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Deep Red (Avatar: The Last Airbender)

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RadiantPhoenix said:
In the OTL Sozin's Comet, Ozai attempts to burn down the Earth continent, starting in the deepest, oldest colonies.
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I'm entirely aware, which really just drives home the point that there is a deep-seated, pervasive fear among the colonials that all those nice, civilized things are part of a Faustian bargain of sorts, with a nutbar who is only enlisting your help because there aren't enough 'purebloods' to do the work yet.

"Useless things are discarded, and we can all see the writing on the wall that We, your imperial masters, see you as useful only insofar as we need bodies in our war factories."
kosm said:
Listen. This is exactly specifically the sort of thing I'm trying to target when I keep telling people to stop the real-life examples. Countless people in the general public are taught to argue this, yes. It is nonetheless massively factually incorrect on every count, and immensely frustrating to hear bandied about. This isn't the place to have a detailed historical breakdown on the matter, but again I'm going to reiterate:

I do not want to hear anyone in this thread talking about how any real-life group benefited from being colonized. I don't care how educated you think your opinion is.
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I'm not saying it's a good thing they've been colonized. I'm not even saying they outweigh all the bad things that have come out of it (I'm personally of the opinion that colonialism in Africa effectively damned the continent to perpetually being in the dark ages except with access to automatic weapons). I'm saying that there are good things in the face of all the other obvious bad things, and it matches up well with the socio-economic outline you were spitballing earlier.
 
The Fire Nation has also been going through something of an Industrial Revolution for some time, I'm uncertain when exactly it started but it would have to have been at least shortly prior to Sozin's time. While much of the technological developments would obviously be focused on the war, there has likely been a fair bit of bleed-over in the area of mass-production: It is likely that (as in the real-life Industrial Revolution) many products have become substantially cheaper and more accessible to the common person, whether that had already happened by Sozin's time or has been happening during the war depends on when exactly the revolution started.

But to the average fireperson peasant, a lot of previously expensive products limited to the ruling elite such as textiles, glass and books have likely become affordable. An extensive train network will also have 'widened horizons' so to speak; making it possible for people and freight to travel great distances with ease, allowing for things like people in outlying villages taking a train to a major city in the morning to work a job (probably a shitty job in a factory, because Industrial Revolution) and then return to their village in the evening. Mechanized farming technologies will also have reduced the price of food while increasing the quantity, simultaneously putting a lot of peasant farmers out of work thanks to reduced manpower needs, who will then have been effectively forced to switch to those aforementioned shitty manufacturing jobs in factories.

So while the average fireperson is probably still working a shitty, dangerous job for little pay, they should have greater access to luxuries, more food and a wider worldview thanks to cheaper transportation education. How much of this has changed during the war as opposed to before it I can't say, as IIRC it is never stated when the Fire Nation's Industrial Revolution started beyond 'it was happening by Sozin's time.'


It's also worth noting that the Fire Kingdom has a centralized, efficient bureaucracy in the image of Imperial Japan, compared to the decentralized feudalism of the Earth Kingdom. The Earth King was shown to have very little influence outside of his own palace, and Ba Sing Se has effectively no actual control over its kingdom: Every individual Earth Kingdom village is basically on its own with whatever local feudal lord exists, with no real sense of unity with the rest of the Kingdom, much like early China. While the Hundred Year War has no doubt assisted in unifying the people of the Earth Kingdom somewhat, the Kingdom is likely to still be quite fragmented and lacking in unity, with local lords further away from the front-lines largely uninterested in the war because it's not their problem. The average fireperson thus probably has a strong sense of national pride, while the average earthperson will tend to be tied to their local home.

Powerofmind said:
(I'm personally of the opinion that colonialism in Africa effectively damned the continent to perpetually being in the dark ages except with access to automatic weapons).
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It did, largely because the colonialism in Africa was dedicated almost exclusively to exploiting local resources and exporting them back home, rather than actually colonizing the continent. Africa got all the downsides of colonialism, and none of the benefits. But this is not the place for that discussion, so I'll say no more.
 
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Powerofmind said:
I'm not saying it's a good thing they've been colonized. I'm not even saying they outweigh all the bad things that have come out of it (I'm personally of the opinion that colonialism in Africa effectively damned the continent to perpetually being in the dark ages except with access to automatic weapons). I'm saying that there are good things in the face of all the other obvious bad things, and it matches up well with the socio-economic outline you were spitballing earlier.
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Taking the opinion that Africa is "damned to perpetually be in the dark ages" is only further evidence of a reductive and propagandized view of the continent. And the good things you listed as occurring in the face of the bad things did not actually occur. Europeans did not go out and selflessly distribute hyper-advanced medicines to the people they conquered. They did not even have more advanced medicines than indigenous Americans and Africans at their initial contact with them; was there a public health boom in the Americas when Europeans showed up with leeches and an insistence that bathing was unhealthy? It was only through the centuries-long genocidal interruption of the societies they invaded that European empires gave themselves the resources and time advantage to develop a lead in medical technology, a lead which they deliberately refused to extend the benefits of to the people they had colonized. Are you under the impression that Europeans implemented universal free health care in their colonies for their subjects?

"Advanced services" is similarly laughable considering that the predominant tactic of colonial rule in Africa was to limit infrastructure development to the bare minimum profitable for the imperial metropole while simultaneously stealing all the resources that the natives could have used to actually provide themselves with "advanced services", and the destruction of food and water supplies was a key tactic to cause mass indigenous deaths during the westward expansion of the United States. The intentional manufacture of famines was a regular feature of colonial rule - look at Ireland and India. And the provision of education as a "service" for natives was limited to the bare minimum necessary to facilitate the goal of cultural genocide, both in the Americas and in Africa.

"Productive labor" is a bizarre and disturbing idea of a benefit since colonialism has been inseparable from forced labor and enslavement for the natives in the Americas and Africa and frankly I have no idea what actual benefit you could be referring to other than some idea that it was more productive for Africans to work in the industries Europe forced to be built for the generation of European profits than it would have been for Africans to actually work for themselves. You realize that Africa was not actually industrialized by the European invaders, right? African nations were forced into extractive economies designed entirely to profit the industrialized imperial metropoles.

Your final example, "protection from local conflict", is beyond nonsensical since the promotion of local conflict to divide and conquer was an absolutely central tactic of European colonizers literally everywhere in the world they went, and its lingering aftereffects can be seen to this day with the arbitrary borders Europe drew throughout Africa and elsewhere.

Your perspective on Africa and the Americas deeply frustrates me. I would recommend books like An Indigenous People's History of the United States, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, African Perspectives on Colonialism, and so on. Regardless, I'd like this topic to be dropped now. I don't want these things in my story thread.

Back on topic, if you're under the impression that these objective benefits of colonialism are being given to Earth Kingdom citizens under Fire Nation rule, I may have miscommunicated. As I said, life for Earth Kingdom citizens is better in Gaoling than it is in Yu Dao. The Fire Nation only has a higher standard of living for Fire Nation citizens - including both "subjective" and "objective" measures.

I don't want to encourage people to project mistaken ideas of real-world colonialism's benefits onto this story, but even more importantly I really, really don't want people to look at this story's depiction of colonialism and project it onto real life to say "maybe colonialism actually does realistically have some nuanced benefits in the real world" or whatever. I know this post may come across as harsh, but it is really my number one objective to make sure that this story with an imperialist protagonist never gives anyone any fuel whatsoever to think that it's either nuanced or true to believe that the typical mythical "objective" benefits of colonialism for the colonized actually exist. If I'm spreading harmful real-life ideas, that undercuts anything good I'm doing with the story.
 
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Even if the Fire Nation's colonialism did have objective benefits for the average earthperson, Ozai's cruel, xenophobic tyranny would have ruined any possibility for that to be the case. Ozai is an unfortunate case of a ruler believing their own bullshit propaganda, probably because he grew up with it unlike Sozin and to a lesser degree Azulon.

This makes it impossible for the average earthperson to see any real benefit from the Fire Nation's colonialism, because Ozai won't let them, due to actually believing that they really are inherently inferior and whatnot. Ozai has drunk the kool-aid, and in his blind bigotry is only making everything worse with his repeated attempts to stomp all over the Earth Kingdom and its people. This is probably worsened by his knowledge of Sozin's Comet returning, as in Ozai's mind it doesn't matter if any problems occur because he can just roll over everything with overwhelming force in a few years when the Comet shows up.
(Speaking of which, what the hell is going on with that Comet? It does not behave even remotely like a real celestial object, there must be some strange spirit magic nonsense going on there.)
 
@kosm So, you're saying that no matter what, we can't reform things to improve the lives of the people in the newly gained territory? I just want to be sure that's how you mean as far as related to the quest.

Because I'm not willing to support heinous acts against the populace despite my designs of world conquest.
 
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I have no idea why you're just realizing that now when Ozai outright said you can't. There's a reason his goal is to outright stomp the Earth Kingdom out of existence when Sozin's comet come.

Also reform, what things needs reform? There's not anything in the Fire Nation that's outright better than the Earth Kingdom. They have schools, hospitals, their own business infrastracture except for outright being in the industrial age maybe? And I'd say, they can do that on their own. The war's just not letting them. Do you think they're savages?
 
I meant reform the fire nation policies.

My goal was to change things from imperialism into outright annexation, making everyone fire nation citizens, and installing a fair rule of law extending across the world as a single unitary government. I would have wanted to disrupt the civilian's lives as little as possible(for a given amount of little given how much the fire nation has already done it), with most of the differences being in technology and in laws, basically. Kosm said it would be hard to achieve, but she never said it would be impossible.

Man, I just wanted to conquer the world, and not get all unfun about it.
 
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Antix_Shadows said:
There's no point in conquering the world if you can't do it as an egalitarian fanatic materialist.
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I'll point you to Code Geass. That's what would happen once the Fire Nation conquers the world.

There's the Britannian (Fire Nation), Honorary Britannian(Yu Dao barely), Numbers(everyone else). You see those Numbers? They had lives before all these things, goverment and everything else. Now they don't even have a simple thing as citizenship.

A conqueror, for the virtue of being a conqueror, will always have a superiority to the conquered. There's no such thing as equal on that situation.

RadiantPhoenix said:
Ozai is not actually a trustworthy source.


EDIT:

Hmph.

Xenophile/Egalitarian is far superior.
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Yeah but on that instance he was. There's a reason Akane had no rebuttal when he said it because he was right. Occupying the entirety of the EK is well beyond the means that they are capable of, add 'uplifting' them to that. You can distrust Ozai all you want but that's the only thing out of his mouth that was logical and reasonable this entire fic.
 
Okay. I don't find this story intriguing enough to warrant trudging through a dozen different political arguments between people who know less then they think they do about history.

If I do decide to keep reading that's about all I'll be doing here, as the thread is frankly a task and a half to watch.
 
Alviam099 said:
Yeah but on that instance he was. There's a reason Akane had no rebuttal when he said it because he was right. Occupying the entirety of the EK is well beyond the means that they are capable of, add 'uplifting' them to that. You can distrust Ozai all you want but that's the only thing out of his mouth that was logical and reasonable this entire fic.
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I'm not saying that claim is wrong, I'm saying that Ozai making the claim isn't a good reason to believe it.
 
I feel like super hypothetically you could have a conquering state be "benevolent" if the conquer-ee was some kind of heavily exploitative mercantile oligopoly with a lot of extra capital to get redistributed, and the conquering state somehow... didn't just insert their own people into those positions.
Otherwise it seems like conquering states or colonizers can't ever be benevolent. The target state is always going to be in such a vulnerable position, and the conquering state is always going to have so many competing internal interests, that protecting the target citizens' wellbeing won't be a sustainable goal.

Or I guess if there was such a ridiculously overwhelming power disparity (like if we found aliens and they were basically defenseless) then the conquering state could make a public spectacle regarding how well they're treating the natives, but in that case it's more like a zoo or nature preserve than an actual colony.
 
Powerofmind said:
Just your average colonial exploitation, then, with the slight twist that without concentrated imperial peers to focus on, the Fire Nation is turning the colonial machine towards war with it's own former masters instead. It could easily be argued that on the qualities of life you can measure objectively (access to medicine, advanced services, productive labor and protection from local conflict), natives in Africa and the Americas had vastly improved lives when imperial colonies popped in, even as the subjective qualities of those lives became increasingly awful (discrimination, cultural suppression, the ubiquitously patronizing imperial attitude).
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How is it that you're so woefully ignorant and yet so confident?
Have you heard of the Rwandan genocide? Who exacerbated cultural differences between the Tutsi and the Hutus? Who withdrew their forces when the genocide started because of all of ten Belgians died resulting in the death, rape and torture of around a million people?

Have you considered reading up a little on the things you venture opinions about and save the uninformed speculation for less charged topics?
 
There's just a lot of dissonance between the kinds of semi-memetic "world conquest" goals that are emblematic in both video games and quests, and the real dirty realities of really what conquests mean in both historical and moral terms. It's all kind of good fun in quests and Crusader Kings 2 to talk about painting the map pink and becoming Emperor/Empress, but the reality of any kind of conquest is that even in the most benevolent of cases there would be huge power disparities between the conqueror and the conquered. This becomes especially true if this extends into extended occupation and colonialism as these unequal relations get stretched across generations and become entrenched. The idea of a rational philosopher king who's gonna come in and make your society more rationally organized is an old and attractive one, pity it never works out that way.

Another angle to consider is the fact that even if the all mighty ruler himself has super benevolent intentions and does just want to make everyone's lives better, people closer to the action on the ground might have different opinions. Throughout the time of the British Empire there have been plenty of examples of people far away from London doing terrible stuff and instigating wars of their own volition, and London was powerless to stop them (leaving aside the times when London itself is ordering questionable actions). So even in a society like the Fire Nation whose ruler holds theoretical absolute power, once the unequal power structure is in place, as it unquestionably will be when you conquer some place, the people actually doing the conquering and the occupying can abuse their positions and you'll never be able to really be rid of it.

I've lurked on this thread for a long time now and even though the quality of the writing is superb, the repeated attempts to basically do world conquering while trying to ignore or justify all of the accompanying injustices and suffering this will wrought by the questers have really kind of soured me to this story unfortunately.
 
Antix_Shadows said:
@kosm So, you're saying that no matter what, we can't reform things to improve the lives of the people in the newly gained territory? I just want to be sure that's how you mean as far as related to the quest.

Because I'm not willing to support heinous acts against the populace despite my designs of world conquest.
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"No matter what" is a bit of a loaded statement - in some hypothetical gumdrops and lollipops fantasy land where both institutionalized racism and the inevitable resentment from a century of war got magically poofed away, along with a huge number of logistical issues, who knows?

But it should have been blindingly obvious well, well before now that kosm isn't going to allow for that sort of unrealistic contrivance just to pander to people's militaristic fetishes.

"Moral world conquest" is and always has been an oxymoron when looked at with any perspective not so distant and abstracted as to be entirely removed from reality - the only thing surprising here is that it took so many people so long to catch onto that.
 
To avoid using any historical evidence in spirit of fairness, my overall statements will be vague and based only on overly generalized logic.

One hundred years of war is not, in fact, good for any country. Yes, War is the engine of progress and whatever, but everything has costs as well as benefits. War is no exception.
The costs are:
1) increased strain on the continuously militarized economy that shifts over time from producing commodities and consumption goods into military apparel. Why does it increase? Because both countries start producing more weapons and draft more soldiers in an effort to win over another country and replenish their losses. When two parties are determined to win one over another, the arms race starts getting a little out of control. Or, you know, common sense.
2) if the nature of warfare is static without any significant technological developments on any side, both sides are likely to experience deterioration in the quality of their military staff. Experienced people die before getting to teach the next generation, the new technology isn't developed, so the military tactics stagnate and worsen.
3) increased national unrest. War means money spent on it. Money means taxes spread over the population, no matter how much you manage to get from the enemy. Taxes means worsened life conditions, increased poverty and maybe stratification between the upper class and the middle and the lower middle, who might soon find themselves below the line of poverty. That sort of thing tends to create resentment. Nobody in the right mind would say that to a Fire Lord, of course, if they want to keep their head unincinerated. Or to the whatever name the Earth Kingdom secret police chucklefucks had.

Now, we need to draw a small distinction between colonialism and warfare. One presupposes another, but there are differences between battling a technologically inferior opponent who can't even offer much in lieu of a fair fight, and an opponent with larger territory, larger army and without insurmountable technological disadvantages that would allow your army to roll over them without stopping for too long. Since it's become a slugging match between two countries, I think the Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom find themselves in the latter situation.

If both sides continue fighting it out without anyone delivering a decisive blow? ( like killing off a significant percentage of their enemy's army/population ) The most likely results are either a peace deal... or societal collapse as both countries' governments find themselves trying to squash open rebellion in their outlying provinces or getting overthrown outright. I think it's too early for a revolution in the Avatar World, but a pretender who says the current king/lord is incompetent and they can win the war in their stead? All too likely.
After the first successful rebellion, it's all downhill from there. The government body loses its legitimacy, since it was already overthrown once, the state fractures, the provinces secede, and the country blows apart with someone down the line hopefully picking up the pieces and reuniting the successor states. That's like, fifty-fifty tho.

So yeah, a hundred years of war can be bad for a country.
That of course, depends on whether the setting is realistic enough for these effects to appear. You'll never hear Tolkien's orcs complain about their wages not meeting minimum living standards, for example.
 
Raiseth said:
You'll never hear Tolkien's orcs complain about their wages not meeting minimum living standards, for example.
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You do find them complaining (to each other) that Sauron's feeding them orc meat. Also killing each other for shinies. Of course, they can't complain to Sauron because then the other orcs will kill them. :V




Man, I hope everyone actually understands that, if you were to violently invade a people, and some of those people took arms in defence of their rights/independence/identity/health/lives, that it is not OK to kill them.

Whenever someone says 'but I hope to help the civilians!'... killing/maiming/fighting the non-civilians is still horribly, morally wrong.

There's correct, morally right ways to spread civilization and quality of life: diplomacy, commerce, agreements in which both parties benefit each other (or the strongest one unilaterally helps the weaker one). War is never one of them. War is not done for the benefit of the attacked parties, and that's so glaringly obvious than having to put it into words feels insulting.

Even if a people's life was lower in standard than yours, if they don't want your help, then they don't want your help, and they have a right to deny you and keep living how they want! That's important. Identity is a key aspect of the human condition.

The fact that the Fire Nation's propaganda that they're doing it for the betterment of the world was always obvious.

Violence vegets violence. Murder, rape, pillaging, hate, discrimination, etc. are intrinsic parts of war. If you're saying waging war is OK, you're necessarily saying all the above is OK. Or do you expect to be able to kindly violently take over a people's territory, erase their culture and identity, murder their inhabitants... and that's just one part of it. Once you've thrown people into the most horrible violence, how can you expect it to not affect them, to not make them violent, to not make them hate, to not make them discriminate?

One of the key actions of any conflict is "the other". To paint a a subset of humanity as the other, the not-human, the not-good, the not-us. To dehumanize them, fuel your people's cruelest vices, and make it OK to attack "the other". It's the worst sort of discrimination possible, and once it's done, it's effects can't not take root in the mentality of the people participating in it, who will then pass on that mentality unto their descendants.

Lastly, every time someone says 'but the Fire Nation are prospering from the war'... two things: One, correlation is not causation. Just because they're developing technology and industry in times of war, doesn't mean the war is a necessary cause of it; it doesn't mean they couldn't have improved just as much or better if they were at peace.

Second, it it's never morally right to kill and steal from others to the benefit of oneself, so... what's the point of saying 'but this is helping the Fire Nation'? Yes, if person A kills person B and takes all their things, and person A is a psychopath without remorse, then that obviously makes person A feel they're benefiting greatly. The point?
 
kosm said:
Back on topic, if you're under the impression that these objective benefits of colonialism are being given to Earth Kingdom citizens under Fire Nation rule, I may have miscommunicated. As I said, life for Earth Kingdom citizens is better in Gaoling than it is in Yu Dao. The Fire Nation only has a higher standard of living for Fire Nation citizens - including both "subjective" and "objective" measures.
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May I ask if this means that what you said about Yu Dao in this story is no longer the case? - Which was that in canon and in DR the same would happen i.e that the people there would fight to remain the society they'd formed of EK and FN people?
 
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Onmur said:
Second, it it's never morally right to kill and steal from others to the benefit of oneself, so... what's the point of saying 'but this is helping the Fire Nation'? Yes, if person A kills person B and takes all their things, and person A is a psychopath without remorse, then that obviously makes person A feel they're benefiting greatly. The point?
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The point is apparently that since the Fire Nation propaganda apparatus, self-assurance of the ruling dynasty and overall extreme nationalism resulting from the first two and a hundred years of war all create an indigenous moral system, where the actions perpetrated by the Fire Nation aren't wrong and are, in fact, right and moral, and we're both a Fire Nation citizen and a member of the ruling dynasty, we should assume this moral system as the driving one for a better, more immersive roleplaying experience.

And world conquest is fun.

I don't really disagree with the last one.
World conquest is fun. When you're playing a grand strategy game so far removed from the perspective of an idividual that you don't even have any idea about the screams of the vanquished and lamentations of their women.

Here, in a character-driven quest it can accomplished by, mmm, developing some kind of dissociative disorder in order to ignore or explain away any unpleasant things. Or embracing the Ozai mentality, one of the two.
 
Gorton said:
May I ask if this means that what you said about Yu Dao in this story is no longer the case? - Which was that in canon and in DR the same would happen i.e that the people there would fight to remain the society they'd formed of EK and FN people?
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The native elite who are actually well-off and all the settlers would fight to keep Yu Dao as it is. A portion of the poor Earth Kingdom citizenry would support them, either out of a genuine belief the Fire Nation makes them better off or out of hope of reward/advancement. A large number of the Earth Kingdom poor would probably not care and could be persuaded to side against the Fire Nation if it seemed like they had a chance of winning and that the Earth Kingdom would make them better off once the settlers were gone. Then again, some of them might also be persuaded to side with the settlers if enticed with the right rewards or fears.
 
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kosm said:
genuine belief the Fire Nation makes them better
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Which, if I might point out, would include those who actually genuinely believe that, and the deeply traumatized people who've resorted to "Identification with the Aggressor", which is a psychological defense mechanism in which a heavily stressed person subconsciously changes the way they think because they can't deal with a certain reality. Thus they become "like" their aggressors as a way to not die of depression.

A commonly known example of this is Stockholm Syndrome.

I'm saying this because people should be aware of it. It's entirely possible Akane will find Earth Kingdom natives who will believe in and fight for the Fire Nation... because they were broken that way. It doesn't mean the Fire Nation is right, and the Earth natives are right for recognizing it, but that they're been traumatized that horribly.
 
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Okay, this is my attempt at putting out some constructive criticism of the writing.

I think the biggest problem with the story is a lack of structure. You have admitted to not knowing where you want the story to go, and it seems you're basically leaving that to the players.
I believe this is a weakness. I know you've been accused of railroading in the past, but I think the opposite is actually the problem.

You haven't really given the players a win condition or expectations of what you'd like to see. So, what we get is a bunch of niche groups all making up their own end goals and each disparate group ends up fighting each other as we have seen.

In the early days of the quest, things seemed pretty straight forward. There was a goal: get stronger to beat ozai.

Not the future seems very uncertain, which is great from a storytelling point of view, but can be disastrous for a quest story were a lot of peoples first response is one of two options, either double down, or panic and go the complete opposite way.

I think the best suggestion I can offer is to take some time to figure out a loose Idea of how you want things to go, and engage the players that way. If it ends up being that you sometimes have to make an executive decision on a vote, fuck it, go ahead.

I think what matters most is that everyone is having fun, especially you. If you decide on a goal, people can either play it or drop out, but at least then people will know what to expect going forwards.

I really love the quest, and wish to always have more of it, and I hope this post was helpful.

Thank you for your time.

PS, sorry if it doesn't make sense, I'm not always the best at expressing my thoughts adequately.
 
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