The Legend of Korra

I remember reading this good equalist!Asami/Korra fanfic called Unstable Equilibrium and right before I was gonna make a page for the writer took it off-line. I didn't even get to finish it.

I remember there being a lot of fanfics pre-finale. The fandom isn't as active as ATLA's but there always seemed to be a steady stream. I didn't notice any change in fanfic quantity, instead I just noticed that Korrasami got a lot more popular. Pretty much every fanfic is Korra/Asami.

This post made me curious enough to try to find out why the fic was deleted (I also read it and remember liking it). Turns out the author became a Southern Baptist and deleted all of her fics dealing with same-sex relationships.

Edited by TheMountainKing on Nov 30th 2018 at 10:34:14 AM

Well, that's a hell of a turn-around.

It's actually kind of weird. She still makes posts decrying homophobia and says she supports the LGBTQ community, but she also believes marriage can only be between a man and a woman and that sex outside of marriage is "a grave sin", so she deleted the fic for "not reflecting [her] values".

Edited by TheMountainKing on Nov 30th 2018 at 10:33:46 AM

Well, consistent if nothing else.

I shouldn't have laughed so hard reading that.

That's humanity for you. We fine plenty of ways to support hypocritical views.

But I mean... not being a religious person it's just hard to see myself waking up tomorrow going, "I've written a story about a same-sex couple... but today I feel it speaks against my religion."

Like she had to be going through some kind of crisis of faith, right? Maybe the Korrasami fics were a way to vent some kind of existential angst. She wasn't sitting on these stories for months/years and then suddenly woke up to the idea that "this is wrong." There was a process here. I have to take several deep breaths before I delete a paragraph in a draft outline, let alone an entire I might have spent months working on.

I guess people are complicated.

I just hope I don't one day wake up feeling that gluten is a sin.

Edited by Soble on Dec 1st 2018 at 9:04:45 AM

When your small intestine starts violently rejecting the substance, then we can have a serious talk about gluten's sinfulness.

Gluten has become a joke because some idiot turned it into a health craze, but it's definitely a very real problem for people. What's next, making fun of people for being allergic to peanuts?

My point was I hope I don't wake up and have a life-altering epiphany about something that presumably would have had prior build-up or warning signs. No offense intended if that was worded poorly.

I do have a peanut allergy and I want to gut whatever part of my DNA decided that causing my throat to close up on contact with tree nuts was acceptable. Making fun of the self-destructive nature of human biology to me is better than being sensitive about it.

That kind of happens already. In fiction, at least, kids with peanut allergies are Acceptable Hard Luck Targets.

...Out of all the reasons Unstable Equilibrium was deleted, that was not something that came to mind. I just assumed the writer didn't like the quality of the fic. It's certainly a fascinating reason nevertheless.

Peanut allergies are definitely no joke though. Especially if they are severe enough that you can end up choking to death from being in the same room as peanuts (it's the peanut dust).

Speaking as someone who has a much milder allergy to cats (I won't die from being in the same building as a cat but I still feel like hell if I find myself in a place a cat calls home), I sympathize.

I know how you feel. I like cats, but I'm quite allergic to them. :( And I keep falling in love with women who have them. ^_^;;

I have three cats of my own, and I love them a ton (even though one of them is a paranoid wreck who thinks that everyone is a danger almost all the time). I also have cat allergies to fur and pelt, though it's very mild.

Edited by PushoverMediaCritic on Dec 3rd 2018 at 1:27:22 PM

I'm allergic to cats but I never found out to what level. I've always thought it was a mildly severe allergy but I've never been near a cat (and have only seen them a few times in real life), so I wouldn't know. I'm also allergic to other animals but that seems to only be to "They make me itch and/or sniffle sometimes". I hate cats (but I want to foster one just to see why people like them), however dogs are another story... Allergies are the worst, but luckily not all allergies are terribly dangerous.

All this talk about allergies makes me think about how animal allergies work in the Avatar-verse with all the mix-and-match animals. I think they have normal cats. I remember a relatively normal-looking cat in the Bumi episode from ATLA.

I wonder if the spirits might have something to do with all the mix-and-match animals. I remember in the episode about Wan's origins they showed one guy who'd been made part-tree by the spirits.

Makes you wonder how exactly King Kuei's pet bear ended up full bear and not a mix-and-match. Was the bear somehow a pedigree bear? Or did it just get the right combination of genes?

Maybe normal animals existed once but have been brought to extinction by the more adaptable mix-and-match animals?

• Can the Avatar be evil?
• Did the clarification on the Avatar's origins ruin things?

Edited by Soble on Dec 16th 2018 at 6:09:08 AM

Each Avatar is a different person, so yeah. Probably. They're reincarnations but the show leans very heavily into nurture over nature, with each Avatar having a distinctly different identity, personality, and even different moral values and ideas of what is right and wrong.

The ability to commune with one's past lives makes it unlikely for a wholly evil Avatar to ever come about, mind you. You'd basically be flipping the bird to all of them. An antagonistic Avatar is more reasonably achievable when the Avatar's values conflict with the protagonists', as we saw in "The Promise".

But there's still nothing that necessarily prohibits an incarnation of the Avatar from being a right bastard. It's within the realm of possibility, but incredibly unlikely. Still, given enough incarnations, it might happen once or twice. Flip a coin an infinite number of times and it'll land on edge at least once.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Dec 16th 2018 at 6:55:00 AM

An Avatar rejecting their past lives' influence, ignoring them entirely or, post-Korra, them not being there in the first place, leaves a lot of room for an evil Avatar, for various values of "evil". And it's not like Avatars don't cock up massively on their own, or can have very skewed values — damn near every named Avatar has had one or more huge failures.

I'd love to see an evil Avatar incarnation. They could do it in Knight Templar form, where they think they're the ones who need to bring balance to the world and are completely blind to the fact that they themselves are upsetting that balance.

Korra herself is a good example of, if not exactly an evil Avatar, one with great potential to do evil. I remember bringing up on previous occasions direct examples of her decisions in Season 2 that would have led to catastrophic consequences for a great many people had chance or the actions of others not prevented her from succeeding. Most notable among these is Korra's attempt to start a war between the United Republic and the Northern Water Tribe, which would have led to countless deaths had Raiko not put a stop to her plans.

& From what we see over the course of both series, it takes active and concerted effort on the part of an Avatar to seek out their previous incarnations to benefit from their accumulated wisdom. It's far from an automatic process, requiring habits of meditation and mindfulness that an "evil" Avatar might simply never have ended up cultivating. Depending on their values or temperament, they might even choose to actively abjure the advice of previous Avatars, wielding the power inherent to being able to bend all 4 elements like some kind of divine inheritance instead of an immense cosmic responsibility. Indeed, this is an attitude we see in Korra, and it's only her ingenuousness and overall good-natured heart that prevents it from manifesting in all sorts of incredibly ugly ways.