http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UnintentionallyUnsympathetic/TheLegendOfKorra
Sometimes characters in The Legend of Korra can be
difficult to sympathize with.
You just gotta deal with it.
- Mako remains one of the most divisive characters in the series because of the show's Romantic Plot Tumor. He spends the first season in a Love Triangle between himself, Korra, and Asami, and while things often don't work out for him, fans often wonder if his rather stupid behavior toward one or the other is the reason for it. His problems in this area are often seen as being his own fault, which is eventually lampshaded in Season 4 and self-acknowledged in the "Turf Wars" comic.
Mako: Well, me and Asami were never officially back together.
Tu: Really? That again? Ya' know, it seems like you're so afraid to disappoint anyone, that you end up disappointing everyone.
- Suyin Beifong:
- A number of fans never warmed up to, upon being introduced in season 3. Due to her rather unapologetic attitude about her criminal past, which included disfiguring her half-sister Lin and getting away with it, a number of fans saw Suyin as a smug Karma Houdini instead of the cool, complex older lady that the show's writers obviously wanted them to see her as being, and for some, her less than sincere apology to Lin at the end of "Old Wounds" came off as unintentionally funny.
- This worsened in Season 4, where it's rather sharply debated if Suyin's decision not to get involved with reuniting the Earth Kingdom was a principled attempt to not force her ideals on others or selfishly abandoning everyone outside her city to the mercy of bandits and warlords and refusing to lift a finger to help the barely-trained Airbenders doing their best to assist the situation. The season's Big Bad Kuvira can have her ascendancy at least partially blamed on Suyin's Bystander Syndrome, although her exact culpability is a very divisive point among fans. Many feel like her cold rejection of Kuvira's apology at the end of the show also reflected badly on the character, considering how she immediately forgave her biological son, who was Kuvira's right-hand man. Considering that the same episode revealed that Kuvira's downward spiral was in part due to lingering abandonment issues from her birth family casting her out as a child, and that she had came to view Suyin as a surrogate mother since then, it makes Suyin come across disowning an adopted daughter, something Kuvira later directly calls her out on in the comic.
- Bataar Jr. helped Kuvira take over the Earth Kingdom and was more than happy to disown his family and treat them like stupid children to get what he wanted, yet we're supposed to feel bad for him after Kuvira attempts to sacrifice him to kill her enemies, after which he shows no remorse for his actions, only bemoaning how Kuvira didn't love him as much as he thought. Suyin forgives him despite the fact that he's equally guilty of terrible crimes and only defected from Kuvira when he realized that while Kuvira may love him, she loves her vision for an Earth Empire more. At best, he was a jerk, and at worst he's shown to be a Dirty Coward. Suyin being so quick to forgive him while being a petty bully towards a spiritually broken and genuinely regretful Kuvira reflects badly on her as well. That the audience never really got to know Bataar Jr. in season three certainly doesn't help him his case.
- Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that grumpy old granny Toph Beifong also has some of this going for her. We're supposed to feel bad for her when she and Lin are finally together again for the first time in thirty years and things don't exactly go smoothly. Although Toph does admit she was a bad mother and says she's proud of Lin, it does not change the fact that Toph still acts like a nasty, arrogant old woman who is generally disrespectful towards people because she thinks it's funny. And it is still her fault that the estrangement happened in the first place due to her insensitive hypocrisy.
- The spirits:
- Much of the spirits of the Spirit World also become this in "Operation Beifong", refusing to ally themselves with Korra to protect Republic City from Kuvira's super weapon because they don't want to involve themselves in humans' wars. From how it's pointed out that Korra is attempting to exploit the spirits for human purposes just like Kuvira has been, we're clearly meant to see their point, but seeing as we were told that humans and spirits and their respective worlds are now "harmoniously co-existing" and thus are now expected to help one another in their lives, the spirits instead come off as self-centered jerks who think little of the humans they co-exist with and feel they're not worth risking their necks for under any circumstance. After having moved into Republic City and asserted themselves by converting a large swath of the city into a Spirit Wild, which drove tons of people out of their homes, they in turn couldn't be bothered to lift a finger to help save the people who moved over to give them their newfound home — When the fighting was over, however, they skanked right back in like nothing happened making them seem less like "co-existing in harmony" and more akin to the parasitic kind of relationship a bunch of rats living on a ship have with the sailors who run it.
- This is not helped by the fact that first case of spirits and humans co-existing boiled down to spirits, largely hostile and racist, ruling the world while humans were forced into exile on the Lion-Turtles. And when humans tried to find a place for themselves outside the Lion-Turtles, the spirits almost immediately attacked them for daring to cut down trees and defend themselves. The attempted grey conflict fails since one side acts more like a xenophobic invading empire driving the other to near extinction. Even the supposedly "good" spirit of order Raava at first cares little for human life.
- Tenzin:
- He regularly wanders into this territory. While he is positioned as the voice of reason, his actual views are often extremely regressive and seem to favor a non-egalitarian status quo; even when the audience knows the other side of the argument is a Well-Intentioned Extremist being set up to be a season's Big Bad, Tenzin has a tendency to reject their valid complaints for the wrong reasons well before any direct evidence of their villainy comes to light.
- There's also his and Korra's father's keeping Korra confined to her training camp and misleading her into thinking it was Avatar Aang's wish, only admitting the truth when called out on it. It's only the next season when they seemingly retcon in a reason; she was targeted by a kidnapping attempt. That Korra's quick enough to accept that reason makes it more questionable why they didn't tell her sooner, before it caused problems.
- Kya. While Aang was wrong to exhibit Parental Favouritism towards Tenzin at her expense, and the extent to which she was a Big Sister Bully is never clearly shown, hearing her joke about beating Tenzin up when they were children, and him being afraid of her in the present day, does not win her sympathy points.
- And then there's Varrick. We're supposed to feel sorry for him as he suffers all manner of angst over Kuvira taking his inventions and uses them for military purposes and he is led to believe that Zhu Li has betrayed him in favor of Kuvira, but even with Character Development Varrick remains incredibly vain and narcissistic, and he never did pay for his crimes in season two, and then he marries Zhu Li, a woman he mistreated for years and this is treated as a happy ending that the other characters cheer for. Seriously, how much sympathy does Varrick really deserve?
