Book 1 was so ineptly written that it was fully possible to dismiss non-bender oppression as a thing that never existed and was made up to wipe out benders–and that’s how large sections of the fandom took it, in fact.
And look, Fantastic Racism in general is very easy to get wrong (looking at you, X-Men, Zootopia, too many others to name…) but LoK is particularly egregious in implying that movements for equality are essentially largescale frauds, especially when the writing is inconsistent enough to imply in places that discrimination against non-benders is in fact a problem that exists.
Abrupt fix-it at the last moment in Book 1. We’re not even allowed to experience the full tragedy of lost bending (and like, bending isn’t real so why are we supposed to care again?), that consequence has to be taken away by divine intervention because Korra was sad.
Speaking of Korra, we don’t get to watch her struggle and work her ass off the way we saw Aang or even Roku do in the brief flashbacks we got. She comes pre-equipped with water, earth, and fire at the age of five, and never even has to grow into the spiritual values of Airbending. She had her other three elements taken away and Airbending abruptly came to her because she needed it in her desperate hour. She doesn’t grow through work or by trying, but by being put in danger and pain. Looking back, this substitution of female suffering for hard work and organic development foreshadowed her end of Book 3-Book 4 trauma storyline.
As a tangent, and because I need more people to piss off apparently, this replacement of suffering for work is strongly reminiscent of Rey in the new Star Wars. Both Korra and Rey are willing to work hard, but that’s not how they actually make the most dramatic gains. Either they’re born with their prodigious talents or the work they did put in happens off screen. Their most meaningful gains come from being violated in some way by male characters, by being kidnapped, having their powers stripped, being poisoned, tied up…
I mean this is just a thinly veiled version of rape as a heroine origin story, where the thing that makes a woman truly powerful is not the hard work she puts in but the fact that some man treated her like an object.
Why are creators afraid to let women struggle? Why do we have to be born prodigies who are violated into our destinies? Yes, trauma and the way we face up to it can make us stronger, and I don’t want to take away from anyone who felt empowered by Korra’s or Rey’s stories. But when I see three seasons dedicated lovingly to Aang working to master the four elements, then Korra just getting it within a season because she had her bending stripped after being physically held down, I’m going to be just a little salty at the different ways male and female protagonists are treated.
Raava and Batu were bullshit concepts that used the trappings of yin and yang to express a stark good-evil duality. If you don’t understand what yin and yang are then stop distorting the fuck out of the imagery. And for that matter it’s pretty iffy to impose a very Christian struggle between cosmic good and evil on a universe built on Asian cultures and mythologies.
This show doesn’t even know what it wants to be. Book 2 took a complex and interesting story of a civil war between literal brothers and a moral/political debate about military interventionism, and made it into a kaiju slugfest. While the slugfest was entertaining, what the hell happened to that earlier story? It’s like Book 1 all over again, they avoided actually dealing with the political storyline they set up early in the season by shunting it aside to magic punching.
Bolin’s abuse was played for laughs. I will never not be mad about this. Because male victims of abuse are not already ridiculed enough in real life, right? Fuck whoever thought this was a good or okay idea.
Speaking of abuse, the Water Tribe brothers from Book 1 (not to be confused with the Water Tribe brothers from Book 2) dying by murder-suicide was horrifying. Hey it’s not like victims of parental abuse already feel broken and unworthy to live, let’s totally validate that by endorsing the position that the only way they have to go is death.
The brothers’ fate is such a far cry from the empowering storylines Zuko and even more minor characters like Mai and Ty Lee got escaping and recovering from their own abuse, it’s insulting for them to even exist in the same franchise.
And yeah, lots of abuse victims are assholes! But Azula was 10,000x more memorable and better written than the asshole brothers ever were, and what’s more, hers was not the only abuse victim narrative in her show–she worked as another perspective of abuse victims precisely because Zuko and the others had very different stories. LoK doesn’t have any such nuance. Just blow them up because that’s all they’re good for and we shall never mention them again.
Asami, Bolin, and Mako could have been replaced by sock puppets for all the development they got in the show. They had potential but were so massively underused while the story spent all its energy changing tracks mid-season and lurching all over the place trying to be everything. Why not do something with the characters you already have.
This show has a really big fucking underlying problem with class. The supposedly good people, Korra, Tenzin, Lin, Su-yin, Iroh II and so on are essentially aristocrats, sons and daughters of heroes and world leaders who, in the case of Korra and Tenzin, have entire organizations dedicated to serving and helping them. Their servants and the orphans they graciously take in, on the other hand, are either invisible or become traitors and Big Bads.
I mean while I squeed at Korrasami, I get cynical about it at times and wonder if what really made Asami the endgame mate for Korra and not Mako was that Asami is the daughter of a rich industrialist who inherited everything from her dickish dad, while Mako is an orphan who grew up on the streets.
Even among the underdeveloped trio of Asami, Mako, and Bolin, it’s clearly Asami who did the best in terms of character development at least toward the end, reconciling with her asshole would-be murderer dad, while Mako and Bolin’s far more interesting mixed heritage family was swept under the rug.
Speaking of which, MAKO WAS TOTALLY IN THE RIGHT FOR SNITCHING KORRA’S AWFUL INTERVENTIONIST PLAN TO THE PRESIDENT AND YOU CAN FIGHT ME ON THIS. Both Korra and Iroh II can get fucked for acting like the New Republic was their fucking property and casually trying to plunge it into war. Fuck that noise and fuck those entitled brats.
Too bad the showrunners were too cowardly to follow up on this actually interesting political and interpersonal conflict, but inconsistency and lack of follow-through are pretty much LoK’s calling cards so what else is new.
For me a big turning point was the portrayal of the human zoo and the woobification of Blue Diamond. The human zoo was presented as a fairly good and humane place to live and the human inhabitants as childlike and not suffering too much from their captivity. The one time they were shown to be in pain at the “choosening” their grief was treated as ridiculous and incomprehensible. This leaves an especially bad taste in the mouth given that human zoos actually existed in Earth’s history and were sites of terrible injustice and racism.
Compare this to the treatment of Blue Diamond’s grief over losing Pink Diamond. Her pain, despite the fact that we know she literally owns humans and co-leads an organization that wanted to obliterate all life on Earth, is treated as serious and worthy of empathy, with an actual song and dance about how sad she and Yellow Diamond (the instigator and driver of the plan to destroy Earth itself) are. After the 10,000th time Blue Diamond fan art showed up on my dash with people calling her “space wife” and such, I unfollowed the tag and a bunch of blogs and my SU fandom activity went into indefinite hiatus.
The Blue Diamond arc was the tipping point, but there was also plenty going wrong with SU before that point. The Bismuth arc, for instance, and specifically the confrontation scene where we were asked to identify through Steven with the Diamonds who were her targets, was not well-handled at all. I still like aspects of the show, but I’m too angry at its biases to give it my undivided support.
Also can I just say there’s a really creepy implication behind the Diamonds making human zoos where an unseen gem instructs the humans how they can decide who they can date? I wouldn’t notice the implication if it wasn’t highlighted by the writers and the narrative too. The implication I get is that the humans in the zoo aren’t allowed to say no to this arrangement. ThIs is incredibly nonconsensual and even Greg points this out. He refers to it as the “catch” to this “utopia.”
What makes me heartsick is that the human zoo’s inhabitants having a collective breakdown was a sign of how deeply, deeply broken and fucked up (in many senses) they were by their captivity. Greg first introduced them to the concept of sexual choice and consent. Their mass-“choosening” Greg was the first real agency for them in their lives, in generations even, and I don’t think they literally meant they all wanted to have sex with him. They were reacting to this new-old concept in a way they understood, and their reaction to Greg’s rejection was much deeper than “wah you won’t sleep with me.” I saw it as the painful crack of a shell, the realization that something fundamental was missing from their lives and they had not even known.
So what’s the narrative reaction to this? Inviting us to laugh at these childish, simple peaple (UGH) and using the occasion as an opportunity to tell us how nice their captors are for giving their captives a pat on the head and then keeping them right where they are to have their every move controlled and (possibly, depending on how this choosening crap works) to be raped over and over again. It turned my stomach and I couldn’t enjoy the show like I used to.
Caption: Twitter by Yonhap News @yonhapnews : Head of theater company exposed by #MeToo faints at court sentencing
The head of a theater company, brought to trial after allegations of sexual assault were brought forward by #MeToo exposures, fainted in court after hearing his five-year sentence.
Also the difference comes in to place with the Bible as well. Jewish ppl tend to follow the god of the Old Testament, all powerful, all knowing, vengeful, jealous, and law abiding. Many of the rules Jewish people ahere to come from the Old Testament, observing the Sabbath, not eating of unclean things like pork. God was something to be feared and have limited to no access to. They also follow the Torah.
Whereas Christians tend to weigh heavily on the New Testament. Christians believe in Jesus, and once he died for our sins the veil from the Old Testament ripped in two clearing the way of god and mankind to become one hence the Holy Spirit. God in you. Though most Christians believe in Jesus and what he did and talked about his two rules, many like to dip into the Old Testament to pick up rules that no longer apply because of what Jesus did. Christians use these rules to okay racism, control over women, slavery, kill homosexuality, killing people who aren’t Christians etc. Christians come from the word Christ as in Jesus Christ.
But a few Christians called Red Letter Christians (which I am) only adhered to Jesus spoken word via the red lettering in the New Testament of the Bible. Jesus gave only two rules 1. Love thy neighbor as thyself. 2. Believe in Him. Never during his time on earth did Jesus condemn homosexuality, control over women, slavery, killing because a person isn’t like you, nor racism.
Is that concept of Judaism something told to you by someone who is Jewish? Because Jewish people I know seem to believe god is a punk-ass bitch and they need to fistfight him, more or less. Jewish people have literally put him on trial multiple times, so mainstream modern Judaism seems very different from the characterization of following an all-powerful, jealous and law-abiding god. And for that matter, most Jewish people’s relationship to the commandments doesn’t bear much resemblance to the legalistic adherence to archaic rules that many Christians characterize them as, aided by the Christian Bible itself.
I had a few Jewish friends growing up. They were from a stricter denomination, Orthodox Judaism to be precise. Your friends sound like Reconstructive Judaism. Orthodox don’t believe Christ was the son of god and that he was just a Prophet.
There are different sects of Judaism: Orthodox (adhere to the Bible/Torah strictly, obey the Sabbath and have a gazzion rules to follow), Conservative (adhere to both the Torah but also *live in the real world* like won’t eat pork but work on the Sabbath), and Reconstructive (which as you described your friends are, they believe in Jesus as God’s son, and condemn God’s teachings of the old rules)
Orthodox Jewish people make up just 10% of Jewish people in the U.S., so they are hardly representative (link). That number is 31% in Israel, adding up adherents of Haredi Judaism and religious Zionism, but they are still outnumbered by the 67% of Jewish Israelis who are non-religious and atheist (link). What we would call Orthodoxy does seem to outnumber Reform (3.9%) and Conservative (3.2%) Judaism among religious Jewish Israelis, however. Jewish people have expressed frustration at the idea that Orthodoxy is more “real” or representative Judaism than other denominations (link). The largest Jewish denomination in the U.S. is Reform (which I think my friends are, if memory serves) followed by Conservative, though these terms are not universal across communities. Reconstructionism as far as I can tell does not teach that Jesus is the son of God, in fact according to my research “classic” Reconstructionists reject traditional theism altogether. While Reconstructionism is theologically diverse, I can’t find a mention of any strain of Reconstructionism believing in Jesus that way.
@yinx1 What you are writing here is a severe misinterpretation of Judaism, and Orthodox Judaism in particular. For reference, I am a practicing Orthodox Jewish woman.
Re the original question, in Judaism there is less of a focus about who G-d is and more of a focus on what G-d does. So when Jewish people talk about G-d, it is as the one who created the world, and delivered the Jewish people from Egypt and gave the Torah. Most Orthodox Jews assume G-d is all-powerful and all-knowing, but don’t really focus on that, since it’s less important.
I am so not qualified to talk about the Jewish concept of g-d or even whether there’s just one concept of it, so if anyone Jewish wants to talk about it feel free. I can talk briefly about the Christian God, but keep in mind I used to belong to a fairly conservative Protestant sect heavily influenced by U.S. Evangelical Christianity so this likely doesn’t represent all Christians. I mean my old sect, the Korean Presbyterian Church, recently declared Catholicism a heresy I can’t with these fuckers 😂
Much antisemitism below
So in the version of Christianity I’m familiar with God is a unity and Trinity at the same time, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. He is heavily gendered, translated with exclusively masculine titles such as King. Not so much gendered pronouns though, since Korean doesn’t truck much with them. Jesus, the Holy Son, is considered to be the Messiah and the fulfillment of prophecies by the Jewish prophets and holy books. (I’m still embarrassed about ever believing this, ouch.) Jesus is considered human and divine at the same time, a concept so tricky–much like all this Trinity stuff–that historically they literally had to kill people who didn’t believe it.
The Virgin Mary is NOT a part of the divine and we were taught nothing about there being anything feminine in God. It’s a big beef my particular sect, and probably many Protestant sects, have with Catholicism that Catholics over-exalt Mary. Some even accuse Catholics of worshipping her as a goddess, which I have seen no evidence of but may not be that far from the history of Mary taking over local goddesses as Christianity spread. But at least we let her have sex after she had Jesus, I think most Protestants believe she had Jesus’s brothers and sisters the good old-fashioned way with Joseph. Evidently Catholics believe she and Joseph never had sex and the siblings of Jesus mentioned in the Bible were cousins or step-siblings, something that had me completely agog when I first heard it.
God as I was taught is all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing, a trilemma I struggled with until I couldn’t keep up my faith anymore. I’ve since come to think God could be at best two out of three, but from talking to Jewish friends they hardly grant one out of three which is, like, a pretty harsh grade to give the creator of the entire universe lmao. I’ve also been taught Scripture is flawless and perfect and to be read literally, so the pronouncements of God are not to be questioned ever. Like, not the genocides, not the slavery, not anything.
Re God’s shady past, it was a pretty common line in my church that the God of the New Testament was a kinder and gentler one than the God of the Old Testament, and that Jewish people worshipped the, I guess, cruel and barbaric pre-makeover god who ordered slaughters and kept His people to an unbearably harsh set of laws while our God was kindly and full of love (but still homophobic as hell because the Old Testament suddenly becomes super important then and only then). The event that perpetuated this huge character growth in God was evidently the coming of Jesus/a.k.a. Messiah, because now our sins were all forgiven as long as we accepted Jesus as our lord and savior so we didn’t need animal sacrifices or all those technical laws anymore. Yeah, again, I’m embarrassed I ever believed any of this.
So those are the headcanons of God from my old corner of the Bible fandom. It’s far from universal but fairly widespread, and I believe very damaging between its cultural appropriation, antisemitism, and regressive attitudes toward women and queer people.
Jewish ppl tend to follow the god of the Old Testament, all powerful, all knowing, vengeful, jealous, and law abiding. Many of the rules Jewish people ahere to come from the Old Testament, observing the Sabbath, not eating of unclean things like pork. God was something to be feared and have limited to no access to. They also follow the Torah.
This is a mixture on inaccuracies and nonsense. A fundamental belief in Judaism is that G-d created humans in order to have a relationship with them, and that G-d is aware people make mistakes, and is forgiving, provided that the person does repentance for their actions.
(as an example from Ezekiel: “
Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord GOD; and not rather that he should return from his ways, and live?
“ or Isaiah: “
Let the wicked forsake his way, and the man of iniquity his thoughts; and let him return unto the LORD, and He will have compassion upon him, and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon
“)
Now you can probably say, well what about the times in the Tanakh (what some call the Old Testament) where G-d seemed to act in cruel ways? There are two points that should be made clear regarding that. Firstly, that Jews (not only Orthodox Jews) do not consider the written Tanakh to be the entire Torah, and learn it alongside the Oral Torah – the Talmud, midrash etc. So, for example, when the Torah talks about punishing a person an eye for an eye, the Jewish position has always been that the phrase is talking about monetary compensation. Jews do not read the Torah just literally. The second point is, yes, there are cases where we ask, while we learn, why did G-d do this or that. That’s one of the reasons why Jewish people argue.
An example that I think will illustrate the point I’m trying to make is the destruction of Sodom. Why did G-d destroy Sodom and Gomorrah? (No, it wasn’t homosexuality). The text simply says that there was ‘a great cry’ and that their sins were ‘grievous’.Then G-d tells Abraham what he is about to do. That, in essence, is an invitation for Abraham to challenge G-d, which Abraham does. He tells G-d, to his face, “
shall not the Judge of all the earth do justly?
“ and tells G-d that he can’t destroy a place even if most of the people there are acting wickedly, if there are a few righteous ones as well. G-d agrees with Abraham.
So what was the sin of Sodom? Here the midrash says that the people there hated any visitors or immigrants, who they perceived as coming to steal their wealth, and would torture any visitors or immigrants in horrific ways. In the text itself we see the people of Sodom threatening to gang rape the angels. (Again, the issue here isn’t homosexuality, it’s gang rape)
to sum it up, to say that in Judaism G-d is “
something to be feared and have limited to no access to
“ is erroneous, to put it mildly. Like I wrote above, G-d created humans in order to have a relationship with them. (This is not exclusive to Jewish people.)
There’s nothing wrong with not dating a trans person, which might be motivated by transphobia but is completely your prerogative. What’s wrong is generalizing about trans people. Trans people of the same gender don’t all have the same “parts,” for one thing. If you’re so prejudiced against trans people please don’t date any trans person ever, they don’t want you. What’s wrong is your transphobia, not the fact that you won’t date them.
And like, this idea that trans people are desperate to date cis people and are trying to use social justice rhetoric to make it happen is not only laughably off base, it is a dangerous and violent form of transphobia, especially transmisogyny.
To cis people who say this shit: You’re not all that. You could be the most attractive person to ever live, and spewing this kind of bigotry will turn any self-respecting trans person right off, not to mention most decent cis people. There are no hordes of trans people breaking down your doors trying make you date them. There’s just you, fancying yourself this amazing catch and trying to silence criticism of transphobia by getting super fragile and positioning trans people as would-be rapists–rhetoric that makes trans people acceptable targets of violence, that you KNOW puts them in danger and yet you do it anyway.
Because that’s the goal, isn’t it? The goal is to divert attention from your disgusting bigotry to making trans people even more unsafe, to make them too afraid to date or be sexual or to discuss the hatred of them and their bodies.
I see you. So please, by all means continue to be openly transphobic so the rest of us know whom to avoid.
Signed,
A cis woman.
if trans ppl weren’t desperate to date cis ppl, then trans women would’ve never invented the cotton ceiling or wasted so much time calling us genital fetishists for only being attracted to the same sex.
it’s weird how you guys always go for the argument that trans ppl don’t have the same genital configuration instead of explaining that ppl who aren’t bisexual will still date trans and nb ppl of the sex they’re attracted to. rejecting trans ppl of the sex they’ve never been attracted to isn’t the same as never dating a trans person. lesbians date trans men. het women stay with their mtf spouses. that shit is common.
The cotton ceiling is literally about this exact phenomenon of trans women being excluded as dating prospects because of transphobia. And no doubt there are abusive dipshits who use that to pressure/guilt cis women, but to generalize that to all trans women? Remember how I said what’s wrong is not deciding you won’t date a trans person but generalizing about trans ppl? You’re doing that right here. You’re also disregarding the fact that trans activists themselves have criticized the cotton ceiling and the term no longer has currency, exposing your contention that trans women are inherently rapists for the hateful lie it is.
How each person chooses to identify their sexuality is their business, and if a lesbian dating a trans man continues to identify as a lesbian and a straight woman who stays married to her trans wife still identifies as straight, that’s between them and their partners. Furthermore, straight women have in fact left their marriages after their spouses came out as trans women, so it’s not universally true that straight women stay with their transgender wives–there’s an article where a bisexual woman talks about her wife’s transition and the range of responses to a spouse coming out and transitioning (link). Even women who have always known they were bi and choose to continue the relationship do not have an easy time of it, as she discusses. I have also read of a trans guy’s struggle with his straight boyfriend increasingly losing attraction to him as he presented and passed as more male, a difficult situation for both of them because they love each other very much.
So it’s just not true that all relationships adjust seamlessly to a partner’s transition. Everyone in this situation makes adjustments in their own way, and they are not rhetorical props to use in your facile and false assertion that sexual orientation is always determined by sex assigned at birth.
[I don’t understand why some people act so scandalized by Dukat/Kira. How is it any worse than popular ships like Spuffy or Reylo? Shipping the hero with the villain is nothing new.]
If someone is against Kira/Dukat, odds are they’re also against Spuffy and Reylo. Because those relationship dynamics are horrifically toxic and abusive and the majority of the people who are shipping them are doing so non-critically, with no acknowledgement of the fact that they are abusive and toxic, and also against the characters actual characterization – generally, the male characters are written as conflicted and pained and hurt, in need of love and forgiveness to achieve their redemption, and the female characters are reduced to a prop to advance his arc, giving her none of the characterization that she has in canon.
Kira/Dukat is among the worst of the worst, because of that horrible dynamic – at any given point in the show’s run, within the previous decade, Kira lived at a time where if Dukat demanded it, he could fuck her and she could only say no if she was willing to be executed. Kira lived through a time where literally, she had no option of consent had any Cardassian approached her and demanded that she sleep with them.
Dukat wanting to fuck Kira is, to a Bajoran, equivalent to Hitler, somehow surviving WWII, telling a survivor of Auschwitz that he would fuck her. And I’m not citing Godwin’s Law here, Dukat was literally compared to Hitler by the show’s producers. To the Bajoran people, Gul Dukat is their answer Hitler. The fact that people look at the dynamic between them and say ‘yeah, they totally should be together’ is horrifying, because those people are literally saying that an abuse victim and her abuser should be paired up, generally on the idea that “she’ll make him a better man.”
It is not the victim’s duty to ever be personally responsible for their abuser’s redemption. Ever. And I say this not just to the Kira/Dukat shippers, but the shippers of the above mentioned ships and the ones like it throughout media. These are toxic and abusive relationships when they are about the actual characters in canon. And if you’re making up characterizations wholesale to justify your ship, maybe you shouldn’t even be shipping this one, because it means you don’t actually want these particular characters together, just characters who look like them, but are not based on the actual canon characters.
It may not have been your conscious goal, but that is the effect. This is the kind of rhetoric terfs use to attack people. They did it to me, calling me a rape apologist who wanted lesbians to be raped by trans women (who they don’t see as women, of course), and I shudder to think what they do to trans women if they’d treat a cis person this way. That second part was addressing a larger problem which is why I didn’t put it in my answer to you but in a reblog–it wasn’t just about you, but about the discussion of transphobia in dating in general and how it is weaponized. I thought of making a new post for that reason but trans people’s voices should be centered in this discussion and I didn’t want to go into the whole context from scratch. If you’re more mindful of how this rhetoric is used to attack trans people and make them unsafe, that’s a good thing.
There’s nothing wrong with not dating a trans person, which might be motivated by transphobia but is completely your prerogative. What’s wrong is generalizing about trans people. Trans people of the same gender don’t all have the same “parts,” for one thing. If you’re so prejudiced against trans people please don’t date any trans person ever, they don’t want you. What’s wrong is your transphobia, not the fact that you won’t date them.
And like, this idea that trans people are desperate to date cis people and are trying to use social justice rhetoric to make it happen is not only laughably off base, it is a dangerous and violent form of transphobia, especially transmisogyny.
To cis people who say this shit: You’re not all that. You could be the most attractive person to ever live, and spewing this kind of bigotry will turn any self-respecting trans person right off, not to mention most decent cis people. There are no hordes of trans people breaking down your doors trying make you date them. There’s just you, fancying yourself this amazing catch and trying to silence criticism of transphobia by getting super fragile and positioning trans people as would-be rapists–rhetoric that makes trans people acceptable targets of violence, that you KNOW puts them in danger and yet you do it anyway.
Because that’s the goal, isn’t it? The goal is to divert attention from your disgusting bigotry to making trans people even more unsafe, to make them too afraid to date or be sexual or to discuss the hatred of them and their bodies.
I see you. So please, by all means continue to be openly transphobic so the rest of us know whom to avoid.
L.J.'s Obsessions 