Ok, so the interracial relationship on the show is described as “forced” and immediately compared to another interracial couple who supposedly have no chemistry.
More bashing on an interracial ship, then shipping two white people who don’t exist in the same universe…but maybe this is all a coincidence. I mean, I don’t even follow Arrow, so I don’t know who Diggle and Lyla are, they couldn’t be…
Sometimes I think about the fact that there is exactly one time that we hear someone express surprise at the fact that Aang–the Avatar– and his companions are children. And it’s in the second episode, from Zuko:
From an out-of-universe perspective, this makes sense. And it wasn’t something that surprised me when I was a ten-year-old in 2005 when A:tLA first aired. One of the tenants, I think, of adventure children’s television is that there is a degree of wish fulfillment. Children want to be taken seriously as agents, and so it makes sense from that vantage point, that everyone takes the Gaang seriously as agents except the person portrayed as an antagonist.
But, I think this also makes sense, heart-breakingly and unlike other children’s adventure television, from an in-universe perspective. This is a world ravaged by bloody, bloody war for a hundred years. A world in which child soldiers are commonplace. We see countless examples of this throughout the series:
When we meet Sokka–fifteen-years-old and in-charge of security for his village–he is training small children to be soldiers. This is played off as something of a laugh, but if Aang hadn’t returned in the second episode, I think we’re supposed to think that Sokka very much would have tried to lead these little boys into battle.
Jet and the Freedom Fighters, who practice guerrilla warfare (fairly successfully) and regularly raid Fire Nation outposts, are children. Jet, who I think we are supposed to assume is one of the eldest of the group, is sixteen when he dies (according to the Avatar wiki).
The Kyoshi Warriors are one of the elite-most fighting force in Avatar World, eventually taken seriously by the Earth Kingdom military and given military jobs. And the general of the Kyoshi Warriors, Suki, and the eldest member of the group (again according to the Avatar wiki) is fifteen. She can’t have always been the eldest member. I’m willing to bet the older women are sent off to war, and Suki becomes the eldest member and the leader by default. (Much like Sokka–probably why they connect so well).
In Zuko, Alone, the soldiers in the village threaten to send Lee off to join the army at the front, and based on the mother’s reaction, and what we see of him when he’s tied up, this doesn’t seem like an empty threat, and it’s probably not the first time this has happened to children in the Earth Kingdom in villages like these.
I could go on.
So of course, after living in a world of child soldiers like these, no one is going to bat an eyelash to learn that the Avatar–perhaps the ultimate non-Fire Nation soldier–is twelve-years old, and his companions aren’t much older. When Aang starts to bring this up himself to Yue, for instance, Yue doesn’t seem to understand. He’s the Avatar, he has to save them, she insists. Who cares if he’s a child?
But the Fire Nation Army isn’t filled with child soldiers. It doesn’t need them. Fire Nation children are in school. It is adults that make up the Fire Nation Army.
And, (with the exception of Azula and her gang), when we do see a Fire Nation child attempting to take on the role of an adult member of the military, he isn’t taken seriously. (E.g. Zuko, and the way Zhao brushes him off.)
So of course it is only Zuko, who grew up in the absolute center of the Fire Nation, and, though he is banished, hasn’t really seen much of the reality of the war until he meets Aang, that looks at the Avatar and remarks in surprise that he is a child.
(If anyone is interested, I wrote a fic that deals with a lot of these themes. It can be found here.)
This is not only an excellent analysis but I think it also ties in to one of the greater themes of the show as a whole, namely these kids are entitled to a childhood even in a broken world:
“Normally we would have told you of your identity when you turned sixteen, but there are troubling signs. Storm clouds are gathering.”
“I fear that war may be upon us, young Avatar.”
In their fear the Air Nomads were going to make Aang the first child soldier against the Fire Nation. In their rush to skip four years they lost a hundred. Aang rejects that role early on and constantly rejects it even as he accepts his responsibility as the Avatar.
He reminds Katara that she’s still a kid. When he connects to Zuko the first time it’s through the language of all the fun he used to have with his friends in the Fire Nation. Team Avatar takes the time they need for vacations and to make new friends. In doing this they start to heal the world person by person.
Aang most succeeds as Avatar when he finds balance between childish things and adult responsibilities. This rubs off on everyone. Sokka goes from desperate to be taken seriously to someone who sets himself up for a laugh, because he knows his own strength. Zuko spends season 1 as an imitation of Ozai, ends the show as someone who can lead a country and smile openly at a goofy drawing.
They are all still very young with too many responsibilities on their shoulders. But they’ve also carved out an important space where they can be children with each other. All things in balance.
I started playing my TFA blu-ray for the first time in… almost a year? And it turns out new roomie has NEVER SEEN A STAR WARS MOVIE in her life. EVER. So she started watching it with me, and I had to explain a lot, and it was kind of hilarious. “OH, so that’s where ‘May the Force be with you’ comes from!” as just one example. She recognized the name Chewbacca too.
Anyway. We get through the exciting Jakku flight scene, and Finn asks Rey if she has a boyfriend. Roomie says, “Oh, he likes her!”
And then when Finn confesses that he’s a former stormtrooper and asks her to come away with him, and Rey says, “Don’t go!”, Roomie says, “Oh, she likes him!”
Sounds par the course. With these blockbuster franchises, romance is much like what you said about originality: seek the lowest common denominator, then go lower. Comprehensibility beats cleverness every time.
This is true. The director of Jeepers Creepers 3, Victor Salva, is a convicted child molester. He sexually assaulted a child while on the set of a movie he directed back in the 90s. He filmed the assault and was also charged with possession of child pornography. Don’t support this movie or give it a cent of your money. It’s already hard enough for sexual assault victims to come out with what happened, especially if their abuser has a lot of power and money. Don’t add on to the trend of forgiving celebrity rapists. STOP GIVING THESE MEN FREE PASSES.
don’t scroll past this with a wave of the hand, this is 100% real.
now, for some reason, child molester doesn’t elicit the type of outrage that i’d hope it would, so i’ll put it a different way. victor salva had sex with a minor, therefore he is a rapist. salva committed statutory rape, and he does not deserve to be breathing, much less have his movie watched.
He only has 522$ raised so far. Even if you can’t donate i think it’s a campaign worth sharing and boosting.
From the campaign page:
“my name is nathan forrest winters. i am a child sex abuse survivor. known for my role as casey in the 1987 horror film ‘clownhouse’ written and directed by victor salva known best for the films ‘powder’ and the ‘jeepers creepers’ series and being the man that sexually abused me for six years of my childhood. towards the end of ’87 salva was convicted of 5 counts of child molestation and sentenced to three years. of which he served a mere eighteen months at a treatment center in napa valley california. i am currently outlining a nation wide speaking tour at various key and pertinent venues to raise awareness, educate and provide information and tools to stop sexual child abuse at all levels. i am also in the beginning stages of starting a non-profit organization “we R their voice ” to be the voice for our children who virtually have none in our judicial system. to bring this epidemic out into the forefront. we as a whole in this country have been too afraid to face such an unspeakable topic and continue to turn a blind eye. which has allowed these predators of our children to go unchecked for too long. just a few of many disturbing facts is that every 98 seconds an american is sexually assaulted. every 8 minutes that victim is a child. meanwhile only 6 out of every 1,000 perpetrators is convicted. united victims and survivors, parents and children can make this world safer. education is prevention and the more light we shed on these darkest of crimes, the fewer shadows there will be for them to hide.”
We are the part of the American history that they want to erase. No wonder they will never let any monuments symbolizing the power of black people to appear.
L.J.'s Obsessions 