While set within the same world as Avatar: the Last Airbender, the Legend of Korra changes up the overall structure. Aang's entire journey is about confronting the Fire Nation and stopping their genocidal, imperial conquest, and while the roles in that fight (particularly the role that Zuko, who is introduced as the show's primary villain, plays) shift, and the focus of each season is on a different part of the world (with plenty of stand-alone episodes as well, something Korra can't really afford with its shorter seasons) it's still ultimately building to that fight with Firelord Ozai - a character who's less of a person than an embodiment of that will to power that he and his father and grandfather (maybe great-grandfather? I can't recall how many generations back Sozin was) possessed that has made a fascistic conqueror out of a nation that, in other ages, had been just another facet of the elemental quadrarchy that defined this world.
Korra, structurally, is a lot more like another classic show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, though despite the fact that Korra is probably supposed to be around Buffy's age, and the younger targeted audience means there's no explicit talk of sex (and definitely less graphic violence) in a lot of ways, Korra's stories feel a bit more like that of a young adult.
But structurally, Korra ditches the single building conflict for a series of one-season villains, whose plots are wrapped up by the end of the season - though the repercussions of those plots are certainly still felt in later seasons.
I've just watched seasons two and three. As with ATLA (and the more recent spiritual successor, set in a different world but with a similar tone and storytelling style and much of the same creative team, the Dragon Prince,) the seasons are organized by "book," with season two as "Spirits" and three as "Change." (If I recall correctly, season one is "Air," which does complete the cycle that the original series started with, though Air is a more important element in season three, which we'll get to.)
Let's get into it, spoilers abound:
Season two, spirits, delves deep into the spiritual aspect of the setting. While the first season touched on the 20th Century radical egalitarian movement, making Amon as part cult-leader, but also part communist revolutionary, the villain of season two is a little less obvious to place, given that his concerns are of a deeply mystical, magical nature.
Unalaq, Korra's uncle and the chieftain of the Northern Water Tribe, comes to the south and begins appearing as a sort of religious traditionalist. There's certainly something to be said about the dangerous rise of religious extremism during the 20th century - between the rise of the Religious Right in the US to the dangers of Jihadism, and the way that religiosity often plays a role in the kind of "traditionalism" that is often mixed in with nationalism, and by extension, fascism - to the exclusion of those who don't conform to these identities, it's a less specifically 20th century thing. Really, the Fire Nation in the original show bears more of a resemblance to the fascist movement of the first half of the 20th Century, which seems to be what Legend of Korra is focused more on referencing.
Of course, much as Amon turns out to be faking his lack of privilege, actually being a rather adept waterbender (his mask only there to provide anonymity and mystique,) Unalaq is far from the traditionally spiritual practitioner, as we discover that he worships essentially the world's version of the devil (or maybe more accurately a kind of Manichean "God of Darkness,") and his ultimate plot is to merge with this being, Vaatu, to become a Dark Avatar.
It's in this season that we learn how the Avatar Cycle began, and that the whole process involves the fusion of human spirits with the spirit of Light, Raava.
The dense, cosmic nature of what happens here, which ultimately winds up pitting a kind of ultimate battle between avatars - feels like it could be a series finale, though the very mysticism of it I think has left a lot of viewers feeling it's a weaker season than the others.
This is always a tricky thing in fantasy stories, actually. You need that mystical, spiritual, primordial feeling to the conflicts in order for the stakes to feel sufficiently high, but when you get too heady, you run the risk of alienating a viewer who is having trouble keeping up with the invented mythology you've created.
Often, good fantasy still winds up having grounded climaxes, with fights that boil down to classic battles or even just wrestling for possession of a ring inside a volcano, and I think that often works because we understand those on a human level - you just make the two sides in this normal fight representatives of larger, philosophical positions.
And while Korra and Unalaq's fight is ultimately that, there's enough crazy stuff going on that you just kind of have to let it wash over you, which does sort of make the fight less satisfying than one in which every move and every reversal feels significant.
What is kind of sad is that, when the first season ends with Korra capable of accessing Aang, Roku, Kyoshi, and all the other past Avatars, that rug is pulled away in this season's finale. While my sense is that it's not that these people have ceased to exist (I've never been totally clear on whether past avatars have their own, separate souls, or if Korra literally is all of them,) but even Aang persists as some kind in some kind of spirit form - as we've seen Uncle Iroh was able to do - Korra's connection to him is fundamentally severed. Raava, while beaten, can't be permanently destroyed, and so Korra is still the avatar, with all her multi-bending powers and such, but without any past selves to give her advice.
It's sad, though it's not as if Legend of Korra is shy about making reference to the original series, which I actually kind of appreciate (though it's not a scripted show, exactly, I'm comparing it with campaign two of Critical Role, in which they've been careful to limit references to the original campaign, though it does make those moments of crossover pretty exciting.)
I do find myself wondering, though, if there's some potential for a reincarnation cycle for the Dark Avatar as well. And this is just making me think of Carnivale - which weirdly allowed its avatars to overlap, generationally, but also had a "dark" avatar who didn't want to do evil and so tried to run away from his role in the cosmic conflict.
The upshot of season two, though, is that things end with Korra changing things - allowing the physical and spirit worlds to remain connected.
Immediately, in season three, we get some consequences - both good and bad. The good is that airbenders start popping up all over the world - people who previously had no bending ability find themselves controlling an element that for the past 170 years or so has been the exclusive domain of Aang and his descendants. Among those is his son Bumi, who is an awesome if ridiculous person in the first place, and whose lack of airbending ability had been a source of tension with his dad (I have so much respect for this show's decision to let Aang not be the perfect father - which we're also going to see with Toph's mothering skills.) Excited over the prospect of reviving a culture that was solely perpetuated by a single family, Tenzin and Korra start searching the world for airbenders to rebuild that culture.
The emergence of the spirits into the physical world (though we obviously saw some of them before) has transformed things, and not always in a welcome way, such as the fact that the weird vines that Unalaq unleashed on Republic City don't seem to be willing to leave.
The bigger problem, though, is actually one of the newest airbenders.
We're introduced to Zaheer, played by Henry Rollins of all people (which is kind of cool, though I'm sympathetic to those who found his performance a little underwhelming,) in a mountaintop prison operated by the White Lotus, which has become a far more active and open organization since ATLA. Using his new airbending powers, he breaks free, and then proceeds to break out other powerful benders - an earthbender who can turn stone into lava, an armless waterbender who uses water to form powerful, tentacle-like appendages (complete with razor-sharp ice-blades when she needs them) and a firebender who, like Explodey Guy, has a third-eye tattoo that allows her to shoot combustion blasts.
Zaheer is a fantastic villain, because he seems to genuinely think he's doing the right thing. His goals are not selfish. He is just a profoundly radical anarchist. He reveals eventually that he's a member of the Red Lotus, an off-shoot of the White Lotus who believed that the original organization had become tyrannical by serving the Avatar openly. In fact, he believes that the world needs to be free, and by free, he means eliminating any government, any people with political power, and any real authority.
And the ultimate expression of that desire is to get rid of the Avatar. He even reveals that Unalaq was part of their organization, but rather than simply releasing Vaatu to destroy the Avatar, Unalaq was selfish and sought to become a twisted version of the Avatar himself.
Given how few people have access to it, we've really only seen Airbending as a positive practice. The Air Nomads as a culture were pacifistic and monastic, and seemed to be no threat to anyone except that after Roku died, Aang was destined to be born among them. So it's actually really cool to see Zaheer as an evil airbender. As an element, air of course lacks the weight of the others, but Zaheer demonstrates how powerful and terrifying it can be - such as when he uses airbending to suck the air out of a person's lungs.
Like Amon, Zaheer's methods are ultimately enough to make it clear he's a Bad Guy, but even if his campaign is wrong, the grievances that he fights to correct aren't entirely without basis. We see that the President of the United Republic of Nations seems like a kind of "pass the buck" sort of leader, and the Earth Queen is a decadent, oppressive tyrant. Zuko, who appears to have retired as Firelord and given the position to his daughter, surely seems to have created a healthy and free nation, but there is, you know, a history of problems there.
It's really made clear, though, when Zaheer goes after the recently re-born Air Nomads (admittedly as a ploy to capture Korra) that Zaheer's belief - that all nations and order are inherently wrong - doesn't actually take into account conflicting notions, such as the hospitality and open arms with which he's welcomed at Air Temple Isle, passing himself off as just another guy who suddenly developed airbending. He's a zealot who can't be talked into even compromising his position.
Naturally, in 2020, I'm sort of skeptical about elements of the show. The degree to which the police in the US seem to be enemies, rather than enforcers, of the rule of law has made me question their portrayal in media, especially that aimed at kids.
Frankly, I think there's a lot to be said about the future of police portrayal in media, not to mention the actual implementation of policing (I doubt we'll have true police abolition, though I hope we'll scale back armed police in favor of other conflict-resolution services that aren't oriented around armed confrontations) and given that the purpose of police, as we're taught culturally, is to enforce the laws that keep us safe, it makes sense for them to often be the good guys.
Mako and Lin Beifong are cops the way cops are supposed to work (well, somewhat - as characters on a show they're a lot more impulsive than you'd want your cops to be) in that they identify, investigate, and stop people who seek to harm regular citizens. But it does strike me that a lot of superhero stories are about upholding a status quo - the villains are usually the ones who want to shake things up.
Defenders of the status quo are good guys when it's a good status quo. Of course, there are libraries written about alternate interpretations of famous superheroes - like whether Batman actually wants to make Gotham any better, or if he just wants to fight.
The Avatar in this world is, essentially, a kind of superhero, though it's also a world in which superpowers are pretty common - the Avatar just get a bigger suite of powers than other people. Still, while Aang's story felt a bit more like a fantasy epic, stopping the grand invasion by an oppressive legion, Korra's is structurally more like a superhero's, trying to restore order to a world that is in the process of healing from that devastating war of the previous generation.
It's sad to think that I've just got one more season of this.
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