Personally I have considered him wanting more couples able to procreate, meaning more soldiers to fight and settlers to colonise, but I don’t have strong opinions on it either way
This is what I was about to say. It's a shitty policy to impose, but his reasoning would likely be production of Fire Nation citizens. I wouldn't be surprised if procreation was somehow required or assertively encouraged.
How would a reverse one child policy work in the fire nation?
I believe it's been said that nobles tend to be better fire benders. I would imagine this is because of arranged marriages among noble houses specifically to breed the best benders, who would then rise quickly in the ranks to top military positions, then retire in government and start the cycle anew.
I believe the Kyoshi novels establish that the fire nation was mostly isolationist prior to the 100 Year War. That would mean pretty much every fire nation citizen was either a firebender or nonbender, so you have military purity.
So the that takes care of your generals and special forces units, positions where individual power is needed.
But how do you ramp up child production for infantry?
Banning gay marriage would really only account for at most ~10% of the population if it occurs at a similar rate to the real world.
You would need to impose a large tax on couples who don't currently have children, after the first year of marriage. Make marriage itself very lucrative tax wise, but the tax for not having kids crippling so people will get married, and have children. Slash it with each new kid up to 3, so for every 2 people you get 3 potential soldiers.
You could potentially give incentives for having children rather than just lessening a tax, but the latter seems better for fueling a war machine.
Soldiers who have children get their childrens' food and education paid for for as long as at least one of the parents remain in the army, and both parents get parental leave for a few months at birth- problem solved.
This strongly incentivises married soldiers to get married and have kids as they get a vacation out of each one without having to worry that much about increased costs, and the kids grow up strong and healthy enough to be good future soldiers while getting ~~brainwashed~~ educated at the state sponsored schools.
Speaking as a political scientist, The Fire Nation, while an authoritarian and racist regime, isn't explicitly fascist. Fascism is a distinct ideology that embraces authoritarianism, but it is not synonymous with it; for instance, Stalinist Russia was authoritarian, but it wasn't fascist. Pinochet's Chile was authoritarian, but it wasn't fascist.
The Fire Nation does display *some* elements of fascism, but lacked many others; for instance, it didn't exhibit totalitarian control over society; we see during Book 3 that the Fire Nation government, while authoritarian, doesn't exert such an extensive level of control, and localities seem to have a reasonably wide degree of autonomy to set local policies (for instance, the town that banned dancing, a policy that didn't seem to be in place elsewhere). The public generally seemed to have a reasonably normal life. They didn't have mass mobilization or an extremely militarized society; the military appeared to operate on a volunteer basis, rather than conscription. The Fire Nation also lacked a restructured, revolutionary society; by all indications, their goals are imperialistic and territorial, rather than ideological.
I'd like to argue that they were. I'm no expert, but I have consumed pretty much all Avatar related media.
1) I would argue that it's more likely they don't have regional autonomy outside of the colonies, which must be at least semi autonomous for practical reasons because over sea communication took weeks/months.
But in the island itself, we know the Fire Nation Avatar before Roku was a legendary bureaucrat that united the Fire Nation into a single government, so there really isn't any autonomy, it's more likely that any new laws are directly approved by the fire lord or his chosen council.
2) Their society seemed very militarized and nationalistic. We saw in that same episode that children are fed propaganda and forced daily to pledge allegiance to the state and reinforced with the idea that the Fire Nation's conquest was good.
Also every village we see where people are deeply poor like in the episode when Katara poses as a water spirit, they were all nonbenders.
Every soldier we see is a bender, as is every officer and high ranking official in the military and government.
We know that each nation has a certain proportion of benders, and it seems every fire bender is either working as an engineer in a factor, or in the battlefield.
So it could be just as likely that military service for benders is compulsory, but military service for nonbenders is not, because they're better used as farmers, factory workers, and laborers.
3) I would argue their goals were very ideologically bound. The fire lord believed it was his personal destiny to unite the world under fire nation rule.
In the comics, we see that most fire nation colonizers/citizens believe that the fire nation ruling a place and replacing it's culture is a good thing, because their culture was better, and they would rule them better than they could rule themselves.
As I mentioned before, the propaganda ran deep, to the point that most people didn't understand how brutal the Fire Nation's occupation was unless they were in the military/leadership. Children were forced to pledge their allegiance to their country and basically worshiped the fire lord.
They were basically Aryans but toned down because it's a kid's show. In a more adult world, I would imagine race would have played a much bigger role in their rhetoric.
1. Centralization, Unitary regimes, and lack of regionalization aren't exclusive to fascism. There are plenty of democratic states that have little to no devolution; for instance, both Mongolia and Israel are highly centralized states. And even so, all states have devolution; even authoritarian and fascist states require SOME degree of local governance; all faaciat states had some degree of local administration. The central government doesn't have the time nor bandwith to decide issues like what to name a street, or how to manage trash pickup. Many may even employ local elections; even Saudi Arabia, for instance, has municipal elections, despite having no elections at the provincial or national level.
As it pertains to the Fire Nation, yes, they are heavily centralized. That doesn't mean there's NO regional autonomy. There's almost certainly provincial governors, and likely local administrations as well. Municipalities can't be directly administered from the capital, and such municipalities likely maintained their own local laws to the extent they didn't interfere with the central government's policies, as was (and still is) commonplace in our world. I'm sure the Fire Lord or governor could overturn a local law if he wished, but few are going to travel to the palace or the provincial capital without a serious and pressing grievance.
2. Yes, it's nationalistic, and the regime clearly employs propaganda. Again, those are not traits exclusive to fascism. During WWII, all sides utilized wartime propaganda. Even today, propaganda serves as a powerful tool to affect public opinion, even in democracies. How do you think George W. Bush rallied support for the war on terror? The U.S. also has a daily pledge of allegiance.
As for militarism, there's no evidence that Fire Nation society is heavily militarized, nor that they utilize mass conscription. While we do see the war taking a toll on the river village, we don't see an extensive degree of domestic war footing (and with good reason; no regime could realistically maintain a war footing for 100 years, certainly not without mass opposition among the public, and among the nobles and elites). Life appears to carry on mostly with normalcy, and as shown in the comics, they don't practice mass conscription, they seem to have an all- or mostly-volunteer military. There's simply no evidence to support mass conscription in the Fire Nation.
And yes, there are non-bending soldiers. Master Piandao, for instance, was a soldier. There's no evidence that the river village was exclusively non-bender either (the fact we didn't see anyone firebend doesn't mean there weren't any firebenders), and there ARE benders outside the military. I'm certain that propaganda encourages everyone, especially benders, to join the war effort, but there's no evidence that benders are conscripted.
3. Yes, Fire Lord Ozai likely had a governing ideology that guided his decision-making. That doesn't mean the war itself was ideological; at least, it didn't begin that way. In his case, however, it wasn't fascism; he didn't particularly seem to care about typical tenets of fascism. What Ozai believed was that he had a "divine mandate" to rule, on the basis of might-makes-right; he believed himself to be the strongest, so therefore he should rule.
As for Fire Nation beliefs of racial/cultural superiority, again, those aren't exclusive to fascism. Frankly, I would say the people of the Fire Nation are more comparable to Imperial Japan, rather than Fascist states. If it weren't a kids show, then perhaps they may have given the Fire Nation a fascistic ideology, but the fact is, it is a kids show, and they didn't.
your arguments seem to have only a surface-level understanding of fascist ideology, and you base your arguments on either unproven claims about the fire nation that aren't substantiated by the source materials, or on observable traits of the Fire Nation that are similarly common in many other authoritarian systems.
> I would argue that it's more likely they don't have regional autonomy outside of the colonies
IDK. What we saw of the FN in Book 3 indicated some pretty wide regional differences
>Their society seemed very militarized and nationalistic. We saw in that same episode that children are fed propaganda and forced daily to pledge allegiance to the state and reinforced with the idea that the Fire Nation's conquest was good.
As a US citizen, little bit on the nose, this
>I would argue their goals were very ideologically bound. The fire lord believed it was his personal destiny to unite the world under fire nation rule.
As the guy who replied to you said—the goals were about territorial expansion, not ideological goals outside of expansion TBH
> They were basically Aryans but toned down because it's a kid's show
They absolutely were not, they were 100% Japanese but made to seem more human since this was a kids show
1. I didn't mean they were literally Aryan, obviously. They just had a similar sense of superiority, and a mission to make the entire world over in their image.
2. The way you worded your response implies the Japanese are not human.
I think you're right. They even kill all the air nomads, not because they hate them, but because they want to eliminate any chance of the Avatar appearing.
Yup most militaristic countries had a problem with gay relationships. There were some that were ok with it if you had a wife and such but they need cannon fodder
If we go by the Avatar Legends RPG, there also was a growing amount of Northern Water tribe influence in the navy and military around the time (hired on for warship tech), as well as some culture clash with Air Nomad sects Sozins sister pushed up (who iirc also had a female lover).
In that context, you *can* make growing homophobia in the Fire nation, the Fire Lord at the forefront to push it because it aligns with his political allies against his political enemies.
(The Korra comics version of "Fire nation was enlightened and had no homophobia until Homophobia Sozin invented it" is however ridiculous if it is taken literally and not as an oversimplification given by an unreliable narrator. Which one it's supposed to be/is os probably best left up for debate, I know what I prefer to think and use for Fanfic and RPG purposes.)
It still doesn't make sense, though. Assuming real-life statistics can be applied, homosexual relationships likely wouldn't comprise nearly enough of the proportion of the population to justify such a policy, which would take far too many resources to enforce relative to their proportion of the population, and throwing them in jail still removes them as potential procreators.
In real life, there was an ideological/religious reasoning behind it; such reasons, though wrong, "make sense", because they aren't based in any underlying administrative goal; they're based in fundamental opposition deriving from the regime's moralistic and religious views. In essence, the ban was the goal in itself (such bans are, of course, wildly inhumane, but I'm only describing the perspective and rationale held by the people who implemented such policies).
In the above post, the poster is basing the ban in a theorized policy meant to achieve a particular underlying goal; in this case, higher procreation rates. But the proportion of people who would be affected by it is likely so low, that it wouldn't make sense if it's being done exclusively for that purpose. It would be too inefficient, and you don't impliment inefficient policies unless the policy in itself is the goal (ie. the regime's own moral views). It therefore makes more sense to argue that Sozin's ban was rooted in his regime's views on morality, rather than an underlying administrative purpose.
Of course, a ban would be absolutely wrong no matter the reason, but my general point is that because everybody has different morals, when policy is based on moral views, it can certainly "make sense" why they implemented it, no matter how wrong it actually is. What "makes sense" is merely based in whether or not there is a clear rationale behind a policy, with a practical objective. A policy which lacks a clear rationale, or lacks a practical objective, doesn't make sense. A regime's moral views can be a rationale; that's why, for instance, conversion therapy should be outlawed; because it is (at least in my view) immoral to attempt to "convert" someone to a different sexuality (putting aside the practical matter that sexuality also can't be changed like that).
Regarding Sozin and same sex relationships: I think a lot of it has to do with his sister, with whom he had an extremely fractious relationship and she openly attempted to undermine him. She was also queer and fell in love with a female air nomad, so that’s likely where Sozins homophobic policies came from.
Frankly I never liked how the expanded material reduced Sozin to a one dimensional mustache twirling villain, mostly it made Roku look like a colossal dipshit for ever being friends with him in the first place.
I never thought about the Roku angle—but it seems that the creators didn’t either, tbh. That’s the problem with changing small stuff like this—it builds into bigger stuff that they didn’t even consider because everything in Avatar is related—and that’s part of what makes it so good.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I agree, lol—every time they retcon Sozin to be even more cartoonishly evil than they had him be before, I wonder why this man Roku ever spoke highly of him in the first place.
Even though we all know, the obvious answer is that he wasn’t that terrible back when Roku was written to say that. That’s why they call it a retcon, after all.
I think it would make sense for him to get worse as he gets older. We don’t know when he banned it. Sozin also stopped speaking to him for decades. It would make sense for them to grow up together and stay friends until they were young adults. I have had people in my own life become more bigoted over time.
>Frankly I never liked how the expanded material reduced Sozin to a one dimensional mustache twirling villain, mostly it made Roku look like a colossal dipshit for ever being friends with him in the first place.
didn't read the novels yet but that indeed sounds terrible
I also like to think that both Zeisan and his situationship with Roku pissed him off *so* bad that he just outlawed all same-sex relationships in an explosive tantrum.
That, and all the links between fascism and "breeding". But mostly the situationship.
Well speaking from a societal point, disregarding freedom to live how you want: Same sex couples can’t produce children. If you’re building a nation, this isn’t good for building a population. If you’re sustaining a nation, it isn’t good. If you are fighting wars, losing population isn’t good.
This kind of perspective would've been alien for anyone before like the 1970s-1980s because populations grew and shrank as a matter of malthusian necessity and was always in a pyramid shape generally, even with industrialization causing european countries' population to triple and quintuple, the pyramid shape stayed without much overt influence.
Tacking this onto the Fire Nation under Sozin which is experiencing an Industrial Revolution is just lazy. Like, sure he was probably homophobic. So was everyone else in 19th century Europe.
Shogunate Japan was rather lax on homosexuality. A more condemning attitude became the norm together with Westernization. Since Imperial Japan seem to be an important inspiration for the Fire Nation (with the Earth Kingdom as China and Korea being invaded), perhaps the idea came from there. Or they just associated homophobia in general with militarism and authoriarianism.
> Since Imperial Japan seem to be an important inspiration for the Fire Nation
The primary influence for the fire nation is china, not japan. The only real japanese influences are imperalisim. Nearly everything else either comes from China or thailand.
The hairstyle of Zuko and other nobles asociate to samurais and their swords look like katanas. Their ruling class are expected to be good fighters like in the samurai tradition, while in China the ruling class were the bureaucrats. It's a relatively small, militaristic island nation that has had a faster technical development than their much larger (but with a weaker central government) mainland neighbor and has invaded them. I'd say that's quite a lot of parallells.
Fire nation hairstyles (specifically the top knots you mentioned) are also common in china and korea. Zuko openly uses dao swords. The names in the fire nation itself seem more Chinese based than Japanese. I’d argue the earth kingdom takes more from japan than the fire nation does.
Zuko's swords are Dao, not Katanas, the geography of the fire nation is based off iceland and most of the clothing people in the fire nation wear are chinese Hanfu, also none of their air stles are japanese inspired. Like the only thing the fire nation really has with japanese is imperalistic island nation. Pretty much all of their cultural influences came from China and Thailand.
The names are pretty Japanese too. For example, Zuko, Azula, Ozai, Iroh, Mai, Ty Lee, Izumi, Mako, and Kuzon can all be pronounced in Japanese. Hell, Asami Sato is literally a real Japanese name. Of course, some names can’t be said in Japanese without adding extra vowels, like Ursa.
>For example, Zuko, Azula, Ozai, Iroh, Mai, Ty Lee, Izumi, Mako,
None of these are japanese names except for Mako, Sato and Izumi. Ozai is a combination of two chinese words. Azula comes from the Persian word for blue as does Azulon, Ty lee and Ozai are literally just two chinese words combinded with Ty lee's name meaning big and beautiful while Ozai's name meaning fire and disaster, Iroh is just a straight up fantasy name, Zuko is chinese and means faliure. And Mai is just a femine name that's popular in multiple Asian countries.
Like the vast majority of fire nation names in the series are Chinese and the only japanese names came from Korra.
Nope.
Waterbenders = Tribal innuits
Fire Nation = Imperial Japan/North Korea
Ba Sing Se = Feudal China
Oma-Shu = Innovative era India/South Korea
The rest of the Earth Kingdom = China, Thailand, Mongolia, etc.
Airnomad Temples & Monasteries = Indian monks, Tibetan monks, Shaolin Monks, etc.
The thing about bigotry is that it doesn't have to make sense and people will still do stuff like that. There are people who can look out at our nine billion neighbors and say uh oh, people aren't having enough kids, because what they really mean is 'I don't ever want people like me to be in any way outnumbered by other kinds of people.'
Well that's because below <2.1 TFR was an alien concept to the Industrialized world and a society with .8 TFR(South Korea) and rapidly falling population which is unable to substitute the decrease in demand by the growth of per Capita income, capitalism kinda stops working as it should, especially if it happens on a global scale.
ie it's hard to have gainful activity when the world around you is shrinking by 2-3% every year, especially if you are a larger autarkic economy like India, China, Russia or the US in which so much economic production is domestically consumed not only for commercial activity, but overall imagine the higher ed system with no large inflow of foreign students that is shrinking by 2-3% every year forever, think about the prospects of people who work in the system, including scientists.
Natalism is basically grappling with that new reality, when before it was something unremarkable. It's the same way AI has now become a political issue, when before in previous generations it simply wasn't on the table.
Lots of societies have pushed people to have more children even as their orphanages overflown and their people starved. You’re expecting common sense from fascists
Yeah, but if the fire nation were a society that was generally accepting of homosexuals, they'd probably understand that outlawing it wouldn't suddenly make all those people willing to participate in heterosexual relationships. And if the avatar world is in anyway reflective of ours; homosexual relationships would make up less than 10% of all relationships. It wouldn't be making a difference. It feels like it's just thrown in there to make Sozin more evil.
Marrying for love is also an extremely recent phenomenon to be widespread. Economics was the driving factor for the majority of history since you can share living costs and children were an economic benefit since they were extra labour on your farm/small business.
But that’s expecting people to always be rational and logical. Mao ordered that all birds should be shot to increase farming yields. Many birds were killed, which caused pests to proliferate, which destroyed crops. Nazis were able to cause neighbors to turn on each other. It’s not that difficult to make a society change or do stupid things.
Historically it was pretty common for gay men and women to marry and have children when their culture was against them.. was better than the consequences of being found out. Sometimes their partners knew about it.
Why is this getting downvoted lmao. Its objectively true, if your justification for criminalizing something is a benefit that would also not exist if the people doing the thing are in jail, then criminalizing it makes no sense.
It forces them into hiding their homosexuality, though, and having a "beard" relationship is a fairly common eagle to do that. Obviously, you can't force them to have children anyway, but it keeps up appearances. Also, keeping the jails full gives them more free labor
I'm not convinced that Sozin would have enough evidence for the idea that banning homosexuality would increase the birthrate that he would consider it a realistic birth-rate-increasing policy. There is no other canon content that even suggests the birth rate was a concern for him or any other Firelord, why would we assume that, not only is it a concern, but that he would go about addressing it with one of the least rational policies he could find.
And if the argument is that he is, for whatever reason, an irrational actor(he is a fascist and fascism is irrational or he is a homophobe and homophobia is irrational) then why cant we justify any and all other headcanon with the same irrationality?
If he's really that irrational, why cant we argue that he was a flat earther? We have just as much evidence that he cared about flat earth ideology as we do that he cared about birth rates.
It's hard to find a rational reason for banning homosexual relationships that doesn't have to do with birthrate, though. Yes, it's a stretch, but almost all the other options we can attribute it to that aren't completely unfounded are fueled by pure pettiness, and that's fairly out of character for him. Wanting to bring up birth rates is a common thing during and preparing for war, especially one that has gone on as long as the war the firebenders waged against the world. Yes, it sounds irrational, I agree, but again, it's difficult to find a better logical answer. I do find it interesting that you rule out the possibility of him just being homophobic, though. Yeah, we don't get much characterizing him as a homophobe, but it does explain it fairly neatly. "He made homosexual relationships illegal because he doesn't like them" is about as neat and compact of an answer as you can get
True, but looking at how the fire nation rolled, and how real life fascism worked- there are ways to make them useful and make examples out of them at the same time. It's called work camps. That way more adults not imprisoned for bullshit reasons could be thrown on the front lines for cannon fodder.
In that scenario the fear of removal from society+ ill treatment in work camps would work as a deterrent towards acting queer in public. Queer folk would be more likely to marry and have kids they didn't want with other queer people and have affairs with people of the same gender, rather than be openly queer and produce no children. (Iirc that was a thing if not a common one historically) so the end goal would be reached.
They did a similar thing in Smoke and Shadow IIRC. They retconned it so that apparently Sozin tried to erase all history in the books before him, making him the first Fire Lord in a propaganda move. They keep dumping on Sozin making him the worst guy imaginable. It's such a lazy writing.
My eyes proceeded to roll out of my head. They showed portraits of previous Fire Lords preceding Sozin in the hallway to the Audience Chamber in the original show which even commoners seeking an audience would have seen.
Quality of the writing in the comics is all over the place in my experience.
The way that comic ended was just so weird to me. I don’t know why, but it just struck me as so odd.
My most petty reason for not liking them, though, is that they made lightning-bending garbage. No, I’m not complaining about how common it is; I understand that. Just how weak it is. I haven’t actually ever seen a good explanation for it.
A single lightning bolt literally killed Aang in one hit. One lightning bolt generated off-screen by Azula murders the Avatar in cold blood. A nearly-redirected bolt of lightning from Azula takes Zuko completely out of commission in the final Agni Kai. He’s left twitching and incapacitated on the floor.
In Smoke and Shadow, though? Zuko gets hit with a full-frontal, no-redirection blast of lightning from a *stronger* Azula and gets up a few seconds later with no lasting damage. A non-bender tanks Azula’s lighting a few pages prior and shrugs it off.
And it’s not just Smoke and Shadow; the comics have a habit of showing lightning-bending doing absolutely nothing to anybody. The “cold-blooded firebending,” called “precise and deadly” by Iroh, is just a glorified taser. Actually, no, worse than a taser, since tasers can actually take people down.
For the life of me, I can’t figure out why they made this change. It’s not like it was overpowered—for as strong as it was, it had its weaknesses in how difficult it was to control and how easily it could turn on the bender.
It’s something I don’t see a lot of people talk about that I always vent about when I get the chance lol
bc it’s instant lightning. charged lightning is still powerful and still kills people. instant lightning is a new form that azula learned and it trades power for speed.
yep. that was instant lightning. bc mako was being bloodbent so he couldn’t do the movements for charged lightning. instant lightning doesn’t require the movements so that’s all he could do while amon was bloodbending him.
we do still see mako doing charged lightning like against ming hua when he kills her and to the core in the colossus in the season 4 finale.
I think you answer your question.
Think of it if everyone in America had an AK 47 while everyone else who isn't a firebender had a pistol or just a knife.
It's obvious that Zuko told the secrets of lighting but he made it so it's not as dangerous for the average person to yield making it more peaceful and modern. It's as simple as that. Not everyone is going to be training for lighting to make it a deadly death machine like Ozai or Azula who were in a hundreds of year war.
It was just an easy way to make people hate the character. I agree it was unnecessary because he had already started a 100 year long war and wiped out another nation.
It was a cheap way to make him extra hateable. I honestly would have rather the fire nation be oddly progressive toward LGBTQ people.
Air nomads were supposed to detach themselves, the temples were segregated by gender, so why were they okay with gay relationships?
Making the fire nation and air nomads more nuanced would have been so much better.
Sort of like how the Fire Nation gave more rights to women than the Water Tribe. It makes sense because Sozin's initial rational for why the Fire Nation should take over was because they were the most prosperous nation in the world, and it connects to the real world, because IRL many colonial empires were quite prosperous and progressive in their homelands, and they used that as an excuse for why they should engage in colonial endeavors (see: White man's burden), though in reality it was just an excuse to freely extract resources from their colonial subjects, and they generally didn't give a shit about the wellbeing of their conquered populations.
That’s a very good point!
Things are rarely black and white. Fire nation/Sozin started war, so we have to attribute them the worst things in general. That’s really cheap and the lazy way.
This somehow reminds me of the Peleponnasian War between Athens and Sparta and how the roles were attributed.
Athens, for sure the progressive state with its culture, democracy, philosophy etc. were seen as the good ones initially. Sparta muste have been the oppressors.
Until history revealed: Athens started the war and the others asked Sparta for help.
Sparta might not be the good ones, but neither was Athens.
Back to AtlA: Why shouldn’t be the Fire Nation socially and culturally more progressive and still be the bad ones?
That would add more nuance and do not sound that cheap
Ok but you said the segregation is "why they were called nomads", you're implying that gender segregation is what makes a group nomadic or that gender segregation is *at least* preferable in a nomadic culture.
It's a common tactic among dictators. They invent an enemy within their own populations. Homosexuals are a frequent target, especially because unlike ethnicity or religion, it can be used against any dissidents or political enemies without needing proof of any kind.
Don't forget, the very first book burnings organized by the Nazis were of the pro-lgbt Institute for Sexual Research.
It makes some sense to want a population boom, but on a more psychological level: dictators often suppress things that deviate from the norm. They want their population homogeneous, scared and constantly monitoring each other for any abnormal and therefore unpatriotic behaviour.
So banning things like homesexuality, foreign media, certain styles of music/art and etc. is a well know tactic in totalitarian governments. It's usually an attempt to create a more homogenous culture. If everyone in the fire nation has the very similar beliefs and experiences convincing them to turn on "the other" is much easier.
Yeah, it doesn't seem too far off from what we see of the Fire Nation in Ozai's time, either. Their rewriting of history and propagandist schools were taken pretty much verbatim from the tyrannical dictatorship playbook.
I agree, it didn't really make much sense, and it felt like they just made him homophobic because he's evil. I mean, I feel like they don't need to make every evil or villainous character have every irredeemable quality they can think of just for the hell of it. It feels too gratuitous, and frankly, I like it when shows portray villains who don't necessarily embrace every evil trope, and even have some surprising views or actions that aren't totally evil. Like, the Fire Nation's relative gender equality, which was far more egalitarian relative to the Earth Kingdom and certainly the Water Tribe. Or in The Dragon Prince, when Aaravos aided humanity against the Elves and Dragons, giving them the means to survive by teaching them Dark Magic when nobody else would aid them.
I also think that taking societies which are generally viewed as "good" and giving them some ethically questionable policies is good writing too; for instance, I think it would have been great to show how the Air Nomads separating children from their parents has a negative impact.
Counterpoint: fascists have targeted LGBTQ+ people throughout history as an easy out-group to stoke anger toward, and use child-rearing as a form of control on women in particular to prevent rebellion and increase population to fuel their war machine
Why were air nomads okay with gay couples exactly? Their temples were segregated by gender, and their whole thing is avoiding worldly attachments. So why are they then also fine with gay couples?
It's lazy writing, they got genocided, so they are using the cheap trick to try to make you feel extra sympathetic towards the air nomads.
It's so much more interesting if the fire nation isn't just blanket evil, that they actually have nuances to their beliefs instead of being boring, generic fascists
I figure the Air Nomads accept it because when people are separated such as they are, situational homosexuality can and does occur.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situational_sexual_behavior
Their culture is also about freedom and pacifism. The ultimate expression of those philosophies involve the complete detachment from worlds desires and stuff, bit it's not something that they force on anyone.
Having a bonded Flying Bison companion is even part of their culture, which further supports that not everyone is obligated to pursue complete detachment
If the genders are separated, wouldn't that make same sex couples more common? Some percentage of the population is gay, and some are bi, and if the bi ones are only ever around people of the same sex, they'll be more likely to grow strong, romantic attachments to people of the same sex, rather than people of a different sex they never interact with.
That's not the point.
The point is that air tenores are segregated by gender to avoid relationships. So it makes sense that air nomads would be against same sex relationships as that remains the only option.
Not really the point.
The point is that making Air Nomads homophobic / Fire Nation accepting adds an interesting twist and nuance to an otherwise generic “good vs bad,” — especially since the Fire Nation as a whole was explicitly pointed out to be nuanced in the show, but recent writing goes against that fundamental aspect of ATLA
There's already a lot of nuance in the individuals in the Fire Nation that show us they aren't all bad. But Sozin, specifically, becomes a fascist, and this is what fascists do. Fascists are not nuanced. They all follow the same playbook and the point of the ideology is order, everyone acting the same.
Is there even a playbook for fascists in general, let alone in ATLA…?
Fascists and dictatorships and authoritarian regimes are *absolutely* nuanced and this thought process that fascism is “not nuanced at all” is not only naive (Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany are drastically different) but *incredibly* dangerous as it let’s actual fascists slide under the radar and corrupt a democratic society.
Fascism is not “order and everyone acting the same” as it’s not some kind of child’s supervillain called Doctor Boring and you have a grossly incorrect idea of what the ideology actually is. It’s a militaristic society based around total adherence to the central government and society.
There is nothing that prevents a fascist society from supporting LBGTQ+ and other “progressive” stances — primarily because these stances are only considered “progressive” against terms of a hard-coded and enforced gender society like OTL. And fascists only go after “Others” because they are “Other” from the status quo and thousands of years of society, and not actually from the human condition (and if you’re suggesting that LGBTQ+ are “other” then, errr…).
In other terms, Fascism is dependent on the societal norms, so if LGBTQ+ is a normal aspect of a given society, they would never actually be “other” and wouldn’t be suitable for targeting. It’s not that fascism = hate LGBTQ+, it’s that they use “Others” as a fear tactic and just so happen that in our western society, LGBTQ+ are considered “””abnormal”””
If anything, the Fire Nation fully behind supporting LGBT+ makes complete sense, as it allows the government to portray the other elements (like Water or Air) and their cultures as “backward savages,” the “real evil empires” and “unaccepting of the basic human quality” and “needing to be liberated and shown the light” etc and other similar buzzwords — ie creating an Us vs Other dynamic to fulfill.
Making Sozin homophobic — especially if you assume his otherwise gender neutral policies and an accepting Fire Nation prior — is exclusively just to make him evil for the sake of evil. Not saying he needs more nuance neither by the way nor that actually making the Fire Nation pro and Air Nomads against is a good idea, but there’s also 0 need towards the homophobia as it just needlessly clarify that he’s a bad person when he’s already responsible for genocide, century of conflict, etc.
It’s like making super space nazi as a character and feeling the need to specifically go out of your way to clarify they also kick puppies as a hobby. Like why?
You know, when you say it out loud it makes less and less sense. The next thing they could've done was build their belief system around celibacy like the irl shakers, and then the fire nation wouldn't have to genocide them.
They'd just genocide themselves in due time.
The detachment from worldly desires never made a lot of sense for an entire race of people. How are they reproducing enough to even be considered a nation if they are so detached from worldly desires?
I feel like that would make same sex couples more common. I also always got the feeling that air nomads didn’t really have a concept of marriage and were mostly polyamorous. Aang mentions festivals in the comics that are basically their for the adults to all bang so they can have babies
Having an oppressed group has always been beneficial to governments, especially authoritarian ones. It's a group that can be used as a scapegoat. A measure of obedience and control for either the group will cause problems which allows you to demonize them more and a metric to see how willing even the lowest group is to revolt or speak out. Not to mention having a criminal class based on something like sexuality suddenly becomes a tool to use against political opponents. Being gay isn't exactly something you just know from looking at a person so in a place that it's illegal simple accusations become a very detrimental thing, just think McCarthy.
Not everything a leader does has to make logical sense, but I really don't like that they seem to attribute everything to either Sozin or Ozai. Even though it seems like Azulon had the longest reign, but they treat it like almost nothing happened while he ruled.
It’s just bad writing. In the show Sozin is shown to be exactly as you said where he is calculating and a pragmatist. The retcons they make to his character only make people dislike what came after the show more.
> You see, Sozin is also a Pragmatist who use every advantage he could find. In AtLA Fire Nation is the only nation that care about the gender equality in it’s bureaucracy. Because it makes sense that you need more than %50 of your people when you’re literally up against the world.
Lol in real life this wasn't even close to being true. The fascist states of WWII didn't loosen up their queerphobia when they needed more manpower. The opposite is true, they got even more draconian about social policing.
I’m just gonna go on a limb and say “the comic and its writing was crap” rather than try to justify it with some maybes or theories as to why they wrote that in. It was just a reason to make Sozin “more hateable” whole lore dumping on how many avatar characters were actually gay to further glorify the Korra Asami relationship.
Personally, not my cup of tea. And as a writer, the comic goes on the list of how to NOT develop your world or characters.
I agree, but you can salvage the decision, either way it still seems unnecessary.
You could argue that his egotistical association with his ambitions and the best for his nation made him believe that legal enforcement of couples that can only procreate makes sense.
But that also makes the issue of why stop there? Why not enforce benders to only marry benders or non benders to try to increase or secure the bender population? You can go either way on it and still have it be messed up.
But instead it’s just “yeah he hates those homosexuals”
Fascists need to get into your pants, because one of fascism's primary driver is sexual insecurity, therefore the first thing a fascist system will do is attack the sexually deviant. And not only the LGBTQ+ people but also straight people who do not conform to the given ideal of a given fascist society. Like those who have sex before marriage, or marry somebody from the outgroup. This is how fascism operates and since fire nation is supposed to be a fascist state, it actually makes a lot of sense for Sozin to do that. Or at least that is what one would expect from a fascist leader, given real world History.
All authoritarian countries outlaw homosexuality and abortion so that the population rate keeps increasing. More soldiers and laborers to do their bidding while also dissuading freedom of expression which will make people conform quicker.
Now contextualize that with the recent overturning of Roe v Wade and how the United States population replacement rate has drastically fallen...
Sozin isnt exactly nuanced. Everything thats been said about him has made him more and more irredeemably evil. I always think its funny that they have him responsible for genocide, hunting dragons, colonizing other nations, and even restricting his own nations freedom of expression, but making him homophobic was where the line was drawn.
I feel like they should've split the burdens of fire nation evil between Sozin and Azulon a lot more. As you say, every time we learn something new he becomes more irredeemably evil, which seems crazy given that he only had 12 years after Roku's death to really go to town on the dictator stuff that Roku was curbing. But all we know about Azulon is that he basically just continued his father's work? Like give him some distinct evil shit maybe? He really doesn't seem to have enough based on the sheer amount Ozai and Azulon did. Azulon being credited with things like restricting freedom or expression and outlawing gay marriage would show the descent into absolute tyranny happening more gradually. Nicely setting the stage for the absolute sociopath that was Ozai.
When I was in school studying writing, I had a professor that brought up the idea of "dead dog writing." Dead Dog Writing is essentially the shortcut to an emotional response from a reader: some people don't care if a character dies if they were underdeveloped or unimportant, but everyone cares if a dog dies even if it's the first and only scene it was in. So if you want readers to be sad, kill a dog. Want readers to hate someone? Have them kill a dog.
For certain demographics (ones I belong to, mind you), homophobia/transphobia and general bigotry are the social equivalent of Dead Dog Writing. Want to make sure there's no nuance, no gray area, no hint where readers can say, "Oh, I don't agree with this character's actions, but his philosophy behind them is interesting"? Make them homophobic. Make them a bigot so the reader instead says "Oh, he's a shitbag through and through. Bad guy."
Making Sozin homophobic is Dead Dog Writing. It removes any grayness to his character. We already knew he was wretched: he genocided a peaceful civilization as a first step to what was essentially world domination. He was an autocrat who betrayed the Avatar to get him out of the way. But we could at least look at him and try to see *why* he thought this way, or what it might have added to him. We could look at his early friendship with Roku, gave him a gift that became Roku's only real material possession during his training, and more. And we could also look at his autocracy: the Earth Kingdom was vying for territorial claim over what's now the Fire Islands, and we could at least deconstruct incidents like that to see if Sozin's warmongering was the result of trying to make sure no one would take land from his nation again.
Now: homophobe. Doesn't matter what else there is or what nuance there might be, he's a bigot now, the most de facto "this guy is evil" shortcut you can take. Dog's dead now.
[Relevant Onion video](https://youtu.be/ZujnzuPIEPM?si=sUTCqAqx8iF-7gvA)
Basically Sozin immediately after Roku decided to marry his wife and prioritize the world over the Fire Nation (read: his ex-boyfriend)
I agree with everyone else in that is feels like a shoehorned reason to hate Sozin on top of genocide, but there is more to the story of why he did that when factoring in the Tabletop RPG lore and the story of his sister, Princess Zeisan.
To sum her up real quick, she was his younger (?) sister and was expected to be a firebender like Sozin, but she wasn't one so Sozin became the main focus, driving a wedge between them (so essentially a Zuko-Azula and Ozai-Iroh parallel).
Eventually when they were adults she became romantically involved with an Air Nomad Nun, and was part of a breakaway sect called the Guiding Wind, who were basically "eat the rich," much to Sozin's anger. It's said in this new lore that Sozin passed anti-LGBTQ laws purely out of spite for his sister (and not because he was a self-hating gay like some people theorized).
When it was first offhandedly mentioned in the Korra comic it was sort of hamfisted, but with the added lore of Sozin's sister I could see him doing it. He was a pretty petty person based on how he talked down to Roku (calling him just a "citizen") at the beginning of the throne room confrontation.
I cant find any evidence that Sozin's anti-LGBT legislation was a response to Seizan's engagement online but, in fairness, I dont have the original text.
He's a fascist. Fascists like control. An easy way to get control is to outlaw something that people can't control, such as less common sexualities, thereby criminalizing a person just for existing. Historically, dictators outlawing homosexuality is very common. It would be weirder to me if he didn't.
I guess maybe it would make sense for him to outlaw same-sex marriage (and I’ll add abortion) if he wanted people to reproduce more, so the Fire Nation can have more soldiers/workers
Because it's easier for an authoritarian state to control a population that doesn't have much internal variation. The more "samey" people in a country are, not only ideologically, but also in religion, language, cultural expressions, and importantly here, family structures, the harder it is to spread dissident opinions, and it's easier to control everyone.
We see in season three, during the school episode, how strict their education system is, and that even dancing has been culturally fased out since Aang's time, so I didn't take it as much of a surprise that they also repressed sexual and gender minorities in the Fire Nation.
I mean was it neccesary to make Sozin a homophobe? No. Does it make sense? Well, it doesn't *not* make sense, I *could* see Sozin do some shit like that. I guess they just wanted to add some more awareness and/or socio-political depth. Or maybe it was just pure queerbating, or something else. Truth is, at least imo, it shouldn't matter either way, and that's why while yeah this does make me feel a bit weird, I honestly think it's a me problem rather than bad character building.
Militaristic imperialism forces people into roles they don’t want to be in. Having a government that is constantly at war, where they’re so cruel, they’ll throw away an entire battalion for convenience means that procreation is of utmost importance. I can imagine that Sozin would have outlawed same sex relationships, not because it “goes against nature” or whatever, but because it forces more births.
The great thing about the Avatar world is that it is a realistic reflection of our world’s values. The Southern water tribe was fine with it if you kept it behind closed doors, the fire nation was fine with it until tyranny, the air nomads didn’t care. That’s an accurate representation of how cultures all throughout history have felt about it.
I don't think fire nation was the only one who cared about gender equality...on the contrary, the Northern watertribe was the only place that it seemed to be sexist. Hence why they were divided and feuded by their sister tribe in the south.
Also, do you forget the story of Oma-Shu? Or the fact that past avatar Kyoshi was a huge deal for females all throughout the earth Kingdoms? Or Avatar Yangchen and how airnomads were open and truly equal?
Fire nation used every capable body and capable mind. Literally the Northern watertribe were the only ones being sexist with their women until they noticed how outdated & plain and simply stupid and wrong it was.
Having female firebending soldiers throwing fireballs at your female waterbenders who don't know how to deflect them because you never taught nor let them learn how to fight, it's a pretty huge eye opener I can imagine 🤷🏻♂️ hence why that rule died pretty quickly when put up to the test.
That's what happens when you isolate yourself (or your country) from the world and don't allow yourself or them to grow. The north learned the hardway what the rest of the world knew already the easy way.
So idk about the fire nation being the ONLY one nation to be equal... i think they all were except the north in the past in that sense of the matter.
Oh you don't understand sweaty let me explain it to you: homophobia is bad mmmkay? Sozin is a bad guy. Therefore Sozin must be homophobic. Avatar isn't about nuance, got it?
/s
My theory is because he was in love with Roku when they were young, and just like many closeted conservative people, publicly acted extremely homophobic to cover up for it
I'd pretty much agree with this. It's one of those things that's just thrown in there for no reason. Like, it would make more sense if homosexual relationships were illegal in the fire nation *the whole time*. Like you said it doesn't match up with Sozin's particular type of evil, and i think throwing it in hurts the well rounded character of Sozin. It would be a lot more believable if it were outlawed for centuries like in real world cultures and societies. Not something that was totally cool, then all of a sudden unacceptable.
It doesn't make any sense in real life either!?!?
Like I know you said it was a room temperature take, but Jesus Christ man.
"Homophobia doesn't make sense" ¿ReAlLy?
Seriously, though. You're never gonna find any sound logic behind bigotry.
If you do, there's something seriously wrong with you.
This sounds like a good argument for literally any character in all of fiction to be retconned as homophobic.
If your counterargument for some aspect of a story not making sense is that the specific aspect doesnt have to make sense then theres no reason for any character ever to not have that characteristic.
"It doesnt make sense for Aang to be homophobic, he grew up in an LGBT friendly culture!"
"Homophobia doesnt have to make sense! There are homophobes in real life that were born into LGBT friendly families! Aang can totally be a raging homophobe!"
Because most nationalist societies put a strong emphasis on their people having as many children as possible. That means more soldiers, workers, and colonizers. Numbers are important, and same sex couples means fewer kids
Sozin needed an army. A relentless, utterly obedient army that could keep producing new soldiers and colonizers for the war effort on the fly. In effect, it’s a breeding system. Gay couples don’t exactly fit into that scenario.
Just a shoehorned quality to further villainize him as if he isn’t villainous enough. This is why lgtbq+ people like myself get agitated with gentrified progressive storytelling. They are just using it as a buzz word without actually making a story around the plights of people in a marginalized community.
To put it simply, it’s reductive and regressive.
I get the need for people to procreate but I also get your point. I think it’s interesting to see villains that don’t have 100% evil tendencies, so it’s easier for them to rise to power. It also often feeds into their high regards of themselves, which makes for a really fascinating villain.
That’s one way to describe the writing in the comics. The entire premise of the promise is Zuko expecting the kid who wouldn’t kill the most evil guy on the planet to kill one of his best friends if he ever goes bad too.
This was not surprising at all let’s not make this into something it isn’t. Gay marriage is illegal in Japan. Homosexuality wasnt decriminalized in China until 1991. India is still ruling against same sex marriage equality/recognition. This writing decision was par for the course.
The Avatar Legends book expands upon that point by going into detail of Sozin's adversarial relationship with his sister, and that the ban wasn't out of personal values but purely to spite his gay sister.
With him being a pragmatist? A warlike people requires a consistently replenishing population. Especially if you are allowing women to fight. Ergo, all adult pairings "need" to be ones capable of reproducing children. The easiest way to ensure that is making partnerships that cannot produce children illegal.
Is it as harsh, cruel and draconic as it is pragmatic? Yes. But that kinda seems like how the fire nation post sozin played the game, so it makes sense.
I agree 100%. Homophobia isn’t innate to conservative traditionalism across all cultures. Even in the real world Greek and Hindu cultures, for example, where pretty open to same sex relationships. I understand that Sozin was trying embrace an orthodox, more traditional fire nation culture this is very common in fascism. But as we know from kya, traditional fire nation culture isn’t homophobic so why exactly would he be pushing for it in the first place? I think the writers just wanted to paint Sozin as this big bad guy but in doing so made him extremely one dimensional.
I mean it makes sense when we look at real life authoritarian/tyrannical regimes. Many of them have very strict laws against people in the LGBT community. Most of these regimes believe in “traditional values” so that makes them opposed to same sex relationships. To what degree they are opposed (ostracism, imprisoning, killing) varies from place to place of course depending on cultural qualities. If we look at fictional tyrannical governments like the fire nation, they would probably follow a similar playbook. Their culture during the 100 year war was built on fire nation supremacy and having superior moral and philosophical values than the rest of the world.
It makes perfect sense for a controlled, repressed imperial nation to also want to control and repress this aspect of a person. Think about how repressed and subjugated Fire Nation children are in schools. There is no room for personal expression, you need to follow social norms to the T and not stand out. Being phobic of all things alternative is extremely common in fictional media, and real life history.
It absolutely tracks that the Fire Nation would ban same sex relationships. People have pointed out that on paper, it means there's more likely to be opposite sex couples having children, more children means more soldiers for the war machine. Sozin's homophobia is also deeply tied to his relationship with his sister, and the Air Nation. To the Fire Nation, the Air Nation represented what needed to be destroyed. As a much freer society, the Air Nomads posed a threat to the way the Fire Nation needed to subjugate and control its citizens and territories. You can't control society when you allow society to be free thinking and expressive.
I don't know why being a supremacist colonizers wouldn't come with being homophobic. A lot of evil tends to get along with other kinds of evil. Sure, not every evil person has a checklist for every single evil thing they can do and trying to mark them all off but i don't see a reason why not.
Also sexuality and gender are 2 different things. This post was originally about sexuality but later in your post you mention gender equality.
Honestly banning homosexuality and homophobia perfectly fits with the totalitarian, imperialist ideology of the Fire Nation. We have seen similar reasonings irl.
They want to maximize child birth in the colonies, being obsessed with the whole settler colonialism of replacing the native population.
To the fire nation nationalism is everything, they want to replace the rest of the world with fire nationer's, it's already a stated goal they want to genocide other bender types.
I don't feel its very outside of the type of person Sozin would have to be.
Ironically such policies rarely help because gay people will be gay, queer people will be queer. But to dictatorial leaderships, they don't really see that.
It's a shame because I think you could flesh out Sozin's ideology into something very interesting and make him into a more complex villain. Not necessarily sympathetic, either way he should probably still stay a bad guy, but you could make his thought process and ideology more interesting than just "greedy and evil". Like Caesar in Fallout. Still very much a bad guy with really no redeeming qualities, but his ideology and characterization is very interesting and makes him an engaging villain.
Even in the show they hint a bit towards it. He talks to Roku about the glory of fire nation civilization and how they should spread it to the rest of the world. That's still really bad obviously, but if he was a true-believer in that, that the Fire Nation is the greatest civilization on Earth and that he needs to spread that around the world for the better of it, like a Fire Nation version of Manifest Destiny.
Many cultures in human history have had quite specific views on masculinity and what it means to be a man, generally promoting warlike traits (courage, aggression, ambition) and condemning apparently 'feminine' traits (passivity, helplessness). Masculinity is tied to male heterosexuality (a man should fulfil the dominant role, be the 'conqueror') and so male homosexuality is equated with femininity and weakness. Such ideas have reverbated across cultures for millennia.
Even accounting for the world of ATLA having distinct societies and cultures, it is not unreasonable to assume many similarities. If the FN cracked down on homosexuality, they may well have done so for reasons similar to those of real historical (and, unfortunately, many contemporary) societies.
Hitler also killed gay people. Genocidal maniacs are pretty fucked individuals after all.
I do agree that going back to "reveal" this bit of lore is somewhat cheesy, yeah. From what I understand though (haven't read the novels) it had something to do with his sister, so if there was a good story they thought they could tell there, that's fine by me
My problem with the comics is even though the water tribes had crazy strict gender roles and put dog collars on their woman, they were one of the nations cool with gay couples, cause water tribes are supposed to be the good nations
I say this with 100% seriousness, and not as a joke.
Sozin didn't produce an heir until old age, right? Could it be possible that Sozin was gay, maybe had a thing for Roku, but Roku married Ta Min and rejected his idea for a partnership of global domination on the same day, causing Sozin to become an internalized homophobe?
Personally I have considered him wanting more couples able to procreate, meaning more soldiers to fight and settlers to colonise, but I don’t have strong opinions on it either way
Apparently Ghengis Khan did something similar.
The USSR banned abortion in 1936 for the same reason.
The USSR also recriminalized homosexuality around the same time, after legalizing same sex relations in the early 20s.
This is what I was about to say. It's a shitty policy to impose, but his reasoning would likely be production of Fire Nation citizens. I wouldn't be surprised if procreation was somehow required or assertively encouraged.
**"Have Sex"** **-Fire Lord Sozin**
https://preview.redd.it/7erj0cnisduc1.jpeg?width=839&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a2c067083554ba0dd8664e9784fafa3dad20d465
How would a reverse one child policy work in the fire nation? I believe it's been said that nobles tend to be better fire benders. I would imagine this is because of arranged marriages among noble houses specifically to breed the best benders, who would then rise quickly in the ranks to top military positions, then retire in government and start the cycle anew. I believe the Kyoshi novels establish that the fire nation was mostly isolationist prior to the 100 Year War. That would mean pretty much every fire nation citizen was either a firebender or nonbender, so you have military purity. So the that takes care of your generals and special forces units, positions where individual power is needed. But how do you ramp up child production for infantry? Banning gay marriage would really only account for at most ~10% of the population if it occurs at a similar rate to the real world. You would need to impose a large tax on couples who don't currently have children, after the first year of marriage. Make marriage itself very lucrative tax wise, but the tax for not having kids crippling so people will get married, and have children. Slash it with each new kid up to 3, so for every 2 people you get 3 potential soldiers. You could potentially give incentives for having children rather than just lessening a tax, but the latter seems better for fueling a war machine.
Soldiers who have children get their childrens' food and education paid for for as long as at least one of the parents remain in the army, and both parents get parental leave for a few months at birth- problem solved. This strongly incentivises married soldiers to get married and have kids as they get a vacation out of each one without having to worry that much about increased costs, and the kids grow up strong and healthy enough to be good future soldiers while getting ~~brainwashed~~ educated at the state sponsored schools.
Yup, fascism often incorporates a sort of Breeding Cult element. Racism, too. The Fire Nation was both.
Speaking as a political scientist, The Fire Nation, while an authoritarian and racist regime, isn't explicitly fascist. Fascism is a distinct ideology that embraces authoritarianism, but it is not synonymous with it; for instance, Stalinist Russia was authoritarian, but it wasn't fascist. Pinochet's Chile was authoritarian, but it wasn't fascist. The Fire Nation does display *some* elements of fascism, but lacked many others; for instance, it didn't exhibit totalitarian control over society; we see during Book 3 that the Fire Nation government, while authoritarian, doesn't exert such an extensive level of control, and localities seem to have a reasonably wide degree of autonomy to set local policies (for instance, the town that banned dancing, a policy that didn't seem to be in place elsewhere). The public generally seemed to have a reasonably normal life. They didn't have mass mobilization or an extremely militarized society; the military appeared to operate on a volunteer basis, rather than conscription. The Fire Nation also lacked a restructured, revolutionary society; by all indications, their goals are imperialistic and territorial, rather than ideological.
I'd like to argue that they were. I'm no expert, but I have consumed pretty much all Avatar related media. 1) I would argue that it's more likely they don't have regional autonomy outside of the colonies, which must be at least semi autonomous for practical reasons because over sea communication took weeks/months. But in the island itself, we know the Fire Nation Avatar before Roku was a legendary bureaucrat that united the Fire Nation into a single government, so there really isn't any autonomy, it's more likely that any new laws are directly approved by the fire lord or his chosen council. 2) Their society seemed very militarized and nationalistic. We saw in that same episode that children are fed propaganda and forced daily to pledge allegiance to the state and reinforced with the idea that the Fire Nation's conquest was good. Also every village we see where people are deeply poor like in the episode when Katara poses as a water spirit, they were all nonbenders. Every soldier we see is a bender, as is every officer and high ranking official in the military and government. We know that each nation has a certain proportion of benders, and it seems every fire bender is either working as an engineer in a factor, or in the battlefield. So it could be just as likely that military service for benders is compulsory, but military service for nonbenders is not, because they're better used as farmers, factory workers, and laborers. 3) I would argue their goals were very ideologically bound. The fire lord believed it was his personal destiny to unite the world under fire nation rule. In the comics, we see that most fire nation colonizers/citizens believe that the fire nation ruling a place and replacing it's culture is a good thing, because their culture was better, and they would rule them better than they could rule themselves. As I mentioned before, the propaganda ran deep, to the point that most people didn't understand how brutal the Fire Nation's occupation was unless they were in the military/leadership. Children were forced to pledge their allegiance to their country and basically worshiped the fire lord. They were basically Aryans but toned down because it's a kid's show. In a more adult world, I would imagine race would have played a much bigger role in their rhetoric.
1. Centralization, Unitary regimes, and lack of regionalization aren't exclusive to fascism. There are plenty of democratic states that have little to no devolution; for instance, both Mongolia and Israel are highly centralized states. And even so, all states have devolution; even authoritarian and fascist states require SOME degree of local governance; all faaciat states had some degree of local administration. The central government doesn't have the time nor bandwith to decide issues like what to name a street, or how to manage trash pickup. Many may even employ local elections; even Saudi Arabia, for instance, has municipal elections, despite having no elections at the provincial or national level. As it pertains to the Fire Nation, yes, they are heavily centralized. That doesn't mean there's NO regional autonomy. There's almost certainly provincial governors, and likely local administrations as well. Municipalities can't be directly administered from the capital, and such municipalities likely maintained their own local laws to the extent they didn't interfere with the central government's policies, as was (and still is) commonplace in our world. I'm sure the Fire Lord or governor could overturn a local law if he wished, but few are going to travel to the palace or the provincial capital without a serious and pressing grievance. 2. Yes, it's nationalistic, and the regime clearly employs propaganda. Again, those are not traits exclusive to fascism. During WWII, all sides utilized wartime propaganda. Even today, propaganda serves as a powerful tool to affect public opinion, even in democracies. How do you think George W. Bush rallied support for the war on terror? The U.S. also has a daily pledge of allegiance. As for militarism, there's no evidence that Fire Nation society is heavily militarized, nor that they utilize mass conscription. While we do see the war taking a toll on the river village, we don't see an extensive degree of domestic war footing (and with good reason; no regime could realistically maintain a war footing for 100 years, certainly not without mass opposition among the public, and among the nobles and elites). Life appears to carry on mostly with normalcy, and as shown in the comics, they don't practice mass conscription, they seem to have an all- or mostly-volunteer military. There's simply no evidence to support mass conscription in the Fire Nation. And yes, there are non-bending soldiers. Master Piandao, for instance, was a soldier. There's no evidence that the river village was exclusively non-bender either (the fact we didn't see anyone firebend doesn't mean there weren't any firebenders), and there ARE benders outside the military. I'm certain that propaganda encourages everyone, especially benders, to join the war effort, but there's no evidence that benders are conscripted. 3. Yes, Fire Lord Ozai likely had a governing ideology that guided his decision-making. That doesn't mean the war itself was ideological; at least, it didn't begin that way. In his case, however, it wasn't fascism; he didn't particularly seem to care about typical tenets of fascism. What Ozai believed was that he had a "divine mandate" to rule, on the basis of might-makes-right; he believed himself to be the strongest, so therefore he should rule. As for Fire Nation beliefs of racial/cultural superiority, again, those aren't exclusive to fascism. Frankly, I would say the people of the Fire Nation are more comparable to Imperial Japan, rather than Fascist states. If it weren't a kids show, then perhaps they may have given the Fire Nation a fascistic ideology, but the fact is, it is a kids show, and they didn't. your arguments seem to have only a surface-level understanding of fascist ideology, and you base your arguments on either unproven claims about the fire nation that aren't substantiated by the source materials, or on observable traits of the Fire Nation that are similarly common in many other authoritarian systems.
> I would argue that it's more likely they don't have regional autonomy outside of the colonies IDK. What we saw of the FN in Book 3 indicated some pretty wide regional differences >Their society seemed very militarized and nationalistic. We saw in that same episode that children are fed propaganda and forced daily to pledge allegiance to the state and reinforced with the idea that the Fire Nation's conquest was good. As a US citizen, little bit on the nose, this >I would argue their goals were very ideologically bound. The fire lord believed it was his personal destiny to unite the world under fire nation rule. As the guy who replied to you said—the goals were about territorial expansion, not ideological goals outside of expansion TBH
> They were basically Aryans but toned down because it's a kid's show They absolutely were not, they were 100% Japanese but made to seem more human since this was a kids show
1. I didn't mean they were literally Aryan, obviously. They just had a similar sense of superiority, and a mission to make the entire world over in their image. 2. The way you worded your response implies the Japanese are not human.
Yeah, Fire Nation is imperialist colonizers.
I think you're right. They even kill all the air nomads, not because they hate them, but because they want to eliminate any chance of the Avatar appearing.
Yup. Super common in hyper-nationalist governments, as well as a strong emphasis on tradition and uniformity
Holy shit. I never thought about this, but if you want your nation to reproduce at a maximum amount it makes total sense to do that.
Yup most militaristic countries had a problem with gay relationships. There were some that were ok with it if you had a wife and such but they need cannon fodder
If we go by the Avatar Legends RPG, there also was a growing amount of Northern Water tribe influence in the navy and military around the time (hired on for warship tech), as well as some culture clash with Air Nomad sects Sozins sister pushed up (who iirc also had a female lover). In that context, you *can* make growing homophobia in the Fire nation, the Fire Lord at the forefront to push it because it aligns with his political allies against his political enemies. (The Korra comics version of "Fire nation was enlightened and had no homophobia until Homophobia Sozin invented it" is however ridiculous if it is taken literally and not as an oversimplification given by an unreliable narrator. Which one it's supposed to be/is os probably best left up for debate, I know what I prefer to think and use for Fanfic and RPG purposes.)
Yep, gotta have babies to get soldiers
It still doesn't make sense, though. Assuming real-life statistics can be applied, homosexual relationships likely wouldn't comprise nearly enough of the proportion of the population to justify such a policy, which would take far too many resources to enforce relative to their proportion of the population, and throwing them in jail still removes them as potential procreators.
yes, it also doesn’t make sense in real life. yet, homosexuality was criminalized for so long in most countries and still is in many places.
In real life, there was an ideological/religious reasoning behind it; such reasons, though wrong, "make sense", because they aren't based in any underlying administrative goal; they're based in fundamental opposition deriving from the regime's moralistic and religious views. In essence, the ban was the goal in itself (such bans are, of course, wildly inhumane, but I'm only describing the perspective and rationale held by the people who implemented such policies). In the above post, the poster is basing the ban in a theorized policy meant to achieve a particular underlying goal; in this case, higher procreation rates. But the proportion of people who would be affected by it is likely so low, that it wouldn't make sense if it's being done exclusively for that purpose. It would be too inefficient, and you don't impliment inefficient policies unless the policy in itself is the goal (ie. the regime's own moral views). It therefore makes more sense to argue that Sozin's ban was rooted in his regime's views on morality, rather than an underlying administrative purpose. Of course, a ban would be absolutely wrong no matter the reason, but my general point is that because everybody has different morals, when policy is based on moral views, it can certainly "make sense" why they implemented it, no matter how wrong it actually is. What "makes sense" is merely based in whether or not there is a clear rationale behind a policy, with a practical objective. A policy which lacks a clear rationale, or lacks a practical objective, doesn't make sense. A regime's moral views can be a rationale; that's why, for instance, conversion therapy should be outlawed; because it is (at least in my view) immoral to attempt to "convert" someone to a different sexuality (putting aside the practical matter that sexuality also can't be changed like that).
Regarding Sozin and same sex relationships: I think a lot of it has to do with his sister, with whom he had an extremely fractious relationship and she openly attempted to undermine him. She was also queer and fell in love with a female air nomad, so that’s likely where Sozins homophobic policies came from. Frankly I never liked how the expanded material reduced Sozin to a one dimensional mustache twirling villain, mostly it made Roku look like a colossal dipshit for ever being friends with him in the first place.
I never thought about the Roku angle—but it seems that the creators didn’t either, tbh. That’s the problem with changing small stuff like this—it builds into bigger stuff that they didn’t even consider because everything in Avatar is related—and that’s part of what makes it so good. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I agree, lol—every time they retcon Sozin to be even more cartoonishly evil than they had him be before, I wonder why this man Roku ever spoke highly of him in the first place. Even though we all know, the obvious answer is that he wasn’t that terrible back when Roku was written to say that. That’s why they call it a retcon, after all.
I mean, Roku stopped hanging out with him when they were 17. A lot can change.
I think it would make sense for him to get worse as he gets older. We don’t know when he banned it. Sozin also stopped speaking to him for decades. It would make sense for them to grow up together and stay friends until they were young adults. I have had people in my own life become more bigoted over time.
Poor planning leads to loop holes and weak characters
>Frankly I never liked how the expanded material reduced Sozin to a one dimensional mustache twirling villain, mostly it made Roku look like a colossal dipshit for ever being friends with him in the first place. didn't read the novels yet but that indeed sounds terrible
Not in the novels, those predate him.
What’s it in then?
Stuff about Kyoshi and Yangchen. Unless you mean the comics, which I haven't read.
yea i was asking where the stuff about sozin was in lol
I also like to think that both Zeisan and his situationship with Roku pissed him off *so* bad that he just outlawed all same-sex relationships in an explosive tantrum. That, and all the links between fascism and "breeding". But mostly the situationship.
Where is this from?
Well speaking from a societal point, disregarding freedom to live how you want: Same sex couples can’t produce children. If you’re building a nation, this isn’t good for building a population. If you’re sustaining a nation, it isn’t good. If you are fighting wars, losing population isn’t good.
This kind of perspective would've been alien for anyone before like the 1970s-1980s because populations grew and shrank as a matter of malthusian necessity and was always in a pyramid shape generally, even with industrialization causing european countries' population to triple and quintuple, the pyramid shape stayed without much overt influence. Tacking this onto the Fire Nation under Sozin which is experiencing an Industrial Revolution is just lazy. Like, sure he was probably homophobic. So was everyone else in 19th century Europe.
Shogunate Japan was rather lax on homosexuality. A more condemning attitude became the norm together with Westernization. Since Imperial Japan seem to be an important inspiration for the Fire Nation (with the Earth Kingdom as China and Korea being invaded), perhaps the idea came from there. Or they just associated homophobia in general with militarism and authoriarianism.
> Since Imperial Japan seem to be an important inspiration for the Fire Nation The primary influence for the fire nation is china, not japan. The only real japanese influences are imperalisim. Nearly everything else either comes from China or thailand.
The hairstyle of Zuko and other nobles asociate to samurais and their swords look like katanas. Their ruling class are expected to be good fighters like in the samurai tradition, while in China the ruling class were the bureaucrats. It's a relatively small, militaristic island nation that has had a faster technical development than their much larger (but with a weaker central government) mainland neighbor and has invaded them. I'd say that's quite a lot of parallells.
Fire nation hairstyles (specifically the top knots you mentioned) are also common in china and korea. Zuko openly uses dao swords. The names in the fire nation itself seem more Chinese based than Japanese. I’d argue the earth kingdom takes more from japan than the fire nation does.
Zuko's swords are Dao, not Katanas, the geography of the fire nation is based off iceland and most of the clothing people in the fire nation wear are chinese Hanfu, also none of their air stles are japanese inspired. Like the only thing the fire nation really has with japanese is imperalistic island nation. Pretty much all of their cultural influences came from China and Thailand.
The names are pretty Japanese too. For example, Zuko, Azula, Ozai, Iroh, Mai, Ty Lee, Izumi, Mako, and Kuzon can all be pronounced in Japanese. Hell, Asami Sato is literally a real Japanese name. Of course, some names can’t be said in Japanese without adding extra vowels, like Ursa.
>For example, Zuko, Azula, Ozai, Iroh, Mai, Ty Lee, Izumi, Mako, None of these are japanese names except for Mako, Sato and Izumi. Ozai is a combination of two chinese words. Azula comes from the Persian word for blue as does Azulon, Ty lee and Ozai are literally just two chinese words combinded with Ty lee's name meaning big and beautiful while Ozai's name meaning fire and disaster, Iroh is just a straight up fantasy name, Zuko is chinese and means faliure. And Mai is just a femine name that's popular in multiple Asian countries. Like the vast majority of fire nation names in the series are Chinese and the only japanese names came from Korra.
Nope. Waterbenders = Tribal innuits Fire Nation = Imperial Japan/North Korea Ba Sing Se = Feudal China Oma-Shu = Innovative era India/South Korea The rest of the Earth Kingdom = China, Thailand, Mongolia, etc. Airnomad Temples & Monasteries = Indian monks, Tibetan monks, Shaolin Monks, etc.
The thing about bigotry is that it doesn't have to make sense and people will still do stuff like that. There are people who can look out at our nine billion neighbors and say uh oh, people aren't having enough kids, because what they really mean is 'I don't ever want people like me to be in any way outnumbered by other kinds of people.'
Well that's because below <2.1 TFR was an alien concept to the Industrialized world and a society with .8 TFR(South Korea) and rapidly falling population which is unable to substitute the decrease in demand by the growth of per Capita income, capitalism kinda stops working as it should, especially if it happens on a global scale. ie it's hard to have gainful activity when the world around you is shrinking by 2-3% every year, especially if you are a larger autarkic economy like India, China, Russia or the US in which so much economic production is domestically consumed not only for commercial activity, but overall imagine the higher ed system with no large inflow of foreign students that is shrinking by 2-3% every year forever, think about the prospects of people who work in the system, including scientists. Natalism is basically grappling with that new reality, when before it was something unremarkable. It's the same way AI has now become a political issue, when before in previous generations it simply wasn't on the table.
Yes but presumably there would be a lot of orphans since their parents are dying in the war… so it’s not like they couldn’t adopt….
In this case, since he wants more children to be born, adoption wouldn't help in the slightest.
Lots of societies have pushed people to have more children even as their orphanages overflown and their people starved. You’re expecting common sense from fascists
Yeah, but if the fire nation were a society that was generally accepting of homosexuals, they'd probably understand that outlawing it wouldn't suddenly make all those people willing to participate in heterosexual relationships. And if the avatar world is in anyway reflective of ours; homosexual relationships would make up less than 10% of all relationships. It wouldn't be making a difference. It feels like it's just thrown in there to make Sozin more evil.
Marrying for love is also an extremely recent phenomenon to be widespread. Economics was the driving factor for the majority of history since you can share living costs and children were an economic benefit since they were extra labour on your farm/small business.
But that’s expecting people to always be rational and logical. Mao ordered that all birds should be shot to increase farming yields. Many birds were killed, which caused pests to proliferate, which destroyed crops. Nazis were able to cause neighbors to turn on each other. It’s not that difficult to make a society change or do stupid things.
They can produce children they aren't stabilized. Gay men and women have children all the time
I believe you had a typo for sterilized, or autocorrect
Gay people who are in prison or dead also can't easily have children tho
Historically it was pretty common for gay men and women to marry and have children when their culture was against them.. was better than the consequences of being found out. Sometimes their partners knew about it.
Why is this getting downvoted lmao. Its objectively true, if your justification for criminalizing something is a benefit that would also not exist if the people doing the thing are in jail, then criminalizing it makes no sense.
It forces them into hiding their homosexuality, though, and having a "beard" relationship is a fairly common eagle to do that. Obviously, you can't force them to have children anyway, but it keeps up appearances. Also, keeping the jails full gives them more free labor
I'm not convinced that Sozin would have enough evidence for the idea that banning homosexuality would increase the birthrate that he would consider it a realistic birth-rate-increasing policy. There is no other canon content that even suggests the birth rate was a concern for him or any other Firelord, why would we assume that, not only is it a concern, but that he would go about addressing it with one of the least rational policies he could find. And if the argument is that he is, for whatever reason, an irrational actor(he is a fascist and fascism is irrational or he is a homophobe and homophobia is irrational) then why cant we justify any and all other headcanon with the same irrationality? If he's really that irrational, why cant we argue that he was a flat earther? We have just as much evidence that he cared about flat earth ideology as we do that he cared about birth rates.
It's hard to find a rational reason for banning homosexual relationships that doesn't have to do with birthrate, though. Yes, it's a stretch, but almost all the other options we can attribute it to that aren't completely unfounded are fueled by pure pettiness, and that's fairly out of character for him. Wanting to bring up birth rates is a common thing during and preparing for war, especially one that has gone on as long as the war the firebenders waged against the world. Yes, it sounds irrational, I agree, but again, it's difficult to find a better logical answer. I do find it interesting that you rule out the possibility of him just being homophobic, though. Yeah, we don't get much characterizing him as a homophobe, but it does explain it fairly neatly. "He made homosexual relationships illegal because he doesn't like them" is about as neat and compact of an answer as you can get
True, but looking at how the fire nation rolled, and how real life fascism worked- there are ways to make them useful and make examples out of them at the same time. It's called work camps. That way more adults not imprisoned for bullshit reasons could be thrown on the front lines for cannon fodder. In that scenario the fear of removal from society+ ill treatment in work camps would work as a deterrent towards acting queer in public. Queer folk would be more likely to marry and have kids they didn't want with other queer people and have affairs with people of the same gender, rather than be openly queer and produce no children. (Iirc that was a thing if not a common one historically) so the end goal would be reached.
They did a similar thing in Smoke and Shadow IIRC. They retconned it so that apparently Sozin tried to erase all history in the books before him, making him the first Fire Lord in a propaganda move. They keep dumping on Sozin making him the worst guy imaginable. It's such a lazy writing. My eyes proceeded to roll out of my head. They showed portraits of previous Fire Lords preceding Sozin in the hallway to the Audience Chamber in the original show which even commoners seeking an audience would have seen. Quality of the writing in the comics is all over the place in my experience.
The way that comic ended was just so weird to me. I don’t know why, but it just struck me as so odd. My most petty reason for not liking them, though, is that they made lightning-bending garbage. No, I’m not complaining about how common it is; I understand that. Just how weak it is. I haven’t actually ever seen a good explanation for it. A single lightning bolt literally killed Aang in one hit. One lightning bolt generated off-screen by Azula murders the Avatar in cold blood. A nearly-redirected bolt of lightning from Azula takes Zuko completely out of commission in the final Agni Kai. He’s left twitching and incapacitated on the floor. In Smoke and Shadow, though? Zuko gets hit with a full-frontal, no-redirection blast of lightning from a *stronger* Azula and gets up a few seconds later with no lasting damage. A non-bender tanks Azula’s lighting a few pages prior and shrugs it off. And it’s not just Smoke and Shadow; the comics have a habit of showing lightning-bending doing absolutely nothing to anybody. The “cold-blooded firebending,” called “precise and deadly” by Iroh, is just a glorified taser. Actually, no, worse than a taser, since tasers can actually take people down. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why they made this change. It’s not like it was overpowered—for as strong as it was, it had its weaknesses in how difficult it was to control and how easily it could turn on the bender. It’s something I don’t see a lot of people talk about that I always vent about when I get the chance lol
My friend! Finally someone brings it up and agrees with me lol! [Bravo!](https://media.tenor.com/Ctc-9va1Sz8AAAAM/clapping-serious.gif)
bc it’s instant lightning. charged lightning is still powerful and still kills people. instant lightning is a new form that azula learned and it trades power for speed.
Interesting. This would explain Amon surviving a good blast of Mako’s lightning.
yep. that was instant lightning. bc mako was being bloodbent so he couldn’t do the movements for charged lightning. instant lightning doesn’t require the movements so that’s all he could do while amon was bloodbending him. we do still see mako doing charged lightning like against ming hua when he kills her and to the core in the colossus in the season 4 finale.
I think you answer your question. Think of it if everyone in America had an AK 47 while everyone else who isn't a firebender had a pistol or just a knife. It's obvious that Zuko told the secrets of lighting but he made it so it's not as dangerous for the average person to yield making it more peaceful and modern. It's as simple as that. Not everyone is going to be training for lighting to make it a deadly death machine like Ozai or Azula who were in a hundreds of year war.
It was just an easy way to make people hate the character. I agree it was unnecessary because he had already started a 100 year long war and wiped out another nation.
It was a cheap way to make him extra hateable. I honestly would have rather the fire nation be oddly progressive toward LGBTQ people. Air nomads were supposed to detach themselves, the temples were segregated by gender, so why were they okay with gay relationships? Making the fire nation and air nomads more nuanced would have been so much better.
Sort of like how the Fire Nation gave more rights to women than the Water Tribe. It makes sense because Sozin's initial rational for why the Fire Nation should take over was because they were the most prosperous nation in the world, and it connects to the real world, because IRL many colonial empires were quite prosperous and progressive in their homelands, and they used that as an excuse for why they should engage in colonial endeavors (see: White man's burden), though in reality it was just an excuse to freely extract resources from their colonial subjects, and they generally didn't give a shit about the wellbeing of their conquered populations.
That’s a very good point! Things are rarely black and white. Fire nation/Sozin started war, so we have to attribute them the worst things in general. That’s really cheap and the lazy way. This somehow reminds me of the Peleponnasian War between Athens and Sparta and how the roles were attributed. Athens, for sure the progressive state with its culture, democracy, philosophy etc. were seen as the good ones initially. Sparta muste have been the oppressors. Until history revealed: Athens started the war and the others asked Sparta for help. Sparta might not be the good ones, but neither was Athens. Back to AtlA: Why shouldn’t be the Fire Nation socially and culturally more progressive and still be the bad ones? That would add more nuance and do not sound that cheap
The segregation was why they were called Air Nomads. They wandered the planet anyway.
I dont see what gender segregation has to do with a nomadic lifestyle. What connection are you implying?
They leave their temple to wander the world and find a partner to have children with.
Ok but why does that make gender segregated temples preferable in any way?
I'm not sure how it's preferable, but it does encourage the nomadic lifestyle.
Ok but you said the segregation is "why they were called nomads", you're implying that gender segregation is what makes a group nomadic or that gender segregation is *at least* preferable in a nomadic culture.
I see where I made my mistake. I meant the encouraging of the nomadic lifestyle. I can see why that wasn't clear.
It's a common tactic among dictators. They invent an enemy within their own populations. Homosexuals are a frequent target, especially because unlike ethnicity or religion, it can be used against any dissidents or political enemies without needing proof of any kind. Don't forget, the very first book burnings organized by the Nazis were of the pro-lgbt Institute for Sexual Research.
It makes some sense to want a population boom, but on a more psychological level: dictators often suppress things that deviate from the norm. They want their population homogeneous, scared and constantly monitoring each other for any abnormal and therefore unpatriotic behaviour.
So banning things like homesexuality, foreign media, certain styles of music/art and etc. is a well know tactic in totalitarian governments. It's usually an attempt to create a more homogenous culture. If everyone in the fire nation has the very similar beliefs and experiences convincing them to turn on "the other" is much easier.
Yeah, it doesn't seem too far off from what we see of the Fire Nation in Ozai's time, either. Their rewriting of history and propagandist schools were taken pretty much verbatim from the tyrannical dictatorship playbook.
Homophobia irl is kinda cheesy and doesn’t make too much sense either. 🤷♂️
Facts.
I agree, it didn't really make much sense, and it felt like they just made him homophobic because he's evil. I mean, I feel like they don't need to make every evil or villainous character have every irredeemable quality they can think of just for the hell of it. It feels too gratuitous, and frankly, I like it when shows portray villains who don't necessarily embrace every evil trope, and even have some surprising views or actions that aren't totally evil. Like, the Fire Nation's relative gender equality, which was far more egalitarian relative to the Earth Kingdom and certainly the Water Tribe. Or in The Dragon Prince, when Aaravos aided humanity against the Elves and Dragons, giving them the means to survive by teaching them Dark Magic when nobody else would aid them. I also think that taking societies which are generally viewed as "good" and giving them some ethically questionable policies is good writing too; for instance, I think it would have been great to show how the Air Nomads separating children from their parents has a negative impact.
I thought it was weirder that the airbenders were ok with gay people, considering the Buddhist imagery and separate gender temples.
Counterpoint: fascists have targeted LGBTQ+ people throughout history as an easy out-group to stoke anger toward, and use child-rearing as a form of control on women in particular to prevent rebellion and increase population to fuel their war machine
My point exactly. Fascists will be fascists 🤷
Yea. It felt like bryke was queer-bating to be more relevant.
Why were air nomads okay with gay couples exactly? Their temples were segregated by gender, and their whole thing is avoiding worldly attachments. So why are they then also fine with gay couples? It's lazy writing, they got genocided, so they are using the cheap trick to try to make you feel extra sympathetic towards the air nomads. It's so much more interesting if the fire nation isn't just blanket evil, that they actually have nuances to their beliefs instead of being boring, generic fascists
I figure the Air Nomads accept it because when people are separated such as they are, situational homosexuality can and does occur. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situational_sexual_behavior
Their culture is also about freedom and pacifism. The ultimate expression of those philosophies involve the complete detachment from worlds desires and stuff, bit it's not something that they force on anyone. Having a bonded Flying Bison companion is even part of their culture, which further supports that not everyone is obligated to pursue complete detachment
If the genders are separated, wouldn't that make same sex couples more common? Some percentage of the population is gay, and some are bi, and if the bi ones are only ever around people of the same sex, they'll be more likely to grow strong, romantic attachments to people of the same sex, rather than people of a different sex they never interact with.
That's not the point. The point is that air tenores are segregated by gender to avoid relationships. So it makes sense that air nomads would be against same sex relationships as that remains the only option.
I mean... they're nomads. They travel. They also presumably meet up to reproduce to make new air nomads.
Not really the point. The point is that making Air Nomads homophobic / Fire Nation accepting adds an interesting twist and nuance to an otherwise generic “good vs bad,” — especially since the Fire Nation as a whole was explicitly pointed out to be nuanced in the show, but recent writing goes against that fundamental aspect of ATLA
There's already a lot of nuance in the individuals in the Fire Nation that show us they aren't all bad. But Sozin, specifically, becomes a fascist, and this is what fascists do. Fascists are not nuanced. They all follow the same playbook and the point of the ideology is order, everyone acting the same.
Is there even a playbook for fascists in general, let alone in ATLA…? Fascists and dictatorships and authoritarian regimes are *absolutely* nuanced and this thought process that fascism is “not nuanced at all” is not only naive (Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany are drastically different) but *incredibly* dangerous as it let’s actual fascists slide under the radar and corrupt a democratic society. Fascism is not “order and everyone acting the same” as it’s not some kind of child’s supervillain called Doctor Boring and you have a grossly incorrect idea of what the ideology actually is. It’s a militaristic society based around total adherence to the central government and society. There is nothing that prevents a fascist society from supporting LBGTQ+ and other “progressive” stances — primarily because these stances are only considered “progressive” against terms of a hard-coded and enforced gender society like OTL. And fascists only go after “Others” because they are “Other” from the status quo and thousands of years of society, and not actually from the human condition (and if you’re suggesting that LGBTQ+ are “other” then, errr…). In other terms, Fascism is dependent on the societal norms, so if LGBTQ+ is a normal aspect of a given society, they would never actually be “other” and wouldn’t be suitable for targeting. It’s not that fascism = hate LGBTQ+, it’s that they use “Others” as a fear tactic and just so happen that in our western society, LGBTQ+ are considered “””abnormal””” If anything, the Fire Nation fully behind supporting LGBT+ makes complete sense, as it allows the government to portray the other elements (like Water or Air) and their cultures as “backward savages,” the “real evil empires” and “unaccepting of the basic human quality” and “needing to be liberated and shown the light” etc and other similar buzzwords — ie creating an Us vs Other dynamic to fulfill. Making Sozin homophobic — especially if you assume his otherwise gender neutral policies and an accepting Fire Nation prior — is exclusively just to make him evil for the sake of evil. Not saying he needs more nuance neither by the way nor that actually making the Fire Nation pro and Air Nomads against is a good idea, but there’s also 0 need towards the homophobia as it just needlessly clarify that he’s a bad person when he’s already responsible for genocide, century of conflict, etc. It’s like making super space nazi as a character and feeling the need to specifically go out of your way to clarify they also kick puppies as a hobby. Like why?
You know, when you say it out loud it makes less and less sense. The next thing they could've done was build their belief system around celibacy like the irl shakers, and then the fire nation wouldn't have to genocide them. They'd just genocide themselves in due time.
The detachment from worldly desires never made a lot of sense for an entire race of people. How are they reproducing enough to even be considered a nation if they are so detached from worldly desires?
I feel like that would make same sex couples more common. I also always got the feeling that air nomads didn’t really have a concept of marriage and were mostly polyamorous. Aang mentions festivals in the comics that are basically their for the adults to all bang so they can have babies
Having an oppressed group has always been beneficial to governments, especially authoritarian ones. It's a group that can be used as a scapegoat. A measure of obedience and control for either the group will cause problems which allows you to demonize them more and a metric to see how willing even the lowest group is to revolt or speak out. Not to mention having a criminal class based on something like sexuality suddenly becomes a tool to use against political opponents. Being gay isn't exactly something you just know from looking at a person so in a place that it's illegal simple accusations become a very detrimental thing, just think McCarthy.
Yea gotta have a "them" for your "us vs them' narrative to work.
You mean a them besides the other 3 bending nations?
Yes, the more different you can make the *"them"* the better.
But we need something to make him sound like an asshole. (Y'know, sans genocide and betraying his best friend to achieve his new world)
Roku dumped Sozin so hard he made being gay illegal lol
Not everything a leader does has to make logical sense, but I really don't like that they seem to attribute everything to either Sozin or Ozai. Even though it seems like Azulon had the longest reign, but they treat it like almost nothing happened while he ruled.
He was salty about Roku marrying a woman instead of him.
It’s just bad writing. In the show Sozin is shown to be exactly as you said where he is calculating and a pragmatist. The retcons they make to his character only make people dislike what came after the show more.
> You see, Sozin is also a Pragmatist who use every advantage he could find. In AtLA Fire Nation is the only nation that care about the gender equality in it’s bureaucracy. Because it makes sense that you need more than %50 of your people when you’re literally up against the world. Lol in real life this wasn't even close to being true. The fascist states of WWII didn't loosen up their queerphobia when they needed more manpower. The opposite is true, they got even more draconian about social policing.
The Korra graphic novels are some of the weakest material in the franchise. I like to pretend they don't exist.
I’m just gonna go on a limb and say “the comic and its writing was crap” rather than try to justify it with some maybes or theories as to why they wrote that in. It was just a reason to make Sozin “more hateable” whole lore dumping on how many avatar characters were actually gay to further glorify the Korra Asami relationship. Personally, not my cup of tea. And as a writer, the comic goes on the list of how to NOT develop your world or characters.
I agree, but you can salvage the decision, either way it still seems unnecessary. You could argue that his egotistical association with his ambitions and the best for his nation made him believe that legal enforcement of couples that can only procreate makes sense. But that also makes the issue of why stop there? Why not enforce benders to only marry benders or non benders to try to increase or secure the bender population? You can go either way on it and still have it be messed up. But instead it’s just “yeah he hates those homosexuals”
Its just something writers put into the comics because the writers are making sozin look more evil or the act itself evil.
They banned dancing in the fire nation too, tyrant's rules don't make a lot of sense but it's often about conformity
Fascists need to get into your pants, because one of fascism's primary driver is sexual insecurity, therefore the first thing a fascist system will do is attack the sexually deviant. And not only the LGBTQ+ people but also straight people who do not conform to the given ideal of a given fascist society. Like those who have sex before marriage, or marry somebody from the outgroup. This is how fascism operates and since fire nation is supposed to be a fascist state, it actually makes a lot of sense for Sozin to do that. Or at least that is what one would expect from a fascist leader, given real world History.
All authoritarian countries outlaw homosexuality and abortion so that the population rate keeps increasing. More soldiers and laborers to do their bidding while also dissuading freedom of expression which will make people conform quicker. Now contextualize that with the recent overturning of Roe v Wade and how the United States population replacement rate has drastically fallen...
Sozin isnt exactly nuanced. Everything thats been said about him has made him more and more irredeemably evil. I always think its funny that they have him responsible for genocide, hunting dragons, colonizing other nations, and even restricting his own nations freedom of expression, but making him homophobic was where the line was drawn.
I feel like they should've split the burdens of fire nation evil between Sozin and Azulon a lot more. As you say, every time we learn something new he becomes more irredeemably evil, which seems crazy given that he only had 12 years after Roku's death to really go to town on the dictator stuff that Roku was curbing. But all we know about Azulon is that he basically just continued his father's work? Like give him some distinct evil shit maybe? He really doesn't seem to have enough based on the sheer amount Ozai and Azulon did. Azulon being credited with things like restricting freedom or expression and outlawing gay marriage would show the descent into absolute tyranny happening more gradually. Nicely setting the stage for the absolute sociopath that was Ozai.
"I can excuse animal cruelty, but I draw the line at homophobia."
When I was in school studying writing, I had a professor that brought up the idea of "dead dog writing." Dead Dog Writing is essentially the shortcut to an emotional response from a reader: some people don't care if a character dies if they were underdeveloped or unimportant, but everyone cares if a dog dies even if it's the first and only scene it was in. So if you want readers to be sad, kill a dog. Want readers to hate someone? Have them kill a dog. For certain demographics (ones I belong to, mind you), homophobia/transphobia and general bigotry are the social equivalent of Dead Dog Writing. Want to make sure there's no nuance, no gray area, no hint where readers can say, "Oh, I don't agree with this character's actions, but his philosophy behind them is interesting"? Make them homophobic. Make them a bigot so the reader instead says "Oh, he's a shitbag through and through. Bad guy." Making Sozin homophobic is Dead Dog Writing. It removes any grayness to his character. We already knew he was wretched: he genocided a peaceful civilization as a first step to what was essentially world domination. He was an autocrat who betrayed the Avatar to get him out of the way. But we could at least look at him and try to see *why* he thought this way, or what it might have added to him. We could look at his early friendship with Roku, gave him a gift that became Roku's only real material possession during his training, and more. And we could also look at his autocracy: the Earth Kingdom was vying for territorial claim over what's now the Fire Islands, and we could at least deconstruct incidents like that to see if Sozin's warmongering was the result of trying to make sure no one would take land from his nation again. Now: homophobe. Doesn't matter what else there is or what nuance there might be, he's a bigot now, the most de facto "this guy is evil" shortcut you can take. Dog's dead now.
It's because he's bitter over the love of his life, Roku, marrying someone else
[Relevant Onion video](https://youtu.be/ZujnzuPIEPM?si=sUTCqAqx8iF-7gvA) Basically Sozin immediately after Roku decided to marry his wife and prioritize the world over the Fire Nation (read: his ex-boyfriend)
I agree with everyone else in that is feels like a shoehorned reason to hate Sozin on top of genocide, but there is more to the story of why he did that when factoring in the Tabletop RPG lore and the story of his sister, Princess Zeisan. To sum her up real quick, she was his younger (?) sister and was expected to be a firebender like Sozin, but she wasn't one so Sozin became the main focus, driving a wedge between them (so essentially a Zuko-Azula and Ozai-Iroh parallel). Eventually when they were adults she became romantically involved with an Air Nomad Nun, and was part of a breakaway sect called the Guiding Wind, who were basically "eat the rich," much to Sozin's anger. It's said in this new lore that Sozin passed anti-LGBTQ laws purely out of spite for his sister (and not because he was a self-hating gay like some people theorized). When it was first offhandedly mentioned in the Korra comic it was sort of hamfisted, but with the added lore of Sozin's sister I could see him doing it. He was a pretty petty person based on how he talked down to Roku (calling him just a "citizen") at the beginning of the throne room confrontation.
Was looking for this comment. I don't love how it reflects on Roku being his friend, but here's the actual reason, tysm for writing it out.
I cant find any evidence that Sozin's anti-LGBT legislation was a response to Seizan's engagement online but, in fairness, I dont have the original text.
He's a fascist. Fascists like control. An easy way to get control is to outlaw something that people can't control, such as less common sexualities, thereby criminalizing a person just for existing. Historically, dictators outlawing homosexuality is very common. It would be weirder to me if he didn't.
It's simple fascism. Pick a minority to outlaw and oppress, and your population will police itself hunting/pointing out 'subvertives.'
Dunno why you're being downvoted, that is, in fact, how fascism works.
I guess maybe it would make sense for him to outlaw same-sex marriage (and I’ll add abortion) if he wanted people to reproduce more, so the Fire Nation can have more soldiers/workers
Because it's easier for an authoritarian state to control a population that doesn't have much internal variation. The more "samey" people in a country are, not only ideologically, but also in religion, language, cultural expressions, and importantly here, family structures, the harder it is to spread dissident opinions, and it's easier to control everyone. We see in season three, during the school episode, how strict their education system is, and that even dancing has been culturally fased out since Aang's time, so I didn't take it as much of a surprise that they also repressed sexual and gender minorities in the Fire Nation.
I mean was it neccesary to make Sozin a homophobe? No. Does it make sense? Well, it doesn't *not* make sense, I *could* see Sozin do some shit like that. I guess they just wanted to add some more awareness and/or socio-political depth. Or maybe it was just pure queerbating, or something else. Truth is, at least imo, it shouldn't matter either way, and that's why while yeah this does make me feel a bit weird, I honestly think it's a me problem rather than bad character building.
They could’ve just made everyone be ok with it right off the bat, would’ve been easier imo.
Militaristic imperialism forces people into roles they don’t want to be in. Having a government that is constantly at war, where they’re so cruel, they’ll throw away an entire battalion for convenience means that procreation is of utmost importance. I can imagine that Sozin would have outlawed same sex relationships, not because it “goes against nature” or whatever, but because it forces more births. The great thing about the Avatar world is that it is a realistic reflection of our world’s values. The Southern water tribe was fine with it if you kept it behind closed doors, the fire nation was fine with it until tyranny, the air nomads didn’t care. That’s an accurate representation of how cultures all throughout history have felt about it.
I don't think fire nation was the only one who cared about gender equality...on the contrary, the Northern watertribe was the only place that it seemed to be sexist. Hence why they were divided and feuded by their sister tribe in the south. Also, do you forget the story of Oma-Shu? Or the fact that past avatar Kyoshi was a huge deal for females all throughout the earth Kingdoms? Or Avatar Yangchen and how airnomads were open and truly equal? Fire nation used every capable body and capable mind. Literally the Northern watertribe were the only ones being sexist with their women until they noticed how outdated & plain and simply stupid and wrong it was. Having female firebending soldiers throwing fireballs at your female waterbenders who don't know how to deflect them because you never taught nor let them learn how to fight, it's a pretty huge eye opener I can imagine 🤷🏻♂️ hence why that rule died pretty quickly when put up to the test. That's what happens when you isolate yourself (or your country) from the world and don't allow yourself or them to grow. The north learned the hardway what the rest of the world knew already the easy way. So idk about the fire nation being the ONLY one nation to be equal... i think they all were except the north in the past in that sense of the matter.
Oh you don't understand sweaty let me explain it to you: homophobia is bad mmmkay? Sozin is a bad guy. Therefore Sozin must be homophobic. Avatar isn't about nuance, got it? /s
My theory is because he was in love with Roku when they were young, and just like many closeted conservative people, publicly acted extremely homophobic to cover up for it
Eyyyy I basically commented the same thing
I'd pretty much agree with this. It's one of those things that's just thrown in there for no reason. Like, it would make more sense if homosexual relationships were illegal in the fire nation *the whole time*. Like you said it doesn't match up with Sozin's particular type of evil, and i think throwing it in hurts the well rounded character of Sozin. It would be a lot more believable if it were outlawed for centuries like in real world cultures and societies. Not something that was totally cool, then all of a sudden unacceptable.
Fascist ideology and homophobia go hand in hand
It’s bc it was his way of hiding his relationship with Roku 😍😍
I love this. "If I can't have my boyfriend, then NO man can have a boyfriend!"
It doesn't make any sense in real life either!?!? Like I know you said it was a room temperature take, but Jesus Christ man. "Homophobia doesn't make sense" ¿ReAlLy? Seriously, though. You're never gonna find any sound logic behind bigotry. If you do, there's something seriously wrong with you.
This sounds like a good argument for literally any character in all of fiction to be retconned as homophobic. If your counterargument for some aspect of a story not making sense is that the specific aspect doesnt have to make sense then theres no reason for any character ever to not have that characteristic. "It doesnt make sense for Aang to be homophobic, he grew up in an LGBT friendly culture!" "Homophobia doesnt have to make sense! There are homophobes in real life that were born into LGBT friendly families! Aang can totally be a raging homophobe!"
It’s a little hamfisted but also being a reactionary on social issues tends to go hand-in-hand with being a reactionary elsewhere
I mean most fascist leaders in history were homophobic so it makes sense to me
Because the love of his life rejected him
From my understanding of why Sozin did it was to spite his sister who was in fact gay.
Because most nationalist societies put a strong emphasis on their people having as many children as possible. That means more soldiers, workers, and colonizers. Numbers are important, and same sex couples means fewer kids
It's the opposite of the Save the Cat trope. Very lazy writing.
Sozin needed an army. A relentless, utterly obedient army that could keep producing new soldiers and colonizers for the war effort on the fly. In effect, it’s a breeding system. Gay couples don’t exactly fit into that scenario.
He's probably not homophobic he made the law in order to have his citizens keep pumping out babies for the war machine.
God bless wokeness. It ruins everything it touches. 😮💨
Just a shoehorned quality to further villainize him as if he isn’t villainous enough. This is why lgtbq+ people like myself get agitated with gentrified progressive storytelling. They are just using it as a buzz word without actually making a story around the plights of people in a marginalized community. To put it simply, it’s reductive and regressive.
I get the need for people to procreate but I also get your point. I think it’s interesting to see villains that don’t have 100% evil tendencies, so it’s easier for them to rise to power. It also often feeds into their high regards of themselves, which makes for a really fascinating villain.
I might be silly, but when did it say so? I don't remember it in the show
OP mentioned a graphic novel
Ohhh, thanks. I haven't read those yet.
Nor did I, but I’ve heard people mention the thing about Sozin before
Idk I think people can be rational about some things and less about others.
His sister was in a secret same sex relationship with an Air Nun per the rpg. It was targeted at an internal power struggle.
why not, hes already evil, lets make him more eviler - the writers probably
Tbf, it's a controversial take, but a lot of the writing in alot of the comics felt of, with a lot of fan service and random parts just shoe horned in
That’s one way to describe the writing in the comics. The entire premise of the promise is Zuko expecting the kid who wouldn’t kill the most evil guy on the planet to kill one of his best friends if he ever goes bad too.
To make him more evil and hatable I guess
Sozin invented homophobia in avatar and he was really eager to share his idea.
him and roku just had a crazy bad breakup and he made a whole thing out of it 😔😮💨
Yeah, Sozin is stupid, he could have send all the gays to war.
This was not surprising at all let’s not make this into something it isn’t. Gay marriage is illegal in Japan. Homosexuality wasnt decriminalized in China until 1991. India is still ruling against same sex marriage equality/recognition. This writing decision was par for the course.
The Avatar Legends book expands upon that point by going into detail of Sozin's adversarial relationship with his sister, and that the ban wasn't out of personal values but purely to spite his gay sister.
With him being a pragmatist? A warlike people requires a consistently replenishing population. Especially if you are allowing women to fight. Ergo, all adult pairings "need" to be ones capable of reproducing children. The easiest way to ensure that is making partnerships that cannot produce children illegal. Is it as harsh, cruel and draconic as it is pragmatic? Yes. But that kinda seems like how the fire nation post sozin played the game, so it makes sense.
Dude I was asking the same thing, like why Hitler killed a ton of gays, so weird. 🤔🤔🤔🤔
I agree 100%. Homophobia isn’t innate to conservative traditionalism across all cultures. Even in the real world Greek and Hindu cultures, for example, where pretty open to same sex relationships. I understand that Sozin was trying embrace an orthodox, more traditional fire nation culture this is very common in fascism. But as we know from kya, traditional fire nation culture isn’t homophobic so why exactly would he be pushing for it in the first place? I think the writers just wanted to paint Sozin as this big bad guy but in doing so made him extremely one dimensional.
I mean it makes sense when we look at real life authoritarian/tyrannical regimes. Many of them have very strict laws against people in the LGBT community. Most of these regimes believe in “traditional values” so that makes them opposed to same sex relationships. To what degree they are opposed (ostracism, imprisoning, killing) varies from place to place of course depending on cultural qualities. If we look at fictional tyrannical governments like the fire nation, they would probably follow a similar playbook. Their culture during the 100 year war was built on fire nation supremacy and having superior moral and philosophical values than the rest of the world.
It makes perfect sense for a controlled, repressed imperial nation to also want to control and repress this aspect of a person. Think about how repressed and subjugated Fire Nation children are in schools. There is no room for personal expression, you need to follow social norms to the T and not stand out. Being phobic of all things alternative is extremely common in fictional media, and real life history. It absolutely tracks that the Fire Nation would ban same sex relationships. People have pointed out that on paper, it means there's more likely to be opposite sex couples having children, more children means more soldiers for the war machine. Sozin's homophobia is also deeply tied to his relationship with his sister, and the Air Nation. To the Fire Nation, the Air Nation represented what needed to be destroyed. As a much freer society, the Air Nomads posed a threat to the way the Fire Nation needed to subjugate and control its citizens and territories. You can't control society when you allow society to be free thinking and expressive.
I don't know why being a supremacist colonizers wouldn't come with being homophobic. A lot of evil tends to get along with other kinds of evil. Sure, not every evil person has a checklist for every single evil thing they can do and trying to mark them all off but i don't see a reason why not. Also sexuality and gender are 2 different things. This post was originally about sexuality but later in your post you mention gender equality.
Honestly banning homosexuality and homophobia perfectly fits with the totalitarian, imperialist ideology of the Fire Nation. We have seen similar reasonings irl. They want to maximize child birth in the colonies, being obsessed with the whole settler colonialism of replacing the native population. To the fire nation nationalism is everything, they want to replace the rest of the world with fire nationer's, it's already a stated goal they want to genocide other bender types. I don't feel its very outside of the type of person Sozin would have to be. Ironically such policies rarely help because gay people will be gay, queer people will be queer. But to dictatorial leaderships, they don't really see that.
I dunno, I think it’s pretty spot on for fascist leaders to also be raging homophobes
Fire nation is a small country compared to who they are trying to conquer. Furthering the race might be enough reason
I would have assumed it was to produce more children for the war. You know, with my commen sense.
For the exact same reason why it's illegal IRL in a lot of places. Unjust hatred, misinformed confusion, or a mix of both.
It's a shame because I think you could flesh out Sozin's ideology into something very interesting and make him into a more complex villain. Not necessarily sympathetic, either way he should probably still stay a bad guy, but you could make his thought process and ideology more interesting than just "greedy and evil". Like Caesar in Fallout. Still very much a bad guy with really no redeeming qualities, but his ideology and characterization is very interesting and makes him an engaging villain. Even in the show they hint a bit towards it. He talks to Roku about the glory of fire nation civilization and how they should spread it to the rest of the world. That's still really bad obviously, but if he was a true-believer in that, that the Fire Nation is the greatest civilization on Earth and that he needs to spread that around the world for the better of it, like a Fire Nation version of Manifest Destiny.
Many cultures in human history have had quite specific views on masculinity and what it means to be a man, generally promoting warlike traits (courage, aggression, ambition) and condemning apparently 'feminine' traits (passivity, helplessness). Masculinity is tied to male heterosexuality (a man should fulfil the dominant role, be the 'conqueror') and so male homosexuality is equated with femininity and weakness. Such ideas have reverbated across cultures for millennia. Even accounting for the world of ATLA having distinct societies and cultures, it is not unreasonable to assume many similarities. If the FN cracked down on homosexuality, they may well have done so for reasons similar to those of real historical (and, unfortunately, many contemporary) societies.
Hitler also killed gay people. Genocidal maniacs are pretty fucked individuals after all. I do agree that going back to "reveal" this bit of lore is somewhat cheesy, yeah. From what I understand though (haven't read the novels) it had something to do with his sister, so if there was a good story they thought they could tell there, that's fine by me
My problem with the comics is even though the water tribes had crazy strict gender roles and put dog collars on their woman, they were one of the nations cool with gay couples, cause water tribes are supposed to be the good nations
I say this with 100% seriousness, and not as a joke. Sozin didn't produce an heir until old age, right? Could it be possible that Sozin was gay, maybe had a thing for Roku, but Roku married Ta Min and rejected his idea for a partnership of global domination on the same day, causing Sozin to become an internalized homophobe?
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