/hobby/ - Hobby

>>35872
Probably more inspired by North Korea… though the two propaganda pots bleed into each other a lot sure.

It’s a children’s show who’s messages are dumbed down to the point a child could understand them. The writers obviously based it off their idea of China. Every villain in Kora is based of a dumb take of a different ideology. Avatar is about defeating the nazis and the commies and bringing the world back to balance. The entire series is reactionary and about the status quo. Pointing out this one portrayal is just as bad as any of the posts in r/avatar that point out really obvious social dynamics
>if you notice in this frame he’s smiling, which means he’s happy
>notice how his line where he says sorry is actually a deep portrayal of empathy
>the over powered move is secretly overpowered
>see how the authoritarian state uses soft and hard power to control the populace through use of soft and hard power?

I recently rewatched avatar. I liked it but i felt a bit too old to be watching it at times. Anyway i didnt really see a resemblance between ba sing se and any real country. Sure the writers mightve meant it to look like some evil asian country but to me it just seemed like a generic "yo these villagers are crazy" type plot. Its not a bad plot but it doesnt really work as propaganda i think. Its a bit like watching children of the corn and saying it resembles… idk france or something

Sometimes it feels like leftoids with a victim complex are trying really hard to see anticommunism where there isn't any.

There is nothing communist about Ba Sing Se. The city is physically segregated according to class, with huge walls encircling the districts. The show makes a point to emphasize this when the protagonists first arrive there. And the whole series has inspiration from Chinese and other Asian or indigenous cultures. OP is reading way too much into this.

The Lake Laogai plot is a generic dystopia that if anything is inspired by the Chinese Civil Service - bureaucrats with a check on the power of the nobility (a rare example of "meritocracy" since they were chosen from the commoners through exams). That has very little to do with communism. You could stretch it to be anti-Dengist or something roughly paralleling DotP with commoners checking the power of a ruling class, and Long Feng is established to have a peasant background, but the class dynamics are barely referenced, and when it comes up it's in the context of Azula (noble) taking power and making things worse. The only real reason it comes across as somewhat anti-communist is because western media has a strong association between propaganda and brainwashing with socialism (which is OP reading that in), and Lake Laogai takes obvious inspiration from the Ministry of Love in 1984 (which in Avatar is a pretty de-contextualized portrayal of brainwashing).

IMO what they were going for with this is that the highly structured and regimented society enables this kind of dystopia to form. Avatar leans centrist libertarian for the most part, but in a sort of trad sense where it's opposed to large empires because they disrupt the "natural order" by imposing an artificial one. The whole series is about restoring balance to the world by stopping colonialism. It's almost like a decolonial 3rd worldist lost cause fantasy. You can still argue the politics are bad (reactionary, idealist, etc) but you should do it based on what the show is actually doing instead of hearing anti-communist propaganda in your walls. Ultimately though it's a fantasy action cartoon and as much as it plays with themes it doesn't try to be very political, unlike Korra. (Korra should be considered separately but tl;dr it is liberal.)

>>35877
Broke: ba sing se is communist
Woke: him from powerpuff girls is communist
Bespoke: vexus from my life as a teenage robot is communist
Toke: aku from samurai jack is communist

Ba Sing Se is clearly a representation of monarchist China holding their heads in the sand whilst the world around them is accelerating and the Imperialists are at their gates after ravaging and pillaging their once powerful nation.

I hate that the world of Avatar develops capitalism in legend of Korra. You'd think that the avatar would be wise enough to see how bad a fucking idea that would be.

Maybe he was busy rebuilding the world after a brutal 100 year war of genocide but still.

>>35880
Not even the avatar can stop progress like that

Lake Laogai is on top of a reeducation center, and is named after Laogai, Chinese labor prisons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laogai
The Dai Li are likely named after a KMT spy of the same name
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_Li
Their uniforms however are modeled after Chinese imperial guards such as pic related
The Earth King himself is directly modeled after Emperor Puyi, which is obvious. Both puppet rulers who never really left the walls of their palace
Joo Dee is based off a Chinese tour guide Bryke followed when they were visiting Beijing before the creation of the show.
There is definitely a typical American fear and suspicion of communist China present in AtLA, I imagine it's more pronounced in Korra. But it's also a mishmash of anything Chinese in general
Not anime THOUGH