Avatar: The Last Airbender

Avatar's 'The Drill' Showcased the Gaang's Best Teamwork

Avatar: The Last Airbender (ATLA) is by far one of the most influential shows of my childhood. Themes of decolonization, biopolitics, and resistance to the status quo are present in all three seasons.

ALTA takes place in a world of four nations: the Water Tribes, Earth Kingdom, Air Nomads, and the Fire Nation. Some people within this world have the ability to "bend" these elements. The Avatar is a physical manifestation of a higher spiritual being, and exists in a cycle of reincarnation, embodying a person from a different nation each time. The Avatar has the ability to wield all four elements and upholds the duty to keep balance in the world. The story follows Aang and his "Gaang" to fight the Fire Nation, who have thrown the world out of balance through their imperialism.

While the show does not examine queerness as it pertains to gender, there is an exploration of gender roles and power within the two sibling pairs: Sokka/Katara and Zuko/Azula. The former coming from a colonized tribe, and the later a direct outcome of the colonizers.

The Gaang spends most of their journey liberating populations and demonstrating acts of resistance to the colonization and tyranny of the Fire Nation. Throughout the show, colonized populations are "other"-ed and made second-class citizens by the Fire Nation. The Gaang works in contradiction to this "othering" by reminding people of their heritage (Aang is 100 years old), and restoring their confidence in the identities the Fire Nation has taken away from them.

The Gaang must grapple with topics of surveillance and biopolitics when they find themselves in Ba Sing Se, an Earth Kingdom city. They experience the Earth Kingdom's use of citizenship as a tool in establishing a legal basis of exclusion to preserve the purity of the state when they try to seek asylum. Ba Sing Se also operates with a "cultural authority" known as the Dah Li, utilizing surveillance to silence all talk of the conflict with the Fire Nation, thus maintaining a "peaceful, orderly utopia" [1].

[1] https://ethnicstudies.ucsd.edu/_files/Student%20Projects/Life%20and%20Death%20in%20Avatar.pdf

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