In my house, we’re huge friends of Avatar: The Last Airbender. When I told my housemate about this blog her response was: “you should write about Avatar!” Because Avatar, despite being an animated kids show, is premised on genocide. Aang, the protagonist of the series with the ability to control or “bend” all four elements and the duty to bring peace to the world, is the last of the Airbenders. Fire Lord Sozin, the villain of the series, is waging an expansionist war to rule over the entire Avatar world. Sozin knew that the person with the ability to stop him - the next Avatar - was going to be born into the Air Nation, so he slaughtered all of the Air Nomads. Only Aang survived.
It’s pretty heavy stuff, for a kids show. When Aang - who spent 100 years frozen in an iceberg - learns of the fate of his people, it’s absolutely heartbreaking. The Air Nomads are in some ways a “classic” victim group. The Fire Nation is militant, and has the most modern technology in the world. The Air Nomads were extremely spiritual and espoused a pacifist ideology. They lived in remote temples and were led by monks. While Fire Nation propaganda 100 years after the war said that the Fire Nation defeated the “Air Nation Army,” the Air Nomads had no army and were largely killed by ambush. In the Fire Nation’s quest to spread “peace” throughout the Avatar world, it was necessary to portray the Air Nomads as a defeated enemy, and not the victims of a one-sided massacre.
While Avatar is premised on one rather explicit case of genocide, the show also provides examples of subtler practices of cultural genocide caused by colonization. In the episode “Imprisoned,” the Aang Gang travels to a village in the Earth Kingdom under Fire Nation occupation. The occupying Fire Nation force extorts exorbitant taxes from the occupied village and forces the inhabitants to mine coal for the war effort. Importantly, they also arrested all known Earthbenders and outlawed bending - anyone found to be practicing Earthbending was arrested and taken to a Fire Nation ship, far away from any earth to bend.
While not everyone in each nation is a bender, bending is essential to the national identity of each group - each nation is defined by their element. Bending is something spiritual and an essential defining characteristic of one’s identity. The ability to bend also represents a weapon, and Katara doesn’t understand why Haru doesn’t use his bending ability to liberate his town from the Fire Nation. Similar to the authors we read attempting to explain the lack of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, the people of Haru’s village learned that resistance through Earthbending is futile, it only further rips their community apart as those who can bend are taken away.
This suppression of culture, along with forced labor, is similar to other genocides we’ve studied, such as Latin America. One of my favorite things about Avatar is how - despite being geared towards kids - it doesn’t shy away from dealing with really complicated adult issues. Through its basic premise, A:tLA shows many different genocidal processes occurring in the context of an expansionary war.
Here are some clips from “The Southern Air Temple” and “Imprisoned”
In this clip, Aang returns to the Southern Air Temple (where he was raised) and discovers what happened to his people (about 2:30 in, and then skip to around 7:10 in unless you want to watch an Agni Kai between Zuko and Zhao.)
This clip shows introduces us to the occupied Earth Nation village and shows what living under Fire Nation occupation is like.
Oh Avatar, the only time a children's show has ever ended in a double suicide between a corrupt politician and a terrorist . The Fire Nation is not shy at all about killing off large groups of people. Do you think what happened to the Southern Water tribe to be genocide? ( In Book Three episode 8 The Puppeteer, it was revealed that the Fire Nation had been taking the water benders from the Southern tribe and imprisoned/killed them all. Which is why Katara and Sokka's mother is dead and why Katara is only water bender in the Southern Water tribe)
ReplyDeleteThat's an excellent point! And yeah, I think Legend of Korra could be the subject of a whole other blog post.
ReplyDeleteI think the Fire Nation raids against the Southern Water Tribe definitely constitute acts of genocide. The goal of the Fire Nation raids was to eliminate all waterbenders in the tribe, which as I argued in the main post constitutes cultural genocide as bending is essential to a nation's culture and identity. But with the constant raids and removal of waterbenders, the Southern Water Tribe was pushed to the edge of extinction which would've been physical genocide as well. The Southern Water Tribe could've very well gone extinct if it hadn't been for help from Pakku and the Northern Water Tribe. The only thing preventing complete annihilation of the Southern Water Tribe was that - with a World War to fight - the Fire Nation didn't want to waste the manpower required to wipe out a small, remote group of people.