The Legend of Korra

I am perfectly alright with Meelo the meme lord, but Ikki never seemed to actually amount to anything at all. Which is a shame, because she's basically the Bumi of her siblings.

I issue I take with jinora is her love interest kai who the writer insist in devolping.....only for hi, being out of focus in the last season.

It show a problem with the show to have a new threat each new season, it never really build well.

I suppose its possible that the writers saw that Kai wasn't a big hit with the audience and scaled down his importance.

It did seem like they had medium plans for the dude with how much screentime they gave him.

Actually, Aang is VERY obviously more skilled in waterbending than Katara, picking up techniques much faster than her. That episode even states that each Avatar has the combined skill of ALL previous Avatars behind him or her. It is pretty clear that the Avatar is supposed to be unparalleled in bending all elements.

I think the confusion comes from seeing the Avatars learning those elements for the first time. A fully trained Avatar should, by definition, be stronger than any other Bender, including Toph and Katara.

Quite a bit of LOK, especially on the character side, seems a result of Writing by the Seat of Your Pants.

Maybe Aang pulled ahead of Katara for a bit while both were still in training, but Katara was the single best waterbender in the world by the time The Last Airbender ended. She was comparable to Toph in terms of basically being the god of her own element.

Its analogous to a person who knows all the kicks versus a person who does the same kick a thousand times.

The Avatar is going to have lifetimes of experience but they're still going to split their efforts between four different movesets. Which is four times as many options to have to consider in a given situation.

I mean that's kind of obvious I think. The only seasons of Korra that were ordered together were 3 and 4. Every season but 3 was written with the idea that it could be the end of the series.

Edited by Kostya on Mar 3rd 2019 at 9:49:32 AM

Remember, Pakku's instruction before breaking away from the Gaang was that Katara was Aang's teacher, not the other way around.

Also, Aang started Waterbending when he was already a declared Master of Airbending; the cycle of elements was explicitly explained as building upon one another.

Edited by MEKristian on Mar 3rd 2019 at 12:38:03 PM

Also, the Avatar doesn't have access to all the knowledge and training of the previous Avatars unless they're in the Avatar state. That's why it's so powerful; in a world where training pretty directly equals power, the Avatar can cheat the system and access thousands of years of training.

Yeah, the Avatar State is an exception, it should be far more powerful than anyone else, and it should be marginally more powerful with each new Avatar. The Avatar outside the Avatar State is just a person who can bend all the elements and communicate with the Spirit World and talk to their past lives for advice. Aside from the past lives thing, all of which have been individual abilities that other people have shown to possess.

The Avatar's stregth is in being a Jack of All Trades, and they need the Avatar State to be Master of All.

Not quite. Later in the same episode she gets captured by the air bison poachers. However, when she and Tenzin make up at the end of the episode, Tenzin concedes that he should consider making her an airbending master and giving her the tatoos — which he then does at the end of the season — which makes it seem like we're meant to agree with her earlier demands.

Also for the record Jinora never went within a mile of showing the airbending chops Tenzin had.

She did however, single-handedly incapacitate Dark Avatar Unalaq during the final battle.

To paraphrase Sokka: that's Avatar stuff, doesn't count.

Jinora isn't the avatar. She is however, a supersaturated character who gets too much attention due to a plot-point that was sort of just barfed into the story

Edited by DreamScrape on Mar 5th 2019 at 12:43:33 PM

Almost forgot there was an LOK thread. So I posted this in the ATLA thread and I'll post it here for good measure.

I want to organize a troper/group rewatch of A:TLA and possibly LOK for funsies. To quote my own post on the matter, here's how I see it:

• we aim for next month
• we start May 1st on Wednesday to the following Wednesday, May 8th, and so on
• we watch a book/season for that week and post our thoughts/hindsight impressions
• we can change the date we start and end each season
• we don't need to set a time so long as it's open enough for everyone to have enough time to rewatch on Netflix

I figure if we started in May and finished 1 Book/Season per week we should be done with TLA by Wed, May 22. If there's enough interest we can also do LOK, but for now I'd just be worried about setting a date/generating interest for TLA. If there's no disagreement we could just do LOK on May 22-3 right after finishing TLA.

PM or post here, if interested, whichever.

One book a week is a bit too much in my opinion if you want broad appeal.

Might want to change it to something like 3 episodes a week.

Frankly, I'm not going to be binging ANY shows via entire season blocks in the foreseeable future, if only because I have work and seasons are long.

Despite subscribing to the idea of rewatching the original show on the other show's forum, I have to agree that one season per week is impossible for the average adult.

Oh. (Ha-ha, being an undergrad with undergrad availability is awesome!) Well let's widen the net then.

2-3 episodes a week starting with Book 1 of TLA starting in May. Or how about just an episode a week to be easier, like we're actually rewatching it syndicated.

I have just finished Turf Wars. What did everyone else think?

I think they made a reasonable effort to introduce gay culture to the Avatarverse, though they did not actually DO much of anything with it. Reactions to Korrasami varied from unquestioning acceptance to mild hesitance. No drama was had whatsoever, which is great for the characters, but a bit of a missed opportunity for dramatic potential. I had hoped that at least ONE main character would have had a problem with it so we could have some friction and character growth.

It is all very boring from a dramatic perspective, I'm afraid. I guess they were unwilling to give a main character such a negative trait. The writers are being far too nice to these characters, and the result is that there is very little actual character work in this arc. There is a brief moment where Korra seems to have doubts, but the story waltzes right past that moment and never really resolves it. It just stops being an issue shortly after.

Now don't get me wrong, this level of acceptance would be great in real life. It just doesn't make for great drama. People getting along perfectly and living happy lives just doesn't make for a compelling story.

The actual plot is fine. A fun villain, though a little flat in characterization. He will likely return, however, so there is still opportunity for that. The stakes kinda deflate in the third act, though. The villains roll in their army into town... and just park it in one neighbourhood, twiddling their thumbs while the airship is prepared with poison gas. But don't they already HAVE their big gun to enforce their demands with that army? It is not clear why that poison gas was neccesary, other than providing a setpiece for the climax.

I enjoyed this story overall, but it also leaves me a little dissapointed, since we see very little actual character work.

I'm fine with some fictional settings never making anything dramatic about race or sexual orientation. Especially if they weren't the best at it in the first place, then decided to call it quits when just taking people as is works out better for the setting they're writing in.

I don't care about the comics, but I did want to respond to the meat of your post. There's other ways to create the tension one wants from allies and friends.

It felt to me that they wanted to address how the setting stands on lgbt things without making it the plot

They needed to address it to follow up on Korra and Asami going off together. But to go too deeply into things would risk an incohesive plot

It was broad strokes worldbuilding

It's not bad, it's just a missed opportunity to tell the sort of story that actual gay people could relate to.

Representation is about more than gay people being present. It is also about representing the situations they go through, including their struggles with acceptance from friends and family. And these kinds of stories need to be told, too, not just for the LGBT community, but also to raise visibility amongst heterosexual readers.

Taking the easy way out effectively lowers the visibility of the gay community and their struggles. It is staying inside the writer's and viewer's comfort zone, in a way. But at least they left an opening by not unilaterally declaring ALL people in the Avatarverse unquestioningly accepting of gay people.

And at least we got a proper kiss at the end, and a declaration of love. I didn't even realize that tension was hanging over this story until it happened.