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Darth Walrus posted:I think we've seen airbenders using anime-style 'razor wind' on inanimate objects before. So this wasn't even the fastest and most efficient way to kill someone with air. yeah, Aang did it a bunch, and Zaheer did it to a barrel of water when they were breaking Ming-Hua out of prison
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Aug 10, 2014 22:43
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BrianWilly posted:Wasn't there an entire episode where Tarrlok systematically oppressed non-benders? The Equalist perspective clearly deserved more attention in general, but I honestly had no problems with any of Book 1's narrative setup until at least the ninth or tenth episode. The problem is that we only see this in response to the Equalists. We don't actually see anything that might have lead people to be sympathetic to the Equalist cause before then that could have served as reasoning for their creation. With the way poo poo ends, it's basically treated as if Amon just had a spell over everyone involved.
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Aug 10, 2014 23:06
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I agree; I think everyone kept hoping that would be explored at some point in those last three episodes of Book 1 -- because how could you possibly set up this particular story and not explore that? -- and to our great sorrow it just ended while brushing that (and a whole lot of other elements) aside. I can't see Book 3 falling into the same hole because there's nothing quite as equally, pressingly important that needs to be addressed before it ends...but there's just this slight worrying sense of them having written themselves into an immaculate, intricate, incredibly well-crafted conflict of a corner...now how the heck are they gonna write themselves out of it?
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Aug 10, 2014 23:20
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It's gonna be a deus ex machina. It's always a deus ex mechina, even in the original series. It just depends on how big of one it is.
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Aug 10, 2014 23:23
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BrianWilly posted:I can't see Book 3 falling into the same hole because there's nothing quite as equally, pressingly important that needs to be addressed before it ends...but there's just this slight worrying sense of them having written themselves into an immaculate, intricate, incredibly well-crafted conflict of a corner...now how the heck are they gonna write themselves out of it? Resolving the situation in Ba Sing Se is important, but feels clearly separated from Zaheer.
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Aug 10, 2014 23:35
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ImpAtom posted:It's gonna be a deus ex machina. It's always a deus ex mechina, even in the original series. It just depends on how big of one it is.
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Aug 10, 2014 23:49
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I don't know how I would feel if lavabending ability came from having two earthbending and firebending parents. On one hand, it makes sense that the secondary element would still have some influence on a person's bending, even passively. On the other, it reeks of the whole "born more special" trope I dislike.
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Aug 11, 2014 00:09
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hiddenriverninja posted:I don't know how I would feel if lavabending ability came from having two earthbending and firebending parents. Well, to be honestly, Avatar is literally nothing but Born More Special, for good or ill. The Avatar themselves is born the most specialist of all but benders are born more special than non-benders. It's kind of the Harry Potter problem where an entire class of people just sort of are legitimately better.
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Aug 11, 2014 00:12
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hiddenriverninja posted:I don't know how I would feel if lavabending ability came from having two earthbending and firebending parents.
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Aug 11, 2014 00:18
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hiddenriverninja posted:I don't know how I would feel if lavabending ability came from having two earthbending and firebending parents. Now, thinking about Zaheer and what he's done, I find myself going back to a conversation between Tenzin and Korra from the first episode of the season quote:Korra: Did I ruin everything by leaving the spirit portals open? The key difference between Zaheer and Korra is that nothing gives Zaheer pause. He believes fully in everything he does. His ideology cannot fail, it can only be failed. I am desperately hoping for a Zaheer/Tenzin fight/debate.
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Aug 11, 2014 00:24
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ImpAtom posted:Well, to be honestly, Avatar is literally nothing but Born More Special, for good or ill. The Avatar themselves is born the most specialist of all but benders are born more special than non-benders. It's kind of the Harry Potter problem where an entire class of people just sort of are legitimately better. Again, the biggest problem of Season 1 is that I sympathized with the Equalists. Could you imagine being some farmer that moved to the city for a job but can't get one because you aren't a bender?
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Aug 11, 2014 00:26
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TheModernAmerican posted:Again, the biggest problem of Season 1 is that I sympathized with the Equalists. Could you imagine being some farmer that moved to the city for a job but can't get one because you aren't a bender? You can always sell cabbages!
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Aug 11, 2014 00:29
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SpiderHyphenMan posted:I am desperately hoping for a Zaheer/Tenzin fight/debate. I can just picture them quoting philosophy in between and during strikes and gales
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Aug 11, 2014 00:31
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SpiderHyphenMan posted:I am desperately hoping for a Zaheer/Tenzin fight/debate. Considering how much they've set up Zaheer as a foil to Tenzin I'm not just desperately hoping for it, I'd be out and out appalled if it didn't happen. Not to mention it'd be a complete waste of a golden opportunity to finally have a pure airbender vs airbender match.
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Aug 11, 2014 01:13
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I love this fanbase sometimes, I really do.
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Aug 11, 2014 01:20
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I feel like an important thing to keep in mind with the Equalists is that they were taking advantage of the discontent and anger caused by Republic City's actual horrible class divides and wealth disparity and scapegoating the benders. Season One kind of hits the viewer over the head with the fact that a.) Republic City has a big class problem and b.) that those problems cut across the bender/nonbender line repeatedly-- i.e., how Bolin and Mako lived compared to how Hiroshi Sato lived, them making a big deal about how that underground community of hobos they hide out in during the last episode is benders and nonbenders living side-by-side, etc. I feel like it's hard to shoehorn benders into being an analogy for any particular real world issue, since in the real world nobody has magic powers they're born with. I do feel like it's worth noting that within the recent history of the world, although the ruling class of the Fire Nation were obviously benders themselves, benders from other nations occupied by the Fire Nation were often singled out for persecution above and beyond the persecution everyone else got-- the entirely-bending Air Nomads were wiped out, the Southern Water Tribe's benders were systematically killed or taken away, and all the earthbenders in that one town were sent away to that offshore metal prison.
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Aug 11, 2014 01:35
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SpiderHyphenMan posted:I love this fanbase sometimes, I really do. A lot of things need more political cartoon-style fan art, if only to better communicate how ridiculous most political cartoons are in reality.
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Aug 11, 2014 01:43
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It's not quite political. They tend to exaggerate features, embiggen them and use visual metaphor rather than state "this guy is a communist" and "These are the peoples". I'd love to see some fan art like that.
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Aug 11, 2014 01:49
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Rincewind posted:I feel like an important thing to keep in mind with the Equalists is that they were taking advantage of the discontent and anger caused by Republic City's actual horrible class divides and wealth disparity and scapegoating the benders. Season One kind of hits the viewer over the head with the fact that a.) Republic City has a big class problem and b.) that those problems cut across the bender/nonbender line repeatedly-- i.e., how Bolin and Mako lived compared to how Hiroshi Sato lived, them making a big deal about how that underground community of hobos they hide out in during the last episode is benders and nonbenders living side-by-side, etc. Also the whole deal with the bending Triads. Organized crime never pulls its muscle from privileged classes, since they're not the people who only have street crime to turn to for wealth and status. On the other hand, in a situation like Republic City where poor benders (sometimes employed by wealthy non-benders as we've seen) prey upon middle/working class non-benders, it's really easy to create an anti-bender narrative like Amon did, without really even bringing up the root issues.
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Aug 11, 2014 01:55
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Jimbot posted:It's not quite political. They tend to exaggerate features, embiggen them and use visual metaphor rather than state "this guy is a communist" and "These are the peoples". I'd love to see some fan art like that. It's in the style of The Onion's cartoonist, who he himself is a savagely brilliant parody of regular cartoonists.
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Aug 11, 2014 02:09
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Killer robot posted:Also the whole deal with the bending Triads. Organized crime never pulls its muscle from privileged classes, since they're not the people who only have street crime to turn to for wealth and status. On the other hand, in a situation like Republic City where poor benders (sometimes employed by wealthy non-benders as we've seen) prey upon middle/working class non-benders, it's really easy to create an anti-bender narrative like Amon did, without really even bringing up the root issues. I mean, poo poo, I'm surprised that there's not more anti-bender sentiment all across the world considering that its because of benders and their fuckery that a 100 year war erupted across the known world, which probably resulted in tremendous loss of life and livelihood. Like, really, sit and think about how awful and broke down society would get if we fought a war for 100 years. Heck, we don't even have to because we can just look to something like the Hundred Years' War (though, to be fair, that wasn't a constant conflict) to see that France and England were massively depopulated because of the conflict (and occasional outbreaks of plague).
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Aug 11, 2014 02:28
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Is it really fair to say that the Hundred Year War happened because of "benders", though? The ruling family of the Fire Nation was all benders, of course, but benders in the other nations were on the chopping block as much or more than everyone else, and the Fire Nation as a whole wasn't just benders. The issues were just plain old nationalism and imperialism and racism, not benders vs. nonbenders.
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Aug 11, 2014 02:45
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TheModernAmerican posted:Again, the biggest problem of Season 1 is that I sympathized with the Equalists. Could you imagine being some farmer that moved to the city for a job but can't get one because you aren't a bender? On the other hand I would probably enjoy having access to electricity courtesy of said benders, and probably would not want to have a masked man remove their abilities if doing so meant I was going back to candles for lighting.
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Aug 11, 2014 03:15
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Rincewind posted:Is it really fair to say that the Hundred Year War happened because of "benders", though? The ruling family of the Fire Nation was all benders, of course, but benders in the other nations were on the chopping block as much or more than everyone else, and the Fire Nation as a whole wasn't just benders. The issues were just plain old nationalism and imperialism and racism, not benders vs. nonbenders. I get that, but what I'm saying is that it would be really easy to jump from 'We Just Fought A 100 Year War' to 'Because Of Those loving Benders' if you're some disenfranchised non-bender who is getting pushed around by a bending gangster types. It's not that much of a mental leap at all, especially for an aggrieved public.
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Aug 11, 2014 03:18
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Could it be that the only reason we were disappointed in Amon being revealed to be a fraud was because we wanted to believe in his scapegoating solely because it made for a more interesting moral dilemma in a fantasy series for bending to truly be an inequality of sorts, rather than any evidence in the actual show? I say yes. Meanwhile, the mere existence of the Earth Queen is proof enough that the way the ruling class works in the Avatar universe is not balanced, so while Zaheer's methods and end goals are too far, there is that seed of truth behind his arguments, unlike with Amon. SpiderHyphenMan fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Aug 11, 2014 |
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Aug 11, 2014 03:21
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nutranurse posted:I get that, but what I'm saying is that it would be really easy to jump from 'We Just Fought A 100 Year War' to 'Because Of Those loving Benders' if you're some disenfranchised non-bender who is getting pushed around by a bending gangster types. It's not that much of a mental leap at all, especially for an aggrieved public. Yeah, it's really easy to do that, even if the war itself was entirely out of a cultural and technological divide, the sort which could (did) happen in a world without any objective splitting up of humanity by magic powers. It's a very natural sort of thing for a charismatic and manipulative "revolutionary" to support.
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Aug 11, 2014 03:28
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ETB posted:I don't know, I have a feeling Gyatso used some form of vacuum creation against the comet-enhanced Firebenders during the Air Nation invasion... Yeah especially since he took out a room full of fire benders turbo charged on Sozin's Comet power... Had to be something extraordinary. hiddenriverninja posted:I don't know how I would feel if lavabending ability came from having two earthbending and firebending parents. Oh god combo benders would be like the next evolution in bending.. Water and fire benders... Steam.. But that's already been done sigh.
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Aug 11, 2014 03:39
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Jimbot posted:It's not quite political. They tend to exaggerate features, embiggen them and use visual metaphor rather than state "this guy is a communist" and "These are the peoples". I'd love to see some fan art like that. It's along the lines of the political cartoons that run for The Onion, the Kelley cartoons (really done by Ward Sutton). They are fantastic and you should read them every monday Fried Chicken fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Aug 11, 2014 |
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Aug 11, 2014 03:39
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The thing is, independent of all the problems Season 1 has in itself, it also suffers for the real world conditions impacting how it is viewed. Mako gets a job at the power plant. It is grueling work leaving him sweat soaked, and shows that benders are instrumental in how the world works, not just exploiting nonbenders. Except Mako is able to just walk on a job by dint of birth and make a living wage able to support him and his brother. Not to be all Thomas Friedman and "In Today's Economy" but seriously, how are we (the 17-21 viewing age of this show) supposed to sympathize with that? We are trying to get jobs ourselves now, and are competing against people who can just walk on because of how they were born. The viewer contrasts it with their real world experience and it shifts from "benders and non benders work alongside equally" to "even if inherited privilege doesn't protect you from everything, it still gives you a massive loving leg up" I know there are schools of criticism that say you shouldn't consider the work in the context of the age it is viewed in, but doing so is still valid and probably one of the more common ways (eg Huckleberry Finn controversy) Rincewind posted:Is it really fair to say that the Hundred Year War happened because of "benders", though? The ruling family of the Fire Nation was all benders, of course, but benders in the other nations were on the chopping block as much or more than everyone else, and the Fire Nation as a whole wasn't just benders. The issues were just plain old nationalism and imperialism and racism, not benders vs. nonbenders. Yeah, but a lot of that was tied in with bending supremacy, specifically fire bending supremacy
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Aug 11, 2014 03:53
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Fried Chicken posted:The thing is, independent of all the problems Season 1 has in itself, it also suffers for the real world conditions impacting how it is viewed. Mako gets a job at the power plant. It is grueling work leaving him sweat soaked, and shows that benders are instrumental in how the world works, not just exploiting nonbenders. Except Mako is able to just walk on a job by dint of birth and make a living wage able to support him and his brother. Not to be all Thomas Friedman and "In Today's Economy" but seriously, how are we (the 17-21 viewing age of this show) supposed to sympathize with that? We are trying to get jobs ourselves now, and are competing against people who can just walk on because of how they were born. The viewer contrasts it with their real world experience and it shifts from "benders and non benders work alongside equally" to "even if inherited privilege doesn't protect you from everything, it still gives you a massive loving leg up" Not really. Most benders probably have to train to have any sort of actual skill, although the show tends to present the opposite view since every important bender character is a genius and therefore absurdly skilled.
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Aug 11, 2014 03:56
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SpiderHyphenMan posted:Could it be that the only reason we were disappointed in Amon being revealed to be a fraud was because we wanted to believe in his scapegoating solely because it made for a more interesting moral dilemma in a fantasy series for bending to truly be an inequality of sorts, rather than any evidence in the actual show? Yeah, I have to agree. I think a lot of us were looking at the world post great recession and applying that framework to the show. It makes, I suppose, for an unfair criticism of it. There is plenty else to criticize about it, that it doesn't frame equalists v benders like the 99% v 1% us us trying to read something never intended into it. I mean, addressing classism and stuff could be awesome (there are still several other weak points with season 1) but they didn't set out to do it. Given the stratified nature of things now people were imposing that on the show, so that it wasn't hits double hard
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Aug 11, 2014 03:57
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Genocyber posted:Not really. Most benders probably have to train to have any sort of actual skill, although the show tends to present the opposite view since every important bender character is a genius and therefore absurdly skilled. Could you unpack this more so I don't respond to something you don't mean? Like are you arguing against comparing benders with the connected people because benders have to train and ou think I am arguing that the connected people don't? Are you saying that benders getting jobs is a reflection of meritocracy because they have to train? Something else entirely?
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Aug 11, 2014 04:01
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If there is some sort of combo bender, it'd be best if it was less from bloodline and more from cross-cultural contact. We already see it with Korra, where her force of personality breaks the standard Avatar cycle of elemental learning struggles by giving her the most difficulty with Air, not Fire as would be expected. If the arts diversified for groups like the Foggy Swamp Tribe and the Sandbenders, I don't see how every bending culture suddenly coming into contact wouldn't produce some new outlooks on bending.
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Aug 11, 2014 04:45
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Suddenly everyone can bend all 4 elements..and travel the spirit world through the open portals... Does the avatar become redundant?
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Aug 11, 2014 05:09
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Babygravy posted:Suddenly everyone can bend all 4 elements..and travel the spirit world through the open portals... Does the avatar become redundant? Not as long as they still have Raava, no. They'd still have the Avatar State and the memories of every Avatar since Korra.
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Aug 11, 2014 05:12
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Jimbot posted:It's not quite political. They tend to exaggerate features, embiggen them and use visual metaphor rather than state "this guy is a communist" and "These are the peoples". I'd love to see some fan art like that.
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Aug 11, 2014 10:51
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achillesforever6 posted:All it needs is a fat guy in the lower right corner saying a bad pun and it's a perfect Kelly,.  
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Aug 11, 2014 11:27
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Oh Snapple! posted:The problem is that we only see this in response to the Equalists. We don't actually see anything that might have lead people to be sympathetic to the Equalist cause before then that could have served as reasoning for their creation. With the way poo poo ends, it's basically treated as if Amon just had a spell over everyone involved. It is hard to imagine the Equalists gaining anything like a big foothold because of the simple fact that everyone's kid can potentially be a bender. It's easy to instill hate for a group that you can easily separate from the general population, but it is harder to do so if there is a good chance that you know someone or are related to someone who belongs to the group you are supposed to hate (see gay rights). That's what bugged me with all the Mutant hate by the population in the Marvel books. TheModernAmerican posted:Again, the biggest problem of Season 1 is that I sympathized with the Equalists. Could you imagine being some farmer that moved to the city for a job but can't get one because you aren't a bender? Yes, happens all the time after all. I can't become a pilot because my eyesight isn't good enough. Others never will be gymnasts or window cleaners because the lack the body control or have a fear of heights. Some never will be bouncers because they are 1.50 m and 40 kg wet. Or watchmakers because they are clumsy people with far too fat fingers. Water benders can't become power plant workers and fire benders can't become metal bending police unit members (but apparently lovely detectives). Said farmer just moving into city will also not be able to do a lot of non-bending jobs because he lacks the necessary skills or abilities. Some he might be able to train for, others he won't, independent from any bending.
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Aug 11, 2014 12:19
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Rincewind posted:I feel like an important thing to keep in mind with the Equalists is that they were taking advantage of the discontent and anger caused by Republic City's actual horrible class divides and wealth disparity and scapegoating the benders. Truthfully, the Equalists were never meant to be anything more than Amon's henchmen by the creators, but their pre-release comments really made it look like the struggle of the non-benders for equality would be a rather significant part of the world building, and it wasn't. In a less cynical way, I was very surprised to learn that they saw Unalaq as having a restrained and precise fighting style reminiscent of a fencer, because it's basically the opposite of how he fought on screen. Rincewind posted:Is it really fair to say that the Hundred Year War happened because of "benders", though? SpiderHyphenMan posted:Could it be that the only reason we were disappointed in Amon being revealed to be a fraud was because we wanted to believe in his scapegoating solely because it made for a more interesting moral dilemma in a fantasy series for bending to truly be an inequality of sorts, rather than any evidence in the actual show?
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Aug 11, 2014 12:19
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ShadowCatboy posted:Fun fact: In ancient China it was generally considered more desirable in executions to be strangled to death rather than beheaded. Though it's a slower, more agonizing way to die, strangulation left the body intact and preserved its sanctity for burial.
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