right well i know nobody cares but i think i figured out why i dislike the avatar comics so much. like i already thought that they justified colonialism a hell of a lot (in direct contrast to the themes of atla itself which makes me CRAZY grrrr) but i was finally able to pin down why, exactly, i think that. in this i’m gonna be focusing specifically on the promise and north and south because i hate both of those with a passion!
i think that the way both north and south and the promise handle the process of decolonization and reckoning with a colonial legacy is inherently flawed. in the promise, zuko withdraws his support of the harmony restoration movement because of the new earth/fire national culture that has been created in yu dao. he thinks it would be wrong to take these people away from livelihoods that they’ve created. he also says that economically, they are better off now than they were 100 years ago.
so like, that’s already yikes. economic justifications of colonialism are the worst ones. always. also, it doesn’t help that as zuko says that, there’s a panel showing a fire nation man getting his shoes shined by an earth national as katara says “it doesn’t look like that wealth was shared equally” or something of that sentiment.
and i know zuko says one of his other reasons for withdrawing from the harmony restoration movement is because the people don’t want to be given back to earth kingdom rule…but uh…which people, exactly, don’t want to be given back to the earth kingdom? who benefited the most from colonial rule in the colonies themselves? (i’ll give you a hint: it wasn’t the earth nationals.)
so although yu dao is now an incredibly wealthy and prosperous place as a direct result of its colonization, the wealth is not spread equally. also, economic prosperity doesn’t mean that yu dao should remain a colony? nor does it mean that the fire nation government should continue to meddle in its affairs by instituting a coalition government and then creating the united republic of nations? they should’ve just given them complete self autonomy and called it a day! but whatever.
in the promise, the process of decolonization (ie giving earth kingdom land back to the earth kingdom itself and repatriating the fire nation citizens) is kind of equated to a direct impediment of Progress™, particularly economic and social Progress™. this is seen again in north and south, when the northern water tribe tries to establish the oil refinery on southern water tribe land. in north and south, many southern water tribe members (and katara herself) take issue with this northern interference, citing that they are just turning the south into a cheap copy of the north in the name of…you guessed it…Progress™. katara and other members of the southern tribe are seen as extremists for wanting to preserve their heritage after one hundred years of war. the oil refinery and other northern interferences are portrayed as a solely good thing, even though they come at the expense of other important traditions.
and so therein lies my biggest problem with these two atla comics: they assume that decolonization = anti progress, when it very much does not. this is something that’s seen in the real world, time and time again. like, i’m from hawai’i (not native hawaiian tho, which is an important distinction to make!) and the whole struggle to halt the construction of the thirty meter telescope on mauna kea is a good real life example. mauna kea is sacred land to native hawaiians, and construction of the telescope would completely desecrate the land, both culturally and environmentally. yet for some reason, native hawaiians are portrayed as “backwards” and “anti-science” for not wanting the TMT to be built, which isn’t true at all! but they shouldn’t have to sacrifice what they believe in the name of progress defined by someone else’s metric.
in the atla comics (and legend of korra), Modern Westernization™ is the default. returning yu dao’s land to the earth kingdom and removing fire nation involvement is seen as anti-progress. refusing to build an oil refinery and trying to preserve important cultural practices and traditions is seen as anti-progress. anything that doesn’t lead to…cómo se dice…complete industrialization and what is essentially capitalism is seen as anti-progress. and this is such a western mindset that it hurts, because that’s not what decolonization is. decolonization is supposed to revive, humanize, and modernize important indigenous and traditional aspects of cultures. decolonization, unlike how it’s portrayed in the promise and in north and south, does not mean that we go backwards. instead, we actively reconstruct our perspectives and stop measuring previously aforementioned Progress™ by a western capitalist mindset! that’s why it’s important, and that’s why these comics fall short, because they had an opportunity to build a world that wasn’t modeled after the patterns of the west…and they just didn’t.
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