The Legend of Korra is a really interesting show. Not because it has amazing themes or
engaging characters or great world building, but actually because it doesn't
have any of those things. The show doesn't really do anything
well, at least in my opinion. And yet, people absolutely love this show. Even people who recognize that it's not as good as
The Last Airbender think it's a high-quality show. And it's just really weird to me. I mean, I get enjoying the nostalgia
of watching another Avatar show, but The Legend of Korra gets so much
credit for being innovative and mature compared to Airbender when it's inferior
in every single way by a huge margin. I don't think Korra deserves any credit, really,
because it doesn't do anything special in general, but especially not compared to Airbender. So why do people want to like The Legend of
Korra, and why does it miss the mark so badly? We have to start at the beginning,
with Avatar The Last Airbender, because The Legend of Korra
just doesn't exist without it. That show is important not just because it was
a good show that established the Avatar world. It also happens to be one of
the greatest TV shows ever made. It is a perfect case study in world-building,
writing, emotional engagement, character development, theme integration, you name
it, Airbender does it really, really well. It is a show that just does everything
right, and manages to tell beautiful stories in a way that resonates with
everyone across every age group. The show's characters are all incredible
and feel real, and the rest of the world is basically built around them to maximize
the emotional impact of their stories. All of the bending, the history, the mythology, and even the cities and people in the world
itself are all specifically there to give the main characters an opportunity to
grow or to solidify traits they have. Every single episode furthers
the characters' emotional growth. Even filler episodes flesh out
the characters in meaningful ways. Purpose is difficult, or arguably impossible,
to determine if you're not a creator of a piece of media, but as a viewer it seems like the
creators of Airbender were really deliberate about what aspects of the world they chose
to flesh out, and how exactly they went about doing it to always give the characters an
opportunity to grow and learn and develop. None of this is to discount how wondrous
the world of Avatar is on its own. There are plenty of parts of the world that are
really cool and creative and exciting regardless of anything else in the show, but I think that
the world takes on a greater meaning because of how it interacted with the characters that we
fell in love with over the course of the show. And this was the legacy that
Legend of Korra tried to continue. Obviously this wasn't a simple task,
but I think the expectation for Korra wasn't to be as good as Airbender, but
to have a similar fundamental quality. The shows had the same creators, so the
hope was that the characters and world would still be really strong, especially
with such a strong foundation to build off. But as I've already mentioned, that didn't happen. There's a couple of things I need to address
before I continue regarding The Legend of Korra. First of all, Korra had a
really difficult development. The show was originally
supposed to be a mini-series, but even then the network temporarily stopped
production of Korra early on before they even aired because they were worried that nobody would
want to watch a show with a female protagonist. As the show became a full series,
production stayed really messy. The show had its budget cut
in the middle of its run, and there was a constant threat that
the show would be cancelled altogether. So I don't really blame the show for its
technical problems, like its animation quality, because I understand that was
mostly beyond the creators' control. Second, I don't think the show is a failure
for being worse than the last Airbender, because it's kind of insane to
not expect that to be the case. Airbender was a masterpiece, and it's really hard
to do anything that good even once in your life. I would have been fine with a show that was
worse than the original, but still good. So with all of that said, my biggest issue with
The Legend of Korra is that its writing is awful. I personally think that the
strength of a piece of media, and the main way it can actually be resonant,
is by having strong character growth. Human engage really strongly with stories
that they can relate to and see themselves in. Even in a story like The Lord of the Rings, which
is widely considered to have one of the most thoroughly fleshed out world histories
of any piece of media ever created, and is best known for having orcs
and wizards and elves and hobbits, even that only became successful because
of how strong its characters were. Writing a world that's magical and different
from ours isn't actually that difficult. Any six year old can create a world with
unicorns and dwarves and talking whales. But what makes stories stand out is
in having their characters feel human, and having them evolve and grow and face
challenges just like we do in real life. That's also what made Airbenders so special, but The Legend of Korra seems
to have completely missed that. Most of the time, it seems like the creators don't even know what to do with any
of the characters they created. By episode 8 of a 52 episode show, three of the
six main characters have nothing to do anymore, two of the other characters sort of just blip
in and out, and the last character is Korra, and she also doesn't really do anything either. I mean, she certainly does things, but
everything she does is completely pointless, both for the plot and for her own growth. Korra starts to show reckless,
combative, impatient, and self-important. She thinks that as the avatar, she deserves to
be treated special by important people, and she thinks that the solution to every problem is to
run in headfirst and fight everyone she sees. Now, I actually really like
that Korra starts out like this. She is the exact opposite of Aang from Airbender. Aang was a pacifist, didn't like fighting
with people, and was extremely reluctant to take on any responsibility and interfere
with other people he didn't understand. Korra being exactly the opposite gives
her a lot of room to grow and to learn lessons that Aang would have never even addressed. So that's her starting point. Season 1 opens with Korra traveling to
Republic City for the first time in her life. Republic City is a major modern metropolitan
city, and the only one of its kind in the world. Korra goes there because she needs
to master all of the elements, and the only Airbender in the world lives there. However, during the time she arrives, there's a lot of corruption, and gangs of
benders are abusing helpless non-benders. This leads to a lot of anti-bender sentiment
among non-benders, to the point where an extremist founds the Equalist Movement, which is a terrorist
organization aiming to rid the world of bending. So there's already a lot of good stuff here. Korra is now in a city that doesn't really
know her at all, and therefore doesn't think she's that special, with a culture that
is sort of anti her entire existence, and she needs to help calm people
down and make them feel safe. At the same time, she needs to learn
Airbending, which is an element that is very focused on spirituality and flexibility,
two traits that Korra doesn't have at all. On top of all of this, one of the Senators is
using the Equalist threat as an opportunity to consolidate power to make himself essentially
a dictator, and is taking advantage of Korra's lack of real world experience to
trick her into working with him, since he's the only one who actually
treats her like she's special. So far, this all sounds like a fantastic
setting for this story to take place. The world is clearly set up in a way
so that Korra needs to grow and mature in difficult ways in order to solve
the crisis and come out victorious. Great setup so far! And then Korra proceeds to spend the first two
thirds of the season futzing around with some homeless people she met in an MMA tournament,
yelling at her Airbending teacher a bunch, causing a lot of property damage,
and getting her ass kicked a lot. Now, normally you would have this stuff happen
so that Korra can fail in order to realize that she needs to grow, but throughout all
of this Korra is completely convinced that she hasn't done anything wrong, so
she thinks she has no reason to change. But eight episodes into the show, she still
doesn't know Airbending, she still hasn't done anything to even inconvenience the
Equalists, and she hasn't grown at all. At the end of the eighth episode, Korra finally
realizes that the Evil Senator is actually evil, and then he immediately captures her. Now, imprisoned and left with
literally nothing else to do, she decides it's finally time to start meditating. Through meditating, she gets a vision from her past life that warns her that the
Evil Senator is evil and dangerous. Helpful. And then, out of nowhere, the terrorist
shows up and accidentally frees her and she runs home to tell everyone what
happened and to figure out what to do. Meanwhile, the terrorist takes
away the Evil Senator's bending, captures all of the other senators, and then
declares himself Supreme Leader of the City. Then he holds some rallies to
take away people's bending. At this point, we have less than
three episodes left in the season. Korra finally decided to meditate, which technically counts as being spiritual
and technically counts as growth, I guess, but she's still impatient and headstrong,
and still doesn't think anything through, and still thinks the solution to every problem
is to beat up whoever disagrees with her. At this point, she'll have
to realize that she can't just run at the terrorists straight on, right? Because so far, her running straight into battle
every time has exclusively led to disaster, right? Well, after some deliberation, Korra and her friends decide that the best
course of action is to run up to the bad guy in the middle of a huge rally he's holding
filled with equalists and yell at him. To be fair, Korra did try to call in
the army to deal with the terrorists, but then the army immediately got blown up, so that literally didn't matter at all and
just served to waste an entire episode. And right after that, Korra found the Evil
Senator in prison, who told her he and the terrorists are actually brothers, which
took another whole episode to explain, which is why she got the idea to yell
at the terrorists in front of a crowd. Now, despite the fact that this plan was clearly
well thought-out and had no flaws whatsoever, nobody believes her, and then the terrorist
chases her down and takes her bending away, leaving her unconscious. I just- there are so many things Korra
could have done to confront the terrorist, and somehow she chose the
worst possible option again. It's just- Actually you know what? Given everything else that's happened in the
show, this situation actually makes perfect sense, because all we've seen so far is all the
ways Korra is completely incompetent. Every time Korra has tried to do anything this
entire season, she ends up getting captured, or the bad guy ends up getting away, or she just
doesn't achieve anything, and then something out of her control comes in and completely invalidates
everything that happened up to that point. Korra gets arrested, her airbending teacher
happens to be friends with the police chief, and gets her out. Korra is about to get captured by some equalists, her polar bear comes in out of
nowhere and scares them off. Korra gets knocked unconscious by an invincible
robot, her friends sneak in and rescue her. Korra gets knocked unconscious
by the terrorist himself, he just decides to not capture her
for a completely stupid reason. Korra gets captured by the senator,
the terrorist accidentally frees her. There have been no real consequences,
good or bad, for any of Korra's actions. She isn't even injured from all of this. And maybe that's also why Korra literally hasn't learned anything or grown at
all in this entire season. Maybe this was all deliberate. Maybe the writers are trying to make a point
that the consequences of our actions aren't actually up to us, but are based on
events that are far beyond our control. Maybe they're showing us that the world is so big and filled with people with enormous amounts of
money and influence that have their own agendas, that can't be stopped by random
people or even figureheads. For whatever we try, we are all just grains
of sand being carried around by the waves of power that a select few individuals wield
mercilessly and without regard for human life. Or maybe this is just bad writing. Alright, there's 10 minutes in the season left, let's see what random thing that Korra has no
control over decides to show up and save her. After a short chase scene, Korra wakes up and accidentally airbends the
terrorist out of the building. Which- fine. She hasn't airbended at all up until now, and
she's barely figured out any of the airbending techniques, and her bending was locked,
but fine, she could just fucking airbend for no goddamn reason even though you had
an entire season that could have been used to show her learning airbending that was
instead spent showing Asami driving cars. And as if it couldn't get any more stupid,
the terrorist ends up falling into the ocean and has to waterbend out of it instead
of swimming like a normal person, and he does it in front of a bunch of people
that he should have realized would be there and that is apparently enough to convince the
entire city that the equalists should disband. Then he runs away in disgrace with
his brother, the evil senator, who decides to commit murder suicide. The season ends with Korra getting
her bending back through magic, which the show helpfully explains with the
previously established "go fuck yourself the writers don't owe you an explanation, fuck you
for asking," corollary of the Avatar universe. And now Korra can use the same magic to
give other people their bending back, which she does for one person,
and then calls it a day. So Korra went around achieving nothing and
learning nothing for 11 and a half episodes until she accidentally pushes
the bad guy out of a building, and she doesn't even kill or capture him. She managed to learn airbending without learning
airbending, but doesn't even feel like she had anything else to learn because look, she won,
the bad guy is dead, it was all worth it, even though the equalists took over the entire
city and the bad senator straight up turned the city into a police state, and there's still
crime gangs beating up helpless civilians, and Korra doesn't actually even know that
the terrorist died now that I think about it. By all accounts she didn't succeed in a single
thing she was supposed to do coming into the city. But the season ends on a triumphant note anyway, and all of the characters say everything
worked out and that Korra did a good job. I just don't understand this. What was the point of any of this? Nothing that happened in
the season mattered at all. Nothing changed, nobody grew, there were
no consequences to anything that happened, it was just a complete waste of time. Korra certainly didn't grow or change, she's
still exactly the same person she was at the start of the season, except now she can
also airbend, which she learned by magic. There's not even a message
for the audience to take away, because bad things kept happening no matter
what Korra or any of the characters did, but every bad thing that happened to them got
reversed, usually in the same fucking episode. From the moment Korra arrived in Republic City,
every minute of every episode was just filler to get to the scene where she faces off against the
terrorist, and she doesn't even actually beat him, he beats himself out of sheer stupidity,
and then his brother fucking kills him. Nothing important happens aside from that that differentiates the world at
the beginning and at the end. So the entire first season of The Legend of Korra
consists of Korra doing stupid things constantly, never reflecting on her decisions, and everything working out for her because
the writers just fucking say it does. And this problem isn't exclusive to season 1; it is the driving force behind everything that
happens throughout the entire rest of the show. I don't think Korra really succeeds in
anything she does for the entire series. When things work out, it's always because other people did the work for her and
she just happened to be there. In season 2, there's a quote unquote
civil war between the Northern and Southern Water Tribes (Korra's from the
Southern Water Tribe by the way) where the leader of the North says the South
needs to merge with them to be safe. Even though the leader looks completely
evil and exclusively says evil things, Korra decides to trust him because, as we've seen
so far, Korra's an idiot, and she basically just helps him take over her home because, as we've
established, Korra is completely incompetent. She also gets beat up by a bunch of dark
spirits, because this wouldn't be The Legend of Korra if there weren't pointless
fight scenes where Korra gets beat up. There's this theme that Korra's
supposed to be more educated as the Avatar and not get involved if
she doesn't know what's happening, or something along those lines, but it doesn't
really matter because Korra basically doesn't do anything after the third episode in the season
because she gets knocked out for a few episodes, and then fucks around in the spirit world for
a bit until eventually the bad guy turns into a giant monster, and then Korra has to turn
into a giant monster, and then they fight. And even then, Korra is going to lose until one of her friends turns into an angel and
basically kills the bad guy herself. Then the civil war is apparently
solved, and everyone is happy. So again, Korra didn't actually have
to learn anything to fix the problem, someone else ended up fixing the problem
for her, and the solution was just to fight, and she wins because she's special
and the show needs her to win. She also opens the spirit portals, which is a whole bullshit can of worms
that I am not ready to talk about yet. In season 3, the main threat is an anarchist who
decides he wants to kidnap Korra because she's the avatar and he hates her on principle, and he
also wants to kill all of the major world leaders. Korra proceeds to get kidnapped three
times this season, and ends up getting saved by her friends all three times, and
then some escaped earth kingdom prisoners kill the anarchist in the end after Korra gets
tortured too badly to be able to fight properly. There's a vague theme about the avatar's duty
or whatever, but Korra does all of her avatar stuff with a bunch of other people who aren't the
avatar who end up doing most of the work anyway, so her being the avatar doesn't actually matter
except to give the anarchist a reason to hate her. Season 4 is the one where people
argue Korra does grow and learn, but even then only in a really cheap
way that ultimately amounts to nothing. She starts season 4 with straight
up post-traumatic stress disorder, because she got tortured and poisoned
so badly at the end of last season. Now, I don't really love this being Korra's arc
this season, because PTSD is fucking brutal. PTSD isn't about feeling scared because
something happened that you can just get over. It's when you go through something
so horrific and traumatic that it literally breaks your brain's coping mechanisms. It can take years to fully recover from it, if
you ever do, so giving a character PTSD and making their arc just getting over it isn't really
realistic and doesn't make for a great plot. And even though Korra has an episode showing her
going through therapy, in the end the solution is to be yelled at by a bunch of old people until she
decides she's fine in the second to last episode. Even if this wasn't meant to be PTSD, even though
it definitely is, it's literally textbook PTSD, and Korra just needs to get over her fears
or something, she doesn't actually do that. She doesn't learn anything about herself or have to face some deeper issue with
herself or her mentality in life. She just has to realize that, yeah, it's scary to
get hurt so badly you almost died multiple times, but that was a while ago and it's getting
old so it's time to get over yourself. That's still not growth and it's
still an unhealthy representation of mental health issues and victims of abuse. And by the way, while she has PTSD, she
still just ends up running into battle and fighting people to solve all of her
problems, or you know, fail constantly. Sure, there is an episode where she realizes
that she shouldn't fight to solve her problems, and that she should try to talk it out to
negotiate a solution, but once again the show takes an opportunity for growth and just chucks it
out the window like a fucking shotput, and Korra just has to fight the main bad guy anyway,
and of course she gets her ass kicked again. So, to sum up, she doesn't really
learn anything, and if she does, it's that eventually everything will come down to
fighting so why even bother trying anything else? Oh, and also in the last scene of the show,
Korra holds hands with her female friend as they walk into a portal together,
which apparently means that she's gay now. So Korra ends up pretty much
exactly where she was in episode 1, except she might potentially
be attracted to women maybe. And it's not just that every plan she had failed,
or that she didn't end up helping pretty much anyone, or that she ended up making everything
worse every time she tried to get involved... Well- okay, well actually it is those things. But also, Korra, the main character
in a show called The Legend of Korra, could have been replaced by a MacGuffin, and
the show would have been exactly the same. And I mean exactly the same. Any time Korra does something that
affects the plot, her friends are all always there for completely unrelated
reasons, and you could really easily just take Korra out and have them do exactly
what she does using a magic spirit key. That's sort of what happens
half of the time anyway. To be absolutely fair, Korra isn't
the only character with this problem. She's definitely the worst, because
she's the main character of the show, but none of the other main characters
change or do that much either. You can sum up each of the other arcs for
the entire show in less than a sentence. Mako gets a job, Bolin gets a job and new
powers (that he didn't work for or anything, he just got them), Asami gets a job
as head of a company off screen, Lin forgives her family, and
Tenzin learns to be more patient. That's not to say these arcs are pointless
or anything, because they're substantial, but all of these arcs occur
in just two or three episodes. This show has 52 episodes across four
seasons, so this just doesn't cut it. All of the main characters, Korra included, spend the vast majority of the show
not really doing anything substantial. But my issues with the show don't end there. If anything, this is just the beginning. I actually think that the severe lack of
character depth is a symptom of something else. It really seems like despite the
fact that The Last Airbender and Korra were made by the same people, the writers of Korra focused exclusively on showing dark
themes instead of having a real story. I don't know if you've personally had this, but
I had this phase when I was a teenager where I became obsessed with stories having to be dark
and quote-unquote "mature" to be interesting. I always felt like games I played and shows
I watched needed to have dark undertones, they needed to be depressing and raw and
have meaningful consequences in the world, or else it would be too childish or something. My personal theory is that this happens because
as a kid you're just told every story has a happy ending and that everything is always good in the
world, but then once you're a teenager, you start coming into contact with the reality that the
world isn't always happy and flowers and rainbows, so you sort of push hard in the opposite
direction to prove you "know the truth now" or whatever and that you're a real
adult who understands real consequences. But as I grew up, that feeling passed, and now I know that media doesn't have to be
dark and depressing to be mature or engaging. There is certainly media that is dark and
depressing that is really interesting and different and uses dark experiences to show
meaningful human stories, but there's a lot of garbage that just tries to be dark for the sake
of being dark and doesn't say anything meaningful. Korra falls into the second category. Season 1 has the rise of the Equalists,
a terrorist organization hell-bent on taking away the physical ability
of half of the world's inhabitants, because that half is abusing its
power on the other powerless half. Republic City is filled with
crime, and the government isn't really doing anything about it except
to basically side with the criminals. There are themes of corruption,
inequality, political instability, police states, and classism, just to start
with, and those are all real problems that have really difficult solutions that affect
every aspect of life, even in the real world. But the writers just sort of throw
away all of these problems at the end of the season and just say the good guys win. The Equalists, who have enough members to take
down the entire police force and an army and have full control of the biggest city in the
world at one point, just disband because one guy gets thrown into the ocean and disappears,
and I guess that somehow also solves inequality. And it's not like anyone did
anything about the crime gangs, they're still just as big of a problem
as they were at the start of the season. The city is exactly where it
was when the show started, and there are no real consequences
for anything that happened. If anything, the show basically goes
out of its way to show that actually, all of those non-benders were just overreacting,
because look at how many good benders there are! They saved the city from... something... and
the Equalists were led by another bender anyway, so everything he said is automatically invalid
because he is just evil and inequality wasn't a real problem in the city because it
doesn't affect the main characters, so I guess everything is okay. Season 2 is almost as bad about it. The Northern Water Tribe tries to
conquer the Southern Water Tribe, basically just as a show of strength, and there
are a lot of conflicts between the occupied citizens of the south, who are pretty much
helpless here, and the aggressors from the north. This kind of thing has a lot
of parallels in real life, even as recently as when Russia
decided to annex Crimea in 2014, and these are really difficult situations to solve
that in most cases are only solved by outside interference or by the aggressor nation crumbling
apart because of internal political problems. But in Korra, the problem is solved by
Korra and the main villain turning into giant monsters and shooting laser beams
at each other until one of them dies. And then hey look, everyone else is actually good and nobody else really
wanted to conquer the south! In Season 3, an anarchist literally
kills the head of state of the biggest nation in the world, which causes the
nation to break up into smaller states. In Season 4, a military commander reunites all
of the states and declares herself supreme ruler of the new united nation, so at least they
do address the consequences of that problem. But then, Season 4 ends with the dictator building
this ridiculous giant robot and Korra's friends destroying it, and after they do, the dictator
just decides to surrender, even though she still has the largest, most technologically advanced
army in the history of the world literally just standing outside the city limits, waiting for
orders, and she hasn't lost a single battle ever. She isn't even captured yet at this point, and
she is also one of the most power-hungry humans ever, willing to kill her fiance
if it means she wins the war. But they broke her knock-off Power Rangers toy,
so I guess there's no point in fighting anymore. Just like in real life, very dark and mature. Season 3 also features Tenzin trying
to revive a dead culture, but finds himself constantly under attack and having
trouble getting people to go along with him. But while in this case the solution is actually
realistic in Season 3, where the new members of this culture keep getting targeted and decide
that they have to work together and bond over their new shared experience to survive, in
Season 4 they become the Flying Squirrel Power Ranger Brigade and just go around giving
tours and saving cats from trees or something. Look, like I mentioned earlier, I don't have an
issue with shows trying to address dark themes, but the writers of Korra are clearly not
capable of writing actual mature stories. I would go so far as to say that the way the writers present these issues
is completely disrespectful. Every season the villain is
supposed to live in this grey area, and the show spends the entire
first half of each season saying, hey, this guy actually has a point, but then
spends the entire second half of the season invalidating everything the villain does,
pretending the guy was evil from the start, and ignoring the central problem that allowed
the villain to rise to power in the first place. You don't get to have it both ways. You can't act as if your show is somehow smart and dark and nuanced just for pointing
out complex socio-political problems, and then turn around and say the solution
is always to fight a video game boss. This show isn't mature,
these writers aren't smart, and it's insulting that they're trying
to trick us into thinking they are. And the real kicker here is that
for all of Korra trying so hard to be all dark and stuff because
Airbender was supposedly for kids, Airbender was significantly darker
and more mature than Korra ever was. The show starts with literal complete genocide, an entire culture across four continents wiped
out of existence, aside from this one fucking 12 year old who now has no friends or family
because they were all systematically executed. His best friends are Sokka and Katara,
whose mom got killed in a war raid and their dad had to leave them to fight
in the war that killed their mom, so they end up having to raise
themselves from the age of 8. Their nemesis is a teenager who was
exiled from his country at the age of 13 because his dad is an abusive sociopath
that also exiled the kid's mom. And on top of all of that, all of these
characters are forced to find themselves and take on enormous responsibilities
that even adults would struggle with. And that's just the main characters. Airbender also portrays the devastating
impact of imperialism and colonialism, shows the effects of prison camps and
discrimination in a world divided by war, shows characters whose lives were
completely upturned as they were forced to become refugees searching
for a place that would accept them. And in all of these cases, it's not even
that the enemies are all sociopaths. I mean, yeah, the Firelord is, but all of the
soldiers are shown to just be regular people who are just drafted into the military and are doing what they're told because they
think what they're doing is right. And what makes the show so impactful is how much it humanizes every person
who was impacted by the war. It doesn't just show some picture
of a colony or have some character give an exposition dump about some
village's history like Korra does. There are entire episodes devoted to meeting
these people whose lives have been destroyed by the Fire Nation, whose parents were taken
prisoner or enslaved because of forces way beyond their control, who just want to
feel safe for once in their lives, and how corruption tears villages apart
without even encountering any enemies directly. The Last Airbender doesn't just
talk about how things are bad, it shows the visceral reality of war
and the human consequences of it. And problems aren't just magically solved either. Solutions only come because
Aang and his friends are smart, caring, and creative, and find actual
ways to address people's problems. There's never a moment in
the show where everything goes back to normal by beating a
giant whatever with a big laser. Yes, The Last Airbender was made for kids to
engage with, but it wasn't just a kid's show. The writers of Korra somehow didn't see that
at all, and instead tried to make plotlines that in theory are nuanced and interesting,
but are actually totally stupid and childish. In the end, every sociopolitical problem
boils down to a boss fight that Korra always wins because she has to because the writers
said so, even if Korra doesn't do anything right. What's mature or realistic about that? What makes me really angry about Korra's
existence though, is that in the process of trying, and failing, to make a more
mature show with more mature themes, they also took a bunch of Airbender's
powerful themes and actively ruined them. Almost all of the major themes Airbender tried
to establish, or the creative mechanisms the show tried to use, were systematically
devalued or outright destroyed by Korra. Let's start with something incredibly simple. The elements. Contrary to what the writers
of Korra seem to think, elements were not included in Airbender
for the sake of having flashy fight scenes. I mean, it probably didn't hurt, but
the actual main point of the elements was to represent different cultures
in a really easy to understand way. Each nation has an element associated with it, and the style of the element was also related
to the cultural values that nation had. This connection between culture and element
meant in order to master all of the elements, the Avatar also had to learn about and
understand all of the world's different cultures. This is a critical point giving the Avatar's
role as the world's peacekeeper and mediator, and the show really proved that out. Aang had to travel around the world to find people
to teach him each element, and in doing so meant different people from different cultures
related to the element he was learning, and even ended up learning a lot about the problems
people were facing and how to best solve them. But Korra completely misses the point here. I mean, to be fair, season 3 does try to do that, with trying to recreate the Airbending
culture and people struggling with it, but aside from that, the show doesn't address
any themes regarding cultural differences at all. Korra never even tries to help anyone, or learn about the different cultures
people are from or anything like that. She herself never really spends any time
meeting people of other cultures or talking to anyone outside of her friend group
in the world's cultural elite. She never bothers to try to understand
non-bender's points of view, she never really listens to people who don't
agree with her ideas, and she barely even tries to solve anybody's problems that
don't involve really important people. And this ties into the earlier point that Korra
doesn't learn anything or grow in any way, because she really isn't ever exposed to
different cultures or even anyone with a different opinion than her that
she doesn't end up trying to kill. In Korra, elements just boil down to
arbitrary superpowers you use to fight. There are no meaningful cultural
differences between benders or even fighting styles between elements. Everyone is pretty much just a generic American
citizen, which isn't really bad in and of itself, but it's a complete waste of the Avatar universe. I don't even think you could argue that
the whole point of Korra was to show how different cultures integrate into a new
society made up of people from all cultures, kind of like how in the US you have immigrants
from cultures all over the world living together, because in Korra the cultural divide is basically
that you're either a bender or you're not. If this were actually like real life, in a
new metropolitan city built exclusively out of immigrants, you would likely have different
districts devoted to different cultures, and political problems would arise from
each culture having different priorities. So even the pathetic attempt Korra makes
at a cultural divide between bender and non-bender is really weak and gets thrown
away towards the end of season 1 regardless. The show just completely fails
to utilize bending properly. Actually, Korra could take out bending
entirely and replace it with X-Men powers or even just guns and space tech,
and nothing would actually change. At this point, the show isn't
that far off from that anyway, with random characters having random
spirit powers or getting abilities that have nothing to do with original bending, or
them just building giant lasers or whatever. Meanwhile, the concept of bending
as it is established in Airbender is critical to the entire show, and
for the most part there are pretty strict but simple rules for how bending
works, and how the world works around it. Bending is ultimately used to create situations that allow the characters to show
the full range of who they are. That's what makes it so effective in Airbender,
and what makes it so disappointing in Korra. And then there's spirits. While Korra just sort of fails
to utilize bending effectively, the show goes out of its way
to ruin spirits entirely. Spirits in The Last Airbender
are used very deliberately. They exclusively appear in the show to portray
how self-centered and destructive humans can be. There are only really six instances of
spirits appearing in the entire show: The first is when a spirit attacks a
nearby village after the forest it's supposed to protect is burned
down from a Fire Nation raid. Pretty self-explanatory there. The second instance is with
the Moon and Ocean spirits, who are both considered necessary
for water bending to exist and work together to keep balance over the ocean,
or something like that, it's kind of vague. A Fire Nation general who wants to conquer the
Water Tribe kills the Moon Spirit in order to permanently weaken the Water Tribe, putting the
entire world at risk for his own selfish reasons. In the same episode, while trying to figure
out how to help the Ocean and Moon spirits, Aang travels to the Spirit
World to meet the Face Stealer, a spirit who steals people's
faces if they show any emotion. This is the only spirit that might have mostly
been there to be an obstacle for Aang to pass, but there is an undertone of humans
being too reckless and emotionally driven and not thinking things through and constantly
getting themselves into trouble as a result. The next instance of spirits was in
the Great Library of Wan Shi Tong, which is a library with all the books and
knowledge generated throughout all of history. The Librarian is a spirit, and he is
extremely wary of humans being in the library, because in the past, every time a human
would come, it would only be to figure out how to destroy his or her enemies, to
the point where one human even destroyed an entire section of the library to prevent
other people from knowing his weaknesses. Eventually, the spirit decides it is
too dangerous to give humans any access to the library ever again, so he buries it
underground in the middle of a desert forever. The last instance of a spirit is of a spirit
who guards a village built on a river, but the river has been polluted
horribly by a nearby factory, ruining the village's livelihood and
killing all of the local wildlife. When Aang and Katara destroy the
factory and help clean up the river, the spirit thanks them for helping
the village when she couldn't. As a side note, even though there aren't
explicitly any spirits in it, the swamp is also assumed to be spirit-related, and it's
also used to show how the world is all connected and that people don't really think about that
enough, but it doesn't have any spirits per se. In all these instances, spirits are used to
show how humans destroyed a part of the world, big or small, for their own selfish
reasons without considering the consequences of their actions
outside of their own bubble. Once again, the point is not
to have spirits for the sake of having some mystical force on
the show, the spirits are there to be a tangible manifestation for what
are otherwise amorphous consequences. And there's actually one more instance of spirits
being used that I haven't mentioned: the Avatar. The Avatar's explicit role is to bring
balance to the world by mediating conflicts between humans and other humans,
and between humans and spirits. The Avatar exists to try to
fix the problems humans create. The Avatar also reincarnates every time one
dies, and a huge part of being the Avatar is having access to the spirits of past Avatars, so that they can give advice and impart
their wisdom on young Avatars growing up, all in service of maintaining balance when
humans throw the world out of balance. That is the point of spirits. They are specifically in the show to
demonstrate how humans are selfish and how they need to be more aware of
the consequences of their behaviors. They serve a really important role, and aren't
overused so that their impact isn't diminished. So what do the writers of The
Legend of Korra do with them? They make there be a shitload of spirits that
just exist to form hordes of faceless enemies that you can throw at the heroes so you can
have a lot of completely pointless fight scenes. Either that, or they're just generic
animals that can talk sometimes. On top of that, the show goes on to
make something called spirit energy, which lets you shoot lasers and open
portals and shoot more, bigger lasers. It's also great for when the writers don't
know how to fix a problem or what to do with a character, so they can just give them fancy
spirit powers and let them do whatever they want. Putting aside the fact that
this is textbook bad writing, what frustrates me here is that this actively
undermines spirits in the first show. Spirits aren't these special mystical
forces beyond our understanding that are meant to keep balance in
the world in some unique way, or even just a symbol for the parts of
the world humans don't think about enough. According to The Legend of Korra,
they're just talking animals that sometimes throw themselves at humans
so that there can be fight scenes. They don't actually matter that much,
at least not any more than the average flying lemur does, and because of Korra,
you don't have to take them seriously. And that's not even mentioning how the show
just shits on the concept of the avatar itself. Remember all those things I
was saying about the avatar? How important it was to the central themes of
balance and the complexity of human behavior? Well, according to the writers of Korra,
that's actually not why there's an avatar. The avatar exists because thousands of years ago,
some random guy decided he wanted to go exploring outside of the realm of humans and bumped
into some big spirits fighting each other. Turns out these are the spirit of Jesus and the
spirit of Satan, battling in an endless war. Eventually, the Jesus spirit just gives the guy
extra abilities and now the avatar has to keep doing things because otherwise evil will
rule, and that's bad because evil is bad. So, all the bad things in the world are reduced to
the Satan spirit telling people to do bad things, and the avatar is literally just some
Jesus figure who is good and always right. So much for the complexity of human behavior
and the importance of balance, right? Being able to split people down the
middle into good and evil is exactly what makes the show more dark and mature, and
definitely not childish and oversimplified. Then, as if metaphorically
killing the avatar wasn't enough, the show goes on to literally
kill the avatar in the show. Korra, being the useless sack of angst that
she is, loses to the bad guy who the Satan spirit is now working with, and he sucks out the
Jesus spirit and proceeds to beat it to death, which for some reason, also erases
the spirits of all the past avatars. Why was this strictly necessary to do? Why would you go out of your way to just
straight up kill the avatar like this? Korra severely underutilized
having past avatars anyway, but why would you literally erase it in the canon? If you didn't want to use them,
you could have just not used them. But now you had to go out of your way to say,
"if I don't have the past avatars, nobody gets to have past avatars," and just invalidate
a lot of what happened in the first show. I mean, they literally erased it! And the avatar spirits were
a major part of the show. They served as Aang's mentors and as an
important part of his history and development. They taught Aang things he
wouldn't have learned otherwise, and gave him advice from different perspectives. That is valuable to the characters. But Korra, totally unprompted, shits
in the Last Airbender's mouth and shoots itself in the foot just to get some
cheap emotional reaction from the viewer. In a better show, this maybe could have
been justified, but here it doesn't matter because Korra wins the fight anyway and
doesn't gain anything from this experience. It just sucks, and now the show ruined another
thing that made Airbender really great. At this point, there's nothing left from the
soul of the original show that's still standing. The world, which was unique because of the
role elements and spirits had in shaping it, has been stripped down to a
generic bland fantasy world, and almost none of the characters are
in any way engaging or interesting. Incredibly, the creators of a show built around
the uniqueness and interconnectedness of its world and the strength of its characters
made a sequel that has no trace of either. I just spent about 10,000 words criticizing this
show, and basically everything it stands for. This show is deeply flawed in fundamental
ways, so much so that in some cases it goes out of its way to ruin some of the best
parts of things it took from Airbender. I did not enjoy watching most of this show. And yet, something about The Legend
of Korra really resonated with me. There's something so magnetic
about the Avatar universe that, even when it's completely mangled
in Korra, is still really engaging. I was really sad when I finished the show,
because even though I found the characters mostly unlikable and the plot contrived and frustrating,
I still really loved the world of Avatar. I also think I haven't given the
writers enough credit for season 3. Really, I think that's the season that
saved the show, in my eyes, at least. Season 3 took the show back to the formula
that made the original series so good. Episodes were mostly self-contained, but
still contributing to a season-long arc, and the characters on the show finally
had a chance to actually develop, except for Korra, who was
mostly just there being loud. The Beifong Half Sisters are fantastic. Zhaofu is an absolutely classic Avatar city, an
entire metal city run entirely by metalbenders. I loved that! And Tenzin trying to recreate the Air Nomad
culture was also really engaging and interesting, and all of the characters felt like they
were actually going through something. And Zaheer and the Red Lotus felt actually
threatening without being invincible. They had to work really
hard to try to kidnap Korra, and they only succeeded by
being talented and clever. Their threat felt earned. And that's not to say that season 3 was perfect. The show still had really bad pacing issues, with multiple episodes that
basically just served to waste time, and Korra still didn't achieve anything and didn't
even need to be there for the entire season. But at least there were a lot of good parts to it, which is more than I can say for
any other season of the show. If the entire show had been
along the lines of season 3, I honestly think I would have
felt satisfied with the show. But it's not, and the show ends up being
mostly a mess of bad ideas and poor execution. And, look, we can argue about whether the writers
deserve any credit for coming up with challenging ideas that are in theory darker and more
interesting than what Airbender tackled. But when it comes down to it, they completely and utterly fail to
follow through on any of those ideas. It's not hard to come up with a dark and edgy
storyline that mirrors real world events. I would know, I did it constantly as a
teenager, and I wasn't that smart or creative. Ideas are cheap. Executing them is the real hard part,
and the only thing that actually matters. The idea of a teenager with
special powers learning to develop those powers to kill an
evil king isn't unique or special. But the way Avatar the Last Airbender
told that story made the show transcendent and one of the
greatest stories ever told. And Korra, for all the things it could have
had going for it, just told a bad story.
