#when i know JACK SHIT about politics and government and war irl

[aromothmantic]

NaNoWriMo prep season has begun for me aka "Time to Question All of the Life Choices That Led Me to Repeatedly Attempting This Insanity for Over Ten Years"

[deafmangoes]

Why Legend of Korra Breaks Avatar's Worldbuilding

Part 3: Politics

The last in my three-part rant about Legend of Korra. This one is the most excuseable because who really wants to put complex international relations into a kid's show, right?

(Look, I was one of the kids who enjoyed the trade dispute arc in Star Wars, sue me)

Avatar's worldbuidling as applies to politics is... pretty simple. There are basically only two "nationstates" as we'd understand them, in TLA, and a handful of "nations" who are not states, as well as some local and indepedent territories.

LoK expands that to three nationstates but gets a bit muddy about the rest.

"Anarchy Bad"

This is more a generic look at the way the series treats politics. It makes it look complex on the surface but it's really very shallow. Again, kids' show, fine.

Season 1 and Season 3's antagonists are both anarchists of a sort. Amon is, on the surface (before he's revealed as a fraud), a sort of socialist who decries the (actual, displayed) inequality shown towards people who can't bend elements. He's the bad guy, of course, because this is an American TV show so we can't have any of that.

Season 3's Zaheer is explicitly an anarchist of the very stereotypical "no gods, no masters" type. Unfortunately there's a lot of mixed messaging going on, because the writers go out of their way to show three nations with incompetent leaders (the Republic City President, who only cares about ratings; the Earth Queen, who exploits her people as property; and more subtly Suyin Beifong in the semi-independent city of Zaofu who is shown to be a bit out of touch with the common folk and running a bit of a dystopia.

Despite these examples, Amon and Zaheer are still definitely shown to be "wrong"... even when their core grievances are upheld as legitimate. The writers don't really seem to know what to do there.

How is this related to the worldbuilding, you ask? Because it shows there isn't much, under the surface. The Earth Queen is assassinated and Ba Sing Se is explicitly stated to fall into utter chaos immediately. Apparently the Dai Li can't do jack shit. The greater Earth Kingdom is also stated to be in a bad state, which could be chalked up to generations of mismanagement from the kingdom's government and warfare with the Fire Nation, but this isn't really discussed or displayed either except for mention of "bandits" in Season 4. Instead we're fed this idea that although the Earth Queen is objectively a bad ruler, without her in place everything falls apart. Don't eat the rich, kids, just... I dunno, go blog about it.

Obviously this isn't how things work IRL. Yes, we have the narrative idea that once you overthrow a dictator things go to shit (see: any war in the last forty years), but this is an overly simplistic look at things. Infrastructure and statehood are complex, messy things that don't flip like a binary switch.

In 'reality', Ba Sing Se may have been a bit loopy for a few days but the Earth Queen's successor would have taken over, the Dai Li would have kept order (like they had been for a century already), and most of the kindgom's bureaucracy would keep ticking over without issue.

Prince Wu

A bit of a basebreaker character, Prince Wu of Season 4 is the Earth Queen's nephew and designated heir to the throne (selected and supported by the Republic City President, the Fire Lord, and Tenzin... which shouldn't be how that works, either, and smacks of other political corruption). He's shown at first to be a whining, pampered, buffoonish dandy but grows over the season to become more connected with the people to the point where he indicates he wants to dissolve the monarch entirely and replace with a federal democracy.

So... wait, last season overthrowing the monarchy was bad and led to complete chaos, followed by three years of a military dictatorship, and now it's all good actually don't worry about it. Again with the mixed messages; also the implication that the people of the Earth Kingom can't do anything unless the God-King allows it, as if they're simple peasant morons who need careful shepherding and guidance.

All in all, it leaves the worldbuilding feeling very insubstantial and empty.

The World Leaders

On that note, it seems that every major decision is delegated to a council of five people: The Fire Lord, the Republic City President, Master Tenzin representing the Air Nomads, the Earth Monarch, and Korra's Dad.

In Season 1, Republic City was more complicated and run by a council that had a representative from each bending nation and a token non-bender. We see in the comics/novels that Aang and Zuko set this up to resolve the issue of Fire Nation colonies in Earth Kingdom territory, and it's overall a pretty okay way of doing things. Very early democratic experiments, I guess.

It gets replaced with a singular President later because... Honestly I don't really remember, but it smacks of "this is too nuanced, make it simpler".

These five people - of whom only one is an elected representative, it's worth adding - meet a few times in Seasons 3 and 4 and are hinted to form a sort of "united nations" analogue. After the Earth Queen's assassination, they seem to be the ones who 'decide' on Prince Wu as her successor... rather than, you know, her government? Or the pre-established line of succession?

It's not really surprising that Kuvira decides to go do her own thing.

How Does the Earth Kingdom Work, Anyway?

Firstly it should be noted that, looking at the world map, it's implied the Earth Kingdom is the size of Eurasia. It doesn't take a lot of knowledge about history to know that this isn't very realistic and is generally considered a big "no-no" in worldbuilding.

From what we can glean from the show, it seems to be a sort of feudal monarchy, with the Earth Monarch ruling from Ba Sing Se (as a city-state) and accepting the vassalage of the rulers of other states - Season 4 shows us briefly the 'Great State of Yi', as well as Zaofu, which is nominally part of the Kingdom but seems to do whatever the hell it likes. Suyin said she "purchased the land" - from who? The King, I guess? Never really cleared up.

From TLA, we know that Avatar Kyoshi previously protected a peninsula - later Kyoshi Island - from becoming part of such a kingdom, so we can infer from this that there are fully autonomus and independent groups around. The Great Desert and the Sandbenders seem to bow to no one's authority, and the Swampbenders are the same.

So really, it looks like the Earth Kingdom is more like a very loose grouping of states who all pay nominal lip-service to Ba Sing Se. This definitely shouldn't lead to the "full anarchy" that supported Kuvira's rise to power.

So... maybe that's actually an in-universe lie, or Republic City scaremongering. Certainly it looks like Kuvira just spent three years going around each of the states in turn and subduing them into her Empire, but apart from the one display of bandits attacking Yi, we have no knowledge of how well or badly the others were faring.

The "Air Nation"

Just as a side note, I love that Tenzin gets an equal seat on this whole world leader council thing when his entire 'nation' is about thirty airbenders and a couple of hundred fanboys.

The Water Tribes

Finally I just want to highlight that in TLA, there are two water tribes - one at the north pole, one at the south, which makes sense because they're literally a world apart from eachother. in LoK we see them "reunited" and Korra's Dad is in charge, but like... There's still the geographical distance, dudes. It's not easy to run a nation as one thing when both halves are separated by the entire planet.

Anyway... That's probably enough of all that. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

[hellsite-yano]

>glorification of porn-addiction and lolicon/shotacon

You know this got me thinking, and now I’ve gotta get this out of my head so I can make it pay rent.

Because on the one hand I go to /a/ to get manga leaks, and you’re absolutely right about those fuckers with their “ironic” pedoposting and constant stream of softcore. But on the other hand, this is also the website that invented an insult against those people, spammed it to the point that the phrase “cumbrain” got filtered, then invented more insults to fling the moment anyone so much as posts a pic with cleavage, sometimes even in threads on boards explicitly (ha) made for posting porn.

And it kind of feels like a microcosm of things happening on the rest of the internet, since on one side you’ve got these idiots who literally define their personality on what they’re jacking off to, who probably joined the internet back when it was relatively niche, a mainstream joke was that “the internet is for porn,” and there was an understanding that you keep it separate from IRL as possible

Vs people who started with social media where friends/family/employers/everyone are also on it and can see you so you need to maintain a good image, and you’re encouraged to give up personal info for trivial reasons like just winning an argument, who also had to deal with the other idiots and then grew into this reactionary puritan attitude where nothing nsfw can be allowed because it turns you into a coomer or is sexist or could be seen by children who really shouldn’t be on the web unsupervised anyways or, or, or, and this happens to align with various corporate interests to sanitize their platforms for “advertiser appeal” or whatever and government interests in fucking shit up because they may or may not understand what they’re doing, for their public image and the interests of their “donors,” (Read: Bribers in all but name) so then the nsfw content starts getting removed

Then the first group start screeching about people taking the boobies, but it’s also about people destroying archives with their heavy-handed policies and controlling what people can post and the other side start screaming back because porn isn’t a vital need and some things shouldn’t be saved/spread and then people start attaching politics to it just like everything else and making it about the culture war and you can’t really point out stupid parts of one side or the good parts of the other without being accused of being part of the tribe who is literally the root of all evil and it is all. Just. Exhausting.

😔