Talking about Raya in appropriation terms is pretty silly, considering who wrote the screenplay, but trying to posit ATLA as the more original/authentic comparison for ANYTHING is certainly even sillier. People who do Media Crit often call TvTropes facile, but it's rich that their Takes frequently fail basic fact checks that a quick swing by TvT could have saved them from.
I mean, I have long said that Ellis is just... not aware of Asian anything, and it really, really shows even to my white, US weeb eyes.
It’s all through her work in covert ways. The one that I remember really bugging me was in her Loose Canon: Death video. It’s an excellent video in many ways! I enjoyed the tour through Bergman-derived death in pop culture. But then she gets to this:
“Another popular concept in recent years is that of there being a bunch of Reapers on like a payroll, and death being this big bureaucratic enterprise.”
Her first example is Dead Like Me, and fair enough. It was pretty popular, and a lot of its fans seemed to find it fresh and new. (Personally, I think this sort of thing owes a lot to earlier trash like Heaven Help Us and Touched By An Angel, but those were more “guardian angel” and less “reaper”.) Then she moved on to Black Butler...
And here we have the problem. Because Lindsay, my dude, death=bureaucracy is like a fucking genre of anime. How did Black Butler end up in here but not Yami no Matsuei or the five trillion other things from Asia in which Hell has hella bureaucracy??? I’m assuming this is coming from Chinese folklore spreading out through successive generations of pop culture worldbuilding. All I know is that I’ve seen plenty of it in Asian and Asian-inspired media, from a bunch of anime series to that novel series by Barry Hughart.
TBH, most people who think they’re doing media crit on Youtube are just straight up morons. Ellis is actually good... but not on Asian stuff, not even Asian stuff that was a hit in the US with people her age.