little things like cultural context
Dec. 8th, 2010 03:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glass_icarusHey, so you know what's awesome about A:TLA? THE UNIVERSE!! I have little use for out-of-universe AUs because omg, why would you AU a premise like that?! This is no Star Trek or SGA or Merlin, okay; hybrid animals or no, A:TLA is not that kind of crackfest. The cultural context is there. Divorcing that from fanworks isn't creating an AU so much as it is dissecting away the skeleton, the skin, the beating heart of the show.
So, yes, it pains me to see things like generic high school AUs, and to hear even third-hand about things like Thanksgiving or Christmas fics- I don't much care for them in any case, but for this canon in particular (and non-Western/USian canons in general, but I won't get into that today) the very idea makes my teeth itch. Trying to plug those things into A:TLA, trying to take the characters we know and love and cram them into a "strictly American" context as opposed to an Inuit/Asian-American one is a severing, an erasure. It removes everything I love about the show and leaves a brittle shell of white mainstream US Americanisms- white mainstream US Americanisms that I can get anywhere else, no less.
There is no shortage of USian high school settings and holiday scenarios; they're both fucking omnipresent in fandom and the media at large. The former is invariably about jocks and nerds and football teams and cheerleaders and various other US stereotypes, and the latter- well. If people stopped making Christmas movies today I would probably still be able to watch one every year for the rest of my life. There is nothing inherently wrong with those stories, and there is nothing inherently wrong with AUing, provided that the characters you're using actually fit- but before you decide to do that, you need to think about what makes the story of A:TLA so special, what its characters need to retain in order to stay themselves, what sort of world they need in order to keep their cultural significance.
Aang is no messiah. Zuko is no Greco-Roman epic hero. Azula's story (and Mai's and Toph's and Katara's and and and) was never written in any western classical canon that I know of. You can't remove their inherent Asian-ness and add it back in haphazardly as flavoring- or rather, you could, but then their stories would ring hollow, false. Their world was built from the ground up, from the inside out; nothing in it was created without a reason. If you don't want to engage with that every time you make something, that's perfectly fine, but please for goodness' sake do not ignore it. The things you write off are not all fantasy.
So, yes, it pains me to see things like generic high school AUs, and to hear even third-hand about things like Thanksgiving or Christmas fics- I don't much care for them in any case, but for this canon in particular (and non-Western/USian canons in general, but I won't get into that today) the very idea makes my teeth itch. Trying to plug those things into A:TLA, trying to take the characters we know and love and cram them into a "strictly American" context as opposed to an Inuit/Asian-American one is a severing, an erasure. It removes everything I love about the show and leaves a brittle shell of white mainstream US Americanisms- white mainstream US Americanisms that I can get anywhere else, no less.
There is no shortage of USian high school settings and holiday scenarios; they're both fucking omnipresent in fandom and the media at large. The former is invariably about jocks and nerds and football teams and cheerleaders and various other US stereotypes, and the latter- well. If people stopped making Christmas movies today I would probably still be able to watch one every year for the rest of my life. There is nothing inherently wrong with those stories, and there is nothing inherently wrong with AUing, provided that the characters you're using actually fit- but before you decide to do that, you need to think about what makes the story of A:TLA so special, what its characters need to retain in order to stay themselves, what sort of world they need in order to keep their cultural significance.
Aang is no messiah. Zuko is no Greco-Roman epic hero. Azula's story (and Mai's and Toph's and Katara's and and and) was never written in any western classical canon that I know of. You can't remove their inherent Asian-ness and add it back in haphazardly as flavoring- or rather, you could, but then their stories would ring hollow, false. Their world was built from the ground up, from the inside out; nothing in it was created without a reason. If you don't want to engage with that every time you make something, that's perfectly fine, but please for goodness' sake do not ignore it. The things you write off are not all fantasy.
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no subject
Date: 2010-12-08 08:43 pm (UTC)What you're describing? *cries inside*
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Date: 2010-12-08 09:40 pm (UTC)Pretty much. ;;
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Date: 2010-12-08 10:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-09 02:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-08 08:45 pm (UTC)\o/
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Date: 2010-12-08 09:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-08 09:09 pm (UTC)o.O Am I even more glad the white_lotus exchange is happening during lunar new year.
Cultural context totally matters! I can't even figure out how some (cracky, in my head) crossovers would work, never mind AUs that take the characters completely out of the A:TLA universe because IDEK how that makes sense.
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Date: 2010-12-08 09:44 pm (UTC)Yeah. In what other canon is there even a parallel for the fucking Avatar, for one? Aang the goofy kid is accurate enough, but Aang as only a goofy kid is... cheapening, to me.
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Date: 2010-12-08 10:31 pm (UTC)Exactly what I thought of when I saw those scrawled marks on the screen at the beginning of M. Night's movie. Those characters are not made up by Mike and Bryan. Those characters have meaning, history, people who use them. To change them into goodness knows what like that...is like dismissing those people.
(Apology for the rant)
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Date: 2010-12-09 03:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-09 12:37 am (UTC)I have no idea why anyone would write a Star Trek high school AU, though I'm totally okay with SGA or Merlin. With Star Trek, though, the politics, institutions, technologies, races, etc, are so rich and diverse and complicated that you can't divorce yourself from the details and still have it be really Star Trek.
But yeah, it's even more true of A:TLA because of the Asian/Inuit influences that get so little recognition in Western media in the first place.
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Date: 2010-12-09 03:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-09 08:33 pm (UTC)I've seen some Christmas fic, but I've also seen fic depicting the Bajoran faith, as well as Julian Bashir as Muslim. Not as much the last two as the first, but at least it exists! IDIC, baby.
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Date: 2010-12-09 12:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-09 03:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-09 01:38 am (UTC)Going the other way? No. Wrong and ugly, for all the reasons you list.
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Date: 2010-12-09 03:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-09 01:38 am (UTC)I think some viewers of A:TLA don't know enough to know that it's not all fantasy.
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Date: 2010-12-09 03:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-09 06:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-09 03:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-10 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-10 09:39 pm (UTC)