The Legend of Korra has some pretty wack politics

So very recently I posted a video ripping apart The Promise comic for disrespecting the original cartoon and its pro colonialist message (I rated it 0/10). This isn’t to self advertise or anything, it’s more a precursor to this rant. So in my pinned comment, I did say I wanted to make a sequel tearing apart The Legend of Korra’s politics and I will. But I’ll need to do some rewatching, this rant is to get all perspectives in before that happens.

Now, I will have to talk about The Promise again because it truly is a property of the post cartoon works, it was made to market TLOK. That’s why it was released when it was and the toxic ideology it promotes is carried into the cartoon.

I think the core of The Promise is that it creates a world, a situation that the Avatarverse was in no way building towards. Remember, they return almost zero of the colonised land to the Earth KIngdom. So despite an active war, most of the colonies are somehow a creole society, the Fire Nation’s xenophobic ideology is missing and everybody is equal. There is no reason given as to why, in fact, it was always like that in The Promise canon. Like I said, Sozin is portrayed as right, the other nations were backwater and needed the FN to make any progress. Ethnic cleansing? Cultural genocide? What’s that? The Fire Nation would NEVER allow a place like that to exist. It simply makes no sense and I explain it more in the video.

See this is what carries into TLOK. See, Bryke are Americans subject to American propaganda. They probably have no idea what the embargo on Cuba actually entails. As such, American Imperialist propaganda is baked into the series with little pushback. The core idea of American Imperialism is that they are special and need to spread that specialness to the rest of the world but as history would tell ya…it doesn’t really work out all that well. See, The United Republic is set up as this beacon of the future that every nation should strive to emulate, they are perfect. The other unique cultures, fuck them, we need to save them from themselves. This stretches further into the politics: The United Republic is a (new) democracy and capitalist utopia. 

Bryke sees no reason to justify why The United Republic’s way is better, it just is. While I technically agree with the UR’s politics (except for Capitalism) you can’t just do that. You should educate kids as to why your vision is right. The villains of the series are trash for this reason, firstly given that I don’t believe “problems that can’t just be fixed by bending fight” should even have something like a villain in the first place. If they aren’t revealed to be liars, then their ideology is strawmanned (Zaheer). It’s weird that Bryke hates Anarchism yet simps for the Air Nomads so much, like hello? The villains with a point cause the problem in that it promotes respectability politics first and foremost (no, you’re not oppressed because you’re too noisy about it). It also spends more time defeating the villain than actually showing the oppression, like with the equalists.

Remember when I said the new canon creates a situation that the world wasn’t building towards? There’s a scene where Suyin Beifong calls queens “outdated”. Now, Suyin is an autocrat, she clearly can’t hate the concept of absolute power or she’s a massive hypocrite. So why is the monarchy bad? It just is. See, there’s this thing called the real world which offers an explanation as to why absolutism was rejected but Bryke for some reasons decides not to do it. Democracy isn’t necessarily wanted by the people. Some people love dictatorships, Kuvira had a lot of support for that reason. They especially don’t like democracy imposed on them by people they hate (Weimar Republic). The simple reason is that the UR is now a democracy so everyone else must be too. Which is funny because the first democratically elected leader turned out to be a corrupt buffoon. So the message everyone should get is that democracy sucks.

My final point will tie back into The Promise in that The United Republic in all honesty would be the villains. It’s stolen land that in the original canon was obtained through ethnic cleansing where they oppressed the natives. By all means, the UR fire nation people should be the 1%, who discriminate against everyone else. But all the UR’s faults are paved over rather quickly (non-bender oppression). Liike, season 4 has President Raiko admit that Wu is gonna be a puppet leader while the UR are the actual leaders. It reminds me of what I said in the video about the UR now being a buffer state to sap resources, ie Neocolonialism. The only interest the UR had in stabilising the EK was to sap more resources. I mean, it’s already stolen the richest lands of the EK. What’s more? While the EK wasn’t perfect, I firmly believed the results at the end of the war destabilised them even more. But Bryke just pushes the worst FN ideologies, like xenophobia, onto them and just walks away.

I have a lot more to say, but that would be way too long for a reddit post. So yeah, fuck American Imperialism, fuck United Republc Imperialism and fuck capitalism.