the extended atla franchise is really proof for why an IP-based approach to art does not work because while it is true that michael dante dimartino and bryan konietzko Created atla, it should be clear from the quality of the rest of the installments in the franchise with their name/stamp of approval on it that they were not the deciding factor in the quality of the original show. in fact, many if not Most of the series best episodes were written by head writer aaron ehasz and his then-wife elizabeth welch. neither of theses two have the Right to make more avatar even though they're a big part of what Made It in the first place.
ehasz then went out to put out 'the dragon prince' for netflix which was not a show i was crazy about but i think i feel pretty confident in calling it better than legend of korra.
now what's also notable about this situation is that ehazs is a notorious enough misogynist to have a section of his wikipedia page devoted to his alleged professional mistreatment of women
elizabeth on the other hand has absolutely no presence online whatsoever. ATLA is her only writing credit. She wrote eight episodes of the show including Zuko Alone, The Avatar and the Fire Lord, and The Southern Raiders. She and aaron are now also divorced.
Now, if you know anything about how misogynist male creatives working in the same field as their wives operate, then you can probably reach the same conclusion I have. If a man is willing to treat female coworkers like his nanny and assistant as a baseline, imagine what he feels entitled to expect from a female coworker that is also his wife. I would not be surprised if much of the work on ATLA that ehasz was able to build his career off of would not have been nearly as good without a lot of behind the scenes assistance from elizabeth.
so of the 4 people mentioned here, the one with the absolute least claim of any entitlement to the Intellectual Property of the avatar franchise is overwhelmingly likely to be the most responsible for the meaningful character and narrative writing that caused ATLA to even earn enough accolades to be worth franchising in the first place.
#this is such a confusing post?? nickelodeon controls the ip of atla and the creators have made that very clear#they said when the live-action movie came out they had no say in it being made or by whom#so they blundered by making korra (even by not hiring back elizabeth whose career begins and ends with atla according to imdb)#how does that make them responsible for the poor state of the ip at al???????? youāve failed to convince me lol
i didn't expect this post to get any traction and be seen by anyone other than my immediate followers who already know how i feel about this sort of stuff, so i didn't really Explain my point here. but i'm not arguing that bryke are responsible for mishandling the ATLA IP at all, i'm making the case that an IP-based system just does not facilitate good artmaking in general.
like it's not that i think elizabeth welch is The One True Genius Mind Behind Avatar and is the person who actually deserves the real credit/the one who could have Made The Franchise Good if they'd let her. but what i am trying to point out by bringing her up is that there are so many unsung people working on these sorts of projects who are critical to their execution (notably what ideas live and die by) but who don't get factored in to either the legal understanding of who has the right to produce More of it, or our cultural ideas about who gets to claim authority over a work.
like if you remember when the new netflix show was announced the whole big thing among the fanbase was Bryke Are Gonna Be In This One So It Could Be Good For Real! obviously they ended up leaving the project so we will never know if their version of that would have been good or not (i suspect not, personally) but. point being is there's a common conception that because bryke hold the status of Creator over this work, they have the capacity to imbue continued ventures in this IP space with legitimacy and quality in a way other people don't. and i feel like that's just been proven to be untrue based on how underwhelming and dissonant korra felt.
in a world where we had no real legal structures in place or deeply entrenched social ideas about who has Ownership over a fictional setting and it's characters, anyone would have the liberty to produce related works in a more legitimized context than fanfiction and contribute to a greater and richer collective body. we'd have the luxury of picking and choosing whose interpretations of these ideas and themes we like, as we currently do for public domain works and those based in fairytales/myth.
i think that would be much better than having to sit around and cross our fingers hoping that a profit-motivated corporate entity will deign to produce anything other than hollowed out nostalgia bait.
