. Do I hold this against China? Of course I do, I hold it against any government that has it. Did it surprise me? No, I’m under no illusions that China is a leftist haven. It is not. A 2022 article from Al Jazeera discusses reports on organ harvesting done on death row inmates… before they were completely dead. A few clicks through that article leads to an Amnesty International report on global death penalty use where the international human rights group makes the assertion that, “China has yet to publish any figures on the death penalty; however, available information indicates that each year thousands of people are executed and sentenced to death” (5). That same report talks about death sentences doled out in violation of international law. They say, “The death penalty was used for crimes that did not involve intentional killing, and therefore did not meet the threshold of ‘most serious crimes’ under international law” (14). China is one of those countries that defied international law by handing it out for both drug-related and economic crimes.
Hm. I wonder why in that interview in Global Times, an English-language Chinese propaganda outfi over how it’s totally unfair for people to critique Qatar’s use of slavery and killing of gay people, weird tankie Danny Haiphong and law professor Wei Leijie went with “so-called human rights record.” I talked about this in a video discussing homophobic leftists. The idea is that “human rights” is a bourgeois concept used to push American hegemony and so you totally shouldn’t ever critique anyone over how they treat their citizens, okay guys? Don’t look too closely at how China embraces the death penalty and violates international law over it. Human rights don’t exist, silly.
A post on the Communism subreddit linked to a Business Insider article about a banker being sentenced to death for corruption.The comments are filled, of course, with people defending China’s right to murder criminals. Will this work as a deterrent? Probably not as there’s no proof the death penalty works as a deterrent for any crime. Does it prevent more harm than life imprisonment? No, not at all, unless their prison systems are torturous. What does it do? It lets the Chinese government portray itself as strongmen who can determine and kill the bad guys. Those on the left in the US who are against the death penalty tend to understand that there is no exception you can make. Some of us arrive there from a morally, ethically principled position of murder is bad. Some arrive from the practical standpoint of “giving the government the power to kill people inevitably means that innocent people will get murdered by the state.”
So why is it okay when China does it?
People’s Daily China tweeted out in 2022 that Fu Zhenghua received a death sentence for corruption. He used to be the Minister of Justice. In response, China shill Carl Zha said, “I know many of you oppose death penalty in US but hear me out…” and then made a guillotine joke. Yes, Carl is someone who thinks conquering territories who don’t want to be controlled by you is fine when China does it. Taiwan is Taiwan, not China. Popular Twitter user KylePlantEmoji replied “hehehe.” Mr. Emoji has several tweets stating his opposition to the death penalty. Yet here he is supporting it. People’s daily reports on these death sentences on their account, and pretty much each time you can find people in the comments and quote tweets with the hammer and sickle going “BASED!”
Speaking of China and state murder: Mao killed a bunch of landlords. Here’s a post in the socialism subreddit agreeing with that and commenters calling for that to happen now. Here’s one in the communism101 subreddit where some people are like “The government didn’t do it” while a bunch of others are like “yessss we should do that now, we’re totally serious about communism and aren’t just edgy boys larp-ing on the internet.”
Communism101 also seems to think the death penalty is a good thing. There’s debate on the post revolutionary state but until communism is established, so, you know, for the foreseeable future, communists should be getting some killing in.
In my video where I talked about some leftist obsession with the idea of inflicting harm on their opponents, I went over the case of the Romanovs. When people are like, “Hey, killing them was, like bad.” You get the edgiest of edgy boys going, “Killing the kids was good actually and I would do the same thing and it was their fault for being born into that family.” In the comments to that video, someone tried to tell me that actually it’s perfectly fine to fantasy happily about the villains of history getting raped. How you could believe that? Well, by believing that actions are not good or bad by their nature. To sexually assault someone isn’t morally one way or another, is the argument, what counts is if you do it against a good or bad person. And yes, that is a morally repugnant, nonsensical argument.
Mr. Plant Emoji put it best when he said that actually it’s good when bad things happen to bad people. Therefore, it makes sense when he’s opposed to the death penalty in the US but gives the cutesy hehe laugh when China hands it down. US bad, China good, billionaire bad. Therefore China kill billionaire good. It’s the sort of person who talks all about how they want to change the system and create a better world. It’s how they gather support from people who do actually want a better world, vast changes to the ways we treat each other. But then you find out they don’t want it to change. They just want to be the boot crushing the throats of people they hate. Some of them are arrogant enough to think they’ll only hurt the so-called bad people and that they’re perfect at determining the bounds of what that means. Some don’t care about that.
So. All of that said. Killing the Fire Lord. The argument that he deserved to die I find pointless. It’s about retribution which is evil. I’m sorry. It serves no purpose besides bloodsport, and there’s no reason to pretend the spectacle of cruelty is a moral good. It isn’t. It’s pure sadism. For the same reason, I reject it the argument that it should have happened so Aang could get revenge for his people. You might recall how people brought up his character arc as a reason why he should have killed Ozai, but I don’t think that tracks. From the start of the show, we’re shown that Aang holds great anger caused by his great pain. It’s painted like he loses himself to the Avatar state because he needs to let go of the world to control it, but as Big Joel points out, that rock slam giving Aang that control derails that argument. Guru Patik was wrong. When Aang loses himself to the Avatar state it’s because he loses himself to his great anger. He sees Gyatso’s corpse. The Earthbenders threaten Katara. Appa vanishes. At the end of the show, he’s presented with the avatar of his suffering, pun intended. He beats Ozai’s ass, and then he chooses to control himself and his anger. That is the culmination of Aang’s growth. Or, at least, it’s one half of it.
The other half of Aang’s character arc is his refusal of his supposed destiny. Complainants say that from the start Aang is shown running away, and here too he ultimately evades his obligation. Not choosing to kill Ozai, they say, is him returning to who he was. But it’s not. It’s a simple storytelling technique. You parallel the start and doing so showcases the changes. Throughout the show and in Aang’s backstory, we see how he’s forced to not be a person. Aang is the Avatar. He has a destiny. He is not allowed to be Aang. He is not allowed to have needs and wants. He has a duty. When he originally flees, he accepts that he has no choice to be what the world demands, and so he flees. But here Aang says that he is Aang. He has the responsibility of his powers, but he is human. His thoughts and opinions nad morals matter. He is not simply a tool of spiritual warfare. Aang rejects not his state of being the Avatar, but he rejects the mold that the world attempts to force him into as the Avatar.
Morally speaking, he also makes the correct choice. With the appearance of the Lion Turtles, the writers actually do something really interesting in that they remove the fantasy from the dilemma. You could say energy bending makes Aang’s decision too easy, but without it, isn’t the decision too easy for the viewer? Theoretically, it’s fun to think about how you would handle Ozai with his bending. I would still say killing him is wrong. But that’s not what the show is interested in here. Without magic, Ozai is a man. A man who has great political and monetary power who has done great evil. Those types of men have, do, and will exist in the real world. They haven’t, don’t, and won’t possess magic. By taking away his magic, the show posits the question, “Is it moral for us, here in the real world, to kill evil people rather than imprison them?” And the answer is no, it is not.
Jet
Jet tries to get the Gaang to flood a village. If it weren’t for Sokka, dozens of people would’ve died. Aang and Katara would’ve become mass murderers. In the resulting guilt, they would’ve collapsed in on themselves, spent the rest of their lives attempting to make up for it and thereby paralleling Aang’s mentality about the iceberg, or they would’ve rationalized it. In rationalizing it so as to assuage their guilt, the duo would’ve had to lean into a version of Jet’s ideology. If it weren’t for Sokka, Jet could’ve swept in and guided them into being extremely violent revolutionaries. Having the Avatar going around nuking Fire Nation colonies would likely inspire deadly attacks from the oppressed peoples of the Earth Kingdom. In the resulting gorilla warfare, the Fire Nation would increase its use of deadly force. But seeing an avenue for freedom through the roads paved by Aang’s deadly campaign, there’s a chance the major cities would actually launch a heavy offensive. Seeing the Fire Nation actually struggle, the Northern Water Tribe might take advantage and launch an offensive from the North. A war is harder to fight on two fronts. Of course there’s a good chance the Earth Kingdom and the Northern Water Tribe wouldn’t behave like that. The uprisings could fail. The two nations could be off-put by the degree of violence deployed. But there is a potential path to victory from Jet’s plan.
So if you believe the ends justify the means, a form of cold utilitarianism, you could maybe convince yourself of the morality of killing all those people. And in that case, might I recommend to you Code Geass. Lelouch is certainly an “ends justify the means” sort of dude. But. If you don’t achieve your ends, does the idea of the ends justify the means? If you calculate the odds and they’re not likely, does the small percentage justify the means? What if someone only pretends to care about the ends? What if their end is merely the means? That’s not me saying you shouldn’t take risks when it comes to achieving a better future. But I think those are important questions.
And. None of them justify killing innocent people.
You can only manage that if, as that Marxism Culturalism dude argues, you adopt the whole “settlers aren’t civilians” mindset and take that to such an extreme that it incorporates children as well. There is a sort of logic there. Settler colonialism is built off and perpetuated by violence against the colonized. And if so, you might start throwing around quotes from Frantz Fanon.
The first mentions I ever saw of Fanon were on October 7th, 2023, deployed in defense of the action of Hamas against Israeli civilians. His name came up again when I was looking into people’s thoughts surrounding the film How to Blow Up a Pipeline. His name is slightly amusing. That would’ve been funny for two reasons: a dude talking about violence would rhyme with cannon and that means he would simply be waiting to appear in a Hamilton-esque musical. The second: his belief that cathartic violence grants the oppressed their humanity is like fan-canon of life.
But alas, I watched some videos and people kept saying Fuh-non, so I guess that’s right.
A short video from Flicker Theory describes Fanon’s observation that colonization systemically dehumanizes the colonized. Violent political ideologies, far as I can tell, always invest in dehumanization. It’s easy to intuit why: it’s easier to brutalize, exploit, and not care about “things” and “creatures” than “fellow people.” Think of fascism's tendency to call people animals and infections. When the Flicker Theory video said, according to Fanon, the oppressed regain their humanity through revolution and violence, I assumed this was politically speaking. When I was looking into some people’s responses to Queen Elizabeth’s death, I read a Michael Harriot article that pointed out how important it is to remind people that the oppressed do not enjoy their oppression. That is an assertion of humanity. But they add a Fanon quote that went against my assumption. “Violence frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction. It makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.” So… Violence is good because it makes the violent feel better psychologically.
All respect to Fanon, but, for the people who deploy that in defense of harming non-combatants, that’s bullshit. No. That is not a valid defense. It’s not a valid reason. We do not become human because of our bloodlust. That’s extremely cynical and, oddly enough, an acquiescence to the colonizer mindset. To inflict violence is to be human. To have inflicted on you is to lose your humanity. It’s one thing to show that as an observation of political goals. It’s another completely to use it as a reason for why violence is fine, good, and should happen.
But actually, in respect to Fanon, I’m not sure that’s a charitable interpretation. A Jacobin interview transcription has Peter Hudis saying that Sartre’s preface to The Wretched of the Earth helped cement the fanon idea, pun intended, that Fanon is “an apostle of violence for its own sake.” However, he says, “That is not what Fanon was doing. He was accounting for the necessity of violence in specific moments of revolutionary struggle and in specific circumstances.”
I’m not convinced that contradicts the implications of the Flicker Theory video. Violence for the sake of psychological catharsis and creation of self-respect… I’m not going to make an argument about what Fanon would think of killing civilians, but I can see how people might use his arguments and observations to defend harming innocents and non-combatants. But. Explanation is not the same as absolution.
Jet was painted as wrong by the show because he was wrong. Cold utilitarianism as a defense for violent force against civilians is just an attempt at distancing from the bloodlust. What Jet wanted was an outlet for his anger. He wanted Fanon’s catharsis. But catharsis is never a valid reason for harming someone let alone murdering them.
There is something to be argued for self-defense and certain exceptions in morality in combat. Most people, for instance, don’t consider a soldier of one army shooting another on the battlefield to be an example of “killing” they wouldn’t consider “murder” and thereby not on the same moral level. I… don’t necessarily agree with that. But we can all understand the idea of certain moral wrongs having moments where they don’t qualify as “wrong.” Lying. We grow up hearing about its moors, but growing up and not being an asshole involves figuring out that sometimes you lie out of kindness. One lesson sexy-nerd Chidi had to learn on The Good Place is that a strict Kantian moral philosophy with categorical imperatives can often lead to hurting people. Does that apply to murdering children?
I’m sure if you want to play devil’s advocate you could come up with some conscious killing of a child that’s defensible in some way. But “their parents or grandparents did something bad” is not one. A targeted attack on non-combatants is not morally defensible. The marxism culturalism video blamed the would-be deaths of those children on their parents, removing all moral culpability from Jet purposefully taking action to murder the children. While yes, you can divvy up the blame that way, it’s also complete bullshit. If you purposefully kill a kid, and then go, “Well their piece of shit parent brought them there,” guess what? You still killed a kid. You bear that responsibility. That does not humanize you. It does not grant you holy catharsis. It makes you a child murderer. But you have to shift the blame. Why? Well, blame shifters are inherently insecure. Put a pin in that.
Hama
Here’s a question: when is torture acceptable? Is it A) when it’s done by the CIA to supposedly gain knowledge in the war on terror, B) when perpetuated by Jack Bauer against whatever poor person comes in his sights, C) when it’s done in hell against the bad people, D) when it’s done as emotionally cathartic violence by the traumatized, or E) when it’s used as punitive punishment in a criminal justice system?
If you answered any of the above, you got an F on the test which is ironic because if you answered F) Never you’d have passed with flying colors with bonus points for your rebellious nature. Very cool.
Sometimes when I’ve seen debates on bloodthirst from leftist revolution LARPers who gleefully talk about people getting the wall, there’s some version of a Nazi story spread around. After some advanced googling on my part, I know, I’m very talented, it seems that story was put out there by Antony Beevor. This is how it goes according to Victor Matus at the Hoover Institution: “A young ss soldier forced to play a piano for his Russian captors. They made it clear in sign language that we would be executed the moment he stopped.’ The man played for 22 hours, after which he collapsed in tears. The Russians congratulated him and then shot him.” Did this actually happen? Who knows. Probably no one cares. What is the goal of people sharing it? It’s not generally shared to showcase Russian brutality or force us to reckon with the ways we treat enemy combatants. The idea is, “This dude is evil. He’s a Nazi.” Good point, correct. “Therefore, his torture is hashtag based.” Terrible point, complete misunderstanding of morality, incorrect. But people are generally, thankfully, wired to be anti-Nazi. Many people are then fine with harming them. When I’ve seen it brought up, the rhetorical goal is to get people to say, “Yeah, that’s fine.” And then go, “So you agree that it’s moral to kill the bad people.” And the trick they think they’re playing is if you say, “Torture is bad” then they can accuse you of being pro-Nazi like that’s how logic works. It isn’t.
When is torture moral?
The answer is never. You can probably build up some thought experiment, some edgy Trolly Problem, but not once will a successful Edgy Boy Trolly Problem make the “torture for cathartic or punitive reasons is fine.” There’s even an edgy boy torture thought experiment called the Ticking Bomb Scenario. Basically, there’s someone you know without a doubt has placed a bomb and knows where it is and how to disable it. The only way to get it out of him is via torture. Is that permissible? The problem with this thought experiment, as Nayef Al-Rodhan points out, is the science doesn’t support the idea that torture is remotely effective in accurate information gathering. To correctly torture someone likely requires systemic support for torture including torture training. That’s not to mention that in the criminal justice system, “proven to have done it” is often a label slapped on entirely innocent individuals.
The point of the thought experiment isn’t to deal with the real world, not really. It’s a test of one’s personal boundaries and how they weigh suffering and acceptable behavior. If you want to be true to it, the fact that it can’t function in the real world could be the point, and how you distinguish it from the Trolly Problem which does unfortunately have real-world analogues. Here in the real world, torture would not save the poeple in the Ticking Bomb Problem because torture doesn’t work.
The very premise of that problem, though, relies on the idea that torture by and of itself is wrong. To find permissible outlets for it, you have to compare it to other horrible things in a binary choice.
Bringing it back to Avatar: The Last Airbender. Hama. Remember the old lady who invented bloodbending? When Team Avatar arrives in her locale, Toph hears screaming beneath the mountains. They eventually discover the Fire Nation civilians imprisoned there. Hama’s bloodbending only works during a full moon. People disappear during full moons. This has been ongoing. Some of these prisoners have likely been there for months. They’re the ones screaming beneath the mountains. Are the shouts only from new prisoners desperate for someone to hear them? Or is it from torture?
It seems like the widely understood notion is that Hama was torturing these people similar to how she was tortured by Fire Nation prison guards after being captured at the South Pole. When Aang, Toph, and Sokka find them, we see the villagers chained with their hands above their heads. That pose is eventually going to cause chaffing, bruising, and lacerations around the wrists from the cuffs. The blood will drain out of your fingers tips, your palms, and your arms. Your heart is going to have trouble pumping blood. They’ll tingle at first. Pins. Needles. Buzzing. Bees in your veins. You might focus on the ache in your arms, but the pins eventually beg for attention. It goes from needles to glass, bees to wasps. Normally when the winter chill comes, the bugs die out, but as your fingers start to freeze from the lack of blood flow and oxygen, the bugs stay. They stab. The cold becomes fire but even that can’t get rid of the bugs. Your knees get weak but if you start to fall, your shoulders strain. They might pop out. You must stand.
Wasn’t that fun to imagine?
Go back and watch the blood bending scenes. See how the body moves? It isn’t in natural ways. It contorts and contracts, twists and spins. Not only do you experience the psychological torture of being a prisoner within your own body, you get the physical torture of those movements.
Hama tortured some folks.
A lot of talk around Hama focuses on a similar moral lynchpin as Jet’s attempted mass-murder: the emotional catharsis of violence. She is filled with anger, righteous anger at the pain caused to her and her people, and this is an outlet for her against people nominally related to those who harmed her. Not the actual people who harmed her. Not against soldiers. Mostly civilians. But her humanity was taken away! So to humanize herself, she has to partake in this violence.
Am I making that sound stupid? I sure hope I am. Bloodthirst is never an excuse. Anger is not this holy emotion beyond critique. Harm done to you does not excuse the harm you do. We are all creatures with free will and we choose how we behave. Hama did not torture these people because she had no choice due to what was done to her. She tortured them because she wanted to. She chose to. That makes a bad person. Or, to be less reductive, a person who does terrible things.
Think of the fire and brimstone version of Christian hell. Sinners are cast down into eternal torment for their crimes on Earth or more specifically not belonging to their specific brand of Christianity. A lot of people who gleefully talk about what they hope happens to people in hell are speaking about cathartic sadism. Some, however, view it as a form of justice. The bad people deserve to be harmed. Torture doesn’t need to have a positive impact, in their minds. Torture is justified when it is punishment for bad behavior. It’s the same justification they use for why they should be allowed to deploy the death penalty when they’re in power because they’ll deploy it against the bad people who deserve it as punishment for what they did. Their entire concept of justice is merely sadism. Retributive justice is, itself, immoral.
People get bogged down here in the arguments over Hama and say that she was wrong because she targeted innocent civilians. Which, yes, she did, and that does make her actions wrong, but… She could have had a bunch of Ozais trapped down there, and torturing them would still be wrong. Why though does the guilt of the tortured weigh on whether or not some consider it immoral? Torture is categorically wrong. But if you twist the ideas of oppressor-oppressed dynamics, you, ironically enough, dehumanize the oppressor and all those related to them. As Al-Rodhan points out, torture is much easier to commit if you dehumanize the victims. You don’t engage your empathy as deeply when dealing with non-human entities. At the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you saw a lot of people wandering towards dehumanizing language and metaphors for Russian people at large. Following the start of Israel’s deadly actions in Gaza, anti-Semitism has been clearly on the rise. There have been people who defend the Houthi slogan saying “A Curse Upon the Jews” by saying that, with Israel nearby doing what it does, of course they’re anti-Semitic. There’s this idea that if you can explain something, it becomes defensible. But it isn’t. Plenty of bigotry is based in trauma. That doesn’t put it beyond critique. It doesn’t make it a good thing. Bigotry is inherently dehumanizing, that is the entire purpose of it.
And dehumanization is always how you justify atrocity.
Which I guess means it’s time for the next book in the series.
Book Four - Politics
As mentioned in Book Two of this ridiculously long video, the criticism of how the show handles violence is often about its “liberalism.” There are people who wholeheartedly defend the actions of Hama and Jet from a sort of pro-violence, no holds barred sort of things. Then there are others who say that they do their worst actions because of the anti-resistance politics of the writers. The claim is that the show is anti-violence.
And no offense to these people, but that is bad media comprehension.
Team Avatar… stages a prison revolt with a bunch of earth benders, smash several Fire Nation airships out of the air many of them with soldiers in the ships, participate in a targeted invasion against of the Fire Nation capitol during a day where Fire Benders are at their weakest, aiming to assault and capture the heads of the Fire Nation, actively fight and imprison both Ozai and Azula, destroy what amounts to a Fire Nation religious temple, particpate it what seems to be an illegal fighting ring, fight against a secret police, do a bit of eco-terrorism, start a prison riot to initiate a second prison break, and, uh, the entire time are participating in a war. These things are presented positively. Violence as self-defense is frequent. Bending is a beautiful extension of martial arts which the show takes heavy pains to showcase as not just useful but awe-inspiring. Violence, the show says, can be art. It can be good.
Outside of the Gaang, the White Lotus retakes Ba Sing Se in a display of heavy violence. Roku is painted as a failure for having too much mercy. Kyoshi is painted as correct for having killed Chin the Conqueror. Zhao’s death is a bit tragic, sure, but it’s almost painted as cosmic justice for both his actions and his entire personality. Everyone who isn’t named Aang is like “Hey, killing the Firelord would be the right thing to do.” Gyatso takes out a whole host of Fire Nation soldiers and only his death is looked at as a tragedy. With Hama, while her breakout might be horrifying, you aren’t meant to view her in a negative light until you find out she’s harming innocents.
To say the show is anti-violence and anti-resistance is to just not engage at all with the content. Or, more accurately, it’s to lie about the content for political reasons. By pretending that the show is whole-sale anti-violence allows you to paint any violence that is not maximally destructive - as in not fine with killing non-combatants, anti-death penalty, anti-torture, and so on - is to be entirely pro-oppression. Now putting a few seconds of thought into that makes it clearly not the case. But if you’re an extremist whose only complaints about the boots pressing down on people is that the wrong people have shoes, doing this sort of non-media analysis can help you. It can also gain you internet points with fellow edgy big boys on the internet, the dirtbag Chapo types.
Say, even, you want to do a revolution.
There’s a lot of critique of media that comes down to “I don’t like that this trope exists and I think it’s inherently invalid.” How many people complain about stories that end with “it was all a dream?” I could go on and on about how that can actually be an excellent ending with brilliant existentialism. If there’s one trope that comes to close to the level of demonization that It Was All a Dream gets, it’s But Then They Kicked A Puppy. Or, at least, it approaches that controversy with certain types online left spectrum peeps.
There’s Killmonger from Black Panther, all the people in movies and books and manga and whatnot I listed earlier. What you’ll often see is people complaining that this trope is deployed by Hollywood and our corporate overlords to stop us from fixing the world and by ficing the world they normally mean doing a Glorious Revolution. Therefore, of course, using the trope makes you at best a “liberal” - ooh, scary - or a reactionary of sorts. The artist and art protector in me finds that childish, insulting, and reactionary by itself. I’m not against critiquing things or tropes, but I am entirely against the idea that art becomes worthless or evil or “bad” because it uses any of these, and this idea that culture is only a method of control is some Evangelical Christian we are not of the world isolationist, cult-building idiotic shit.
“These people have a point, but they go too far.” Or, to put it another way, “These people have point, but then they kicked a puppy so you know they’re the bad guy.” Part of the problem here is a grade-school level understanding of literature. Good guy versus bad guy is not the same thing as protagonist versus antagonist. An antagonist can be the most moral person in a story and still be the antagonist because they oppose the protagonist.
But what really lies at the core of the hatred for this trope isn’t the deligimatization of rightful critique. Killmonger’s accusations against Wakanda weren’t wrong because dude was a murderous psychopath. Coin wanting to restart the Hunger Games with Capitol children didn’t make the resistance against the Capitol wrong. Dedyme being a genocidal shit didn’t make the Dahnan uprising against the Renans wrong. Sometimes, yes, the trope is deployed as a way of saying, “These beliefs are inherently radicalizing.” But isn’t it mostly just… a critique? The critique of Coin in The Hunger Games isn’t that rebelling against oppressors is bad. The critique is that cathartic revenge is bad. Populism is bad.
But because we think “bad guy” when we think antagonist, when we see extremist, morally wrong actions taken by antagonistic groups with legitimate grievances, we assume the text is calling them THE “bad guy” group. And that’s troubling because the bad guys are supposed to be all bad. To have legitimate grievances and still act in horrid ways, means horrid actions are morally wrong. And that people of any persuasion might commit them. That they are, in fact, committed by people and not monsters.
Think back to that Nazi torture story. When it’s told as a “lol based” type thing, the idea is that the Nazism dehumanizes the man to the point where we can now enjoy torture and bask in sadism. They can turn their empathy off. We want the “bad guys” to be Monsters, not humans. That way we more easily enjoy their pain.
I watched the first couple of seasons of Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why adaptation when I was in college. I was in my apartment and thinking about doing what the show talks about. I’m in no danger of ever acting on that, I’ve trained myself, but I still have those thoughts somewhat frequently. In it, football player Bryce sexually assaults people. At first, he’s just evil. Bully asshole with charisma. But then the show starts to humanize him in the following seasons. I remember at the time people being outraged at this. Redeeming a rapist? How dare we. But, here’s the thing, is that what it was doing? Or was it saying that Bryce wasn’t this monster high school stock character? He was just a guy. He had nice moments. He had cruel moments. He was a person, and he did something horrific.
The point to humanizing the villains is to remind us that there are no monsters. There are only people. We tend to imagine that we’re not capable of such horrific things. The people we love and trust aren’t. We’re human. Our enemies, those monsters? They lack the humanity needed to not do the bad things. Only, they are human. And we are capable of being cruel. Of the three people who’ve done similar things to me as Bryce did, I only know one of them. And while I think he’s generally a bit annoying, he isn’t a monster. He just did something kind of awful to me. But dehumanizing him would only make him into something bigger, some thing, a creature I could justify wishing sadistic harm on. But I don’t. He’s a person. And people do shitty things.
Even our political allies.
But we can’t abide by our ideological partners being shown as antagonists, sympathetic or not, because then we have to recognize that the “bad guys” are still just people. And suddenly we might not be able to dehumanize our own enemies so easily. A lack of dehumanization makes it harder to commit violences. Dehumanization lessens the empathy felt for the dehumanized. That lessened empathy makes it easier psychologically to inflict harm. If you take that away, sadism suddenly gets a lot less fun. And if your political LARP online is all about being cruel to other people, taking the fun out of sadism defeats the purpose of the whole thing.
Jet and Hama are tragic characters. They have been put through incredible amounts of pain, suffering, and loneliness. They are filled with understandable anger. Part of them wants to help their people. Part of them wants to be free of the burden of their anger. Part of them wants the catharsis of sadism. That third one is what destroys them. And this isn’t without real world parallels. The Russian Tsars were bad. Monarchy is bad. Killing the Romanoff children and descrating their corpses before tossing them into unmarked graves was also bad. Lincoln fighting against slavery? Good. Lincoln giving a middle finger to habeas corpus? Very bad. Defeating Imperial Japan? Good. Vaporizing civilians with a doomsday bomb? Bad. You can go on and on with this sort of thing. You can do it in reverse too and look at the good things done by people primarily known for their horrors.
I made a video talking about the TikTok brainworms that is the Starbucks Palestine boycott. The boycott is largely based on falsehoods, and people get very very angry when you point this out even when you are pro-Palestinian. One of the comments I got on that video decided, for some reason, to defend 9/11 as a way of defending 10/7. The idea of the comment was that both the US and Israel have committed atrocities, and therefore killing civilians was understandable and maybe even warranted. I deleted that comment. I’m not going to entertain your bloodlust or give you a platform for it. I also deleted comments calling for the ethnic cleansing of Israelis. People can rage at me all they want because they’re angry over being told their boycott is based on a lie. That’s fine. But you can sincerely fuck off with any LARPist, sadistic bullshit. Get fucked.
But I bring up here because that 9/11 comment was doing something similar to this trope everyone complains about. There were legitimate grievances against the US for our policies in the Middle East. The idea, then, is that because there is something there, then their actions are justifiable and good. But no, they aren’t. Bad actions are bad actions. It doesn’t matter who commits them. Killing civilians is always wrong. It’s wrong when Israel does it; it’s wrong when Al-Queida does it; it’s wrong when Hamas does it; and it’s wrong when the US does it.
Despite what the Red Star caucus of DSA might say, a group fighting for liberation does not absolve them of all their wrong doing. You can only argue that if your political goals require dehumanization of your enemies so you can inflict violences on them and say it is fine because they deserve it.
This critique of Avatar, that it’s handling of Jet and Hama and Ozai comes from an anti-liberation, anti-violence, pro-oppression, neoliberal White dude bro space, in my opinion, is pure cope. And it’s entirely based in the insecurity of violence. But before we can get to that, we do have to address the Bosco is Just a Bear elephant in the room.
Book Five - Children’s Media
Avatar: The Last Airbender is a children’s cartoon. In the first section, I blathered on and on about how that doesn’t mean you can’t mine it for depth and I stand by that. All art is an ocean that goes as deep as you’re willing to dive. But we can’t ignore what it is when talking about how it handles its content.
Here’s a question for you: What is Avatar The Last Airbender even about? Break it down to its core. What is this show? It’s tempting when you’re older to say it’s about war, but… is it? A war happens. There is a lot of fighting. But… is it about fighting? Is it about… magic? No. There is a Spider-Man with great power vibe going on with Aang’s chosen-one-ness, but is that what it’s about? Not really. Maybe secondarily, but that might even be tertiary. When people talk about wanting a dark take on the show, they’re already admitting something: it’s a light show. It is bathed in the light. In hope.
I would posit that Avatar The Last Airbender, in super simple terms, is truly about how to keep hold of yourself and your joy in the face of hardship. The beauty of Aang as a character is that he’s a goofy kid. He likes having fun and making jokes. He’s amazed by the world. He searches for the good when he can. Avatar is a fun show. It’s a funny show. For all the drama and sad moments, there are a million more smiles. The fights are dances, but sometimes they’re slapstick dances. Aang’s lowest moments are where he loses himself. He loses to fear and to anger. He loses sight of himself when he’s pursuing not who he is as Aang the person or Aang the Avatar but as The Avatar who is currently named Aang.
Toph is sarcastic and gruff and violent. But she is filled with wonder and joy and love. Katara grew up way too fast and she has a helluva lot of repressed anger, but she is filled with empathy and love. Sokka is untrusting and longing to prove himself, but he’s insane and curious and filled with wonder. Zuko is traumatized and scarred and pushed by supposed destiny, but he just wants to be loved. He’s goofy and awkward and tries too hard.
Aang meeting the lion turtle and learning energy bending was the only way the show was ever going to end. Lion turtle or elsewise, he was never going to kill Ozai. That’s not because of Nickelodeon censors, but because killing him would be going against the whole point of the show. It would be destroying Aang in order to be the Avatar. It would be saying that your innocence and hope must be dashed. But Avatar firmly rejects that idea. Aang’s innocence and hope and childishness are his greatest strengths.
Jet is there to show that if the Gaang killed their innocence, they would be killing civilians. If they could not find joy, they would do horrible things. “Do not lose yourself to anger.” Zuko’s character arc is learning how to find himself after being lost to his anger and pride. Aang’s character arc is about learning how not to lose himself. This isn’t a show about defeating the bad guy. It’s about making sure you survive. You and your joy are needed to make a better world. That’s the show.
But it is also important to keep in mind that you’re showing this to kids. Are kids in the United States likely to be under the oppressive thumb of an invading genocidal empire? No. Are any 12 year olds out there likely to lead a successful revolution? Definitely not. You take these lessons and apply them to your own life. Seven year olds are dealing with schools and family. Some, yes, deal with much worse. But if you make a kids show about how you have to kill the bad guy, um, that might be a bad lesson when the majority of the audience sees the bad guy as the kid who pushed them on the playground.
Okay, so, for Hama and Jet to be portrayed as right, for Ozai to have died, this would not only have to probably be made for a different age demographic, but it would fundamentally have to be a different show. Hama and Jet are lessons that fit firmly within the themes. Their tragedy is tragic because they aren’t the “bad guys.”
Okay. So we’ve talked about the critiques, I’ve given my critiques of the critiques, but there’s one question left over. Why is it that arguments keep getting hashed out over Avatar the Last Airbender on end forever? Part of it is nostalgia and recent adaptation. People rewatching or watching for the first time and wanting to discuss something. But that isn’t everything. Why do we keep talking about violence in Avatar?
Book Six - The Insecurity of Violence
I made a long video over the censorship of NSFW content both online and in art in general. In it I made some brief comments poking fun at leftists who go on about the revolution they long for that’s not actually coming. Plenty of people have pointed out how for certain types of left-leaning people the revolution is just a secular version of rapture. Sometimes those types coincide with the same ones who are “anti-woke” but leftistly. They cling to the idea of hell, torment, and karmic justice where the “bad guys” will be violently punished in retribution. They’re basically evangelical christians who found the religious label too cringe but didn’t want to discard the underlying beliefs. A commenter asked who I was talking about because he didn’t have any experience with those types. After I responded, this person basically said, “Well, as a college educated white dude, I don’t think it’s my place to tell oppressed people how to act. I don’t want to take anything off the table for them.”
And what a cowardly, bullshit answer that is. There are I think two ways to interpret the first section of the comment. It could have been a dig at me. I’m also a college educated white guy. I have a degree in theatre, laugh all you want. In the grand scheme of things, I am quite privileged. That may have been his way of saying, “You being anti-violence is a bit yikesies, my guy. Don’t you know sadistic fantasy is fine?” The second interpretation is that he’s using his proximity to privilege to dodge the question. Notice how that’s not a statement on whether he finds heavy violence acceptable or what kinds he would approve of or if he wants a revolution or any comment actually about his personal morals, politics, or ethics. Why? Because that would be putting a personal stake on it. He’s either not okay with sadistic violence or he is, and he knows that’s shameful, so he avoids saying it.
On May 24th, the Red Star Caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America published a statement pushing against condemnations of the terrorist group Hamas. Red Star’s argument is that because Hamas is part of the resistance that exists, condemning them while being pro-Palestine is being idealist. To which I say: fuck your materialism if it leads you to say you’re not allowed to condemn the killing of civilians. “FOr the better part of the past century, Western media has shaped the story of Israel and Palestine into one where Israel, the settler-colonial aggressors, are ‘victims’ of the indigenous resistance. This phenomenon has deeply shaped how Americans view the situation. DSA members are not immune to that, and this type of propaganda has been very effective at making people hesitant to support Palestinian resistance.” By ‘Palestinian resistance,’ they do mean Hamas. The graphic at the top of the article says, “Do you commend Hamas?”
They recommend Al Jazeers as a good source for info. To quote Al Jazeera, “Early on October 7, Hamas fighters stormed communities along Israel’s southern fence with Gaa. At least 1,139 people, mostly civilians, were killed in the the attack.”
Another news org the article supports, Electronic Intifada, says in an article critiquing CNN anchor Dana Bash that when she claimed 1200 civilians were killed, that’s about 300 too many. Which means they think 900 civilians were killed. 900 out 1200 is 75% civilian casualities. Only, uh-oh, they say 75 more were foreigners. That’s 81 percent non-combatants killed.
Do we need to commend Hamas for carrying out an operation where 8 out of every 10 killed were not acceptable targets? No. Commend suggests uncritical support. To critique would destroy the entire resistance is the implication of the article. If resistance cannot withstand critique against the mass murder of civilians, then it is incredibly fragile and has no future.
Their article argues that if you don’t support Hamas, you support imperialism, capitalism, and the boot pressing down on oppressed peoples everywhere. To critique them is to be the enemy. That’s pretty hyperbolic. Why do they say that? An October 12 joint statement by Red Star and MUG laments a statement they suggested DSA put out and the edits made. They helpfully offer both statements for comparison. The main difference between the two statements is an added second paragraph that starts, “We abhor attacks on innocent Palestinians and Israelis and mourn the death of all those who have already been killed.” No such similar language appears in the statement suggested by those caucuses. Put together with their “we commend Hamas” moment, it seems as if Red Star is in support of the attacks on Israeli civilians. In my opinion. Read through for yourself.
When the Romanoffs come up for discussion, another one of those constantly recurring discourses, people get very defensive when you suggest killing the kids was bad. “But the material conditions!” We’re talking morality and philosophy here. The point of critique is so that we can be better. But people often assume any critique destroys. It’s a childish black-and-white morality. If you suggest nuance, you’re suggesting that they might be the bad guys, because these people are so insecure, they can’t imagine themselves as holding any shades of gray without falling into heavy despair.
When people say that Avatar is against violence, they’re lying. They’re not engaging with the content of the show almost at all. But the idea is that you have to support all excesses they might want to engage in. If you don’t support all of their violent urges, then you don’t support them at all. To say that murder and torture are bad is to say those who want to do those things are bad. And they can’t stand to feel like maybe their anger is bad.
Anger is inherently fragile.
A politics based in anger is inherently insecure. Facts are rejected and feed the anger because they suggest the anger might be misplaced. And that critique might destroy the entire movement. At least, that’s the fear. When you say that no, Starbucks does not support genocide, some people get pissed off because they are very emotionally invested in that idea, it’s an outlet for their immense anger, and to say it’s a waste of their energy that could be better spent helping the Palestinian people and cause, feels as if you’re saying the entire cause is a waste of energy. That doesn’t logically flow. But to riff off a popular phrase on the right, “Facts might not care about your feelings, but feelings don’t care about facts either.” Just as desire is desire for desire, anger often exists to perpetuate itself.
When we critique movements, actions, people, what are we doing? Are we attempting to make ourselves feel better or are we attempting to innoculate ourselves against our worst instincts? I think it’s the second one. So, yes. The actions of the oppressed are subject to critique. Actions can be good or bad. Harming civilians is a morally negative act regardless of the team of the person who does the harm. The Fire Nation harming civilians is a moral wrong. Jet aiming to harm civilians is a moral wrong. Capital punishment is a moral wrong. It does not matter if it’s the US government or some magical future communist utopia. It does not matter if the person sentenced is innocent or guilty. The death penalty itself is wrong. When people say, “It’s not my place to critique the actions of the oppressed” when the actions are harming civilians, they’re completely sidestepping the question. When they defend the anti-Semistism of the Houthis, Jet wanting to flood a village, Hama torturing civilians, when they get angry at those who do critique, they’re being insecure. Why? Because they do support those actions, but they feel shame for that support, and so they pretend they don’t. Red Star’s statements avoid talking about the deaths of innocent Israelis because the very concept makes them insecure.
Avatar continues to roll through the same discourse cycles because the pro-violence people are insecure. They cannot handle being critiqued in their bloodlust. Even more specifically, what they really cannot bear, is to be told not to lose themselves to their anger. But they want to bury themselves in their anger. Because, maybe a bit counter-intuitively, anger is easy. And it gets you a lot of social credit on the internet. You play the angry radical for other angry radicals. You talk about how being against killing civilians is liberal bullshit while ginning up the supposed revolution and how you’ll stick it to the bad guys and get your bloody, bloody justice because you are despairing.
And unfortunately, the supposed catharsis of violence has never filled the pits of despair. It can’t. I look forward to your angry comments I’m going to promptly ignore though. Thanks for the engagement. Bye.
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