Talking about the Legend of Korra
I've just finished rewatching The Legend of Korra as of late.
It's kind of a weird show to discuss, honestly, because it doesn't really stand on its own, at least not in the current day. The Legend of Korra is an animated action drama TV show, and is the sequel to the highly esteemed Avatar: the Last Airbender(Atla), a show of similar ilk.
Recently, Wizards of the Coast put out an Avatar Magic set (exclusively the original work - not Korra), which, as weaponizing my nostalgia always does, this gave me an intense desire to rewatch the show. This, in turn caused me to want to watch Korra. If you've never heard of The Last Airbender, you might not expect an animated kids' show where a group of friends going on wacky adventures to be one of the greatest TV shows ever made, but it is.
Many people have discussed why this show is a success, and I'll throw my hat in the ring. The show takes really deep, and often dark topics and reinterprets them in a way that is not only palatable for kids, but still engaging for adults.
It's similar to real life, honestly. As kids, we often hear about events throughout history that we don't really have the capacity to process. It's difficult to wrap your brain around the scale of World War II, or the brutality of the American Civil War as a kid. You know of these events, but you can't fathom their intensity, nor can you really understand the breadth and scale of their impact.
This show treats these dark topics the same way. They happened, and continue to happen, but the show never dwells on them. There's always hope, and a chance for change. The show depicts a battle of good vs. evil, but it's never shallow. The way the writers not only accomplish this, but keep it up for three seasons with the show getting exponentially better as it goes on, is breathtaking.
Then they make Korra.
I like Korra, it's not a bad show (even when it gets kind of bad, it's really only "pretty mediocre"), but something that has struck me is how frankly childish it can be.
The show takes place about 60-ish years after the events of Avatar, with a new protagonist, new events and whatever. The show does deal with some pretty big topics, similarly to Avatar. Industrialization and its effects on society, the disparity between those with, and those without, etc. That aspect is still pretty similar to how Avatar depicts it. What I'm talking about is just the tone.
But man, is it weirdly juvenile at times. Right out the gate, the characters are a bit older than in Atla, but they sure don't act like it. I really am just bothered by the inane and pointless love triangle. There's all this angst about who's going to end up with whom, and then Season Two kills any and all interest in the romantic pairings. It serves nothing but make everyone uncomfortable, and be pointless. Love triangles can work, but it takes skill.
Season Two is an interesting topic. I don't have that much of a problem with it as some people, but I still think there are some flaws. Korra acts pretty irrationally throughout the first part, Unalaq is a boring antagonist, the Kaiju battle reeks of "we couldn't think of a conclusion," among other things. Though, I wanted to highlight the Avatar origin story. Vaatu, the "evilest, meanest kite who ever flew" (Thanks Varrick), and Raava to the same degree, really rub me the wrong way. A major tenet in a lot of the eastern mythos (Which both shows obviously draw from) is the separation of good and evil. Nothing is cut and dry "bad" or "good," they just are. You can see this most prominently in the Taijitu, or the Yin and Yang symbol. Forces are complimentary, and while they may lean one way or another, they contain the opposing side. It's clever symbolism, and does represent a lot of how we as humans think about things
My issue with Raava and Vaatu is that they aren't Yin and Yang. Vaatu is plainly "the evil spirit" and Raava, "the good spirit." There's not even a "law and chaos" dichotomy here, which would have worked pretty well with minimal fiddling. But no, let's just blatantly ignore the cultural context you intentionally draw upon for your TV show. I don't really like this season, and would probably opt to skip it if Varrick wasn't there, but it's not egregiously terrible.
The rest of the show's pretty good. Seasons 3 and 4 are up there with Atla, and the first is also rather enjoyable. My only complaint is that it's way more fast-paced than Atla, and I don't love that. Also, at times, it doesn't really feel like the same world as Atla. I'm glad they didn't go too heavy-handed and self-referential, and honestly, that's the one thing Season Two really didn't touch. But once you're desensitized to the bending and stuff as just "the way things work," it mostly feels like its own thing, which is definitely good and bad.
I'd be remiss not to touch on Korrasami, and yeah - it sure is a thing. I'm gonna be honest, I really don't see it. The evidence going for it is like "they spent some time together" and "Korra wrote to her and not Mako or Bolin when she wasn't feeling well," and that's pretty much it. I don't have anything against the ship, I just don't put that much stock in it. Sure, you can chalk it up to pressures from the publishers to not have a lesbian couple, but they're barely friends, and you want me to believe they currently are, or will be thirsting for each other? It just doens't seem that plausable, as someone who really doesn't care about shipping wars and whatever.
Asami herself gets to be progressively a more neutered. She starts off as this kind of femme-fatale rich girl who ends up having an interesting arc in Seasons one and two, but really just doesn't contribute to much towards the latter-half of the show.
The real, and only, couple that matters (sorry Bolin and Opal, though I do like it) is Varrick and Zhu Li. It's just so fun to watch that unfold throughout Season four. It's self-contained, and the proposal and wedding are just some of the best scenes ever. Funny and heartwarming at the same time.
Those are my spicy takes on Korra. In summation, season two isn't great, Korrasami isn't really developed all that, love triangles are almost never good, and Varrick and Zhu Li deserve to have a spin-off slice of life sitcom, because that would be the best thing ever. Overall, the show's pretty good, though not as good as atla. I'd recommend you watch both, starting with atla, though.
Sorry for the long-ish post about a topic tangentially related to my normal topics, but I felt the need to get something about this show on record before I move on.
Also, I've been trying to port over the remaining articles from Medium for the archives and that has proved to be a semi-herculean effort. A lot of my recent work has been using self-made charts, meaning I can't just link wikimedia images like I normally do, so that's fun. Plus, I've been having a busy couple of weeks, so the blog stuff has kind of been on the backburner. Hopefully that'll change soon, but I'm still here, still writing, and I hope to continue to do so for a long time to come.
Fight on!
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