bobbityhobbity:
queertoonqueertoons:
lokgifsandmusings:
Look, it’s very rare that I stay up after 10 when I have work the next day (I get up at 5am), and you better be fucking sure that I am goddamn upset if it’s this late and I’m posting. But there has been a disgusting amount of vitriol aimed at this post of mine from earlier, which pulled snippets from queertoonqueertoons‘s Dear Bryke essay. In my post, I said to fucking read the essay, but hey, I figured reading 3 paragraphs in full wouldn’t be too arduous either.
One needs look no further than queertoon’s list of essays to find that they are incredibly sensitive about racial subjects for one, and 100% do not eclipse Korra within her own narrative. In particular, their essays on Depictions of Brutalized WOC in media and “Vaatu, Violence, and Voice Casting” are particularly effective at highlighting racial issues inherent in the LOK narrative. Further, if anyone had bothered to read the full essay “Dear Bryke,” it would become immensely clear that Korra is the “most important” character in the narrative, and in fact I say from personal knowledge that it is queertoon’s favorite character.
I made a post hoping to highlight the complexity of Asami and her unique function as a non-normative character in children’s media. No more, no less.
Not liking Asami is okay. What is NOT OKAY EVER is cyber-bullying. You don’t know someone’s past and you don’t understand what’s triggering. If there is an issue that you take with something you read (again, assuming you extended the courtesy to read it IN CONTEXT), then there are far more polite ways to go about addressing it than hiding behind anon messages, vitriolic tags, or the creation of particularly toxic and misdirected posts.
We all love the same show. Let’s try and keep each other safe.
Thank you, so much for this. I was a little too caught off guard to even make a post that made cohesive sentences to respond. And really, I do welcome critique of any of my essays, that’s apart of academic work, but I just… I’m used to being given the benefit of the doubt or at least asked for clarification if my claims seem off point. But I promise that I believe Korra is “a character whose intersectionality I can only hope will become an archetype of American storytelling” (Dear Bryke).
And I do think it is critical that QWOC voices are at the center of these conversations about intersectionality, especially as it relates to Korra.
Korra is so important to me. And her story has been an incredible place of healing in my own life. I also love this fandom, and I’m terribly sorry if any of my words hurt you unintentionally, even if taken out of context.
I am deeply sorry that you were negatively impacted by this, and I apologize if my precipitous snark contributed to the problem. But since you have expressed openness to critique of your writing in context, in the spirit of peer review, I am going offer you one.
I have read your Dear Bryke essay three times, and I think you express your argument very well. But I also see that argument as the consequence of what sometimes happens when we fall in love with an interpretive framework: it causes us to miss the things that our framework cannot account for. And in this case, it also verges on the Intentionalist Fallacy. Reading LOK as a kind of allegory of Bryke’s struggle to overcome the influences of Disney and Miyazaki is interesting as a piece of armchair psychoanalysis, but rests on shaky evidentiary grounds as a rubric for developing an authoritative interpretation of the show, especially when you get to the part about Hiroshi. Hiroshi’s appearance certainly seems like a tribute to Miyazaki, but reading his death as a triumph over the patriarchy feels like a bit of a stretch, at least partly because it ignores the way in which that storyline was used in Book 4 and ignores what the series largely failed to do with Asami.
I have seen plenty of Asami’s fans admit that the character was underused, but it is the ways in which Asami was underused that concern me here. Asami is consistently used as a prop to further the development of another character. Asami is denied consistency in her emotions and feelings. She is denied the opportunity for genuine heroic sacrifice. She was left out of three out of four series finales. I have seen Asami praised as an “internal” character. But my issue with Asami is not that she has a rich inner life (I’m an introvert and I like plenty of characters who are introverted), it’s that Asami’s inner life has of necessity largely been supplied for her by her fans and not by the show itself (evidence of which is in great supply in some of the responses to your post on your blog, which weave elaborate motivations for Asami that are, by and large, invisible to many of us on screen). It’s fine as far as fandom is concerned. But it is a problem if you are going to try to make the argument that Asami one of the best things Bryke has ever created. Where you see creators listening to the character and deciding not to make her a villain, I see creators who had a lot of difficulty fitting her into the show after they made that decision. Aside from “Long Live the Queen,” Bryke consistently failed to make Asami matter materially to the plot and also consistently allowed her to be upstaged by other characters.
This is most especially and annoyingly egregious in the lead-up to the Book 4 finale. Asami has one job: build the Hummingbird Suits. And the scenes that involve them, Varrick consistently takes center-stage (as has been true since he and Asami shared scenes together in Book 2). And it’s easy to see how that might happen, given what a big, fun, expressive character Varrick is and how much the writers seem to enjoy creating material for him. But given the role that Asami was going to play in the final scene, you have to ask yourself why they didn’t put in a little more effort to make sure that this didn’t happen. Why didn’t they, for example, give her a hero moment?
Because here is what actually happens in Asami’s plotline in the final two episodes of Book 4: the team can’t use the suits to get close enough to get someone into the mech. Asami is out of solutions, and it is Hiroshi who re-enters the story in order to supply one. Likewise, it is Hiroshi who makes the decision to eject Asami and finish cutting into the mech, giving him the opportunity to heroically sacrifice himself and advance the plot forward. Asami exits the scene entirely, never to return until the moment when everyone is looking for Korra and the camera chooses to focus on Jinora and Mako. And in all that time, other characters - especially Mako - get to have huge hero moments in which they make positive decisions that place them in danger, demonstrate moral courage, and advance the plot.
You could make the argument that Asami has never really been one of the more significant ass-kickers in the series, that what she brings to the show has never been her talent for violence but rather emotional support for Korra. But how does having a female character be the emotional support while other characters get to be Big Damn Heroes subvert the patriarchy exactly? (Unless we are in the land of ultra-essentialist feminist readings from the 60s which, given your choice of quotations from Butler, maybe we are? Point is that assigning the emotional support role to a female sidekick is both depressingly standard and actively oppressive when held up as the benchmark for how women should behave and be, especially when said character is preferred over one who doesn’t embody this sort of role.) Furthermore, Asami isn’t really all that good at that role, because once again, in her big opportunity to offer comfort to Korra in “Remembrances,” she gets upstaged by Tenzin. Again, it is easy to see why this might happen, given the importance of Tenzin and Korra’s relationship, but you have to ask why no one tried to compensate for Asami’s consistently reactive role and her tendency to disappear when other characters enter the scene.
You obviously did not experience the show this way, and your argument reflects that. What I am ultimately suggesting is that you became caught up in a largely symbolic reading of the show rather than engaging with things that were more glaringly obvious. You found a feminist reading of the show at a symbolic level, when what was happening in the plot is that Asami was consistently being set to one side in favor of male characters. I’ll be honest: I see a LOT of this from the Asami/Korrasami fandom. And I understand why. Queer readings have historically had to rely a lot on symbolism and subtext because of what could not be expressed in the text itself. But I would argue that while these are valid and interesting readings in their own right, they are poor instruments for finding reasons to praise creators for what they ultimately failed to do with their onscreen depiction.
Because the answer for why I find Asami to be such a frustrating disappointment lies, I believe, in an argument you made elsewhere, which is that this all-male writing and production team (Katie Matilla excepted) really had no idea what to do with this character, that they weren’t really comfortable writing intimate female friendship (not to mention romance), and that they were just far, far more interested in playing around with characters like Bolin, Meelo, Prince Wu, and Varrick, whose proposal and wedding sucked up more screen time than all of Asami’s scenes in the finale put together.
But here is the thing: you know that this is not a perfect show and that no show is, especially in the environment in which media is made today. We are constantly placed in positions of having to decide what we will tolerate and what we just can’t overlook, of having to square our political commitments with what we enjoy. It’s always a compromise. And in this case, you connected enough with Asami’s story and with her relationship with Korra enough to set aside a lot of the stuff that wasn’t done so well. But that doesn’t make the argument that Asami is the “unsung hero” of the show any stronger, because what the words “unsung hero” do is to assign the blame for the fact that some people did not connect with Asami to the audience and not to the people who created the character. I guess that is entirely possible (and while this is merely an implication - perhaps unfairly imputed - in your essay, it is explicit in the posts made by lokgifsandmusings). But it’s also why people got mad.
Well, it’s one of the reasons. I’ll get to the other one in a sec. Much of the good Asami criticism is focused not on who Asami would be if she were a real person but instead on the decisions the writers made with her in the show. But when people get frustrated, they do tend to resort to calling her “boring” or “bland” or a “pale princess” or whatever. So here’s that second bit: in your essay, you begin by expressing a critical attitude toward Bryke and rather negative feelings about the show, and the piece is not only an analysis but a narrative tracing the softening of your attitude towards it over time. What this makes people wonder is the following: why was it Asami Sato who sort of changed your mind? Why is she your emotional touchstone for this series? Why are you willing, for Asami Sato’s sake, to read what is plausibly the failure of a bunch of male writers to do right by this character as not only intentional and justifiablebut as a revolutionary statement?
You had originally planned to keep your whole argument within the context of fandom and to talk about how the fandom made Korrasami happen, so let’s talk about the Asami fandom for a second, particularly how many people who have been fans of Korra have experienced the Asami fandom since 2012. When Korra was introduced, there were already people who did not like her, largely because she conflicted with their idea of what an Avatar should be. Korra was not a safe character. She had an attitude. She was confident about her abilities and eager to use them. She was confrontational. And while some people pumped their fists in the air when they saw this, it bothered some others. It would be idiotic to suggest that all of those people were motivated by racism, that they simply didn’t like an aggressive brown girl on their screen. Nevertheless, racialized misogyny became one of the ways in which members of the fandom expressed their frustration with and dislike for Korra. And it was deeply hurtful.
Then Asami appeared, and Asami was nice, poised, un-aggressive, and safe. Those qualities certainly influenced a lot of people who immediately latched onto her. Many people like good, safe, headcanon-friendly characters. Furthermore, Asami was often a victim (often of the insensitivity of Korra and Mako). Thus, she is easy to sympathize with. But the leveraging of Asami’s “goodness” over Korra got really disgusting at some points. This included the use of misguided social justice rubrics to condemn Korra as a “white savior” (???) in the Equalist controversy. At one point, people were saying that Asami was more deserving of the Avatar title (”Legend of Asami”). There were also claims that Asami was the more feminist character because she kicked ass and wore make-up at the same time (a variant of Tumblr Feminism that permeates a ton of fandoms and is utterly exhausting to listen to), while Korra’s gender identity was too close to a man (arguments that Korra was simultaneously too aggressive and too masculine combined with arguments that she is Bad for Feminism because Mako saved her right before she saved him kind of make my head hurt). This, coupled with arguments that Korra deserved to lose her bending and needed to be humbled, and the utter viciousness with which these opinions were expressed (arguments toward which your essay veered rather close in substance if not in tone), led a lot of people who really loved Korra back them to actively start hating Asami - not because she had done anything wrong in the show, but because she was consistently being elevated by the fans above Korra. And you can start to see how the suggestion that Korra be removed as the protagonist of her show and replaced with Asami starts taking on icky implications when you look at the designs of both characters, especially when it’s being expressed in racist and misogynist ways by some, even if they are only a small minority.
So THIS is all the baggage people are bringing along with them when they read your argument that “Asami is by far the greatest thing Bryke ever created.” (Where is the source of this quote by the way? You put it in quotes, so I’m guessing it’s not original to you, but it’s impossible for me to glean the source from context.) This is what people are thinking about when you put Korra in the ranks of supposedly conventional female heroines and instead award the Certificate of Revolutionari-ness to Asami Sato, who, by embodying that combination of conventional, patriarchally compliant feminine looks and badass skills is precisely in line with the status quo for women in action films and television right now.
I don’t doubt that you love Korra, but since you initially wanted to talk about all of this in the context of fandom, I feel like the fandom context for your argument is fair game. And the context is that many people who have loved this show since 2012 have experienced this fandom not (as you have) as a “bright spot” but as an unending hell marked by racialized misogyny against their favorite character, blogs dedicated to Mako and Korra hate, and, finally, the labelling of everyone who fails to find Korrasami compelling (including the queer ones), as homophobes. It is a fandom in which we continue to see popular fanart depicting Korra in ways that have icky implications when it comes to race, gender, and disability, a lot of it coming from Asami fans. I am not in any way saying that you are part of that problem. I am saying that you got shit you didn’t deserve because of shitty people who just so happen to agree with you about this one thing, including people who post lines from your stuff out of context, andincluding people who are, at this very moment, leaping to your defense.
Believe me, a lot of Makorra fans and fans who are just generally not 100% signed on for Asami or Korrasami know precisely how that feels.