The Problem with Spirits in Legend of Korra

the spirits of avatar The Last Airbender were iconic evangelion-style pandas face stealing giant centipedes and nerdy owl dragon things that were simply Beyond human understanding they often served as narrative extensions of the natural world and had mysterious compelling motivations outside the boundaries of Good and Evil truly they were a breath of fresh air compared to the usual Western understanding of Good vs Evil that we're all kind of sick of which is why it's so frustrating that Legend of Korra despite wanting to tell more stories about the spirits doesn't seem to understand why the spirits in the original series work to begin with instead of being complex nuanced totally amoral entities they're watered down to a rather juvenile moral framework that doesn't actually explore the many facets of spirituality ones even tackled by the original series such as the environmental Devastation wrought by industrialization or even the idea of spiritual growth through personal development So today we're going to talk about why the spirits of avatar The Last Airbender worked so well and how Legend of Korra understood none of it in Avatar Spirits are inherently linked to the Natural World be they embodiments of different aspects of nature or guardians of a specific forest or town they're often directly involved whenever the natural world around them has been disrespected or threatened they're not fully understood entities From Another Dimension rather they're a sort of metaphorical abstract vessel for the world of Avatar itself spirituality is also seen as a way to understand oneself in relation to the rest of the world General iro's Enlightenment his spiritual aptitude is an extension of his ability to understand both himself and the ways of others and the invisible connections between them it is important to draw wisdom from many different places understanding others the other elements and the other nations will help you become whole when Aang undergoes the process of unlocking his chakras each one involves him confronting some kind of mental or emotional block the trauma of having lost his people the fear of hurting someone with his fire bending and the love he has for others We Are All One people but we live as if divided we're all connected his spiritual growth is his personal growth it's more than just ooh spooky ghost thingies must be respected likewise Spirits are not concerned with the concepts of good and evil or light and dark they're beyond any kind of man-made construct Spirits instead have specific motivations and causes they have relationships with each other and the land that they're a part of as such they act directly in response to those things being jeopardized in order to calm them you must understand what caused them to wreak havoc if they can be calmed at all take habai for instance when the forest his statue is in is raised by the Fire Nation he goes on a rampage attacking any humans in the nearby Village as retribution Spirit of this Forest now I understand you're upset angry because your home was burned down he doesn't care that their Earth Kingdom citizens because to Spirits the lines between nations are imaginary ones useful only to humans likewise we don't see where those he takes are whisked off to they aren't killed or thrown in some Spirit prison but they simply vanish from existence to appease hey bye Aang has to understand why he is rampaging to begin with once he discovers the link between hebai and the destroyed Forest he realizes that the fire nation's actions have ruined the spirit's home to appease hey by Aang shows that the acorn that Katara showed him earlier using it as a symbol of hope that the forest will one day grow back when I saw the force had burned I was sad and upset but my friend gave me hope that the forest would grow back this does in fact appease haybai he returns to his pacified form and then leaves releasing his captives through a bamboo Thicket that grows in his place as he disappears mysteriously into the night then there's the Painted Lady the spirit of the Zhang Hui River in the Fire Nation The Painted Lady she's part of our Town's lore they say she's a River Spirit who watches over our town in times of need she was believed to Once watch over a small fishing Village on the river however the industrialization of the fire nation has led to pollution of its own environment with one of its factories heavily contaminating the zhangui river and bringing illness upon the village fishing town at least that's how it was before the factory moved in Army makes their medal there moved in a few years ago and started gunking a ball River and now our little village is struggling to survive it's believed that this drove the Painted Lady away as well rather than seek retribution she is seemingly vacated altogether but when Katara masquerades as the Painted Lady to protect the village heal its people destroy the factory and Inspire the locals to clean the river The Painted Lady directly visits and thanks her [Music] [Applause] thank you she doesn't act the same way that hey bye did at all as such we can assume each spirit will act according to its own nature and personality Tui and law the moon and ocean Spirits respectively came to the human world long ago in the form of black and white koi fish have always circled each other with eternal tense the push and pull life and death good and evil in and young they swim in the spirit Oasis of the northern water tribe Palace the original water try where we can assume the first waterbenders built their home the Legends say the moon was the first waterbender our ancestors saw how it pushed and pulled the tides and learned how to do it themselves when Zhao kills the moon Spirit the ocean Spirit joins with Aang in his Avatar state to seek vengeance upon the Fire Nation Army they assume a terrifying form which the waterbenders immediately recognize and bow to while the ocean Spirit decks the Fire Nation Invaders it's only when Princess yuei assumes the role of the new moon spirit that the ocean Spirit ends its Rampage and returns to the koi pond through all of this neither Spirit speaks at all safe for UA as the moon Spirit instead we understand their motivations through what we're told by Co and by the clear connection between the two as a stand-in for Yin and Yong remember that bit for later then we have the freakier spirits firstly Co the face stealer who lives within his own domain in the spirit world a spooky knurled tree surrounded by a thick fog and a Petrified Forest we don't know exactly why or how but Co is not very fond of humans well except for their faces when he encounters one or any living thing he waits for them to express even the slightest hint of emotion once they do he steals their face to wear for himself leaving his victim a faceless husk when you speak with him you must be very careful to show no emotion at all not the slightest expression or he will steal your face he is rather mysterious again we don't know why exactly he does this though we do know that he isn't fond of Avatar korik in particular having stolen the face of his lover how could I forget you one of your previous incarnations tried to slay me oh it was something about stealing the face of someone you loved it gets further explained in the comics but it's honestly much more interesting leaving so much of Coast nature as a mystery it adds to the frightening power of His presence even his form as this giant centipede lurking within the darkness of a hollowed tree inspires sheer Terror as he coils around Aang he does provide useful information that helps Aang giving insight into the nature of the Moon and ocean spirits and their corporeal forms he could have easily lied if he were indeed truly evil but he doesn't he tells the truth and though he does try to seize an opportunity to steal Aang's face when he expresses excitement even trying to scare him at points KO accepts when Aang manages to go back to a neutral expression and leaves if anything KO is more mischievous and a little bit Petty than he is outright evil Juan XI Tong he who knows ten thousand things has an insatiable curiosity he longs to collect all the knowledge of the universe and gather it within his Library thanks to his foxy knowledge Seekers he believes in knowledge for knowledge is sake he's also not very fond of humans because in his experience humans abuse that knowledge to outwit and destroy each other humans only bother learning things to get the edge on other humans like that Firebender who came to this place a few years ago looking to destroy his enemy it is a Corruption of what Juan shitong loves he doesn't care about the different sides in a human War seeing it as little more more than another repetition in humankind's long and fraught history you think you're the first person to believe their war was justified countless others before you have come here seeking weapons or weaknesses or battle strategies throughout the entire show Spirits are not really depicted as light or dark good or evil they simply are some may be more cruel than others but they don't quite adhere to a human understanding of morality and how could they even the constructs of morality are rather young compared to the timelessness of spirits it's like trying to ask whether a hurricane or a blizzard is good or evil the weather is not good or evil it simply is and Spirits are very much the same except with a bit more attitude I'll delve into this a bit later but it basically boils down to the difference between immoral and amoral human morality is a construct that varies wildly between regions cultures religions time periods and even individual people what is considered good or evil or even good or bad yes those are different depends on all of these different factors to be evil would be going against morality and thus immoral a morality however is the objection of this system altogether to be amoral is not to be good or bad evil or good but rather to not operate within this framework to begin with Spirits are neither good or evil but rather amoral acting outside of any kind of moral framework The Legend of Korra it doesn't quite view Spirits this way I really do appreciate that Legend of Korra wanted to explore Spirits more in depth they were such a fascinating part of Avatar's World it makes perfect sense that its sequel series would want to do a bit more with them however it does so without understanding what made the spirits of Avatar unique or interesting and instead tries to explain the spirits the rules around them and their world logically and according to human understanding and by doing so they robbed the spirits of their air of mystery their mysticism their inherent connection to the natural world and their indifference to human ideas of morality Spirits first begin appearing naturally in Book 2 spirits in the original series Spirits were incredibly distinct largely due to their Rarity they could appear as humans as animals as unique chimeric Creatures based on different animals or as something completely different in Alien together but because Spirits are so ubiquitous in Cora it resulted in a need to simplify the design of the quote-unquote average Spirit they needed common ones that could just easily be thrown into a scene without the need to give them Unique Designs and thus you get colored paint blobs just flying around everywhere spirit why are you angry with us what have we done to offend you there's no real character or personality to these gooey Globs they're more akin to generic energy monsters or Studio Ghibli extras than the other worldly entities or characters of the original series the closest you get are the Gophers Korra and Genora encounter when they first enter the spirit world angered by Korra inadvertently disturbing their home and then trying to bend at them get out of our world get away from me yeah she tried to bend at us in our own holes some are interesting like the Sunbird that Korra befriends but without any clear motivation like hey bye these Spirits feel incredibly Superfluous just like the paint blobs with the world of Korra becoming heavily industrialized it should be easy to see why the spirits would have become so irate as their homes are destroyed turned into human cities and stripped of their resources they would naturally become infuriated and lash out and that metaphorically speaks to these spiritual decay of a rapidly industrializing world even the very concept of modernity is informed by in our world colonialist attitudes and it's the same in the Avatar world the fire nation's industrialization both allowed and prompted them to invade and colonize the other nations to impose their idea of progress on the rest of the world to take their resources to fuel their machines and to eradicate other cultures and ways of life seen as primitive and inferior but none of that is really part of book 2's conversation about spirituality for more about this topic regarding colonialism's lasting effects I recommend Kane's Skittles video about the politics of Legend of korres book 2 but through all of book 2 the story only pays lip service to this idea of industrialization and by extension colonization leading to spiritual Decay and even taking the very concept of modernity for granted without investigating where it comes from it is all instead boiled down to a very black and white Battle of tradition versus progress and even worse a battle between good and evil since the beginning of time we have battled over the fate of this world [Music] what I honestly hate most about the spirits in Korra is the introduction of light and dark Spirits as per usual the light equals good and dark equals bad when Spirits are quote unquote out of balance the darkness takes over literally giving them a very obviously evil form and forcing them to go on a rampage there are no evil spirits there is light and dark in them all when they're unbalanced the darkness takes over instead of spirits being amoral existing outside of moral Frameworks of any kind legit okora tries instead to shoehorn Spirits into a very basic Western good and evil framework with this light and dark system in which light is the fave obviously take hey bye for instance when he was rampaging it wasn't because he became a dark Spirit the destruction of the forest didn't turn him evil instead he was just genuinely in pain and lashed out at any humans in his path he was amoral if this happened in Cora haibai's design and writing would have made him come off as immoral and 25 more generic turned dark because he was out of balance and instead of appeasing him by giving him hope of the forest growing back through the acorn one day Cora would have just waterbended the evil out of him [Music] foreign nope no longer do spirits need a specific reason or a motivation to be upset nor do they need a unique response to the situation and no longer do you need to understand their pain and ameliorate it to help them instead you can just clearly identify them as a dark corrupted spirit and then water bend some swirlies around them to make them go take a nap who needs compassion and an honest effort to bridge divides when you can instead hit the purify button perhaps the worst example of the show's need to force Spirits into a moral framework is the classic good and evil Duo rava and vatu AKA God Kites and Satan kite he is the force of darkness and chaos I am the force of light and peace aesthetically they do resemble the yin and yang symbol AS something tween law already fulfilled Grumble Grumble but philosophically they are a complete misunderstanding of the concept yin and yang are not good in evil they are the relation between two opposing forces which exist in perpetuity Order and Chaos masculine and feminine passive and active the symbol is meant to represent how the two constantly flow around one another Always harmoniously coexisting In fact when one overpowers the other the imbalance always causes problems too much Yin is as bad as too much Yong rava and vatsu by stark contrast do not coexist harmoniously instead of dancing around each other they battle constantly for control since the beginning of time we have battled over the fate of this world one always seeks to dominate the other that's about as far away from yin and yang as you can get and yes rava or in this case Yin having dominance is as much a bad thing as vatu being loose but instead rava is portrayed as light and good meaning we're supposed to want her to overpower vatu's darkness in evil it is a projection of Western moral Frameworks on a completely amoral concept Legend of Korra is not alone here most western media takes this framework of Good and Evil for granted given it's the system that we have all lived in and had ingrained in us since birth but what makes it sting especially is how it completely fails the amoral spectacle of the original series not to mention I'm just annoyed by once again the lip service to balance he cannot destroy light any destroy Darkness one cannot exist without the other but then the goal is not to have Raven vatu coexisting in the Avatar in harmony which would actually embody the concept of Yin and Yang instead the goal is to lock Yang inside of a tree for 10 000 years because apparently Yong is Satan this is your prison now and I will close the portal so no human was you Yin dominates the world and apparently that imbalance is a good thing because the right side won what cannot exist without the other this robs the world of the rich complexity and mystery of spirits not to mention it also takes away the complexity of Unilock as an antagonist Legend of Korra loves to paint its villains as always having a point but just going too far in their Ambitions the problem was those guys were totally out of bounds and they took their ideologies too far and in udalog's case it's well it's actually kind of hard to decipher he claims to want to give the world back to the spirits and return to a world which had more reverence for them you think what Avatar one did was good driving almost all the spirits from this world in the original series that would have likely made him want to disrupt industrialization but again Legend of Korra doesn't really seem interested in the connections between spirituality industrialization modernity and colonization so we're kind of already starting on very shaky ground this is made worse by the fact that unalak himself is written as a deceitful manipulative character who seems to derive pleasure in tormenting his enemies and even disregards the well-being of his own children you're no brother of mine you betrayed me you had me banished yes I did any kind of virtue or goal that he claims to have for the spirits doesn't come across as sincere but as a facade for his evil Ambitions and they took their ideology he didn't go too far he was just a liar he's a cartoonish villain Amplified by his loyalty to Satan kite ten thousand years of Darkness begins there are no evil spirits because vatu is depicted as inherently evil and must be stopped it makes any attempt to liberate him come across as evil for the sake of evil it robs the story of any Nuance devolving it into a conflict not about the clashing motivations of characters and their opposing values but the literal forces of Good and Evil shooting light and dark energy beams at each other it's not like the evil of human characters like sozin azulon and ozai each of them were imperialist tyrants with their own motivations sozin deluded himself into wanting to spread his idea of prosperity and was partially driven by Spite towards Roku we should share this Prosperity with the rest of the world in our hands as the most successful Empire in history it's time we expanded it azulon from what we've seen appeared largely cold and detached focused solely on expanding the Empire from a very dispassionate View and ozai was a cruel sadistic bastard fueled by ego the through line for all of them was the Fire Nation ethos of self-righteous superiority a belief that might makes right you're weak just like the rest of your people they did not deserve to exist in this world in my world and even a desire to conquer the natural world why else would they oppose the Avatar and the spirits themselves though they are clearly Evil Within a moral framework there's still a reason for their evil that they justify in their heads unalak and vatsu by comparison are just evil for Evil's sake they're not fueled by human desires or delusions of grandeur or at least vatu definitely isn't and his very involvement in existence Cloud any insight into unalak's goal and even when the spirit portals are opened the idea of spirits coexisting with humans is never really explored sufficiently we don't see people become more spiritually developed in tune with the natural world instead we get commercialized vines that we organize tour groups or around and also new Airbenders literally nothing even changed aside from having a few ghosties floating around people don't become more appreciative or respectful towards the natural world they don't become more in tune with themselves or spiritually balanced reconnecting with the elements and their philosophies instead just going about their industrialized modernized lives is huge but with a greenwashed filter oh also I just want to say that I hate the introduction of literal Spirit portals this literalization takes away from any metaphorical strength of the spirits instead making them seem like ordinary creatures who happen to be From Another Dimension it misses the understanding of spirits from a narrative perspective as an extension of the natural world it feels less like an attempt to build upon the metaphors of spirits and more like the creators wanted to take away the mystery factor of spirits for the sake of substituting story and theme with lore for Laura's sake lore is not a story you can communicate lore as story Lord of the Rings style but lore in and of itself is not a story even if you can put it on a goddamn wiki page Legend of Korra really dropped the ball when it comes to spirituality it had every chance to interrogate the fraught relationship between spirituality and an Ever modernizing World exploring the Nuance of how a world scarred by War and colonization could spiritually heal what we got instead was a basic run-of-the-mill good versus evil story projected onto the world of Avatar losing everything that made both spirits and the concept of spirituality in the original series so compelling and mature anyhow if you enjoyed this video and would like to see more content like this from me then you can subscribe and ring the bell for notifications because YouTube hates creators if you would like to support me and the channel further then you can pledge your support over on patreon and check out my urban fantasy novel dissonaribus From the Ashes wherever books are sold I'm the universe War and the era of rather's show [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Unicorn of War - Thomas Vaccaro

Views: 429,034

Keywords: atla, avatar, korra, writing, spirits, raava, vaatu, wan, beginnings, koh, face stealer, wan shi tong, hei bai, painted lady, iroh, moon spirit, ocean spirit

Id: 5PRWBm6HDjU

Length: 25min 50sec (1550 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 27 2023