Leokumi Loser

Figured it was time to update my pinned post, since I'm doing a lot of stuff lately.

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Specifically, apparently they chose to move The Painted Lady into season 2 instead of keeping it in season 3? And I've seen some folks say that they feel it "fit better" in season 2 in the context of seeing suffering in Ba Sing Se, and I'm going to tell you why I think that's a load of bull. I've seen people call the original episode "filler" and I don't think that could be further from the truth. It has a lot to say and all of it is very relevant to the show's overarching plot and themes.

The Painted Lady NEEDS to be in season 3 because it's doing the very important job of world building the Fire Nation. A place that has, up until Season 3, been a sort of boogeyman that is discussed but never seen outside of very small snippets. And it's... mundane. The people there are not monsters, at least not inherently. They're in the imperial core, and that gives (some of) them privileges, but also unique struggles

In The Painted Lady the Gaang stumble across a completely average fishing village in the heart of the Fire Nation. These are people who Katara has every reason to hate. They are part of the Fire Nation, the country that subjugated and colonized the Earth Kingdom, that destroyed her cultural heritage and denied her the ability to learn about that culture and her own abilities, that committed the genocide of the Air Nomads, that killed her mother.

Yet they aren't monsters. These are people who are suffering too. They don't make the decisions. They aren't soldiers. The reason they're suffering is because the Fire Nation is using their river as a dumping ground so they can construct instruments of war, and stealing their food and medicine to feed and heal the army. All to fuel a conquest that the people of this village never seem to benefit from, despite how it has clearly made the Fire Nation as a whole fabulously wealthy and privileged. It shows how even living in the imperial core can be an experience of suffering and oppression. These people didn't want their livelihoods upended, their village destroyed, their people massacred by starvation and disease. They didn't choose this. They had no say in who became Fire Lord, or what the Fire Lord decided to do with that power once they got it.

The Fire Nation is not just destroying the world; it's destroying itself in its obsessive conquest. That's what the first half of Season 3 is trying to portray. There are rich kids in private schools getting educated, but they're repressed and they're stifled creatively and expressively because creativity and self-expression and free thought are the bane of propaganda ecosystems. The poor and downtrodden are easily exploited and oppressed in the service of pushing the war machine forward. The crown prince has a crisis of faith after having been removed from this bubble, experiencing the world without restriction, and then suddenly being thrust back into the bubble and told to go back to playing a part he no longer fully believes in. The Fire Nation captured the Southern Tribe's waterbenders, and in doing so created an enemy that began killing their people from the inside. The Fire Nation's belief that they are better than the rest of the world cuts off avenues for cultural exchange, learning, and growth.

And that's just what it says about the world. The episode also has a lot to say about Katara herself. She has always been compassionate, but there's a massive difference between being compassionate toward people who you have always identified with, and being compassionate toward those you have biases and preconcieved notions about. It's MUCH harder when you're working against bias as a baseline. This episode firmly establishes that Katara doesn't care that this fishing village is "Fire Nation." She doesn't let her biases get in the way of her compassion. She cares that they're suffering injustice and she can do something to stop it. She gives her compassion to them wholeheartedly because she sees them as human beings worthy of dignity and respect, despite her grievances with the Fire Nation as a whole.

And, this is important, that compassion is reciprocated. Not just in The Painted Lady, but in most of these early Season 3 episodes. In The Headband the children at the school choose to protect Aang and give him the opportunity to escape. They didn't know it, but returning the kindness that Aang showed them meant that he wasn't caught and forced to reveal himself as the Avatar too early. In Sokka's Master, Piandao respects that Sokka is forward with him about being from the Water Tribe, and makes his philosophy clear. In The Painted Lady, the fishing village discovers Katara is a water bender. Initially they lash out against her, but they quickly realize that they're wrong to do that. It would have been easy to turn her in and get back in the good graces of the army, but they don't. They choose to overcome their biases and keep her secret to thank her for her help.

The overall effect is to humanize the Fire Nation, and that's very important for constructing a believable ending to this show. If you believe one side is nothing but monsters, or if you depict one side as nothing but monsters, then how do you sell the audience on an ending where Zuko takes power and makes peace? You don't. If they're all monsters then a regime change isn't going to fix anything. You have to show that the Fire Nation has good as well as bad, just like anywhere else, and give the audience hope that the good can overcome the bad.

Moving The Painted Lady to season 2 and setting it in Ba Sing Se completely misses the point of that episode and destroys the original message. You strip it of the world building, you skip the part of it that humanizes the regular folk living under a fascist regime they did not choose, and you remove Katara's opportunity to demonstrate the breadth and unconditional nature of her compassion, and how that compassion is reciprocated, fosters understanding, and finally leads to change.

Sadly I realized that making one 10 hour video was probably not feasible and so I'm gonna have to break it up

Current challenge: overcoming the ADHD to actually source everything properly for the script (look I know I'm right but I come from academia)

Bro really out here like:

Here's the thing I need people to understand about Netflix's business model (and the business model of most of the entertainment industry right now)

Step 1: Greenlight a new show, but because you're nervous that something completely original might bomb, attach a preexisting franchise to it. Regardless of if that IP fits with the story you're trying to tell or not, you can at least guarantee fans of the preexisting IP will give it a shot.

Step 2: Bait the preexisting fans of that franchise into consuming your show to juice your early release numbers and push it to people who have never heard of the preexisting IP before

Step 3: Congratulations! By the time fans of the preexisting IP realize that the show doesn't respect the thing it's wearing as a skin suit, you've already pushed the show to the top so the normies who have never heard of preexisting IP are curious enough to watch it. As long as the show is good enough they will probably stick around long enough to justify making a few more seasons of it so they can continue profiting off of it.

Step 4: Discard fans of preexisting IP because you no longer need them. It's nice for the corporation if some of them like it and stick around, but normies and hate watchers will prop up your numbers from here on out.

In this case it's DMC, but just think of all the remake reboot reimagining recycled things that have come out in the last ten years or so. Studios are terrified of taking risks on new IPs so they just continue recycling the ol' reliables. Sometimes that's fine, because the people making the new thing respect the source material and genuinely want to do a good job, and sometimes it's terrible because they're just making slop so a big corporation's line can go up. Netflix makes slop, and they have for a looooong time now. There's literally directives in Netflix writer's rooms to "write like the audience is going to be playing on their phone the whole time." They don't respect you enough to create content (dare I say art) that they expect you to actually pay attention to. They're creating background noise for you to use as you scroll social media. That's the definition of slop.

It's fair for fans of DMC to be hurt and annoyed and upset by the blatant exploitation done to them by a corporation that was clearly never intending to respect the thing they love. They handed the series to a guy who explicitly stated that he hates that the series didn't die, because the only thing he liked about making a DMC anime is that he might get to be the Godsavior of DMC who we would all bow to and thank for reviving our favorite dead franchise. And he handed it to writers who, even if they did want to respect DMC, were kneecapped by executive directives that boil down to "you don't have to try and make a good show. Just treat everyone watching like phone obsessed zombies who won't even be paying attention."

Can you please explain why my keyboard suddenly looks like this when I’m trying to comment reply?

1) ergonomically uncomfortable when typing because the space bar is so tiny. I don’t need the @ and period constantly at my finger tips. I can go to the secondary menu for @ and double space for period. I usually only see that keyboard when you specifically need to type your email in???

2) I cannot access commas or parenthesis???? I don’t see a question mark in there either