A.V.A.T.A.R. is biting remixed critique of Hollywood’s repeated use of the Might Whitey trope in which white heroes save oppressed and exotified people of color. Craig Saddlemire also created a highly critical mashup of Zack Snyder’s blockbuster film 300 which we have posted about before. He writes:
A.V.A.T.A.R. (Anglos Valiantly Aiding Tragic Awe-inspiring Races) is a fast‐paced media mashup that highlights the overplayed racial tropes of Hollywood cinema using James Cameron’s multimillion‐dollar epic Avatar as its visual anchor. The hilarious visual juxtapositions and accompanying soundtrack of baffling one‐liners spliced together from seventeen films are both a humorous jab at racism in our supposedly liberal popular culture, as well as a media literacy tool for deconstructing how whiteness and Other-ness is portrayed in mainstream films about humanitarian crises. This piece builds on our previous work, 300 Epithets, that analyzes the archetypes used in the nationalist right-wing film, 300.
