Being an Indian-American, I grew up with watching Indians often portrayed as something that wasn’t even familiar or identifiable as genuinely Indian. On many occasions I evem watched them portrayed by actors of other ethnicities. Fortunately, I had the chance to grow up with Malayalam cinema, a film industry that’s has nothing to do with Bollywood, to show me portrayals of Indians as actual people. It’s a shame that Hollywood rarely does the same.

I don’t like characters because they look like me, which is what Hollywood seems to think that people want. On one of my favorite shows Lost, my favorite couple was the Koreans Jin and Sun. It never occurred to me that I shouldn’t relate or enjoy their story, even if they came from a different culture or spoke a different language.

Thank you for introducing the first and second Asian family to television. It’s people like you who make a true difference in Hollywood.

All artists should have their own web site. Fans want to know their favorite band better.. and they want to meet new bands. They want to know where to get their blues fix on the weekend, who’s playing at festivals and what they do. And a website lets …

You’re right in that there is no Asia in the Avatar world, but you’re incredibly foolish to say race doesn’t matter in a fantasy world. Any good fantasy writer will create a world that is based on the real world (if it’s not explicitly mentioned that it is the real world like in Harry Potter), and this includes having race in mind when creating characters. Even the blue aliens in James’s Avatar are based on some native people.

Ursula Le Guin is a prime example of why race matters in fantasy. She wrote the Earthsea fantasy series with a brown skinned lead character, but when the SciFi channel made a movie based on her books, they turned the lead into a Caucasian person, and Ursula was pissed:

slate[dot]com/id/2111107/

The article also reveals possible clues to Michael and Bryan’s situation with The Last Airbender and why they can’t publicly speak out about the movie. They can only say good things, which they haven’t even really done besides saying the teaser trailer looked good and they’re excited to see the final movie (as opposed to praising the actors’ portrayals of their characters). Even though they’ve remained mostly silent, Bryan did draw this poster for ComiCon that features an Asian Aang:

flickr[dot]com/photos/overweightglobgrease/3774982297/in/photostream/

You can’t POSSIBLY say he looks Caucasian. And remember, it’s the creator’s word against yours.

And sure, you can do all of those Asian things and not be Asian. Do you know why? Because this is MODERN TIMES. You’d have access to any culture and can learn from and embrace it. Avatar is based on ANCIENT TIMES (with bits of steam punk thrown in) where non-Asian people wouldn’t interact much, if at all, with Asian people!

It is clear to anyone with eyes and a brain that the characters were meant to be Asian and Inuit, and nothing else. They don’t “look it” because the style is based on Japanese cartoons, which use large expressive eyes, and the Japanese know their cartoon characters are meant to be Japanese unless otherwise stated. Large eyes are also used for young characters while older characters have smaller eyes. Compare Zuko’s eyes at 15 years old to his eyes in his flashbacks when he was younger. Compare Toph’s eyes to her parents. Aang has large eyes as a young child, but when he becomes older, he’ll have smaller eyes like the OTHER Airbenders, like Avatar Yangchen, who certainly DOESN’T LOOK CAUCASIAN.

And their eye color means nothing in terms of people being Caucasian or not. In the Avatar world, eye color corresponds to the nation and element from where a person hails. Katara is based on the Inuit, but has blue eyes because of her WATER ELEMENT. So many people think she’s Caucasian because of her eyes! So I guess Toph BEI FONG is Caucasian or non-East Asian because of her green eyes, huh, as well as her mother?

Just look at early sketches before, and hell even artwork after, the series aired. There is an Art of the Animated Series coming out, and you can preview the pages at Amazon:

amazon[dot]com/Avatar-Last-Airbender-Art-Animated/dp/1595825045/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271710037&sr=8-1

Depending on your computer, you’ll either have to click the “Surprise Me!” link continuously to see extra pages, or your browser will alread include the extra pages as you flip through them. There are sketches of Aang and friends drawn in the western style that actually depicts racial markers for those brain-dead slobs who wouldn’t be able to tell otherwise a character’s ethnicities (see: any person who sees most Japanese cartoon characters as white).

Is that Asian enough for you?

These characters happen to not be Asian or Caucasian. Avatar is set in, as someone else said, a fantasy world slightly resembling our own. Races as we know them are features of people of Earth, and if you watch the opening sequence you can clearly see that the world portrayed is not Earth (if the flying bison and people who can manipulate elements with their bare ands didn’t clue you in).

For example, Katara has a very Indian look to her but her eyes are blue. So for her they should cast an Indian or Indian-looking girl and give her blue contacts. The fire nation looks closer to Asian, and Aang looks more white. They should have been cast accordingly, and they weren’t, but to think that they are Asians when there isn’t even an Asia in this world, is rediculous. The Asian influence is just that: influence.

Oh, and Bettycastle, it’s not an \Asian anime\. It’s American. Your idiocy is even more amusing by the fact that you made this an exclamation.

Margaret, I love you, and I do wish there were more Asians in the media, but on this you’re way off.

To the person who said that humanity is one race… perhaps technically you’re right. But even if we were viewing ourselves as one race, without the cultural stigma attached to characteristics like skin tone, the film should STILL be cast with people native to the Asian regions. Why, you ask? Because the world of the story is based on ASIAN cultures and ASIAN writing and religion and architecture and fashion, etc. An area of the world, where humans have certain physical characteristics. It wouldn’t be LOGICAL to populate a country based heavily on Korean culture and so forth with people from Africa, because they aren’t the proper CULTURE. It might seem like a different word for the same thing, but… even if we don’t DISCRIMINATE and SEPARATE based on ancestry, if a story is based in the history of a certain area, even if it’s a fictional world heavily based on the history of a certain area, it should also be cast with people who could, appearance-wise, BE from that area. If we were “race blind”, as it were, this would be common sense (I’d hope). So either way you turn it, it comes out the same: The Last Airbender’s cast should be ASIAN.

And to the people who are saying that we shouldn’t be so “shocked” and “surprised” and so forth, because this is what Hollywood does? I just say that I think everyone’s mostly surprised that they cast white kids in what has repeatedly been called an ASIAN world. It was always a fear, but with how popular the original series was, and how often and openly it had been described as an ASIAN world, we thought that maybe Hollywood would get the hint. We had our hopes dashed, and we’re angry about that as well as the casting. I think a lot of people would LIKE to have some faith in Hollywood again, and every once in a while, something happens that gets our hopes up, and then they do something like THIS and we get pessimistic again.

And for anyone who thinks it doesn’t matter? These characters are heroes for COUNTLESS children of Asian descent. Paramount’s casting is a slap in the face to them, telling them that even if they can get cartoons about kids like them, they’re not good enough to be in the movies. It’s telling them that white kids are better than them, more popular than them, more talented than them, and better loved than them, and THAT is unacceptable.