#it's nice people have the luxury to shut out uncomfy elements

[vidma-kazhe]

What makes me so disgusted about Netlix santizing the ever-loving fuck of the ATLA story ("Oooh we toned toned the sexism", "Oooh, Aang is more serious now") is because they're just showing they're fucking cowards making content for audience that wants to consume but not to think.

Despite it's light-hearted tone and well-balanced moments of humor and teenage goofiness, ATLA managed to convey one simple truth: war is ugly.

War changes you. War distorts you. Even if you're not at the frontline and in a relative safety, you're still affected and it's not supposed to look good.

With Sokka and Katara they barely scratched the surface: despite Sokka saying some stuff about girls because of his own insecurity and feeling he had big boots to fill and Katara having never recovered from the anger of being unable to save her mom, they were nice and kind to everyone, included Fire Nation civillians, because they could afford being kind. Because of Aang. Who gave them hope. Who was a promise that this war can end and they can all be saved. They had a promise of tomorrow and a future - and so no matter what they had seen, they held on to that. And even with this, they still had their scars. They just got to address them instead of having them fester.

For comparsion, we had characters like Jet - who never had such hope in the first place and thus was capable of much more cruel decisions, caring not for a single life of a Fire Nation civillian (not that I blame him) because he experienced the brutality of invasion with nobody around to protect him.

We had characters like Hama -- a waterbender stolen from her tribe, imprisoned and tortured, stuck in the enemy's land unable to trust anyone; growing old and alone, having to watch Fire Nation people enjoy they lives ignorant of the destruction their empire was bringing to others and wanting make them suffer as much as she did. Wanting to make them know fear and desperation and the horror of being locked away to rot.

And the only reason why Katara wasn't Hama, was Katara's mom sacrifice. Not because Katara was different, kinder or more merciful. Because someone gave her life away to protect her life.

We had a society like Southern Tribe, where women were forbidden from practicing combat waterbending and only allowed to do healing -- because Fire Nation wasn't above committing genocide and keeping women from fighting seemed like a measure to keep them safe. It was a flawed logic, but the show pointed out how being stuck in the old ways and clinging to the illusion of safety can bite you in the ass.

Sokka and Katara didn't remain good people because of some inner goodness they had at birth -- it became possible, because of Aang. Otherwise, in time, they too would have grown more bitter, more cynical, clinging to whatever coping mechanisms available just to survive. In time, they would have approved of Jet's ideas -- because nothing is fair in this world, there is no miracle, and if resisting genocide and colonization means being violent, then so be it.

War is horrible because it ruins your life and takes away the parts of you that you may never claim back.

But I won't expect modern show writers to ever understand it or even to be willing to get out from their comfort zone and explore it.