grab bag of randomness~

[askerian]

-Naruto manga: Once again, I have nothing much to say except for eeeee uzumaki/namikaze family. ;^; waugh.


-Bweee!! They're making a sequel to Avatar the Last Airbender -- and I don't mean a second live-action movie, I mean the original authors are coming back with the story of the next avatar after Aang, who is a girl. She looks really badass from this... okay, this lone concept picture which might be totally misteading. But! Water Tribe avatar! IN A STEAMPUNK WORLD. AND PEOPLE PROTESTING BENDERS. be still my heart. God please make it not suck. *_*

Q: The new “Avatar” is a woman. What inspired you to change the sex of the protagonist of the series?

Michael DiMartino: It’s not so much about changing because we had Avatar Kyoshi before Aang. We’d established that the Avatar can be male or female and we just thought let’s explore one of those more in depth, because Kyoshi was a popular character with a lot of fans and it seemed like a great opportunity to not retread what we’d done with Aang, who was a great hero, we all loved him, but we really wanted to try something different. And we have so many great female fans out there, who really responded to Katara in the first series, we thought we have the fan base who are really going to enjoy seeing the Avatar be a female.

Konietzko: Mike and I, we love those characters too, and we’ve encountered countless fans who are male who really like those characters too. We just don’t subscribe to the conventional wisdom that you can’t have an action series led by a female character. It’s kinda nonsense to us.

nnngh ♥♥♥♥♥♥


-... no, you know what, i'll make a separate post for this one. >______> i've got drabbly silliness on the brain.

Comments

[nothri.livejournal.com]

I hate to be a huge downer here, but regarding the whole action series and the female character being the lead actor and so on...well, there actually is a trend like that- you have series like She-ra which involves an action cartoon and a lead character. Know what that has in common with this? Its essentially a female version of a male character- in the case of She-ra, He-man came first, was popular, and got this as a spin-off series. And now here we have a female version of Avatar....I feel awful saying this, but I kinda feel like this isn't particularly groundbreaking. The devil's advocate in me wants to take on an ultra feminist stance and point out that- yes, you aren't subscribing to the conventional wisdom that you can't have an action series led by a female character. You are subscribing to the conventional wisdom that you can't have an action series unless their female character has had a male character version of herself test the waters first and prove its safe and viable for marketing.

[askerian]

That's still infinitely better than no female main character at all. Which is what we'd get, if we went "oh but this girl hero is just a copy of a boy hero so she can't happen, nevermind let's cancel it", which means there wouldn't be the potential success of the girlhero-following-a-boyhero as an encouraging precedent for an actual original-series girlhero, and people could keep whining "but there's a reason there's so little female heroes, it's because no one watches them !"

I'm not saying brykke are genderblind or magically all-feminist and aang just only happened to be a boy because they flipped a coin (though far as we know, it could have happened because yes, boys are just about one half of the world out here and it's not automatically evil to go with a non-girl, especially with he'd been incarnated as a woman before) -- but complaining of gender fail in this? God, so many other places to look first. How about all those other hundreds of action series where the women aren't even good, engaging sidekicks?

They said themselves they weren't interested in revisiting Aang. I seriously doubt she's going to be Aang with boobs. The setting is going to be different, even the universe surrounding them has evolved. It's not "the genderflipped gAang's adventures". Likely there will be themes in common because they're the same authors, but it just so happens I liked a lot of the themes I saw in the first run. The rest I don't care about. Avatar is a fascinating universe and usually has good character building, and I'm not going to complain that she wasn't the hero of the first run, because she's the hero of the second, and for all we know it could be even better than the first.