What on earth happened to Sokka after Avatar? | The Last Airbender

soccer is a bit of a mystery in the avatar story following the war all of the other characters get a comic of their own or at least we know what happened to them i mean even sookie's got a comic of her own now but sokka nothing except he does have a story running in the background about the tension between tradition and technology about confronting the socio-economic realities of this world from the perspective of a non-bender also if i look like i've been crying it's just because i've been listening to sad music and i just cry way too easily these days it's just how it works for some reason but first give me an all hail supreme leader momo down in the comments and uh cheers to campfire for sponsoring this video i say how about you me my link down the description a bottle of wine a late night who knows where it could lead soccer's arc in the last dare bender is a very traditional coming of age story in many ways it's about him learning self-control responsibility leadership and the place of self-sacrifice it's about him becoming a man of his tribe and there's this dunning-kruger curve to how he thinks of himself he starts out being overly confident thinking he's the best damn worry in the entire world that he's a great strategist despite being neither of those things really then he grows and he learns across the story but as he does he actually doubts himself even more until he feels like he can't do anything that he doesn't contribute which is how we end up at soccer's master one of my favorite episodes by the way what's your favorite episode you know tell me down below it's only after learning a lot by the day of black sun that he both recognizes his skills and the gaps in his knowledge coming to terms with himself and becoming wise i guess a large part of this arc comes from soccer being the only non-bender in team avatar hashtag justice for suki i don't know does she count you know it was really unclear now though the creators did initially say that they didn't want the world stratified into a class of benders and non-binders well it kinda is anyway the fire nation noble houses all come from the strongest lines of firebenders to the point that the fire lord tries to keep the genes within the family even if the earth king isn't an earthbender the state power rarely lies with the daily a sect of exclusively powerful earthbenders all of the major players in avatar's history were basically benders the cogs of wealth class and power are clearly turned by them and work better for them it's a lot harder to make a living building houses when you're competing with people who can conjure the foundations from the earth it's really an unavoidable reality of this kind of world but soccer finds himself in a post-war world where things are starting to change the technology of the fire nation's industrial revolution machinery steam power mass transport doesn't just make life easier for a lot of people but it acts as an equalizer between benders and non-benders katara this is hard for you to understand what non-bender says because you're a bender the kind of power you possess just hasn't been available to us non-benders until now machines can finally make us equal soccer was always an inventor and tinkerer he knows the value of technology so his story naturally picks up with him trying to bring more of these machines to the world to improve the lives of other non-benders because he gets it in the rift soccer encounters a forklift for the first time and he's just over the moon about it he loves the damn thing oh there's a whole factory dedicated to producing and manipulating materials in a way that previously only benders were ever capable of doing it's like literally finding out you have magic as well so really picks up from his arc in the show of him finding how he can make a difference in a world full of benders and machines help him and others do that likewise in north and south the southern water tribe is rapidly expanding and changing with the southern reconstruction project having found an oil deposit soccer views this and the machinery that might come with it as an opportunity to bring his home into a new era into the modern world a world with so much more opportunity because suddenly they're able to build things quickly and safely in a way that bend is perhaps aren't even able to they can use materials like wood and metal that most benders can't manipulate now while not a perfect parallel because bending does not equal wealth the industrial revolution in our world massively expanded the middle class largely due to these machines prior to that you couldn't really produce more than what you could refine or sew or mine personally until machines came along with the ability to make more money came more free time the capacity to engage in politics and demand new rights soccer is pretty keen for that same thing to happen and as someone with a lot of political power in the post-war world he clearly sets himself on a path to facilitating that but in contrast katara views all of this technological advancement changing her home as kind of horrific that it's corrupting her home polluting the environment destroying her culture with the traditional ways of doing things building and cooking being left behind for what i've made a video discussing katara's perspective before it's linked up in the corner right now but all of this does open an interesting discussion about power tradition and progress the lenses through which we view each of these things katara doesn't just benefit from the culture and political economic framework as it stands without machines it's something that she personally identifies with as well it's deeply tied to her sense of self-worth water-bending arts are deeply ingrained into the way that water tribe society works they form the values and give katara a sense of place and purpose in her society culture is sometimes imagined as something that we might engage with but is not us soccer is very much someone who is aware of how important the waterbending arts to his people and culture and home but he is not a waterbender his identity is not wrapped up in it in the way that kataras is in a weird way soccer is kind of an outside observer to his own culture and that's okay by the way there are lots of things that we consider to be part of our culture but are not us for a simple example some people may consider a church or certain religious practices to be part of their culture even if they are not religious themselves but on the other hand some religious people who view their religion as a foundational part of their culture be it christian muslim jewish buddhist or otherwise they may view attempts to reduce its importance in public life or in government intentionally or not not only as unwanted change but as undermining their sense of self-worth and their connection to what they view as their culture it becomes easy to see it as a personal attack even if it's not especially because we're forgetting here that soccer is trying to include people in his culture who were not necessarily excluded before but were disadvantaged he's trying to increase their self-worth within their idea of their culture katara and soccer of course clash over this for a long time until soccer finally says but katara you and i have no actual idea what things were like here before the war this south pole that you're imagining the one where everything is how it's supposed to be what if that never actually existed and i mean we tend to mythologize the past our cultural heritage our national identity don't we we tell it as a story to our kids to others to ourselves and often it's a little bit too perfect ignoring the imperfections of history but that story is especially easy to believe if you fit into it soccer's story is about reconciling his deep attachment to his cultural heritage which we see in the show that kept him so close to his father in his absence with the fact that his culture may disadvantage people if he holds on to it there's an interesting historical parallel we could make to the meiji restoration which was a radical socio-economic shift in japan that started in 1868 largely in response to the growing presence of western powers in asia there was the saints that was either change or die because if we don't we're probably going to get colonized and you know what probably true so things did begin to change but at the time 1 out of every 20 people in japan were samurai now there's a bit of the misconception that samurai were these warrior poets who followed this bushido philosophy that was very clear and specific but they were really more of a military class that ranged from poor to administrative people to the very wealthy landowners either way many of them resisted this rapid globalization and cultural evolution on similar grounds to katara the samurai occupied a particular position in society that means that they didn't want to leave this part of their culture behind it was a reduction in their position yes even if it meant bringing others up but they framed it as something detrimental to the fabric of their culture and society as to adopting the system of every other country to improve our own way of life it is first necessary to base our country on a firm foundation develop public morals if on the other hand we blindly follow the foreign our national policy will decline and our public morals decay beyond rescue but even when confronted with the reality of living as a non-bender katara turns around and says i guess i've just never thought of non-benders as not equal i mean it's kind of like the samurai during this radical change in society turning around and going you know i never thought of the farmers as unequal we just we just have different roles different strengths different places in society i suspect the samurai had a similar sort of blindness the kind that we all have when it comes to our own culture especially the parts that we fit into there's a really interesting moment in the first season of legend of korra where a non-bender yells out the chorus saying please help us you're our avatar too cora's been trying to fit into the position of the avatar as someone who is neutral in the middle not biased but sometimes being in the middle is taking the side of the oppressor treating them as equal sides and it's really easy to do that when you naturally align with the side with all of the power cora really has to reckon with what that means as the all-powerful bending avatar what does it mean for her role here so what do you do about the samurai well the powers of the meiji restoration did a couple of things one it tried to incorporate the samurai into the imperial army and administration turning that military class into an empire building force with only a moderate success and two it actually undermines their role and power in this new culture very explicitly with taxes and the like soccer most directly confronts this question in the comic imbalance where machines have started to put benders out of work their jobs have been automated leading them to sabotage the factories and grow resentful of non-benders soccer helps and realize that even if they removed the bad guy in charge it wouldn't fix the underlying socioeconomic problems that were really causing this violence the bender supremacist movement is more than one person remember all the benders we saw some of them were even on the business council while we don't know much about this period of his life we do know that he would have been deeply aware of these problems and he would have tried to use his influence to fix them i can imagine him being something like a uniting figure he's close to the bending population while able to speak to the problem from the position of a non-bender there's some implication that he may have been responsible for starting the pro-bending arena games which marco and berlin later describe as the one place benders and non-benders can gather in peace and to the comic imbalance soccer sees the importance of the non-bending arm to the police force something that he would have likely carried over to republic city finally in helping found republic city's council it is implied again that soccer tried to keep a mix of benders and non-benders working together that giving everyone a voice in the way things work was helping keep it stable the problem was that of course over time these things break down until they were all benders by the legend of korra this again suggests to me that he was someone with enough influence to keep all of these budding factions together for a while but not enough for that to last beyond him also i need you to recognize how cute and lovely this baby is she's been sleeping right next to my chair and i've nearly run her over multiple times so instead i'm gonna halt her so when anne goes to soccer and he says hey all of these problems are being caused by machines you know things would just be better if they just went back to the way they were soccer turns around and gives them a real reality check he says there's a lot about the good old pre-machine days that doesn't seem that good to me speaking as a non-bender you've seen how machines can make things between vendors and non-vendors a little more equal satoru can manage an entire factory by himself which would have been impossible before you can't blame the rise of bender supremacy on machines and i mean he's right isn't he so on the one hand soccer story is about tradition versus progress and technology but on the other it's about navigating the tensions of a post-war world what happens once the revolution is over once the war is won who gets to be in charge then what things should we build our nation around world war one was actually a time of intense class tensions across europe but war does something weird to those sentiments conscription and the direction of labor made for a more inclusive sense of national identity in 1914 britain nationalism was one legacy of the war although war sensitized workers to class inequality nationalist sentiments in popular culture set limits on the political consequences of class feeling whether it's true or not war can obscure these tensions for a bit the chinese nationalists and communists they united to fight the japanese empire in 1937 but fell back into civil war after the second world war ended the mensheviks and bolsheviks both kind of worked together in the 1917 russian revolution but permanently fractured after the revolution succeeded as they argued over how the new state should be arranged it's easy when it's the enemy of my enemy as my friend not so easy when it's the enemy is my enemy in each of these the socioeconomic tensions are being put aside to fight the bigger enemy but when that enemy is gone those tensions come back and often with a vengeance soccer explains that these tensions between benders and non-binders have been building for generations but the hundred year war probably helped people put them aside for a bit in order to fight the fire nation and soccer is finally seeing those tensions bubble to the surface with rapidly advancing technology just exacerbating these issues in soccer well he's trying to figure out which side he wants to come down on part of the reason that this sort of thing is also so damn difficult is because of how we imagine and form our political communities we typically form them around things we have in common with others either a shared sense of something that we need to protect or preserve or a shared thing that we want to accomplish with the war over benders and non-benders look for a new political community one that doesn't just stop the fire nation and as those tensions bubble back to the surface and they're starting to form around that belief that non-benders need to protect themselves from benders and benders need to protect themselves from automation and non-benders so where does soccer's arc go from here while benders and on benders do have things in common these clearly aren't as strong as those fears now soccer hasn't grown up around those tensions and he does have a vision for the future that brings them together incorporates them both it's a shared goal that might form a political community for a while but he won't succeed abstract concepts like justice and peace and nation-building well they're hard for the average person to internalize compared to say i've lost my job who's to blame legend of korra will see these tensions boil over but it'll be interesting to see the ups and downs of trying to stop this and failing because history is a story of 10 failures for every success change is hard won in blood and sweat and even then it doesn't always last [Music] so i try my best to take sponsors that i feel are going to be relevant to you and that are something that i can comment on and campfire is doing something that i have really wanted to see for a long time it's a platform not only aimed at helping you write in word builds with pages for magic systems and character profiles and maps and timelines and a manuscript editor but soon it's going to be a place that you can earn money from your writing and you can support writers that you like directly and i think that is fantastic as a platform they listen to feedback like one time i was on twitter and i was just like hey i wish we had this feature somewhere and then they were just like aha i'm on it and 24 hours later it was in campfire personally i love that you only pay for the features that you use like if you only want to use the character profiles because all too often you have to buy a massive program only to use one specific feature here's looking at you adobe but i've got a code hfm21 use that and you'll get 20 off for all lifetime purchases which is also great and you can try for free now because i'm selective about the sponsors that i take when i say go do that figure out if you like it for yourself i really mean it especially because i know that has already been helpful to a hell of a lot of you but i'd love to see your stories on there one day send them to me when they're up there i'd love to take a look so yeah they're doing something that i've wanted to see for a long time so i support it go try it cowards remember on reigning we're building volume 2 you can pre-order now it comes out november 25th stay nerdy and i will see you in the future you

Channel: Hello Future Me

Views: 638,873

Keywords: explained, theory, lore, analysis, how to

Id: eh6shvI7Wvc

Length: 19min 41sec (1181 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 19 2021