fridgrave

it might sound familiar to individuals who have read or discussed sexualised violence. i’ve taken from there. the idea of the Perfect Victim who “never did anything wrong, didn’t provoke anything from the attacker” backfires, because no real human being who’s gone through sexualised violence actually fits the stereotype. (maybe a dead victim, but only that) same with survivors/victims of imperial tyranny. none of them are perfect--not those who have fully reflected upon the larger system at play--and thus every single group consists of Faulty Survivors, aka the scapegoats.

in essence, this film shows you what the liberal thinkers (oxymoron, but i’ll allow) consider to be the answer to imperial violence and genocide. suppression. moving on. doing nothing with one’s rage, serving the future without properly burying or rebuilding, or at least mourning, the past.

to my utmost chagrin, the vessel for the liberal bullshit in this abysmal unaborted embryo of a film was Katara. she, at every turn, wedged in dialogue lines that never addressed Aang's central concerns, only reminded him he was the Avatar, and thus functionally ignored his pain. this is not a romantic partner who listens actively, if ever. there is a difference between candour, which is useful, and obliviousness, which is no better than than the absence of a backbone.

we’ll circle back to this. i’ll divert.

the Perfect Survivor vs the Faulty Survivor. doesn’t take a PhD to know i mean Aang vs Tagah. that’s how the narrative positioned them against each other, made them into foils that are meant to demonstrate how a “righteous” traumatic response compares to its “psychotic” counterpart.

the implication, of course, is that only the righteous model of behaviour deserves to be regarded with respect; that a survivor with fangs and self-possession and barbed wire for nails is not welcome in the colonial ecosystem.

in order to discuss this further, let us compare the foils via the parameter that is used by the film itself as the main point of reference: the traumatic experience. not to be confused with a juvenile measuring of appendages. this is a material breakdown, not Oppression Olympics.

Aang.

found out about Avatar Status at 12 and ran away;

was frozen in ice and woke up to find his entire people had been exterminated, with him now Sole Survivor;

had to move forward and end Hundred Year War, as well as sustain nomad philosophy in himself because no one else would preserve it.

Tagah.

lived his life as nomad student under Avatar Sonam and thought himself inferior for being non-bender;

was gifted airbending by Sonam, officially becoming part of bending aspect of nomad culture;

was sent along with comrades to spread message of peace, saw them slaughtered and could do shite about it due to vow of non-violence.

(i may have shat the bed somewhere here by obscuring other relevant details, but such is my comparison at this point in time.)

while the traumatic events both characters went through may share obvious commonalities, the way the characters’ psyches rendered their respective events--the way they were experienced in the mind--differs widely.

circumstances demanded from Aang a swift moving on, almost a swallowing of feelings because he had an impossible time constraint within which to save the world. on top of that, he was the very last of the nation. keeping true to non-violence became a mechanism through which he connected back to his culture, since he was absent during the day of genocide.

Tagah, meanwhile, marinated in his sorrow. he ruminated, even. he wasn’t absent, and in that fact lies the core of his trauma. he was present and witnessed the genocide firsthand. he didn’t have that weighty layer of being the last of anything, but he did have a sense of powerlessness that originated from non-violence.

here, a glaring contrast can be noticed. Aang’s situation demanded pacifism as part of the necessary conservation measures, and that of Tagah demanded immediate action that may have felt counter-intuitive to the nomad philosophy as Aang knew it--and as we, the viewers, knew it.

the film did recognise this dichotomy and did attempt to play into it, but did so with an outrageous laziness and incuriosity. all we got, really, was a dialogue line from Tagah to Aang during a fight:

I watched my friends die! Where were you?! You ran!

nothing after that. no battle of wits, no realisation from anyone, no debate or argument that would have dug into the heart of generational trauma incited by genocide. we move on and beat up Tagah, a man severely villainised despite having a compelling backstory and all the proper ingredients for a rich psychological portrait. of course, we also animate a brainless gag in the Spirit World because lip service to fanbase matters more than substance. brilliantly done. terrible job, supershit.

moving on.

on the face of it, the manner in which Aang processed this severe crack in his life was written in ATLA The Series as more palatable anyway, which i do not believe to be a coincidence, but instead a reflection of brykos’ true psychology, or at least a willing lack of awareness around the shite they are supposed to have treated with care. this is no surprise: the financial prosperity of people in the imperial core will always depend on wilful blindness, while the global south suffocates and tries to be polite as its citizens die in excruciating agony.

now, i do not propose that Aang as a character isn’t legitimate; i’ve no gripe about it in isolation. it is realistic, for there may be no limit to the kindness of the human heart. but the central question here is this:

what does it say about the broad narrative of ATLA that Aang’s foil was created not just as a deep exploration of a different type of survivor, but instead as an insultingly superficial cautionary tale on how not to revolt?

stripped to the bone and devoid of flowery bullshit, this film strives to tell a story about a “psychotic” survivor who’s supposed to stand inadequate against Aang’s inoffensive, perfectly liberal existence.

this takes me to Tagah.

was he psychotic?

first part of answer (Small Brain). now, of course he was. the film constructed him to be perceived that way.

second part of answer (Big Brain). but it’s one of the instances where input of ideas clashed with the final output. seeds were planted of a thoroughly interesting character motivation, and right there were reduced to dust in a laughable manner--not even for a reason that justifies the decision. it was done, pathetically so, only for Tagah to accommodate a disgustingly primitive western narrative about the morally clean path of standing up to the oppressor in a specific, preapproved way. never ever try to shake the boat, much less sink it! are you insane? what’s with your purity testing? why can’t we all just be in a dialogue with each other!?

you get the point. concretely, how did Tagah behave? what were the missteps of him? how were they framed?

he was very cordial with Aang and showed him the absolute beauty of a union between two skilful airbenders. positive. it was an “in” for him to win over Aang, who had already been easy enough to win over.

at the same time, shady. not half-subtle about it, either. his speeches were crass and reminiscent of any ideology built on Arbitrary Trait Supremacy (take the zionist-jewish or white flavour of that as examples). negative. very negative, but also ridiculously framed. (i’ll be elaborating)

had a pact with the Equaliser Group stand-ins of the film. negative. makes no narrative sense, but likely written so on purpose in order to cement the audience’s perception of Tagah. the Denied losers had no care for the ancient Air Temple Aang visited at the beginning of film, which is very clearly meant to put off the viewer. Airbender Survivor + Alliance with Ignorant Pieces of Shit = Strong Antipathy.

attacked Katara and all the other members of the team. negative. obviously and absolutely. again, makes no narrative sense, but likely done to make Tagah’s cruelty more prominent and on the nose.

do we notice something mighty peculiar, class? the only reliable way to make Tagah psychotic and inadequate was to sloppily try and give him traits and behaviours of the oppressor group against which he was meant to rally.

but here’s the rub in that, lads, and here’s also where it gets real.

he’s not part of the oppressor group. he’s a fellow surviving airbender, one of the two left alive in the entire world of ATLA. beyond the optics of framing him in this specific way--which are dogshite--what sense does it make?

what sense does it make to have a person with his experiences spew hitlerite horseshite? to try and mimic after zionists? but the inconsistency there--which is also overlooked by liberals all the fucking time--is that zionism became a project unto itself long before WWII, and the Holocaust, came around. which means that even the shady idea of “victim takes on traits of oppressor as trauma response” may not have merit when the trauma in question is something as singular in nature as genocide.

the desire, not to mention the ability and the resources to do so, to subjugate and establish a higher order with Supremely Organised Human Beings is more than an ugly trauma response to oppression. it is a means by which the oppressors themselves ensure their dominance, never the oppressed who simply want justice and proper reckoning, at times cruel and gorey. but the empire, of course, will always gain a lot from mischaracterising the resistance that fights against it. that’s what this film does in a nutshell, with Tagah as its instrument. whether it means to do so or not is truly secondary, to my own mind. intention does not outweigh consequence. what matters is that these talking points and judgements are so baked into even the art-oriented, so-called liberal western minds, to the point that one may never find nuanced, thoughtful anti-imperial discussion anywhere.

let’s clarify. severe violence against the oppressor, even severe attempts at gaining independence from the oppressor, will never hold a candle to the imperial machine that crushes entrails and bones.

with that in mind, what message does this film deliver via conflating Tagah’s survivor identity with clearly oppressor-coded behaviour? can it realistically be anything but what i’ve stated above, anything but the harmful mishandling of what it means to have witnessed genocide?

further on, what sense does the framing of Tagah’s connection to the Denied make? what would have been the purpose of leading them? he would have been, and was, unstoppable with the staff, so there was no practical, nor ideological, reason to team up. but yes, we’ve got to create a mental image of Air Temple Desecration and connect Tagah back to it, because reasons. because audience manipulation. it’s subtle, but it’s there. considering the hitlerite little oopsie in the first half of film, nothing else is left but to judge in bad faith. (not that i ever pursue good faith--i’m not that charitable. BUT! bff argues the screenwriters might have simply been overall lobotobised with the Tagah - Denied bit. fair. won’t be mad if that’s a popular perception.)

circling back to Katara as the vessel for spineless liberalism. i won’t be dying on this particular hill, but consider in your minds whether it could have been strategic that the film chose a woman of colour who lived under Fire Nation’s heel her entire childhood so she could specifically throw inane adages at Aang about how she knew what he wanted, she knew how hard it was for him. indeed, it would have been an amazing confrontation if it had actually been written as one. if he’d lashed out properly and fully, if she’d then apologised to him and promised to never step over the line again, to never presume anything. to never blame him for wanting to stay a little bit in the past.

no, no. what we do is we animate a wide shot of the Air Temple Island at the arse end of Republic City. what does this prove about the politics of in-film Katara? that she helped build a lifeless rock without inner history? how does that cancel out the absolute nonsense she spoke to Aang, and to Tagah as well?

oh! the way she barked at Tagah! what a properly cringe moment! no indigenous people were in the writers’ room! (if there were? they should have done better. or, which is more likely, they were not listened to. for that, i am sorry.)

basically, Katara tokenised Aang’s identity as an airbender. by the script’s design, she turned her relationship with him and proximity to him into rhetorical weapons that would allow her to argue with an actual airbender about what it meant to be an airbender in the correct way. Tagah didn’t torture Team Avatar enough for this.

let’s zero in on that--the correct way to be an airbender. that is the gist of the dichotomy of Perfect Survivor vs Faulty Survivor that i had droned on about. the narrative sees Tagah’s survival tactics as impermissible and offensive, comparing them to those of Aang. but the thing is, as i outlined far above, that their tactics are different because their experiences are fucking different. written properly, Tagah would have been not a generic villain, not a generic and uninspired combination of Zaheer and Unalaq, but very much his own person with robust justifications for his unorthodox, much fucking better written actions.

instead, though, the script had him do two completely drunk-on-your-arse things that served no grander purpose in his plan:

try to annihilate Aang’s team

and team up with the Denied.

the Denied issue was tackled above. now, the killing spree upon Team Avatar only worsened Tagah’s chances of indoctrinating Aang towards his side, as he logically wanted. but no. we animate that anyway. we watch him do that, and we watch Aang suffer in a cheap turn of events. because reasons.

of course, one could argue Tagah didn’t actually want a true collaboration with Aang, and only used him for his own ends. in this case, a question:

why make Tagah an airbender in the first place, if his identity as one ended up being this useless in the plot, in his relation to Aang? this easy to omit, even?

this went so far that Katara’s arguments at him weren’t rendered as prideful and bigoted and offensive, but, to the contrary, were essentially defended.

now that i’m all out of juice, i’ll give a tease of a semi-competent writing strategy here.

what would have made more sense is this:

make Tagah laser-focused on Zuko and Toph as two representatives of the groups he, at this point, perceives to be a real imperial threat. Zuko as a very recent memory of annihilation through Aang’s retellings, and Toph as a rudimentary memory from his own time. build it logically, and extend it. in fucking fact, there were grounds for that already in the script, with the question Tagah posed to Aang:

How can you stand the presence of the Fire Lord? [...] Yet he still wears that crown.

nobody gave any argument to those words. nobody responded. the plot breezed through a very fair concern, a very fair question, with a usual Pony Rainbow Whatever MLP response. fucking utilise things from time to time, would you? fucking be ruthless in your writing, would you?

i’ll review.

we create an airbender character with a unique and radical view of how to best proceed with the protection of airbenders as a people. we even write that this character had experienced a genocide firsthand, and then arguably was re-traumatised upon finding out that his descendants in the future were all but exterminated. and we demonise his drastic responses, we write them awkwardly and don’t give them enough weight, enough time to develop. to add insult to mutilation, we stand him up against our good ole survivor whose temperament and personal history have become great breeding ground for unconditional tolerance regarding discomfort and offence. perhaps not overtly, but we do pontificate on what it means to survive, and what it means to do so gracefully. because, for some reason, that should matter in a context of genocidal legacies.

then, like a primitive organism, we feel absolutely confident in making this piece of... not art. posturing. it is a piece of posturing with a rare instance of soul in the granular amounts.

who are we, the writers, then? what is our endgame? what is the name of the system that birthed us?

right. i think we’ve reached the last leaves of this post. there are many other things to dissect that pertain to all this subject matter, but i’m all out of petrol.

among other things, these are some important points i have not addressed:

the fact that Tagah, in essence, fucking killed Aang at one point.

the fact that Tagah disintegrated by the end, which for fucking sure was re-traumatising for Aang.

the fact that the film, above all, is a spineless cashgrab, because it told a story that became of no consequence to the actual ATLA-LOK canon. no ripples from this film will be felt anywhere except for my therapist’s office.

the fact that we’re supposed to be okay with the way things ended concerning Sonam’s staff. we’re supposed to forget that Tenzin would not have suffered in his life if Aang had utilised the thing fucking properly. bravissimo.

the supershit of the Denied. what a failure to explore the bender - nonbender discrimination axis.

Sonam’s spineless behaviour and lacklustre reign as her age’s Avatar. there is a parallel to be drawn between her and Roku the Ash Maker. both dumped their bullshite on Aang and said peace out bitch!!!

Sokka’s tonally poor role in narrative. he was there only to be the comic relief. i need to kill brykos and engage in ritualistic cannibalism.

that’s that, then. curtain call. for the concluding words, hold on to these core questions:

who are we, the writers, then? what is our endgame? what is the name of the system that birthed us?