This is Bryan “Big Boy” Konietzko and Michael
Tortelini Dimartino, the creators of Avatar
Following the success of The Last Airbender Bryan and Michael set out to create a more
mature followup series that would introduce nuanced political themes
The only problem is
Mike and Bryan don’t understand political ideologies
Set 70 years after the events of The Last airbender, The Legend Of Korra takes place
in Republic City, capital of the United Republic. A parallel of the industrial capitalism and
cultural melting pot of the United States in the early 20th century.
While Aang and co spent the entirety of The Last Airbender working toward defeating the
genocidal expansionist fire nation to restore balance to the world (and in that case balance
is specifically understood to mean national liberation and peace), Korra lives in a world
without a clear singular enemy. The Avatar is a being dedicated to preserving balance.
But when problems are more complicated than simply Defeat The Big Bad, what IS balance?
Throughout the 4 seasons of the show, Korra faces off against antagonists who represent
their own distinct political ideologies who have risen up as a response to the problems
caused by the rapid onset of this industrial capitalist society. The Boys basically use
this series to play out the ideological conflicts of the 20th century but, you won’t be surprised
to hear the deck is rigged. Let’s discuss our antagonists. Enter the Equalists.
Led by Amon, a mysterious masked figure who we’ll get to in a moment, The Equalists
are a group of non-benders who are organising against what they SAY is a ruling class of
benders who have been exploiting and oppressing them. Their goal is to take this power from
them and build a world where all are equal. Have you figured out which political ideology
these guys represent yet?
Bending in this case serves as an allegory for wealth, and the power that comes along
with it. In our real world most of the wealth and land is held by a small number of people
who are able to exercise incredible amounts of influence over the populace.
And who is our protagonist? Our foil to this revolutionary movement? The Avatar, the Ultimate
Bender. If bending is wealth and power she is Jeff fuckin Bezos. She frequently expects
special treatment and assumes she’s entitled to a certain status as the Avatar, and even
though the conceit of the political ideologies explored in this show is that our heroes must
confront these ideas and determine where they are right and where they go too far, Korra
doesn’t really do the former with The Equalists. She’s dismissive of them from start to finish.
In Amon’s scenes he’s often portrayed like a monster in a horror movie, even down
to the music. He is less a person than a nebulously Bad Thing, he causes only fear in our hero.
Honestly, Amon is made out to be more horrifying to Korra than the Fire Lord ever was to Aang,
who was like 10 years old. Korra has nightmares about him taking her bending away, she feels
a genuine existential terror because bending in this universe isn’t just power, it’s
also a fundamental part of who someone is. The Boys craft an allegory in which socialism
doesn’t just take your wealth it takes your individuality, it takes your very sense of
self.
Here’s where the shortcomings, and indeed the hidden intent behind this allegory begin
to unravel.
Bending cannot be redistributed, you either have bending or you don’t. In reality, wealth
is an accumulation of resources that CAN be redistributed. However if the redistribution
of wealth and indeed of POWER is something you don’t consider realistic, then this
allegory makes a lot more sense. Writing things this way might give us some clues as to how
The Boys view wealth and power which are treated as just a part of who someone is, and it would
be like killing a part of them to take it away.
Amon’s goal is to make people equal by taking the power from the upper class of society
who have undue advantages over everyone else that they’re using for personal profit and
to solidify a caste of people who are a Higher Level Of Citizen. Amon does this by taking
away their bending. And… it’s gone. Of course in the real world parallel, a working
class revolution taking the property, land, and wealth from an upper class of society
has a key difference. That property, land, and wealth doesn’t disappear. It is collectivised
and redistributed. The picture that The Boys paint of redistributing resources is one of
destruction. Much like the Cuban exile who complains that Castro took all their families
mansions, they only view the TAKING. The part where these resources continue to be used,
possibly in more useful ways than they were before, is invisible to them. From their perspective
they were robbed and that’s the end of the story.
When thinking about their perspective we start to put together a clearer image of the understanding
The Boys have of socialism, of resource redistribution. There is no collectivisation, there is no
putting land to use for the good of the people, or even for the good of someone else. It’s
just gone. There is only a theft. The Thing ceases to exist after that point. If that’s
how you perceive wealth redistribution of COURSE you’d oppose socialism, by this understanding
its only goal is to unfairly take things from people for no reason and to no advantage of
anyone. And indeed our protagonist is the person who has the most to lose from this.
You’ll find people who have this perspective on socialism don’t seem to be as critical
of the relationship between the employer and the employee however, in which much of the
value produced by the actual labour of a worker IS stolen for the enrichment of a small number
of people. Although even in THAT case that value doesn’t vanish into thin air. The
form that Amon’s allegorical wealth redistribution takes is one of wealth destruction, one of
making everyone poorer out of a dogmatic pursuit of “Being Equal” And if you’ve ever
heard an opponent of socialism try to explain why socialism is Bad And Evil you’ll notice
that’s how nearly all of them view any efforts to make our economic model more democratic
and fair. They leave out the part where the incredible wealth seized from the ruling class
is actually put to use to better society and meet people’s needs.
Amon is painted as JEALOUS of the power and status of benders rather than truly committed
to creating a society free of this caste system for the benefit of all. He is constantly depicted
not just by how other characters speak of him and the equalists but by his own words
as someone who just has a personal grudge against benders. Here the struggle for equality
is portrayed not as a struggle against a legitimate ruling class, but as a hate group who just
has an Unjustified Bigotry against benders. All talk of systemic oppression is neglected,
in fact we see very little actual oppression of non benders at the hands of benders. We
know some bender crime gangs are extorting non bending shopkeepers but this doesn’t
indicate the systemic class system the Equalists imply. We know the council is made up exclusively
of benders but this is never discussed or confronted in any way, and we certainly don’t
know that nonbenders are being kept out of it either explicitly or by more societal means.
We can ASSUME that but the show has so little interest in legitimising the motivations behind
this HUGE revolutionary movement that we kind of have to just take their word for it that
they’re systemically oppressed. And since we’re only going on their word it becomes
incredibly easy to delegitimise their movement by having them constantly be seen to just
Personally Hate Benders.
And in the end Amon turns out to actually BE a bender.
Perfectly lining up with the anticommunist myths that reliably crop up about every leader
of every socialist country there’s ever been, that they are secretly rich, that the
wealth they took from the ruling class of their nation disappeared… right into their
pockets. That communist leaders are in fact part of the wealthy bourgeois class themselves,
that the equalist leader is a bender himself.
And the moment the Equalists see what he really is they’re disillusioned. Because their
movement wasn’t based on a genuine need for systemic change caused by their material
conditions it was just based on Hating Benders. Because the Boys wrote them that way. This
implies that communist movements are moralistic ones. That they support working class power
just because they like them and think they are Good And Correct.
This Is Freddy “The Beard” Engles, he and his pal Karl kinda wrote the book on communism,
quite a few books in fact. Engles was a factory owner. A boss. At no point have organised
working class socialists turned around and said wait a minute Engles did WHAT, well fuck
it then let’s call the whole thing off. That could only have happened if communism
was simply based on workers personally hating the rich for no material reason. And that’s
the version of events The Boys peddle to us with The Equalists and Amon.
Amon is, like so many socialist leaders have been according to the anticommunist narrative,
a grifter who is only riding the waves of this liberation movement to secure power for
himself and his wealthy allies. The greatest fears that the capitalist and capitalist enthusiast
tries to sell us about the communists, is that they’ll do what capitalists are doing…
right now. That’s the worst case scenario they can imagine, that the socialists will
simply replicate the status quo.
This also echoes the tactics used to cleanly explain away other antagonists from other
works who actually have political ideas that might make a little too much sense if the
writers aren’t careful. Killmonger in Marvel’s Black Panther is a great example. His hostility
toward Wakanda derives from an anger that they stood by while colonialism enslaved africans,
and killed millions of indigenous people to enrich the rulers of the settler state. He
wishes to use Wakanda’s exceptional futuristic technology to empower anticolonial armies
to decolonise the world. Holy shit, that’s awesome. So what’s the catch? Well he heavily
indicates that he expects to rule this new decolonised world as a king, recreating power
dynamics of the past and potentially not putting power into the hands of the people he claims
to want to liberate. And on a personal level he is shown to consistently be violent towards
women, on screen, so we KNOW he’s still a Bad Guy.
Thing is, this isn’t a valid criticism of these ideas. If you’re coming from a position
of wanting to communicate that “yeah socialism has some good ideas but here’s why it goes
too far” you need to actually critique socialism, you need to explain why the goals and ideas
of socialist tendencies have problems. What they’ve done instead is INVENTED THEIR OWN
PROBLEMS that can then be used to invalidate this character and their ideas. Much like
violence against women is not a tenant of anticolonial politics. Secretly being a member
of the ruling class is not a tenant of any socialist tendency, destroying all the wealth
you seize from the ruling class is not a socialist tendency, this is just a Bad Thing you’ve
speculated might happen, because you WROTE YOUR CHARACTER TO DO IT.
That’s not a legitimate political criticism, that’s the laziest form of propaganda. And
The Boys aren’t done.
This is Tarloc.
He uses the threat of a revolutionary uprising and the demonisation of an out-group to consolidate
power by playing to people’s bigotry and fear. Tarloc is
a fascist. As soon as he’s able to assemble a task force with the support of the police
to crush the revolution, putting down this marginalised group who is struggling for equality,
Tarloc’s task force basically declares martial law, turns off the power in non-bending neighbourhoods,
imposes a curfew on them, and begins mass arrests. We see our first real bender oppression
of non-benders through Tarloc, near the end of the season.
Fascism often rears its head to put down socialist revolution, purging the political left is
one of the top priorities of the governments put in place by many a fascist coup throughout
history. After Tarloc is defeated, we learn that he and Amon… are brothers.
That’s right. Fascism and Communism. Are brothers. It was horseshoe theory the whole
time. Our two antagonists are conveniently painted as two sides of the same, dangerous,
radical coin. Solidifying the status quo of republic city as the “balanced” solution
to the societal problems brought up throughout the season. There is no alternative. Sorry
pal.
This hegemony of neoliberal capitalism as the default and central ideology is further
compounded by the revelation that Tarloc and Amon are the way they are not because they
had real political convictions or were trying to solve genuine societal problems, but because
they were both deeply traumatised by an abusive, criminal father. Pathologising people who
deviate from the status quo. You don’t like the way things are? There must be something
WRONG with you.
Amon’s revolution is Not established to be a response to real systemic
oppression A cover for his personal hatred of people
in power Only a means for him to gain power
The result of psychological trauma
Our antagonists are written off as corrupt, dishonest, and deeply damaged. And their ideas,
dismissed.
So what did our protagonist learn from Amon? Did she come to better understand the plight
of the oppressed in this society? Did she begin to question the power structure in any
meaningful way? Not… really.
So we’re left wondering. What is Korra’s solution if Amon’s was wrong?
The only thing that changes for non-benders is the first non-bender president is elected
at the start of the next season. There isn’t really any systemic change and everyone just
kinda… moves on. Further reinforcing that the oppression of non-benders wasn’t really
that substantial to begin with. That’s the message The Boys are sending. Socialists are
making up or exaggerating oppression as a means to gain power.
Luckily the non-benders have a president now and as we all know, the moment a member of
a marginalised group becomes president, all systemic oppression they experience disappears.
Right? Right?