Former President Donald Trump once poetically mused that “everything ‘woke’ goes to s***.” It seems like the executives at Netflix are determined to prove the former president right, this time with their live-action reboot of Avatar: The Last Airbender, which drops this month.
New reporting reveals that Netflix executives are making significant changes to the classic 2005 animated series. In the original show, the main character, Ang, goes on a journey with two friends, siblings Katara and Sokka. It’s the latter character, Sokka, who’s getting a major rewrite with the “woke” red pen.
In the original cartoon, Sokka is a 15-year-old boy who was raised in a society, the Water Tribe, with strict gender roles for men and women. During their journey, he makes goofy and oaflike sexist missteps, from telling his sister that women are meant to stick to sewing to doubting completely the prowess of female warriors they encounter — and being hilariously proven wrong.
But producers have apparently axed all depiction of this “sexism” from the live-action reboot.
“When ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ makes its live-action debut on Netflix next month, Sokka’s sexism will be toned down considerably,” Variety reports. “In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, cast members Kiawentiio (Katara) and Ian Ousley (Sokka) informed fans that Sokka’s sexism was discussed during the live-action show’s development and was deliberately cut away at, as it had no place in the new remake.”
“I feel like we also took out the element of how sexist [Sokka] was,” the actress playing Katara said. “I feel like there were a lot of moments in the original show that were iffy.”
They’re apparently making so many changes in the real-action series that the original creators of the show, who had been brought in as executive producers, quit the reboot, writing that “whatever version ends up on-screen, it will not be what [we] had envisioned or intended to make.”
Yikes.
There are so many problems with this, I don’t even know where to begin.
For one, it’s pathetic and cowardly. Studios will never create anything meaningful or interesting if they are so terrified that one person on X might take something out of context and get offended. People this spineless shouldn’t be working in art at all, let alone entrusted with the high-profile reboot of a beloved classic.
Secondly, it shows just how incoherent the extreme “woke” worldview is. The whole arc of Sokka being sexist and then getting backlash for it was a feminist plotline. It was intended to, and I think successfully did, make sexist, outdated male boorishness look stupid and show children that it’s wrong. By cutting this from the remake, the creators are ironically making the show less progressive than it was in 2005.
Oh, and they’re going to make one of the main characters more static, less dynamic, and fundamentally less interesting. Other than that, great job!
Even fans on X and Reddit — most of whom are probably left-leaning — bashed the executives’ decision to nuke Sokka’s character arc.
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It’s bad enough that the entertainment industry is increasingly unable to come up with new and original ideas, forced instead to remake classics endlessly. Now, they can’t even do that without making them worse in the name of social justice, or something.
Audiences have to stop this by punishing these executives and voting with our eyeballs and our wallets. Otherwise, who knows what they’ll ruin next?
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is an independent journalist, YouTuber, and co-founder of BASEDPolitics.