Oh, I didn't know about the comics! That's quite mollifying, actually.
Yep, true about air never going much further... I also always found it quite sad that air bending has basically deteriorated to the avatar plus 1 master. I'd have thought that so much knowledge would have been lost, but that never really gets addressed after the first season.
I guess that the fact that it became more than just a one-off that Aang could pull was what comforted me about bending-bending. I mostly just didn't like that it took away from that final stretch of Aang's journey, by a method unknown by the generations and generations of avatars before him. He basically invents a magical way to strip people of their powers that make them dangerous instead of killing them. This bothered me on several levels: first, because it implies that Ozai was only scary and unmanageable because of his bending (which I thought was a prejudice we were supposed to have overcome in watching Sokka, the Kyoshi warriors, etc.). Second, because while it's beautiful and lovely to think that dedication to pacifism can win out and solve everything, I'm a little bit too far gone into cynicism to see that as anything but a huge, glaring lie. I saw Aang's dedication to pacifism as something similar to Mahatma Gandhi. But the thing is, even with millions upon millions of followers, Gandhi had to make sacrifices—huge sacrifices—to make his pacifist ways pull through, and even then couldn't do everything peacefully.
Aang was never disillusioned. He never sacrificed anything. It's a Disney "If you wish upon a star" scenario, and I wish I could believe that that story could really have gone that way, because after all it's a fictional world...but I can't. It feels like the way depressing classics are sometimes given contrived happy endings in children's books, and my own inability to see past that and just appreciate the sugar-coated happy ending makes me a little sad.
That's the way of languages, sadly... I took Russian for 3 years at and before uni and loved it, but now can't remember more than enough for a (probably ungrammatical) cursory conversation about my name, where I live and possibly what I study.
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timeasmymeasure
Re: Part 2 II B
Date: 2013-03-16 09:57 pm (UTC)Yep, true about air never going much further... I also always found it quite sad that air bending has basically deteriorated to the avatar plus 1 master. I'd have thought that so much knowledge would have been lost, but that never really gets addressed after the first season.
I guess that the fact that it became more than just a one-off that Aang could pull was what comforted me about bending-bending. I mostly just didn't like that it took away from that final stretch of Aang's journey, by a method unknown by the generations and generations of avatars before him. He basically invents a magical way to strip people of their powers that make them dangerous instead of killing them. This bothered me on several levels: first, because it implies that Ozai was only scary and unmanageable because of his bending (which I thought was a prejudice we were supposed to have overcome in watching Sokka, the Kyoshi warriors, etc.). Second, because while it's beautiful and lovely to think that dedication to pacifism can win out and solve everything, I'm a little bit too far gone into cynicism to see that as anything but a huge, glaring lie. I saw Aang's dedication to pacifism as something similar to Mahatma Gandhi. But the thing is, even with millions upon millions of followers, Gandhi had to make sacrifices—huge sacrifices—to make his pacifist ways pull through, and even then couldn't do everything peacefully.
Aang was never disillusioned. He never sacrificed anything. It's a Disney "If you wish upon a star" scenario, and I wish I could believe that that story could really have gone that way, because after all it's a fictional world...but I can't. It feels like the way depressing classics are sometimes given contrived happy endings in children's books, and my own inability to see past that and just appreciate the sugar-coated happy ending makes me a little sad.
That's the way of languages, sadly... I took Russian for 3 years at and before uni and loved it, but now can't remember more than enough for a (probably ungrammatical) cursory conversation about my name, where I live and possibly what I study.
Which part of Germany were you at?