Avatar: the Legend of Korra is coming to Netflix after Avatar: the Last Airbender breaks the record for consecutive days in the Top 10 shows list at 61 days (surpassing Ozark, the previous record holder of 57 days). LoK was meant to be an inversion of AtLA both setting and character development. This is the first critique of the show I’ve seen since it’s release worth a read by fans tackling the issue of setting.

In the case of Avatar, we have a setting that has been highly praised for existing outside of the usual paradigms of whiteness and yet when it tries to move the clock forwards, it cannot create a vision of that world’s future without resorting to the same white or western touchstones of modernity. That it cannot imagine an industrialised world that doesn’t revolve around America and its European roots is genuinely aggravating.

And I understand that The Legend of Korra is largely made for and by Americans. As such, it’s no great crime for them to create a setting that reflect themselves. I’ve loved many tv shows and books and films that are set in these America-flavoured fantasy worlds (the Hercules tv series that’s greek mythology but also high school was rather charming and I’ve never gotten Clone High’s theme song out of my head). But Korra isn’t a wholly new setting intentionally based on the intersections of between Asian and EuroAmerican culture, it is written to be a sequel to The Last Airbender and as such is building on the foundations of being without a EuroAmerica in its world.

It is doubtless less strange or alien an idea to Americans (especially white Americans) that the world of The Last Airbender should birth a new America. It might even be appealing to think that all roads do indeed lead to America and to imagine the world of The Last Airbender as an alternate past for themselves. I understand this and I’m even sympathetic to this in concept.

But I keep coming back to how The Legend of Korra takes this opportunity to imagine a future without European and American colonisation and imperialism and give us nothing but that.

And that leaves a very foul aftertaste. To suggest that Americana is the inevitable future of all worlds. That is no other possibility for modernity and progress. That westernisation is inevitable even in fantasy worlds without a “West.”

The Southern Water Tribe’s aggressive industrialisation, exploitation of their environment and creating pollution is very much part of this “inevitability of progress” theme. It’s very uncomfortable given how the Water Tribe is based on indigenous cultures (especially the Inuit-Yupik culture). In the real world these are very much the people resisting imperialism, especially ecological imperialism (which they do in The Last Airbender), and thus to cast them as the polluting villains implies that given the opportunity these cultures would be “as bad” as the West, that this is how “everyone” is.

It universalises something that just isn’t universal.

Related: Show’s creators step away from Netflix’s live adaptation due to creative differences.