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Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Frankly... among my generation of roughly 30 year olds, I'd expect Avatar the Last Airbender to have higher cultural impact than 1984 (which was written in 1949).

Most of us were forced to read 1984 and didn't really enjoy it. ATLA however, is something that we organically grew up with through high-school / college and actually paid attention to.

My group of friends would be aware of 1984 concepts... such as "Big Brother is Watching" (phrases / concepts which have escaped the book and become a thing of their own). But I don't think we'd recognize the phrase "At War with Eurasia".

Honestly, the only reason why I remember "At War with Eurasia" is because I was a quiz-bowl player and was forced to memorize key phrases from many books I barely read. Even if I did read 1984 in my high school classes, it never actually stuck with me.

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Among your generation _where you live_ maybe.

1984 is a very popular and influential book.

I fairly confident that if you asked the authors of Avatar The Last Airbender they would tell you straight that they’d based that idea on 1984.

I’d be willing to bet people will be quoting 1984 long after ATLA has been forgotten.

Either way, I'm able to connect with the root comment here about Ba Sing Se more readily than "We're at war with Eurasia".

The original two posters in this thread were also intimately familiar with Ba Sing Se / Avatar the Last Airbender. So multiple people here are fully aware of the reference and are in good communication.

I probably wouldn't reach for a reference to ATLA myself. But, apparently its popular enough that plenty of different posters in this very discussion are aware of it and able to explain to other people here the concept.

Possibly routed through Babylon 5, where Earth and Mars were kept unaware of a galaxy-wide war that had been going for a couple years.

Either you're generalizing a bit too much or I'm weird as I'm mid 30's now, and I have definitely read 1984 but have never seen Avatar. In fact when I read "Avatar" I think of blue space aliens before I think of the anime.

If you're in your mid 30s now you'd be in your early 20s when Avatar the Last Airbender originally aired. Since it's a children's show (Nickelodeon), you wouldn't have been in the target demographic, so I don't think that's unusual.

I'm your age and I never even heard of Avatar the Last Airbender. I'm sure my younger cousins know about it.

The claim was that "Frankly... among my generation of roughly 30 year olds, I'd expect Avatar the Last Airbender to have higher cultural impact than 1984 (which was written in 1949)." - if you and I would have been early 20's, that would have made that cohort late teens, so I still find the demographics weird.

Fun fact: as a kid in 8th grade or so, we were supposed to read and summarise a book for English class Most picked easy books, I picked 1984, probably out of a desire to be edgy. Little did I know that my level of English at the time was not enough for that book. The result is that, since I never went back and re-read the book, I kind of only half-read it because half of it I didn't really understand. :D I think I got the general idea of it though.

Here's a great summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIr_v3a5T-s

The phrase is "we've always been at war with Eastasia", and it is known because it resumes the core theme of the book. 1984 was written in 1948. There's a reason why it is in the school curricula, but sadly to be forced to read a book obviously creates a bad predisposition. Good books that philosophically shed light on human nature are timeless.

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