i'm sorry but it was so jarring to see them all using this stupid fantasy language in the ATLA movie.
like dont get me wrong i love a conlang im literally a conlanger but this isnt a conlang this is a cipher of english
^ the phonetic inventory of english
when it was announced, i thought this 'Avatarian' was just gonna be for Seven Havens, and i was already sad about that. The dilution of culture, the loss of real Chinese calligraphy in favor of essentially English. I was worried that Seven Havens was gonna feel too much like generic western fantasy instead of the Avatarverse...
But now that it's in the Avatar Aang movie, it really makes no sense, because in Korra they literally use Chinese characters!
so in the Aang movie literally everything is in Avatarian, there's not a Chinese character in sight. It's a retcon.
I understand there's an argument that Avatar pulls from a wide variety of cultures and so it deserves its own 'neutral' writing system rather than being 'biased' towards Chinese. But replacing the Chinese characters with the made-up English cipher serves to erase culture from the universe, not add to it. (Not to get too in the weeds here but imo this is a case of Sinocentrism being used as a pretext for Sinophobia...)
If they want more cultures to be represented, they could just include other scripts! They could have included writing in the air temples in Tibetan or Sanskrit or Pali, for instance! That would be incredible! But don't completely erase hanzi from the world! Chinese influence is still a part of Avatar, and Chinese characters and calligraphy are a huge part of the history of writing in East Asia! It just gives me a feeling that they want to lean away from Chinese culture, which is really disappointing.
As a Chinese-American kid, I grew up on ATLA. To me ATLA is very quintessentially Asian-American. It was a gateway to my dad introducing me to wuxias and Chinese dramas, and the influences that these had on Avatar are very clear! I love seeing the work of translator and calligrapher Dr. Siu-Leung Lee in the original series and Korra, and I wish that this was carried forward in the new stuff they did! It just feels like doing it is too hard for them. Asian culture is too hard. Let's just create our own knock-off fantasy version that we own, so we can do whatever we want with it.
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