I think my biggest issue with the way white Americans talk about Zuko’s redemption arc and even Zutara is I don’t see anyone discussing how the Fire Nation is obviously stand-in WWII Japanese imperialism and how that is a popular RACIST trope in popular American media.

Within the contact of the show the Fire Nation is bad, doing bad stuff. But this is a story being told primarily by white American men.

That context is important when looking at how it portrays imperialism, especially because they added racial coding that mirrors real life.

I wasn’t very surprised at the live action shows casting because I thought the subtext coding was obvious to other fan.

The choice to make the villains obviously Asian. The choice to make Aang’s ethnicity easier to code as white. Katara being voiced by a white woman.

Whether the creators/audience are aware of the subtext or not it still works on us, especially Americans who have a very complicated relationship with Japanese culture since WWII and have long had a villain trope based on a very specific type of anti-Asian racism.

You see this anti-Asian trope even when Asian people aren’t actually in the story. They’re often non-human creatures. They’re the enemy who is both elegant and technologically advanced, their flaw being their hubris and rigid culture traditions they often framed as silly.

They’re often portrayed as emotionless or controlled to the point of appearance so. They’ll may even have makeup/designs that elude to racist stereotypes of Asians “slanted eyes.” Despite their superiority the stories shows them to be inferior to Humans/white.

The men are often portrayed as being feminine coded (by white standards).

This stereotype is even applied to adaptation of books where the anti-Asian stereotype wasn’t necessarily present but the filmmakers using Asian esthetics to communicate the idea of the racist trope.

The trope: an old/ancient empire, wise but arrogant, restrained by seemingly pointless cultural traditions, men are are feminine-coded, portrayed as ethereal and beautiful, but ultimately weak and inferior to to humans/white people, often because of their inflexibility.

To bring this back to AtlA, I’d like (white) Americans to ask themselves, how does the Fire Nation being Asian impact how you react to them and Zuko.? Would they have found them as compelling if the Fire Nation were white people?

Why did the Fire Nation have to be Asian at all?

AtlA is a prime example of how Americans liked to REDUCE complicated systems and their histories in other cultures into one homogenous Big Bad that’s easy-to-understand and judge as inferior to democracy/self governance that doesn’t remotely resemble the reality of America.

To say nothing how Americans convenient like to forget our nation’s history of imperialism.

See: Hawai’i and Pureto Rico to start.

While this thread is primarily addressing white Americans, us Americans of color don’t get off the hook. We perpetuate a lot of these racist stereotypes, and oversimplifications of imperialism, colonialism, and sovereignty that end up harming other people of color.