Don't see The Last Airbender.

[feuervogel]

It opens this weekend. Much has been said around the web, about the whitewashing of the characters and the changes they've made to the story.

Supporting this film, by giving the studios money when you go see it, will only encourage them to continue making racist casting decisions. (Did you know that 83% of Paramount's planned films for this decade have white, male leads?)

I'll leave you with a comic by Gene Luen Yang, author of American Born Chinese, on why he won't be watching the movie.

(Hint: it has to do with the casting call for Aang's role: "12-15, male, Caucasian or any other ethnicity." If you don't see how this wording expresses a preference for a white actor, there's little I can do to convince you. But go read the extensive information at Racebending.com anyway.)

Comments

[leora.livejournal.com]

It just seemed so cruel to the penguins. But darch says they are sledding penguins, so it's okay. Mainly though my issue is how much time is taken up with goofy kidness that I find dull. But I chalk it up to the show being aimed at kids, and I like that it does a lot of good things. I really hate the tendency of shows to think that writing for kids means writing crap. So, I do appreciate when a show realizes you can aim complex and good content at kids.

I've been thinking about the race changes, and really there are two things that bother me most. One is the casting call specifically trying for Caucasians in a story that in no way justifies that, and second casting good primary characters as white and secondary characters or evil characters as not-white.

They could have done some radical race changes that I think would have been fine. Let's say that they cast all of the water tribe as Indians (people of descent from India). That would be a change, but it'd keep a consistent race for the water tribe. It wouldn't make much sense on our Earth to have Indians living at the poles, but given that it's a fantasy setting and not our Earth, I would be okay with that. I'd assume they cast the siblings first and then kept that as the water tribe ethnicity.

It's the deliberate aiming to whiten plus allowing a net effect of whiter characters being better that bothers me far more than any changes in race. Plus the idea of caucasian or any other race... as if there are white people and then there are other people. I actually did have a view of race as binary at one point, although it was that there are white people and there are black people and everyone was one or the other. However, I was in Elementary School at the time, these are adults. (I considered Asians, Hispanics, and many other people to be White, which is part of why I can tell you how many Black kids were in my classes but I have difficulty knowing what the distribution between Caucasian and Asian was.)

[feuervogel]

A:TLA is, essentially, about genocide and hegemony and imperialism. Aimed at 12-year-old boys. (And there are a lot of things that many people wonder how they got past the censors.) I liked a lot of the humor, because it took what could be a heavy, gloom and doom story and lightens it up. Gives a few glimmers of hope.

The factors you point out are the two biggest ones that racebending focuses on. There are set photos and stills of Our White Heroes standing in front of a group of Inuit. Which just... no.

[summer-jackel.livejournal.com]

I managed to catch a couple scraps of the cartoon on Youtube, and I think I need to figure out how to see the rest of it now. It looks really fascinating!
...shame about the movie being crap.

[feuervogel]

Netflix has it, I think. I don't have Netflix, so I can't check.

Or you can buy the DVDs. Amazon has them for $30 per season (3 seasons). There's a new collector's edition out, which (according to sources) is the same as the complete season collections, but with an extra disc of goodies.