Snippets

Bryke is back at Nickelodeon in a big way.

⚡️💙⬇️💙⚡️

Mike and I are heading up a new studio dedicated to expanding the Avatarverse. Here’s our quote from EW.com (link for the full article):

“It’s hard to believe it’s been 19 years since we created Avatar: The Last Airbender. But even after all that time, there are still many stories and time periods in Aang’s world that we are eager to bring to life. We are fortunate to have an ever-growing community of passionate fans that enjoys exploring the Avatarverse as much as we do. And with this new Avatar Studios venture we have an unparalleled opportunity to develop our franchise and its storytelling on a vast scale, in myriad exciting ways and mediums. We are exceedingly grateful to Brian Robbins and Ramsey Naito for their enthusiasm and respect for the Avatar property and us as its stewards. From the start, they’ve supported our ambitious plans and created a positive, proactive environment for us. We’re excited to be back at Nickelodeon where Avatar began, doing what we do best in the biggest way possible. We can’t wait to build the great teams and productions to make all of this fantasy a reality.” – Bryan Konietzko & Michael DiMartino

Before I get to the crux of this statement, I would like to make it clear that I am very aware and appreciative of the fact that I am in an exceedingly fortunate position, and that the following issues are indeed good problems to have — even more so now that we are in the grips of a global pandemic and a cratering economy which have left millions unemployed. With that crucial context, here is the big news from my little world.

Michael DiMartino and I recently chose to leave Netflix’s live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender, the series he and I created together in 2002. We will have no involvement in the project moving forward. This is probably the most difficult decision I have ever made. But there is no doubt in my mind it was absolutely the right choice.

There are many types of racism. On one end of the spectrum, there are the Ku-Klux-Klan-type of white supremacists, who literally wear their vile philosophy on their sleeves. At the other end of the spectrum are the lazy racists, which include most of us. We do not want to be racists, yet out of laziness and inattention our deeds result in discrimination and the perpetuation of demeaning stereotypes. We hire people who look like us, who speak with the same accent like us and who have the same cultural biases as we do, and we mark them in our writings as Korean or Algerian.

Lazy racism is unintentional racism, yet racism nonetheless.

I have recently called Adam Rutherford a racist. What I mean is that he is a lazy racist, like the rest of us when we do not pay attention. The index of his book lists many dozens of contemporary figures. Yet only two people are listed by nationality. He does not refer to Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, Tony Blair, or Ewan Birney as English. He does not refer to Francois Jacob as French. He does not call Lionel Messi an Argentine professional footballer playing for a Spanish team, nor does he refer to Bill Anders as an American astronaut. Rutherford does not even refer to Svante Pääbo a Swedish-Estonian scientist working in Germany.

There are two people who are singled out by nationality: Susumu Ohno is referred to as “Korean,” and murderer Abdelmalek Bayout is described as an “Algerian living in Italy.” Incidentally, not distinguishing between a Japanese name and a Korean one is also a sign of lazy racism.