Disney Buys LucasArts

So the big news of the moment is that Disney has bought LucasArts, makers of classic games like Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion/Day of the Tentacle, and Full Throttle.

I've seen some people express concerns about this purchase, though they seem to be mostly focused on some other property Disney picked up in the deal. Apparently there's a movie studio attached to LucasArts? I dunno, it doesn't appear to have been involved with much of anything interesting.

Anyway, back to the important part of the story, there's a lot of potential here that I don't think people are seeing. Here's a short list of awesome things Disney could do with these properties:

• Sell Monkey Island back to Ron Gilbert. He's already asked for it on Twitter, and a few people are kicking around the idea of a Kickstarter to buy the IP and fund a new game.
• Give Monkey Island to the Epic Mickey team. I don't know whether the results would be good, mind you, but they would definitely be interesting.
• Green and Purple Tentacle as recurring guest stars on Phineas and Ferb. I would never stop watching that.
• A new Full Throttle cartoon from the makers of Gravity Falls.
• A Maniac Mansion 3D CGI movie. Preferably Tim Burton directing, but there are other possibilities too.

Seriously, the ideas write themselves! There is no end to the awesome things that Disney could do with this IP they just picked up.

Or hey, I bet you could make a good movie set in the world of TIE Fighter! Just as long as they don't muck it up and add a bunch of Disney-fied crap like space wizards or heroic teddy bears or something.

Guest Post: Convention Bestiary: “That Guy- Actually Guy”

This post was written and sent to me by Charles Dunbar of Study of Anime, who is awesome. I, being significantly less awesome, then proceeded to sit on it for several months. Sorry!

That Guy isn’t a single entity or person, but rather an entire genus of congoer that is seemingly everywhere, and nowhere, at the same time. Owing to a very powerful camouflage that shields them most of the time, it isn’t until That Guy is upon you that you actually see/experience their attack. But fret not- most of These Guys can be easily dealt with.

 Today’s “That Guy” is kith and kin to Conversation Guy, but his method is a tad different. 

Identifying Features: None, which is how this one gets the drop on you. While there have been attempts to single out this particular type of congoer, most of them are either Conversation Guys or socially awkward Basement Dwellers. Actually Guy can mirror the above congoers, but likely will be unidentifiable until he springs into motion.

Habitat: Like Conversation Guy, Actually Guy makes his home in panel rooms, but will not hesitate to insert himself into random conversations in hallways or the Dealer’s Room, or anywhere really, that congoers congregate. 

Notable Behaviours: Again, like Conversation Guy, he will attempt to speak with you during panels. But that is where the resemblance ends. Actually Guy will often attempt to display his “superior” knowledge of the topic at hand by talking over the panelist, interrupting everything they say with an “actually...” followed by his own explanation of the topic at hand. Attempts to shut him down are either met with awkward silences, or with him repeating his “information” and occasionally expressing his disappointment that “he knows more about the topic than the panelist,” but never actually attempting to either host his own panel or contribute to constructive dialogue. Post-panel, they are often overheard to repeat their dissatisfaction loudly to anyone in the room or outside it before vanishing into the crowd without providing tips or helpful pointers. Many a novice panelist has decided to quit paneling because of Actually Guy, at which point he will move on to a different panel and repeat his tactics. 

Effective Countertactics: Few that actually work. Most of the time Actually Guy is also a Troll, and will relish any attempt to shut him down. Unless the complete room rises up against him (at which point he will often make snide remarks about the “ignorance” of the audience) or a staff member intercedes (again, making snide remarks about said staffer) there is no effective way to shut him down.

That said, any panelist well versed in debate will have a solid chance to strike back. It should also be noted that Actually Guy also possesses strong arrogance and a powerful ego, which fuels his motivations (which often lie in the realms of self-gratification through trolling inexperienced panelists and attendees). This will also cause him to make mistakes during the course of dialogue, which any skilled panelist can take advantage of. Puncturing holes in his arguments, or disproving them outright, can potentially turn off all future “contributions” to the panel.

Cautions: There are Actually Guys who actually DO mean well. These will often be less abrasive, and genuinely willing to assist the panelist after the panel with plugging up holes in the material. Normally they can be identified by responding to polite requests to save comments for the end, or even through observing methods of polite interjection (like raising a hand and waiting to be called on), followed closely by comments phrased as questions. These types of Actually Guys should be treated respectfully, because they might actually know more about the topic at hand, and are in the panel for perspective’s sake. 

It should also be noted that some Actually Guys have the potential to either turn hostile or become Panel Jackers. These must be dealt with swiftly, or the repercussions will be dire for all those involved. This subtype of Actually Guy is also far more likely to engage in conversation crashing than other types.

Brave Princesses, Avatars in Refrigerators, and the Trouble with Tomboys

So, I watched Brave last night, and the season finale of The Legend of Korra this morning. Both were pretty good (Korra was better), but both made me a little uncomfortable when I thought about them from a feminist perspective.

Here's the problem. The kyriarchy tells us that there are two gendered sets of virtues, and that masculine virtues are better than feminine virtues. For example:

• Masculine: Strength, Courage, Honor, Determination, Combat Skills
• Feminine: Compassion, Prudence, Negotiation, Calm, Emotional Intelligence, Domestic Skills

The kyriarchy wants us to believe that men are more inclined to have the masculine virtues, and that the more masculine virtue you have, the better a man you are, while women are more inclined to have the feminine virtues, and the more feminine virtue you have, the better a woman you are. This is a lie; virtue is virtue, variation within a gender is greater than the differences between genders, and there aren't two and only two genders, anyway.

The plot of Brave is, in large part, about exposing and rejecting this lie (within a nice safe distant-past-foreign-country-fantasy-world, so that we can pretend it's not a lie our culture tells, too). Merida has the "masculine" virtues in great measure--she's pretty much your classic generic-issue Spunky Tomboy Princess Cliche--while her mother Elinor is a font of "feminine" virtues. Of course Elinor is trying to stamp out Merida's tomboyishness and teach her feminine virtues, and Merida rebels, and so she runs to the Sea Bear Witch and makes an ill-advised bargain and yeah we've seen this movie before. But it's pretty!

And yeah, okay, kudos for exposing that half of the lie, but... ultimately, Merida very slightly for one moment adopts a couple of "feminine" virtues to resolve the main subplot, but the climax of the movie entails Elinor needing to take on and learn to appreciate "masculine" virtues in herself and her daughter, and the ending shows Elinor embracing and joining in Merida's wilderness romps. Which is fine and all, but it's still saying that the "masculine" virtues are better than the feminine virtues. It's not saying "Be yourself," it's saying "Be yourself as long as you display traditionally masculine virtues; if you have traditionally feminine virtues, change."

But the movie has a much bigger example of genderfail: Every single male character, without exception, is a violent, idiotic slob, and it is always up to women to reign them in. It's Sitcom Sexism, right down to the fat unkempt slob of a husband with the slim, perfectly groomed, conventionally beautiful wife. By Sitcom Sexism, I mean misogyny disguised as misandry--look at pretty much anything by Stephen Moffat or Seth MacFarlane for some great examples. Men are depicted as buffoons with no control over their lives and no capacity for self-consideration, either barbarians or henpecked wimps, while women are depicted as controlled and controlling, civilizing influences that bring order to masculine chaos through their negotiation skills, emotional intelligence, and outright manipulation. On the surface it seems to depict women as superior to men, but note what it adds up to: Men can do whatever they want, without consequences, because no one expects anything better of them, while women do all the work of maintaining relationships, homes, and in this case kingdoms, and get nothing for it, because they're expected to do it.

------

And then there's Korra. Korra has not lived up to the depth of characterization of its predecessor, because it has a lot less room to do so--twelve episodes to tell a complete story with a large cast, instead of the 60-plus of Avatar the Last Airbender. Korra herself is the only character who's had any real development, and she's... well, she's strong, courageous, moderately honorable, and an incredible fighter, and admittedly fairly compassionate toward allies and bystanders (but most definitely not enemies), but she clearly doesn't possess much in the way of "feminine" virtues. Her lack of emotional intelligence is even a major element in the two biggest subplots, the love triangle and her struggle to master airbending and the spiritual side of being the Avatar.

But there's two major differences from Brave in Korra's tomboyishness: First, no one ever presents her with a gendered notion of virtue. No one ever says, as they do to Merida, "Your behavior is acceptable for a boy, but you're a girl." Some people are trying to teach her the "feminine" virtues, but not because she's a girl; they are depicted as things everyone needs to learn. The second is that, because "masculine" and "feminine" virtues are not presented as opposites (because they're not--you can be both courageous and prudent, determined and capable of negotiation, and so on), she does not have to choose one set over the other and one set is not depicted as superior to the other. Instead, there aren't two sets--just a bunch of different virtues she needs to acquire.

The bigger problem in Korra is the Women in Refrigerators issue. For those unfamiliar, Women in Refrigerators is a term coined by comic-book writer Gail Simone to refer to the frequency with which female characters in superhero books are killed, maimed, or depowered. Among other things, Avatar and Korra are superhero stories; Korra is a legacy character, the Silver Age Flash to his Golden Age Flash (or perhaps more appropriately, the Renee Montoya to his Charlie Sage).

And what happens when we switch from a male hero to a female hero? The old villain's goal was world domination through genocide; the new villain's goal is stripping everyone of their superpowers.  And surprise surprise, Korra gets depowered. And then a man saves her. And then another man kills him. And then a third man gives her her powers back.

Oops.

------

I'm inclined to be charitable to Korra. Yeah, the depowering thing is pretty fail-y, especially given that the skill used to depower her is also a specialty of the woman who fails to heal her, but because she didn't yet have one of her powers he wasn't able to take it. Reaching rock bottom enables her to tap her spiritual side and airbend, and then later it enables her to summon Aang to restore her bending.

More to the point, these are people who gave us Toph. And Katara, and even Azula in her own way. They've earned it.

Brave, on the other hand? It would take a lot of charity to get the taste of Sitcom Sexism out of my mouth, and frankly, Pixar hasn't earned it. Try again, guys.

Katsucon 2012: Analyzing Anime 101

I think I still owe some AUSA panels, and I will try to get to those soon. In the meantime, here is one from earlier this month at Katsucon 2012 in National Harbor, MD.

This was an experiment, blending panel and workshop elements. I think it was pretty successful, but needs more audience action at the beginning. Below is the first part; click to go to Youtube and you should get a playlist with all four parts.

Convention Bestiary: The Glomper

While glompers have become rare in recent years due to cons increasingly cracking down on over-exuberant behavior likely to cause injury, they still occasionally turn up. Of all creatures in the Convention Bestiary, the glomper is among the most physically dangerous, so vigilance remains important despite its increasingly endangered status.

Identifying Features: Glompers are typically younger and female, but both older and male glompers exist. Identifying a glomper by site is extremely difficult, but they are easily identified by their behavior.

Habitat: Convention center and hotel hallways; anywhere that cosplayers congregate.

Notable Behaviors: Upon sighting a cosplayer dressed as a favorite character, the glomper will immediately emit a high-pitched squeal and attempt to hug the cosplayer, without regard for personal space or safety. There is at least one documented instance of a glomper tackling a cosplayer at the top of a staircase, throwing both of them down it.

Effective Countertactics: The only certain way to avoid glomping is to not cosplay. However, if you still wish to cosplay, your best option is vigilance. If you hear the distinctive shriek of the glomper, locate the glomper, wait for them to start their attack run, and then step out of the way. If you're lucky, they will go down the stairs instead of you.

Cautions: Do not attempt to use poor hygiene or direct violence as a defence against glompers. Poor hygiene is simply not effective; anyone unobservant enough to tackle-hug someone at the top of a staircase is not going to notice even the most powerful con-stench. Violence has a tendency to get one thrown out of cons, even when in self-defense against random glompings.

Katsucon Post-Coma Report

I think Katsucon may have been the most tiring convention I've ever been to. I slept for fifteen and a half hours after I got home! I don't think I've ever slept that much straight through without chemical assistance or being seriously ill.

Anyway, Katsucon was fun, but had serious flaws. Let's start with...

The Good

Some of the good things at Katsucon were the typical good things at any con: Seeing con friends like Charles and Aaron and Tom (no Jeff, bastard went to the Doctor Who con instead), feeling like an accepted member of a community even when surrounded by strangers, not feeling threatened when people I don't know start talking to me and I don't know why, all that stuff was out in force. Also, I don't think I heard any meme kids all con--the only time anybody tried that obnoxious call-response shit was when Charles did it to make a point about fan culture.

Some high points specific to the con:

• I never went to the video rooms or manga library. As I believe I've mentioned before, I don't go to cons to watch anime or read manga, because I can easily (and much more cheaply) do that at home. I will only go to a video room or manga library if there's nothing else to do, and that never happened at this year's Katsu.
• We Con, Therefore We Are: A debate of sorts between an elitist jackass who was offended that anime cons don't consist entirely of scholarly gentlemen sipping tea and smoking fine cigars whilst comparing and contrasting Tezuka's linework to Miyazaki's, and Charles, who argued (rightly) that cons are and should be more about the fandom than the anime itself. Very entertaining, and the elitist jackass argued his point well despite being massively wrong and facing quite a bit of hostility from the crowd.
• My Panels: All of my panels went off really well. Analyzing Anime 101 was a resounding success, despite the terrible time slot, and I am immensely happy with it. I am already making plans for a less anime-focused version to pitch to multi-fandom cons. Judaism and Anime went well, but still ran a little short even with the new content. I will have to add still more before I try again.
  As for my panels with Viga, the Madoka panel was immensely successful but we were unable to film it. We promised we would record a version at home and put that up on YouTube, but we will probably not be able to until some time in March. Anime of the West managed to blow some minds and hopefully help people understand that animation is animation no matter where it's from. Finally, My Little Panel: Friendship Is Magic went amazingly--our revised material was strong, our discussions of pony biology and the Cutie Mark Crusaders generated a lot of response, and the audience was extremely enthusiastic (some of them waited in line for two hours)!
• Charles' and Aaron's Panels: I finally got to see Charles' Pokemon panel after missing it two cons in a row, and it was everything I had hoped for. He even gave Vanillish some much-needed love! I also finally managed to catch one of Aaron's panels (two, actually, The Life and Works of Hideaki Anno and Evangelion, WTF) and both were quite good.

The Bad

Despite having a lot of good, there were some serious issues with Katsucon this year, and they pretty much sum up to one word: Scheduling. A lot of people (including at least one guest I know of) had complaints about the scheduling of their panels, which seemed to be done without any regard for when might be an appropriate time (the middle of the night is not a good time for any panel that expects its audience to think!) or the effects on panelists and attendees. For example, my panel schedule was:

• 2 a.m. Sunday: Analyzing Anime 101
• 7 a.m. Sunday: Judaism and Anime
• 9 a.m. Sunday: Madoka
• 11 a.m. Sunday: Anime of the West
• 1 p.m. Sunday: MLP:FIM

Kindly explain to me when the hell I'm supposed to get some sleep while giving those five hours of panels? And seriously, Analyzing Anime at two in the morning? What were you thinking, Katsucon!? I basically had to miss busiest part of the con because I spent Saturday afternoon and evening asleep in preparation for this absurd schedule.

The Ugly

Yes, there was worse than the scheduling fail. Much worse, and like the bad, it all comes down to one word. In this case: Communication.

Katsucon staff failed, hard, at communicating even basic information to the people who needed to know it, right from the start:

• Panelists were not informed of their panels until two weeks before the convention. E-mails to con staff prior to this received no response or unhelpful responses. I understand that this was because they had not yet completely nailed down the guests, but there must have been some point well before the two weeks mark at which they were sure that they would have time for at least X panels, and they could have accepted that many panels while waitlisting an additional Y they hoped to have room for, like Anime Boston is doing this year.
  
• The printed schedule handed out at the beginning of the con was an unreadable mess. Every con I have ever been to uses a grid layout: one axis shows the rooms, the other shows the time, and at the intersection you find the name of whatever event is in that room at that time. Katsucon has always had particularly unreadable grids that make it hard to tell whether a panel is on the half-hour or the hour, but this year was worse by far: There was no grid at all, just a list of panels organized by room.
  A list would be bad enough, but organizing it by room elevated the schedule from hard to use to impossible to use. People use the con schedule either to plan their day in advance or to decide where to go right now. In either case, the question is "What is happening at a particular time?" Only after you make that decision do you then want to know what room the event is in. Organizing by rooms makes answering the second question much easier, but at the price of making answering the first question a ton of work. I am quite sure I missed out on panels I might want to see because it was too much work to figure out when they were and whether they conflicted with other things I wanted to see--not that it matters, because thanks to my ridiculous schedule, I probably couldn't have seen them anyway.
  There was an online schedule using the grid format, but as the hotel did not have free wi-fi, it was only accessible to people with smartphones. There was no other attempt to communicate the schedule: No schedule grid posted as a sign at the information desks, and no signs in front of rooms showing the individual schedules for each room. Which leads to my next point...
  
• Con staff did a woefully inadequate job of communicating schedule changes. The print schedule did not reflect changes made even before the con started, but they didn't actually tell anyone that unless they asked. They updated the online schedule with any changes, but did not provide updated print schedules at the information desks, which most cons do. Schedule changes during the con were not announced in any form except online--since there were no schedule signs, those could not be updated, nor did anyone post signs on room doors, as I've seen other cons do. Our My Little Pony panel was rescheduled from noon Sunday to 1 p.m., and not only did no one tell Viga and I, no one told the 60+ fans waiting in line for it until Viga and I saw them and started making noise. The former is an annoying oversight, but not disastrous. The latter is completely unacceptable. Oh, and when I asked why we were rescheduled, I got either the blatant lie or the egregious error that it was to give us a bigger space, even though we were still in the same room!
• The convention did not have a feedback panel at the end. Apparently, buried in the unreadable mess of a schedule, there was one on Saturday afternoon at some point, which is just absurd. How can people give feedback on the con when half of it hasn't happened yet?

Conclusions

I'm still mulling this one over. Viga and I are seriously considering not coming back to Katsucon next year. She wants to make MagFest her winter con, and I am frankly fine with having one fewer con to pay for. On the other hand, if not for the shit-tacular scheduling that forced us to get a room for the weekend, this would have been nearly as cheap as AUSA, so the cost savings wouldn't be that much if I felt reasonably confident that I wouldn't have such bad scheduling. So it's up in the air right now.

Convention Bestiary: Meme Kids

Identifying Features: Meme kids have the same distribution of gender, class, ethnicity, and clothing styles as con attendees in general. However, they are nearly always in the 14-21 age range and without adult supervision. Often they can be identified by their dead, lifeless eyes, manic grins, and slight drool, indicative of their lack of capacity for original thought or anything resembling normal human conversation.

Habitat: Convention center and hotel hallways, as well as the streets immediately surrounding the convention.

Notable Behaviors: Shouting out call-and-response memes is the only form of communication of which meme kids are capable, and they indulge in it continually. Their cries have been theorized to be a form of asserting membership in the herd, or possibly some sort of echolocation. Suggestions that it may be a mating cry have been met with horrified outrage, as it implies the possibility of meme kids reproducing at some point.

Effective Countertactics: There are only two known ways to stop meme kids, and both can only be accomplished by convention organizers and staff. The first is a zero-tolerance policy: Anyone caught shouting memes has their badge taken away and is immediately expelled from the convention. The second is to simply price the convention out of meme kids' range, either by making tickets very expensive or by holding it at a very expensive location. The second strategy has the unfortunate side effect of preventing lower-income fans from attending, so the first is heartily recommended.

Cautions: Despite all indications to the contrary, meme kids are still considered human beings by most jurisdictions, and so indiscriminate slaughter may result in arrest, jail time, even execution or expulsion from the convention! Even in those few jurisdictions that rightly classify teenagers as wild beasts, animal cruelty laws may still apply. Above all, do not try to make meme kids or point out that they are incredibly annoying. If they were capable of reasoning, they would not need to constantly parrot memes, and the entire point of their behavior is to get a response--yelling at them is simply rewarding them.

Convention Bestiary: Conversation Guy

Going to be starting something new. It is, perhaps, a little mean-spirited, but very cathartic. I am going to start chronicling the... let's say "less than perfectly socialized" people you tend to meet at cons. Since I mostly go to anime cons with the occasional cross-geekery or sci-fi con thrown in, the list will be skewed in those directions. For our first entry, let's all meet...


Conversation Guy

Identifying Features: Conversation Guy is always a white male in his 20s or older, usually bearded and overweight, and always poorly groomed. There is no particular reason why these features should be so, but I have encountered many different Conversation Guys, and the patterns are consistent.

Habitat: Any panel, but especially ones to do with a technological or science-fictional topic.

Notable Behaviors: Conversation Guy's primary characteristics are a total lack of consideration and an inability to distinguish between a panel and a personal conversation. Conversation Guy will thus respond to every single thing the panelists say as if the rest of the audience were not in the room and instead he and the panelists were hanging out together, shooting the breeze.

Effective Countertactics: Snark. Conversation Guy is typically desperate to prove his knowledge of the panel topic, so puncturing his fragile little ego is a great way to shut him down. If you are in the audience, and Conversation Guy is disrupting the panel, ask him why his name isn't in the program, since clearly he thinks he's on the panel. If you are a panelist, try pointing out that you don't go to his panels and talk over him.

Cautions: Do not set your Conversation Guy sensors too high! Bearded, poorly groomed, overweight white dudes and people with poor social skills are both fairly common at cons, and so is the intersection. Don't immediately jump down the throat of anyone who, in a moment of passion, responds to or corrects a panelist, especially if the panelists seem okay with it! On the other hand, if an audience member seems to be talking more than any of the panelists, you have a case of Conversation Guy on your hands. Shoot to kill; you are doing everyone a favor.

Analyzing Anime 101 Notes

Below are my notes for my upcoming Analyzing Anime 101 panel at Katsucon 2012. The aim of the panel is to provide an overview of the techniques and approaches of textual analysis as applied to anime. It assumes a level of knowledge equivalent to a high school education, which is to say no prior knowledge of textual analysis (hence the 101).

I welcome comments, suggestions, and criticisms, as I want to do the best job I can of presenting this. In particular, if anyone can suggest good introductory books or books for laymen on general analysis, film criticism, or anime criticism in specific, I would be most appreciative--all of my knowledge comes from the textbooks I used in college, which were expensive to begin with and now mostly out of print.

Warning: Major NGE spoilers, minor spoilers for Madoka, Cardcaptor Sakura, and Slayers.

Analyzing Anime 101

What is Analysis?

• All art is collaborative process: Even when there is a singular artist, there are still two people involved in the experience of art: the artist and the viewer.
• Most viewers usually are passive consumers of art, with the interpretation occurring mostly automatically and subconsciously. Few works provoke the general viewer into actively trying to construct meaning, usually by aggressively posing questions and providing ambiguous answers.
• Analysis is the active, conscious participation in art. It consists of taking conscious control of the process of interpreting art, observing one's own automatic interpretations and subjecting them to test or intentionally trying different interpretations.
• Analysis begins with "close reading," the careful and attentive study of a text with a focus on identifying what is actually in the text itself, rather than what is constructed by the viewer.

Why Analyze?

• Because it is fun: the more effort you put into the things you enjoy, the more you enjoy them. Good art becomes better; bad art becomes tolerable, or at least instructive.
• Because it adds depth to your experience of works: The passive consumption of a 22-minute episode takes 22 minutes. The analysis can take as long as you want it to, which means you get to enjoy it that much longer. You can also discover things to appreciate you never knew were there.
• It gives you new things to think about, talk about, and explore: Analysis can lead you down new and interesting paths to learn about things you never thought you would be interested in, and give you insights into other works. For example, I learned about Kabbalah primarily because I wanted to understand Neon Genesis Evangelion. I learned about Jung's use of alchemical symbolism because I wanted to understand Xenosaga. And when both showed up together in Fullmetal Alchemist, I understood.

Basic Concepts

• Art as Process, not Object
  
• Multiplicity of Perspectives
  
• Close Reading
• Pattern-Forming
• Interrogating the Text

Art as Process

• Any work of art begins as thoughts, feelings, images, and concepts in the mind of the artist(s).
• The artist expresses these thoughts, feelings, etc. through some sort of medium, for example a painting, a book, or film.
• The chosen medium informs and contains the expression. There are things a painting can do that a film cannot, and vice versa. This is why, when a film is based on a book, adhering too closely to the book often results in a bad film, even if the book was good. Because the artist's expression is filtered through the medium, the text is already moving away from being a pure expression of the artist's intent.
  
• The viewer experiences art through the medium.
• The viewer interprets and filters the art through their own ideas, experiences, and current state.
• As time passes, the viewer's imperfect memory further distorts the text, while at the same time the viewer continues to interpret and re-interpret it each time they think about it. The viewer constructs an interpretation and understanding of the text, forms opinions and emotional responses, and creates the final form of the experienced text in the viewer's mind.

Perspectives on a Text

• Doylist vs. Watsonian: Who wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories? In real life, Doyle did. But in the stories themselves, they are accounts by Watson of his adventures with Holmes. The Doylist perspective on a text looks at it from outside, as an artificial work created in a real-world context, and all the characters and events are creations of the author. The Watsonian perspective on a text looks at if from within, as a reality of its own, and all the characters and events are real, with motivations and causes. For example, a Doylist explanation of the last two episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion might be that they were a cost-saving measure forced by the studio's near-bankruptcy. A Watsonian interpretation might be that they represent Shinji's attempt to interpret events beyond human comprehension. A spectrum, rather than a binary, and most of the following perspectives can be placed on that spectrum.
  
• Psychological Perspectives: Focus on the characters. What drives them? Why do they make the choices that they do? What are their personalities, and how do they reflect the way real people behave and think? For example, one can view the magical girls in Puella Magi Madoka Magica as exploring different responses to child abuse: Kyoko oscillates between acting out and denial; Homura detaches and tries to shut down her emotions; Sayaka becomes violent and self-destructive. A mostly Watsonian approach.
  
• Historical/Cultural Perspectives: Focus on the time and place in which the work was created. How does the work reflect the concerns, ideas, and controversies of its time? Does it embrace any trends in other works from the same time/place? Attack such trends? For example, Sailor Moon blends the traditionally feminine maho shojo genre with elements of the traditionally masculine sentai genre. One can argue that this was a trend in the 90s of adding shonen elements to shojo series and vice versa. A mostly Doylist approach.
• Social/Values Criticism: How does the work reflect the social and political structures and conflicts of its time/place, or how can it be applied to the social and political structures and conflicts of the viewer's time/place? What values does the work express and explore? For example, one can explore Cardcaptor Sakura from the perspective of queer criticism, and look at how it depicts both a romantic reciprocal relationship between two young men (one clearly bi and the other gay or bi), and a one-sidedly romantic relationship between a lesbian or bi young woman and her apparently straight friend. Tends to blend Doylist and Watsonian perspectives.
• Death of the Author: Not a perspective per se, but a concept which cuts across and influences many perspectives. The Death of the Author is the notion that, since the work in the author's mind is not the same as either the text or the final product in the viewer's mind, statements by the author about the meaning of the text carry no more weight than any other person's statements. More broadly, the only facts, as far as analysis is concerned, are the contents of the text itself. Everything else is interpretation. It is a historical fact that Hideaki Anno said that the Christian and Jewish symbols used in Neon Genesis Evangelion were just thrown in to look cool and exotic to Japanese audiences, but the only fact as far as interpreting the series is concerned is that they are there. They may be meaningless in the NGE in Anno's head, but that does not necessarily mean they are meaningless in the NGE in yours.
  
• No perspective is the best one. If you have a particular perspective you find you prefer, by all means go for it. If you find different perspectives better for different texts, go with that. If you find mixing multiple perspectives most rewarding, go with that.

Close Reading

• "Reading" a "text": Despite the terms, any human creation can be viewed as a text, from a novel to a film to a painting to the back of a cereal box to a garbage can lid. Any text can be read, which is to say, viewed and interpreted in order to construct and assign meaning.
• Close reading is mindfulness. It consists of paying close attention to the text, looking for details and patterns, and noting anything that stands out.
  
• Close reading is about the text and only the text. It is not about what you think of the text, how the text makes you feel, or anything else about you. It is not about where the text was written or what it implies about the author. It is solely and entirely about getting as clear a view of the text as possible, both as a unified whole and on a reductionist level. It is objective, not subjective.
  
• [Example: Show the ending credits sequence of Puella Magi Madoka Magica, guide audience through a brief attempt at close reading.]

Pattern-Forming

• Humans are pattern-making machines, so sophisticated and powerful we can look at two dots and a curved line and turn them into a face. Pattern-forming consists of finding patterns within the text and fitting the text into external patterns.
• Patterns within a work can include repeated motifs, parallels between elements, contrasts between elements, and implied comparisons between elements. For example, NGE has a repeated motif of bad things happening to people's left arms, especially Shinji's. It parallels Shinji's troubled relationship with his father to Misato's troubled relationship with her father. It contrasts Asuka's bright colors and brash persona to Shinji's more neutral color scheme and extreme doormat tendencies. By presenting both as possible love interests to Shinji and as pilots, it implies comparison between Rei and Asuka.
• External patterns a work can fit into include the use of common structures, tropes, and motifs; generic elements that place it within a definable genre; and references, allusions to and parodies of other works. Slayers uses immediately recognizable tropes such as its anti-hero main characters and Manichaean fantasy setting; its story structures, character archetypes, and themes are typical of the shonen fantasy adventure genre; it includes references such as a character in Utena's costume proffering a rose to Gourry or Lina wearing a dress reminiscent of Alice and Wonderland while lost in an absurdist dream world, and explicitly parodies (among other things) sentai teams, the movie Shane, and old Merrie Melodies shorts.
• [Example: Ask audience to describe patterns within and external patterns influencing the Madoka ending credits.]

Interrogating the Text

• Does the text ask any questions? A text may explicitly or implicitly ask questions of the viewer, as simple as "What just happened?" or as complex as "Who are you?" or "What does it mean to be good?" These are often a good place to start in asking and answering your own questions of the text.
• Does it answer its own questions? Most texts will pose and then answer at least some questions, such as "And then what happened?" Some texts will do likewise for more difficult questions. The text may also answer a question, but then call that answer into question. For example, early on NGE poses the question of whether human science can win against a force of nature, and points to air conditioning as proof that yes, it can. Later, however, when the Eva breaks free of its binding this conclusion is denied.
• Does the text take a stand (implicitly or explicitly) on any controversies? What political positions does it support or treat as true? For example, Hayao Miyazaki frequently depicts anti-war and environmental themes in his films. In Princess Mononoke, the three-way war between Iron Town, the Imperial forces, and the boars accomplished nothing but bringing destruction and suffering to all sides, and the elimination of the industrial Iron Town and restoration of the natural environment it damaged is treated as a happy ending.
• What does the text have to say about the big questions of life, the universe, and everything? Bakurano depicts a universe that is bleak, hostile, and hopeless, and human existence as tiny and meaningless. Gurren Lagann, by contrast, depicts humans as beings of immense potential to affect change, who can transform portions of the universe to be friendly spaces full of hope.
• What is the viewer left wondering? Does the text give any clues? NGE's final episodes are notoriously difficult to understand and stylized, but they contain tantalizing glimpses of what is "really" happening and interstitials suggesting a possible interpretation.
• [Example: Ask the audience to interrogate the same Madoka clip.]

Further Reading (TBD)

Questions

My Little Panel: Friendship is Magic

I'm not dead! I've been really busy... here's a taste of some of what I've been busy doing.

Part One:




Part Two:



Part Three:



Part Four:



Part Five:



More to come as we upload it!

The Brony Effect

So, after weeks of my fiancee talking endlessly about it, last weekend I began working my way through My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic the latest installment of Hasbro's long-running toy commercial. I watched every episode of the first season, about 10 hours of cartoon, over the next six days. And I loved it.

I'm far from alone on this. The latest incarnation of MLP has three major demographics: The little girls who are the target market for the toy line, nostalgic 20-something women who played with My Little Ponies as girls, and 20-something men who until now were vaguely aware that My Little Pony existed. "Bronies," as these male fans are called, are fairly common in Internet geek circles now, especially in the overlapping circles of anime fans and gamers.

But why should this be?

A better question: Why not?

Misogyny is as rampant or more in geek circles as in the culture at large, but on the other hand male and female geeks alike often have long experience in being harassed for failing to meet gender norms. Male anime geeks in particular often watch shows which, in Japan, are marketed to girls,* for a couple of reasons:

• Sex appeal: Shoujo often have a lot of young female characters, and said characters are often more attractive than their counterparts in boys' anime.
• Character depth: Shoujo series, even action-driven ones, tend to have more of a focus on character relationships and emotional growth than shounen series, and thus the better shoujo series are often less formulaic and have deeper characters than most shounen series.
• Brevity: Most of the best-known shoujo series have 13, 26, or rarely 50 or 70 episodes, while the better-known shounen series may have hundreds, especially shounen fighting shows.

We thus have a body of American 20-something male geeks who more or less accept watching cartoons marketed to girls.

So why haven't they watched a lot of American girls' shows before now? Simple: Most American cartoons for girls suck. Consider, for example, the Nostalgia Chick review of an early My Little Pony movie, in which she cannot tell the characters apart. Most children's television in the U.S. is deeply socially conservative. So-called "general audience" kids' shows are primarily for boys, because only boys are people, and because only boys are people, there is no need to have more than one female character, who is effectively identical to Smurfette. Rarely, as in Scooby-Doo, you'll get a Princess/Geek dichotomy, which is basically a Madonna-Whore complex with intellectual assertiveness in place of sexual assertiveness, and still doesn't allow for much variety. Most shows for girls likewise have only one female character, she just inhabits multiple bodies. Or they may have very slight differences ("all girls love to shop, but this one is The Shopaholic!"), or a Betty/Veronica pairing (another kiddified variant of Madonna-Whore).
MLP:FIM, on the other hand, has actual characters. The ponies in the mane cast**** all have distinctly drawn personalities, many of which violate the usual stereotypes, and none of them are passive:

• Twilight Sparkle is intellectual and socially awkward, but rather than the usual nerd-girl stereotype she's also a highly organized, take-charge natural leader.
• Pinkie Pie is giggly, silly, and random (to the point of sometimes defying the laws of physics, such as they are in a universe of magical talking ponies), but she also often intuitively leaps to the solution to some of the more bizarre problems the ponies face, and late in the season we learn that her silliness masks a rather sad, borderline neglectful childhood and a deep fear of losing her friends if she fails to entertain them.
• Fluttershy is painfully shy, self-effacing, and fearful, whose gentle, soft-spoken love for all living things makes her incredibly gifted at working with animals. Then she makes a full-grown, angry, enormous, fire-breathing dragon CRY. Then she wins a staring contest with a BASILISK. I won't even attempt to describe the pure awesomeness she gets into in the season finale. (Yeah, she's pretty obviously my favorite.)
• Rarity is the fashionista pony, but unlike the usual shallow, vain, shopaholic variant, she's depicted as a hard-working, somewhat temperamental (and yes, occasionally vain) artist whose medium happens to be clothes. She's also depicted as the most generous of the ponies, and a successful businesswoman. (Actually, with the exception of Twilight, who appears to be on the equivalent of a government research grant, and Pinkie Pie, who may or may not be an apprentice baker, all the mane ponies have explicitly defined jobs.)
• Applejack is another successful businesswoman, a workaholic, very strong farmer who, interestingly, appears to be the leader of her family (at least in its interactions with outsiders) and de facto owner of their farm, even though she has both a grandmother and an older brother. She supposedly represents honesty in the pilot, but seems a better fit for loyalty given her patient, steadfast nature and dedication to keeping her promises.
• Finally, Rainbow Dash is a very athletic pony who tends to be very blunt and a little bit of a jerk, impatient, brash, and prone to charging into danger. Also she controls the weather by kicking it in the face. She supposedly represents loyalty, but her tendency to say exactly what's on her mind makes her seem a better fit for honesty.

The pilot for the series is basically a magical girl show: a group of young women are drawn together to face a prophecy of ancient evil, and overcome it by weaponizing the interpersonal bonds between them. Most of the rest of the show follows a more episodic, Western format, alternating between episodes where the primary conflict is interpersonal (for example, the hysterical episode in which Fluttershy reluctantly becomes a model because she thinks she'll disappoint Rarity if she stops, and Rarity is jealous but pushes Fluttershy to keep modeling out of guilt over the jealousy), and episodes where the primary conflict is straight out of the D&D Monster Manual (for example, the episode with the dragon).

My own experience ran something like this: I watched the pilot, moderately enjoyed it as a magical girl show with no uncomfortable fetishization of the underage main characters, and then mostly forgot about it. A while later, I was bored so I watched another couple of episodes, and enjoyed the adventure-y aspects and the humor. And then I started to realize I actually liked these characters, recognized them as people, and cared about what happened to them. Female characters being depicted as people! Weird people who kept learning childlike lessons while filling adult social roles, who happened to be shaped like magical talking ponies, but people!

I suspect my experience is fairly typical. Certainly there are other factors in the Brony explosion, such as Hasbro's lax attitude to piracy, but I think at its core it is a combination of a group open to watching a "girls' cartoon," and a cartoon that actually treats girls as human beings.

*For the uninitiate: In Japan, manga (comics)** and the anime derived from them divide into four basic categories determined by target demographic: shounen (for boys), shoujo (ostensibly for girls, though in anime increasingly driven by the "moe"*** market), seinen (for men), and jousei (for women). Unlike American comics, which are mostly about superheroes, manga cover pretty much the same range of subjects and genres as print literature.

**To be really anal, it's actually the magazines which publish manga which are divided into these categories, more than the individual manga. Often if a given manga is borderline (such as Fullmetal Alchemist, which straddles the shonen-seinen divide at times), the magazine which publishes it will be the deciding factor in determining what category popular consensus files it under.

***A phenomenon in anime fandom that can be roughly understood as a combination of Nice Guy Syndrome, White Knight-ism, and a touch of pedophilia.

****By convention so universal it might as well be law, all discussion of My Little Pony is required to contain a particular set of horrible horse-themed puns.

Is Cartoon Network Making a Comeback?

Sorry for going so long without posting. I'm going to make a real push to get back on the wagon with writing.

Today I'm wondering aloud... is Cartoon Network starting to recover some of its glory? I mean, yes, they are continuing to show loads of live action crap like the Scooby-Doo movies, Destroy Build Destroy, and Hole in the Wall. And of course they still have their share of bad cartoons, like the utterly godawful Mad, as well as shows that I just plain have no desire to try, like the umpteenth Ben 10 iteration or Generator Rex.

But... Regular Show is hysterically funny. Scooby-Doo: Mystery, Inc. is astonishingly entertaining. Young Justice is roughly on par with the lesser entries in the DCAU, which is to say it's quite good. Sym-Bionic Titan is excellent, by turns funny, exciting, dramatic, even occasionally a little scary or sexy. And of course Adventure Time! is the best damn thing in years.

Simply put, right now, Cartoon Network has more good stuff in a typical week than any time since the early 2000s. It's too soon to call this a comeback--most of the shows I mention have yet to reach 20 episodes--but it's legitimate grounds for hope.

Temporary Hiatus

Not that the effect is at all noticeable, since massive delays and procrastination are the norm for this blog, but I'm going to have to go on temporary hiatus until I can get the headphone jack fixed on my laptop, which will hopefully be this coming weekend. My twice-daily train rides are my primary AtLA-watching-and-dissecting time, and it's, you know, illegal to go without without headphones on Metro. Not to mention nigh-impossible, given the background noise.

So, no AtLA for a while. I will try to fill in with thoughts on other shows as I can, but nothing with the depth of my AtLA reviews.

Site Business: August Schedule for AtLA Mondays, Otakon Report

A couple of site business items:

• I will not be able to post an AtLA Monday tonight. Rather than keep on making and breaking promises, for the month of August, I'm going to have to go to AtLA every-other-Monday. So, expect "The Blue Spirit" next Monday, and "The Fortuneteller" August 30.
• I was a guest on Viga the Otagal's podcast to talk about Otakon 2010. So if you've ever wondered if I sound as nerdy as I write (answer: I sound even nerdier), check it out.
• If you want a shorter summary of my thoughts on Otakon: They've gotten too big to keep being a disorganized bunch of unprofessional buddy-buddies whose immediate reaction to any criticism is to circle the wagons and protect their own. They need to be more open and communicative with the attendees and less defensive when they screw up. Also, the con has a very strong focus on guests, which is fine if that's what you're into, but personally I'd much rather hear a bunch of fans debating the philosophical implications of LeLouch's powers than meet his voice actor. That goes double if it's the American voice actor. Otakon just doesn't seem to care about fan-generated programming, and it shows -- I had much, much more downtime than at Anime Boston.

AtLA Monday: Zuko Explained

Sokka: I'm too young to die!
Old Fisherman: I'm not, but I still don't wanna!

I live! Sorry about vanishing for so long. There is no explanation; I simply suck at sticking to things. But I am going to see this through to the end!

So, that said, let's dive back in!

Book One: Water
Chapter Twelve: The Storm

Synopsis: The Gaang are out of food and money, so Sokka gets a temporary job helping on an old man's fishing boat. The old man accuses Aang of abandoning the world to the Fire Nation, and Aang runs, followed by Katara.

Sheltering from a storm in a cave, Aang tells Katara his story: He found out he was the Avatar much younger than the normal 16, and was isolated from his friends, except for his teacher and guardian, Gyatso. Unfortunately, Gyatso's attempts to ensure Aang had some time for freedom and fun in among his training did not sit well with the other monks, and they decided Aang had to be separated from Gyatso. Rather than continue his training at the Eastern Air Temple, Aang ran away, was caught in a storm, and fell into the sea. Next thing he knew, he was waking up at the South Pole a hundred years later.

Meanwhile, Zuko is obsessing over finding the Avatar, and claims even the safety of the crew doesn't matter. One of the crewmembers takes exception to this, and he and Zuko nearly come to blows. Iroh separates them, and later tells a few of the crewmembers Zuko's story: Zuko snuck into one of the Fire Lord's war councils with Iroh's help, and was outraged at a proposed strategy that would sacrifice a unit of new recruits to draw out an Earth Kingdom force. His outburst was deemed disrespectful, so he had to take part in an Agni Kai against his own father. He refused to fight, and Ozai gave him his scar, then banished him until he can bring back the Avatar.

After the flashbacks, the storm gets bad enough that Aang, Katara, and Appa have to set out in it to rescue Sokka and the fisherman, while Zuko has to rescue his own helmsman. They come within a dozen feet of each other, but both are too busy saving their comrades to fight, and the Gaang escape Zuko once more.

-------------

And suddenly Zuko makes sense. The main work of "The Storm" is to unfold for us who Zuko really is, under the anger and obsession. Without this, the next episode ("The Blue Bandit") makes no sense; the season finale makes no sense; the entire second season makes no sense.

We get Aang's backstory, too, but it's less interesting than Zuko's because we know Aang will come to terms with it. He is a largely healthy and balanced child; he can handle it. Zuko, on the other hand, is constantly on the verge of breaking. He rages and obsesses; he sulks and throws tantrums -- and then he turns around and risks his life to save one of his crew. He's more complicated than Aang, more confusing, and therefore more interesting. We want to solve the Zuko puzzle, and so an episode like this is exciting, presenting us with so many pieces.

Early in the episode, Zuko insists he doesn't care about the safety of his crew -- finding the Avatar is more important. Iroh hastily tells the overhearing lieutenant that Zuko doesn't mean it, which sounds like Iroh is making excuses, but is actually the truth. The flashback shows that young Zuko was full of compassion for the common soldiers, and the end of the episode sees him foregoing the pursuit of the Avatar precisely for their safety, which previously he had only done for Iroh. Saying he doesn't care is the temporary aberration, which has lasted for a good couple of years at this point, but is finally beginning to change.

We see Iroh's point of view, but think about the whole incident from Zuko's point of view. He was mostly raised by first his mother, and then his uncle. He doesn't actually know his father very well, but is desperate to win his approval, praise, and love (the same approval that Azula seems to earn effortlessly). Ozai and Azula consistently present Ozai's love as a prize to be won or earned, and so Zuko absorbs that it is his failure that he does not receive praise or acknowledgment from his father.

Zuko is eager to take on an adult role, partially because he's thirteen and partially because he wants an opportunity to prove himself to his father. He tries, but an outburst of his natural compassion, in defiance of the hierarchy and social rules, earns him a brutal, painful rebuke. He is terrified to face his father, in part because he knows his father is a powerful and deadly opponent, yes, but mostly because he knows there is no way to win what he really wants, approval: if he fights back and injures his father, he is a traitor, but if he is defeated easily he is a weakling. Ozai wounds Zuko terribly, scarring him for life not just physically but mentally. The one person who should love and protect Zuko most brutally and disproportionately punishes him. It is monstrous and evil and cruel, and it turns Zuko's world upside down.

From all this, thirteen-year-old Zuko learns that compassion is weakness. He assumes, because he has always assumed, has been trained to assume, that the abuse is his fault for being weak. He cannot admit the real reason for it, that his father is a sick, cruel tyrant. What child wants to believe that? He desperately wants his father's love back, but cannot phrase it to himself that way, because the thought of being abandoned by his father, especially after losing his mother, is too much to bear. So, Zuko lies to himself, pretending that what he is seeking is his honor (which he never lost; we will eventually see, in "Zuko Alone," why he makes that particular jump). Nonetheless, what he really wants is clear: we see a single flash of it, as Zuko remembers Ozai standing beside him, one hand on his shoulder.

Zuko sees capturing the Avatar as his only chance to regain his father's love, and so he is willing to sacrifice anything -- including his honor, as the next episode will show -- to accomplish it. Zuko sees compassion as a weakness which cost him his father's love, and so he tries to be cruel to his enemies and demanding of his men -- yet his essential goodness occasionally shines through, as when he spares Zhao after their duel in "The Southern Air Temple." Zuko is unable to confront his own real need for love, and so he is unable to accept Iroh's love, kindness, and excellent advice.

Zuko's efforts, of course, cannot succeed. The abuse is entirely Ozai's choice and Ozai's false. Unfortunately, it won't be for two more seasons until Zuko finally -- and awesomely -- admits this.

Random observations:

• Aang's dream is in order of closeness: Aang rides Appa, his oldest and closest companion. Sokka is alone on the glider, as the one Aang is least close to. Katara rides Momo, Aang's pet and in some ways his id and libido. Katara is the first to say "We need you, Aang." As we see much, much later in "The Guru," Katara is Aang's primary attachment to the world, and represents it in his dream. Additionally, he fears that she will be hurt because of him -- he is, after all, the reason she left her home. This fear comes to the fore in "The Deserter." Next we see Gyatso, who represents Aang's attachment to and abandonment of his old life. The storm is Aang's guilt over abandoning them, as well as a memory of how that abandonment came about. In a chorus of voices, the entire world begs for Aang's help as he drifts away, and then we get a quick flash of the Fire Lord as Aang wakes.
• Katara says Aang has been having "a lot" of nightmares lately, meaning more so than when they first started traveling together. So what was the trigger? Something has upped his guilt level or brought it closer to the surface -- knowledge of the comet, perhaps? Or maybe the waterbending training with Katara in "The Waterbending Scroll" reminded him of his airbending training?
• Sokka's dream about food eating people, of course, never comes true (unless it presages the coming of the ultimate evil of the Avatar world, against whom the true hero, Wang Fire, struggles epically -- the foul, demonic entity known only as Melon Lord). But it raises an interesting point: for all the talk of "destiny", there doesn't appear to be any way of predicting the future in Avatar (with the exception of known cyclical events like comets and eclipses) -- but that's more a discussion for "The Fortuneteller" a couple of episodes from now.
• In Aang's flashback, none of the other children have airbender tattoos, but all of the adult monks do. The distinction cannot be simply age-based, however, because some of Aang's friends appear to be close to his age, maybe even older. Nor can it be a born distinction, such as caste or nobility; in "The Avatar and the Firelord," young Gyatso doesn't have the mark. Aang's gifts and the subconscious aid of his past selves have probably accelerated his airbending studies just as they do for the bending styles we actually see him learn. The tattoos also cannot indicate total mastery of airbending, because Aang clearly still has airbending to learn in this flashback; otherwise, they'd be sending him away to the North or South Pole, not another Air Temple. My best guess is that the tattoos are the airbender equivalent of a black belt: Aang has demonstrated the ability to use all the techniques of airbending, but not necessarily mastery of when and how to use them.
• The way the monks find the new Avatar -- looking for a child born as close as possible to the moment of the Avatar's death, and then letting him choose from toys that include relics of previous Avatars -- is very reminiscent of the methods used to select a new Dalai Lama, who is also held to be the reincarnation of the prior Dalai Lama.
• Is Jinju supposed to be, er, developmentally disabled or something? Or is he just a not-very-skilled airbender with a goofy laugh and hygiene problems? Anyway, his addition, apparently for a joke, is unfunny and a little bit distressing. Avatar's usually better than that.
• Is Gyatso specifically assigned as Aang's guardian because he's the Avatar, or does every kid get one? Or is it an apprenticeship thing? Maybe the tattoo indicates that Aang is done with general training and ready to train with a specific master, sort of like the difference between undergraduate and graduate instruction. Regardless, the relationship between Gyatso and Aang is clearly a paternal one: play and love and instruction and the passing on of life lessons. Gyatso is not very serious, much like Iroh, but much liike Iroh (as we saw in "The Southern Air Temple," when his skeleton lay on top of a pile of soldier skeletons), Gyatso's playful demeanor conceals a powerful and deadly combatant.
• Gyatso is presented in opposition to an unnamed, sour-faced monk who is clearly well-meaning, but more concerned about the well-being of the world than whether Aang gets to have a childhood. His attitude is understandable, but as Avatar emphasizes again and again, joy is a necessary part of wisdom. Iroh knows it; Gyatso knows it; Aang knows it intuitively. Zuko will eventually learn it. Those who don't understand how important joy, love, and play are (Zhao, Azula, Ozai) will inevitably be defeated by those who do.
• Gyatso is right, of course, about Aang's reputation. No matter the threat to the world, it's hard to imagine it being more dangerous than an Avatar unable to appreciate freedom and fun. Think about it: a child with prodigal, but potentially very dangerous, talents is taught by all the adults around her that her talents are the only thing about her that anyone else values. Everything else must be sacrificed to honing her abilities, or else she is worthless. She is also led to believe that she is the most important person in the world, destined for greatness. How long could the world survive Avatar Azula?
• Aang was not there when (if) Gyatso found his note. That entire scene appears to be made up by Aang. He imagines that Gyatso would have fought to keep him if he hadn't run away, and uses that to enhance his own guilt.
• Just as 100 years ago, Aang is in a storm, goes underwater, and enters avatar state -- but before, he saw the world's needs as abstract and in opposition to his needs. This time, actual people depend on him, so he saves them. There's a parallel to Zuko here, as well: he was unable to save the soldiers described abstractly in the war council, but he can save his own crew.
• Let's say Aang didn't run away. Katara's right -- he almost certainly would have been killed with the rest of his people. Now, presumably the Avatar Cycle wouldn't have ended right away -- the Water Tribe would still be there, and so there could be a next step in the cycle -- so the question then becomes, is there someone in the series who would have been the Avatar if it wasn't Aang? We'll get some hints much, MUCH later of who that might be.
• I've mentioned before the solar symbolism that surrounds the Avatar. The shafts of sunlight after the storm? They're all about Aang's return, and his growing acceptance of who he is.
• The fishing boat captain and the fishhauler at first bicker like an old married couple. But then the old man says he'll hire a new fishhauler at double what the old woman gets, implying she's his employee. This is further confirmed by him taking back the offer to pay double as soon as Sokka volunteers for the job -- clearly, double is more than the normal pay, so the normal pay can't be zero. But then at the end, she refers to him as her husband when she asks Aang to help him! I am confused by these people's relationship.
• Telling Zuko he needs to learn respect, this episode shows, is a major trigger for his temper. And it's understandable why, given what happened with his father! But the final straw seems to be the suggestion that he's spoiled. Later episodes show how far that is from the truth; Zuko was far from the favored child, and held to a brutal standard he could not live up to.
• The Lieutenant Zuko nearly fights seems kind of old to still be a lieutenant. Of course, given that Zuko's been banished, his crew is likely not made up of the Fire Nation's best and brightest.
• In Iroh's flashback, he's about the same height as Zuko. In the present day, Zuko is at least half a head taller. Nice reminder from the animators that Zuko is still growing -- and has some growing to do yet.
• Unlike his dour present self, young Zuko is bright, ambitious, optimistic, idealistic, and compassionate. Except maybe for the ambition, he's a lot like Aang.
• So much said without any words at all! Zuko catches the falling helmsman and passes him to the lieutenant he nearly came to blows with earlier. They smile at each other; all is forgiven. The lieutenant understands Zuko better now, and Zuko is starting to re-manifest the essential goodness that his father tried to (literally!) burn out of him.
• In "The Spirit World," Zuko gave up on a chance to chase Appa in order to rescue Iroh. Now he does so for his entire crew. He doesn't need to catch the Avatar to get his honor back; it never left him.
• When Zuko apologizes to Iroh, is it for the way he acted earlier in this episode, or for bringing Iroh into exile with him?
• In the crowd of people watching Zuko get burned, we see generals from the war council, Iroh, and Zhao. Zhao's presence is interesting, since at the time of this episode he's only a commander. Three years prior he may have been an even lower rank; regardless, based on military rank he's not important enough to be standing next to the Fire Lord's brother. Perhaps he's a member of the nobility; it would explain his high rank despite his arrogant incompetence.
• Also next to Iroh, clearly revelling in Zuko's pain, is some girl. She's also the firebender in the opening credits. But I'm sure her appearance and behavior here aren't foreshadowing her appearance as a prominent character later in the series. Nope, nope, not here.
• Irony alert: the Avatar gives Zuko hope, just as he does Katara.
• As an adult, it is at least accepted, and maybe expected, for the heir to the Fire Nation to serve as a military leader. And in the war room, Zuko is not only right, but shows an attitude that could some day make him very popular with the troops. And Zuko is close to Iroh, who was at one time the rightful heir to the throne. All of this adds up to make Zuko a potential threat to the Fire Lord; in a few years, an impatient Zuko -- who Ozai doubtless knows has every reason to resent him -- could well try to seize the throne early. Ozai is afraid of Zuko, and burns and banishes him as a way of reasserting power.
• Ozai's throne is concealed behind a wall of flames -- it is both a concealment and a defense. It seems that not even top military officials can see the Fire Lord directly. Such a taboo suggests an almost religious deference; Ozai is not just the Fire Nation's ruler but their epic hero (as we see in "The Deserter") and practically a god. He is a tyrant, used to obedience, and the way he treats his own son (disfiguring him for life, just for being "disrespectful") is an indicator of how he treats everyone weaker than him: cruelly and abusively. The entire Fire Nation is an abused child lashing out in hopes of earning its father's approval.
• I believe this episode is the first time Ozai speaks. He's voiced by the incredibly talented Mark Hamill, who voiced the Joker in the DCAU. Oh, and also he played Luke Skywalker, but we don't care about that.
• Given that one of the episode's major themes is characters blaming themselves for things that aren't their fault, it's possible that Iroh feels guilty for letting Zuko into the war council. That may be a factor in why he travels with Zuko, though undoubtedly it's primarily out of a paternal desire to protect and guide Zuko.
• It's interesting that Iroh agrees with Zuko in the war room. Sacrificing a not-very-valuable unit to draw out a well-entrenched enemy is a pretty good strategy, but like Zuko, Iroh doesn't see that unit or those troops as being of low value. He values them for something other than their military effectiveness. Still, it's interesting that Zuko is outraged, not at the sacrifice of lives or of human beings, but of loyal citizens of the Fire Nation. Even he is not immune to the Fire Nation's nationalism.
• During the storm, while Zuko is risking his life to save the helmsman, Iroh catches a lightning bolt headed for the ship and redirects it harmlessly into the water. After, he looks slightly singed and very surprised -- was this the first time he ever used the move? Entirely possible; he says later he developed it himself by watching waterbenders, so presumably it was during his hinted-at-but-never-described travels after his son died (during which, apparently, he had some kind of an adventure involving the spirit world). It seems unlikely he engaged in Agni Kai with anyone who can throw lightning (as far as we know, only Azula and Ozai), so he really probably never did try it before.
• Iroh gives this great sideways glance after Zuko chooses not to go after Aang -- he's proud of Zuko's choice, and I think he really doesn't want the Avatar caught. He has to have already realized that the Avatar is the only good way to end the war.
• Both Zuko and Aang have serious issues tied to events before the series began, which led directly to their first appearance. Both have those issues brought out by an older, bearded man who says things in anger, not realizing how they will resonate with Zuko/Aang's own issues. The whole episode is, in addition to filling in back story and developing characters, working to show us that Zuko and Aang are fundamentally alike. Neither can return home. Both blame themselves, even though it isn't really their fault.
• The Avatar is normally told of his nature on his sixteenth birthday (four squared). Zuko is sixteen for the duration of the series. Coincidence?
• Gyatso's similarity to Iroh is, of course, yet another way of playing up the parallels between Aang and Zuko.
• Both Zuko and Aang face banishment in their respective stories.
• That moment of Zuko and Aang staring at each other both plays up their parallel and foreshadows "The Blue Spirit," which in many ways has the opposite ending.
• Aang gets over his past. Zuko won't for a long long time. But then, Zuko was abused. That's often harder to get over than survivor guilt in an otherwise healthy psyche.

Thoughts on New Futurama

Avatar: The Last Airbender Monday may be late this week due to the holiday weekend. If I'm able to finish today, it will go up today; if I'm not able to finish it today, however, I may not be able to get it done for a couple of days. Sorry for the last-minute notice. As an apology, here's some proof that I do occasionally think about things other than Avatar:

The first two episodes of new Futurama, I was too excited by the new-ness and Futurama-ness of it all to form a reliable opinion. In particular, the fact that they didn't push the reset button on the Fry-Leela relationship, despite having memory loss as a plot element in the first episode and potential cheating in the second, was deeply impressive.

Last night's episode... not so much. Most of it was pretty good. Nothing on par with the best episodes of Futurama past, neither as heartwarming and -wrenching as "The Sting" or "Luck of the Fry-rish," nor as deliciously plot-tastic as "The Why of Fry," nor even as simply and happily entertaining as "The Deep South" or "Where No Fan Has Gone Before," it was for the large part entertaining enough, with a couple of laugh-out-loud moments.

But then there was Mr. Chunks. Though he did give rise to one obscure-but-hilarious-if-you-get-it joke ("Pukeme-Pooyou"), which Futurama has always done well, mostly he was the kind of moronic gross-out "humor" that all too often mars even the best episodes of Comedy Central's other big animated shows, South Park.

This worries me, to say the least. The move to cable allows Futurama more freedom than they had on network television, true, and that opens up new artistic tools for both the comedy and drama of Futurama. But the greatness of Futurama has always lain in the fact that it is capable of being smart, subtle, and (despite and sometimes because of the inherent cynicism Matt Groening brings to everything) surprisingly uplifting. That's not really possible when you have a poo-eating, perpetually vomiting goat as a major plot point.

The other thing that deeply distresses me about the episode is that there's no hint in Fry's and Leela's interactions that anything has changed between them since the original Fox run. They don't act at all like a couple, and Leela even refers to Fry as "a good friend." What happened? Did they break up over "In-a-Gadda-Da-Leela" after all, and the writers just forgot to tell us?

The reason I thought it was daring of the writers not to reboot the Fry-Leela relationship was that unresolved sexual tension -- the classic "Will they or won't they?" -- is one of the driving sources of conflict, drama, and humor in many long-running serials, from comic strips to sitcoms. While it is impossible to move the characters forward without answering the question eventually, it can be very difficult to sustain a series after one of its major conflicts is resolved. Bringing Fry and Leela closes that arc, and it also reflects how far those characters have come: the Fry of first season and the Leela of first season could have never worked, mostly because he was a thoughtless, insensitive, lazy buffoon, but also because Leela could not permit herself to have a functional relationship.

Over the course of the series, both matured. Leela discovered her homeworld and even a family, and Fry's experiences slowly made him capable of caring. Compare the Fry of the real-world portion of "The Sting" to the Fry of the first season: he's still lazy and stupid, but he is genuinely loving toward Leela, without ulterior motive; he just wants her to be well. And then, of course, there's Fry's future self, Lars. The path from first-season Fry to Lars is clear, and it leads right through the Fry of "The Sting" -- his feelings for Leela make him want to be a better person, so he becomes one. It is perhaps not the healthiest relationship in the world, but it seems to work for them in the end.

Or it would, if the writers let it. The Fry of "Attack of the Killer App" is not the Fry of "Into the Wild Green Yonder." It's the inconsiderate jerkass of "I, Roommate," the third episode of the first season. Fry doesn't act like that anymore! Not toward Leela. For Leela, he would sit by a hospital bed for days, drive out his own mind-expanding parasites, or make a deal with the Robot Devil! Of course he would swim through puke for her. That shouldn't even be in question!

I hope, very much, that this episode is a fluke. Even the best show can have the occasional terrible episode, where everyone is out of character and the writing doesn't quite fit the show. Heck, my last AtLA Monday was one. So, I remain on the fence about new Futurama, but they still have plenty of time to win me over.

Why "The Last Airbender" Had to Fail

Of course we all know why, morally, The Last Airbender (the live-action movie remake of the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender) had to fail. If you don't, look up "racebending"; the controversy has been covered well enough by others. (Remember, morality is always entirely about action; beliefs only matter insofar as they (poorly) predict action. It doesn't matter whether Shyamalan and the rest of his crew had racist intent; the casting choices were immoral.)

But even if Shyamalan had cast actors of the right ethnicities, I still skip watching The Last Airbender, and the reviews are proving me right. Here's why it was always doomed to suck:

1) Avatar is complex: A movie adaptation of a long, complex work, such as a novel or TV series, has to boil it down to its core elements. The problem is that the core elements of Avatar are hoary old cliches and the possibly the most formulaic of all stories, the monomyth: As prophesied, a child sets forth on a journey to master his power and become a man. The forces of evil try to stop him while he is still young and weak. Eventually he masters his powers and stomps out evil, ushering in a new age. Exciting the first time you encounter it, but it gets old fast, unless you have something other than plot to chew on -- which nine times out of ten, means characterization.

There's a lot of ways to make that twist. Avatar did it by making the hero NOT the sole focus of the story. Ultimately, it's an ensemble piece, and as much or more attention is paid to developing the characters of Sokka, Katara, and especially Zuko as to developing Aang. But pretty much all of that happens in side stories. Characters aren't solely or even primarily defined by how they interact with Aang, the way they would be in a typical monomyth (see Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann for example, where every character is defined by the role they play in Simon's story). Much of the character development happens while Aang isn't around, especially for Zuko. This presents a major problem if you're trying to boil nine hours of television down to 100 minutes of movie, because you either have to cut those side stories, losing all that characterization, or compress the side stories until they're so short that you lose the characterization anyway.

Of course, there's the third option of heavily rewriting the story so that the characterization is merged into the main plotline, but the level of changes needed to that to Avatar crosses the line from "adaption of" to "loosely inspired by."

2) Hollywood: Hollywood loves the monomyth. Hollywood is obsessed with the monomyth. Producers who have never studied literature outside of one required course in college will, upon hearing a pitch, ask about the Call to Action, the Road of Trials, the Temptress. The problem is that they don't understand that the monomyth is an analytical tool, not a formula for writing stories. Hollywood will always pull a story closer to the monomyth if they can -- and Avatar is pretty close to the monomyth already.

Even the most well-meaning director, who understands the craft storytelling deeply enough to know better, will still face pressure from his financial backers to follow the formula. And if the story is already almost at the formula, pulling it closer still, coupled with paring it down to series length, is going to produce an insufferably formulaic movie.

3) Shyamalan: Seriously, how does this guy keep getting backing? Every movie he's made is worse than the last -- Sixth Sense was good, albeit shallower than it thought it was; Unbreakable was decent; Signs was unmitigated crap. I haven't watched his movies after that, but broad consensus is that they're terrible.

I've seen reviews of The Last Airbender comparing him to Ed Wood and Uwe Boll. That level of awful is practically an achievement in itself.

4) Live Action, Realism, and Grit: Avatar was heavily inspired by the works of the greatest animator of all time, Hayao Miyazaki. The series is heavy on gorgeous, highly detailed scenes of natural beauty, with just a touch of the surreal and the impressionistic. Often times these aren't tracking or establishing shots, but backdrops on which the action unfolds, noticeable only on repeat viewings. Certainly a live action movie is capable of such beauty -- the Lord of the Rings movies pulled it off, for example -- but the tendency when adapting animation is to make it more "realistic", and as we all know, reality is brown and gray, filthy, and poorly lit. Or at least that's what "realistic" movies claim.

Add the last-minute decision to go 3-D (which halves the apparent brightness of the movie because each eye only sees half the light), and you have a recipe for a dark, drab, visually dull film that no amount of martial arts can save.

Not to mention, let's face it, punching and having a fireball erupt from your fist looks awesome in animation, but in live action it comes across as... kind of silly.

5) There was no need for a movie: More accurately, we already had a movie, and it was awesome. "Sozin's Comet," the finale of the TV series, was 90 minutes long (not counting commercials and opening/closing credits, which bumped it up to two hours), upped the animation quality to film caliber, took the already good music up to eleven with live strings, and told an epic, world-shattering, continent-spanning tale with multiple intersecting storylines that ultimately culminated in two simultaneous final showdowns happening hundreds of miles apart.

I'd rather have a remastered theatric release of "Sozin's Comet" than a generic live-action blockbuster any day. And don't tell me you'd need to introduce audiences to the characters -- it'd be cheap enough to make (considering that it's already made)that nobody but fans could show up, and it'd still make a huge profit.

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I made the decision months ago to boycott "The Last Airbender" for its racist casting choices. But I've never regretted that decision, because I always strongly suspected the movie was going to suck, and now the reviews are confirming that suspicion. Avoid this movie like the plague! If you feel the need for some epic, movie-quality Avatar action, pop in "Sozin's Comet" instead. You'll be glad you did.

AtLA Monday: Hidden Depths

Actress Aang: (enthusiastically) Look, (points down) it’s The Great Divide. (Actress Katara looks down) The biggest canyon in the Earth Kingdom.
Actor Sokka: (looks down and throws his arm to the side dismissively) Meh. Let’s keep flying.

I've been looking forward to this review since the start, so let's jump right in:

Book One: Water
Chapter Eleven: The Great Divide

Synopsis:

The Gaang camp near the edge of the Great Divide, the largest canyon in the world, and Katara and Sokka squabble over setting up the tents. After Aang settles the squabble, they encounter two tribes of refugees seeking to cross the divide: the slovenly Gan Jin and the fastidious Zhang. The two tribes have a longstanding enmity and wounded. Appa ferries the wounded across while the rest of the Gaang go with the refugees on foot. They find the guide, and he warns them not to bring any food with them as it attracts predators.

Of course, said predators (giant insects) attack the refugees on their way across, and the guide's arm is broken, meaning he can't earthbend the paths open. The two groups resume their squabbling, and Aang splits them up. Sokka spends the night with the Gan Jin and Katara with the Zhang, and both bond quickly with their companions as they learn the story behind the conflict: an orb had to be delivered according to a sacred ritual by one of the Zhang, but one of the Gan Jin either mugged him or took up the task after the original carrier was injured, depending on who's telling the story. The Zhang, justly or unjustly, imprisoned the Gan Jin. Both groups also reveal that they brought food, because they assumed the other would break the rule.

The next day, the giant insects return in force, but Aang gets the two tribes to work together to use their attack to get out of the canyon. He then makes up the "true story" of the incident on the fly: the "sacred ritual" was a ball game, and the two years of imprisonment were really two minutes in the penalty box over a disputed foul. The two tribes agree to work in the future, and move on to the next phase of their flight to safety, while the Gaang resume their trip to the North Pole.

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"The Great Divide" is, among Avatar fans, the most reviled episode. Even the creators seem to hate it: in the recap episode "The Ember Island Players" the Great Divide is dismissed as a pointless detour. But fans only believe this because they are blinded by their own absorption of the bourgeouis ideology to see its true brilliance. Even the creators, seduced by three seasons of success, have by the end of the series abandoned the revolutionary impulse which gave rise to this scathing satire and brilliant allegory.

The key to "The Great Divide" is to understand who the two tribes represent. The Zhang are wealthy, polite well-dressed, and concerned with maintaining tradition, following empty rules while fully aware that they serve no purpose. They are contrasted with the rude, crude Gan Jin, who clearly have far less wealth, if their clothing is anything to go by. What is this but the age-old conflict of the haves and the have-nots, the patricians and the proletariat, the capitalists and the workers?

Nowhere is this so clear as in the food incident. The capitalists see the workers as hardly better than criminals, and so assume that they will break the food rule. This allows the capitalists to justify breaking the rule themselves. Just as in reality: A capitalist who cheats hundreds customers out of what little wealth they have, or calculatedly kills unknown hundreds by poisoning the environment, gets a slap on the wrist, even while crusading loudly against the lower-class criminals who steal a fraction of the wealth of one rich man, or murder one person in a moment of passion. And of course, the Gan Jin, aware of the opinion of the Zhang, break the rule as well, just as a poor man who knows the system is against him will turn to crime as the only available path.

The Zhang are almost infinitely contemptuous of the Gan Jin's way of life, while the Gan Jin complain mostly about their mistreatment by the Zhang. This again is characteristic of the class struggle: The wealthy are offended by the lack of such luxuries as manners, hygiene, and fancy dress among the poor, and use that as an excuse to deny them access to the same luxuries. The poor chafe against these injustices, but can rarely do anything about them.

The story changes, of course, when there is work to be done or an enemy to fight. Then all of a sudden there is room for cooperation and comradeship, and the bourgeousie magnanimously pretend to see the proletariat as equals, in exchange for which the proletariat are expected to fight and die for the good of the bourgeousie, who may or may not even participate in the battle. This, of course, occurs in the final fight with the giant insects.

Throughout, Katara and Sokka play the role of outsiders, children newcome to the class struggle. Katara opens the episode by insisting on tradition and adherence to the rules; women often serve as the transmitters of culture to the next generation, and thus often hold a traditionalist view even when it is harmful to them. Like many in the proletariat, Katara instinctively sides with the beorgousie because she fantasizes about becoming one of them, unaware that this very dream is what traps her. Sokka, young revolutionary that he is, instead sides instinctively with the struggle of the underclass, sympathizing with their mistreatment by the Zhang.

At the end of the episode, Aang steps in as a peacemaker, but his attempt to make peace is predicated on lies. It is important to remember that he is a religious figure, a monk described as "the bridge between our world and the spirit world." What is the role of religion in the class struggle? To mollify and tranquilize the proletariat with sweet lies, to soothe them and dupe them into cooperating with the system that abuses them. The effete Zhang need the Gan Jin's strength and pragmatism, especially now that all are refugees, but what do the Gan Jin need their oppressors for? Nothing, except they are convinced by Aang's patronizing little myth that they should be friends.

Soon after this episode, Avatar's revolutionary bent reversed itself. This is perhaps inevitable given the romantic (and thus authoritarian) philosophy that dominates visual media, and the presence of a religious icon as the main character. Still, given the powerful way "The Great Divide" captured the essence of the class struggle, it is disappointing that later episodes did not further explore the historical/politico-economic narrative.

(Next week, actually serious reviews begin. I wouldn't feel the need to say this, except that Poe's Law implies a satire of Marxist criticism is indistinguishable from the genuine article.)

AtLA Monday: The fangirls will not be pleased with me...

Jet: Sokka, you fool! We could have freed this valley!
Sokka: Who would be free? Everyone would be dead!
Jet: You traitor!
Sokka: No, Jet. You became the traitor when you stopped protecting innocent people.

At long last, AtLA Monday makes its (hopefully) triumphant return! Let's dive right in:

Book 1: Water
Chapter 10: Jet

Synopsis:

When the Gaang stumble onto a camp of Fire Nation soldiers, they are saved by teen "freedom fighter" Jet and his band of war orphans. Jet is a gifted fighter and charismatic leader, and Aang and Katara are immediately taken with him, while Sokka is skeptical.

Jet takes Sokka on a raid, which turns out to be ambushing and robbing a single elderly civilian. After, Sokka tries to convince Katara and Aang to leave, but Jet convinces them to stay and claims the old man was an assassin.

Sokka overhears Jet and his fighters planning to blow up a damn and flood the valley, destroying the Fire Nation soldiers and the civilian town alike, but is taken prisoner before he can tell anyone. Sokka soon escapes, but not before Jet tricks Katara and Aang into using their bending abilities to fill the reservoir. Katara and Aang realize what Jet is up to, but he fights Aang to a standstill. Katara gets the drop on Jet and freezes him, but he is still able to whistle the signal to blow the dam.

The dam explodes, but Sokka arrives on Appa and reveals that he convinced the town and Fire Nation soldiers to evacuate. Jet accuses him of being a traitor, but Sokka tells him off and the Gaang goes on their way.

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From one perspective, "Jet" is a completely unnecessary episode. It doesn't advance the larger plot of Avatar or really develop any of the characters. It showcases how far they've come, but doesn't really advance them.

But from another perspective, "Jet" is a vitally important episode, because it shows the flipside of Iroh and Zuko. This is probably why they don't appear (well, other than the obvious reason that there's no room for them in 22 minutes): Jet is their polar opposite. Zuko and Iroh prove that the Fire Nation are human beings, with human capacity to do good. Jet proves that the "good guy" nations are human beings, too, with human capacity to do evil.

Before we get into that, though, it's important to note what this episode isn't. This is not the episode where the silly girl character (who has GIRL PARTS!) falls for a charismatic apparent good guy who, because she is a silly girl who lacks a penis, turns out to be a villain. It could easily have been that episode, if it focused on Katara and her feelings of first attraction to Jet and then betrayal, but it avoided that trap neatly: first, by having Aang as much taken in as Katara, and second by focusing on Sokka and his jealousy of Jet.

Because make no mistake, Sokka's mistrust of Jet is initially based entirely on jealousy. He has no basis to mistrust Jet other than the fact that Jet showed him up and was more interested in Katara's and Aang's bending abilities than Sokka's (lackluster by comparison) fighting. Sokka does turn out to be right, but that's because Sokka had to be right eventually. Sure, there's the running gag about instinct, but Sokka's instincts are repeatedly shown to be useless. He's an extremely clever boy, and later in the series, when he relies more on wit, observation, and fast thinking, he's much more effective. Intuition, after all, has to be trained; Sokka simply doesn't have enough experience in anything to intuit his way through it.

Of course, Sokka has good reason to be jealous of Jet. Jet is everything Sokka puffs his fragile teen-boy ego up to be: a charismatic leader, a brilliant fighter, and almost impossibly cool. His response to learning that his newest guest is Kung Fu Action Jesus: "Avatar, huh? Very nice."

Unfortunately, Jet is also dangerously paranoid, violent, ruthless, and racist. The party his gang throws after defeating the Fire Nation soldiers is deeply unsettling. There's a strong "Lord of the Flies" vibe to it, a sense that these kids have, in the absence of any parents to give them a culture, invented rituals of their own. Jet's speech is the most disturbing part: he casts himself (and, to a lesser extent, his band) as a lone and sacred warrior standing against the forces of darkness, feared and hated by them. It may be so unsettling because it is how, in a lesser show, Aang would be portrayed.

But Jet shows his true colors when he attacks and robs a helpless old man. Sokka shows his true colors there, as well. For all his talk about hating the Fire Nation (as a vast, abstract, faceless army), when presented with an actual, frightened human being, Sokka sees only their common humanity, and tries to talk Jet out of it. Jet's later claims that the old man was an assassin are obvious lies: if he were, Jet would never let him leave alive, but the old man is in the village later.

Jet is (at least in this episode; later we will see his attempts to redeem himself) as close to pure evil as Avatar characters come. While Azula or Long Feng may be more frightening, they simply don't care about questions of right and wrong. Jet thinks he's not only a hero, but the Hero. He sees the world in stark terms of good and evil, and thinks that they're a matter of what team you're on. Anything which hurts Team Evil is good, in his eyes. He is the Good Guy, and therefore anything he does, no matter how evil, is by definition Good. It's a sadly common view in real life, spouted by everyone from terrorists in caves to pundits on TV to Presidents in the Oval Office.

Later in the series, we have many more examples that evil can appear in any nation, it just happens to be running the Fire Nation at the moment. But this first major instance of that theme is particularly noticeable. Previously the Fire Nation has been by and large a bunch of thugs who burn down forests just for the laughs. Now we are presented with them as ordinary villagers just trying to live their lives, and the people plotting to destroy a forest and murder innocents are a group of Earth Kingdom children (children!)

Jet is really the first case of evil in an apparent good guy -- someone who befriends the Gaang and shares common cause with them. But Jet is not portrayed unsympathetically, either. His actions are unjustifiable, and no attempt to justify them is made, but we can understand the reasons for them. Jet and his band have suffered terribly at the hands of the Fire Nation, losing their parents and their homes. They are children, lashing out in rage. Unfortunately, they choose to do so in a horrifically adult way.

Perhaps nowhere is the difference between Jet and Sokka so clear as in Jet's attempt to convince Sokka that destroying the valley is necessary, pragmatic, and right. Jet sees himself as a pragmatist and Sokka as an idealist, but where Jet sees only the categories Jet himself created of "enemy" and "ally", Sokka sees the reality: living, breathing people, "mothers and fathers and children." Jet is not a pragmatist, he is a madman; Sokka is the realist here. The death of Jet's parents taught him to hate the Fire Nation and destroy them before they hurt him more. Sokka, on the other hand, learned the right lesson from his pain: It sucks when people you love die, so you shouldn't kill people other people might love (which is everyone).

At the beginning of the episode, Aang and Katara see Sokka as something of a joke, and to a degree they are justified. His judgment has not been very reliable for most of the series to this point. Sokka is sarcastic, cynical, and a complainer; he's difficult to get along with, where Jet is charismatic and winning. But Sokka doesn't try to kick cowering old men in the head, and eventually Aang and Katara learn their lesson: It doesn't matter what team you're on or how much charisma you have; the people to trust are the people who do what's right.

Random Observations:

• By focusing on Sokka instead of Katara, the episode becomes "skeptic saves the day with the power of doubt." "The Fortuneteller" uses the same plot structure, and it's a nice reminder that, no matter how fantastic the Avatar world may seem by our standards, healthy skepticism is still a vitally important skill.
• Jet is one of the few cases of a Character of the Week who is sufficiently interesting in his own right to carry the episode.
• The forest seems to think it's fall, judging by the amount of red and brown foliage. Weird, considering that it's at most a couple of weeks past the winter solstice. Unless they're somewhere where the first snow is really late? Avatar seasons are messed up to begin with, considering that they appear to have the same seasons in both the northern and southern hemispheres. It's possible, given a planet with no axial tilt and a fairly eccentric orbit, but it's bloody unlikely.
• Sokka talks a great deal of sense when he complains that Appa sticks out to much. The Gaang in general does a TERRIBLE job of keeping a low profile.
• "Why do boys always think someone has to be the leader?" Hearing Katara say that is hilarious, considering how much of a power struggle there's going to be between her and Toph later in the series.
• Katara is just a bitch early in this episode, with her snarking on Sokka's youth (even though she's younger), lack of sexual experience (like she has any more!), and claims about his instincts (okay, that one's fair).
• Without making a big deal about it, this episode really shows how much Katara has improved in the last few weeks. For example, she puts out the fire on Sokka's shirt with a gentler version of the water whip. In the time between last episode and this one, she's practiced it enough to modify it. The fight against the Fire Nation soldiers even suggests that Katara has actually surpassed Sokka in combat. That scroll was good stuff! Also, I think this may be the first time she uses the trick of keeping a bottle of water at her belt. Later in the episode, she quickly takes down Jet, an opponent Aang was having trouble with! Admittedly, he was probably at least somewhat tired from his fight with Aang, and she had the advantage of surprise, but still impressive on her part.
• Why would soldiers be carrying around large boxes full of candy? Sure, a little candy in each package of field rations, so they have a quick way to raise blood sugar without having to sit down to a full meal, but a big box full of nothing but candy? A possibility: They really are trying to kill Jet, and it's either bait to trap one of his younger followers or a bribe to turn them on him.
• That twig in Jet's mouth serves double duty. It's an Asian culture reference, showing up in a lot of Japanese films as visual shorthand for a ronin, a masterless samurai -- the rough samurai movie equivalent of the lone gun in a Western -- and it's also a stand-in for the cigarette Jet would doubtless be sporting in a show aimed at adults. The ronin parallels are particularly strong: Jet is fighting to continue a war his lord (if, as seems likely, the Earth Kingdom is feudal) has already lost. He's also entirely without honor.
• In the first few minutes after Jet appears, he seems to be set up as Katara's equivalent to Suki: a non-bending, highly skilled Earth Kingdom warrior and war leader, wielding a non-conventional weapon (hook-swords, a fan). The biggest difference is that Suki is subject to civilian, adult authority, and Jet is not. Oh yeah, and Suki is sane.
• The Fire Nation killed Jet's parents when he was eight years old, prompting him to become paranoid, violent, and obsessive. He then trained himself to become an incredible fighter, able to take on people with superpowers even though he has none. Jet is Batman!
• Sokka's trick with the knife and the tree is very cool, and by praising it, Jet scores more points with Sokka. Also, I love that knife; it's clearly made from the jawbone of some animal -- it even still has some of the teeth. That's a great little worldbuilding detail -- it implies that the Southern Water Tribe neither has much access to metal, nor much opportunity to trade for it.
• If Sokka had not intervened, Jet would have kicked a cowering old man in the head. Just thought I'd repeat that, in case any of his fangirls are reading.
• The old man in this episode is the opposite of the old man from "Imprisoned." The old man from the earlier episode was Earth Kingdom, and repaid kindness by turning Haru in to the Fire Nation. This old man is Fire Nation, and repays Sokka's attempted kindness by helping him save the village.
• This episode is another rare case of the cabbage cart being destroyed by someone other than the Gaang; in this case, we don't even see Cabbage Man, but a display of cabbages is prominently shown as the wave bears down on the village.
• As I mentioned, if the old man had really been an assassin, Jet would never have let him go. In fact, from a purely military point of view, Jet shouldn't have let him go -- if you're going to attack civilians in the first place, you shouldn't let them go home and tell everyone where you're hiding. The only reason to do that is if you're more interested in making "enemy" civilians afraid than any military strategy -- which is a roundabout way of saying Jet's a terrorist. Who kicks old men in the head.