So I'm watching a YouTube video of a guy going through and reviewing every episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark, the 90's Nickelodeon kids horror anthology show. It's a show I remember fondly from when I was a kid, and the review video is pretty great. But one thing seeing all these clips really jumps out at me. The sheer amount of racemixing couples that were in various episodes. I've seen like 5 or 6 black guy/White girl 'relationships' so far, and I'm only at season 2. It's the usual 'oooooo she has a crush' kid shit, but it's the amount of it that is jumping out at me now. 12yo me of course never noticed, but now that I'm seeing again, and knowing how rare it was in real life back then for White girls to date blacks, I can't help but suspect this sort of thing was included on purpose to normalize it, even decades before what we now see as the 'woke' era.
Can you think of any other examples of things that you didn't notice at the time, but looking back you realize they were attempts to push woke ideology long before it was known as such?
not going as far back as you, but Legend of Korra fits as an example i'd say
Even back to the original you tend to have Katara as the "level headed one" and Sokka as the idiot, mirroring Lisa and Bart from the Simpsons.
At least in that show, although Sokka was often the comic relief, he was also often shown as heroic and intelligent. The man with the plan, to whose authority the others often deferred during the hardest times. He wasn't just a jester used to ridicule men and manhood as a whole.
Legend of Korra has far too many things wrong with it to be redeemable. It may have had some potential with some of its plot points, but they were all badly handled and concluded. It was also utterly filled with retcons and Mary Sue / girlboss moments, to the point that you couldn't ever get a good sense of who characters were, what relationships they had between each others, and what abilities they had. It was just a trash show in general.
Sokka also was a very good lesson of a character in the difference between assuming authority, because you are the oldest, the man, etc, and having to earn it through actions and leadership prowess.
That's something most of us this side of the culture probably need to learn at some point.
You could argue Sokka was a clown to hide his insecurities over his lack of waterbending ability.
That too. He was a complex character, constantly worried about having to protect his clan, his family and those he loves, while trying to pull his weight in their group, despite not having the same kind of magical abilities over elements that the others possessed.
Meanwhile, in Korra, nearly every character was either one-dimensional, or an anthropomorphised trope, or a plot device. Even Korra herself would conveniently forget she had abilities she'd displayed before, just because if she'd been competent and consistent, then the antagonists would have been defeated within minutes of their first encounters. She would fail or succeed challenges, not because it made sense narratively, but just because the plot demanded it.
It's hard to fathom that the same writer wrote on both shows, considering the vast difference in quality between the two.
I don't know if that's totally fair. Katara was the mother figure, Sokka, while comic relief, was also perfectly level-headed and also the one with the balls.
I have a bigger problem with the original because Katara has no arc at all, she plays the mother hen the entire show, except like one fucking episode they threw in right before the finale with bloodbending because the writers thought it up too late in the series to do anything with it.