owldee

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teeny tiny piece of new content from avatar: seven havens dropped at sdcc

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happy 10 years korrasami <3

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i can lie and say it’s a queue even if i’m online, ok?

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Happy 10 year anniversary to Korrasami! It felt only appropriate to do a redraw of the art I originally did immediately after the finale.

I'm not sure if folks coming up in today's media climate can fully understand the impact of this moment. Queer rep in shows aimed at adults was rare enough, and my expectation for it here was nill. I didn't think the writing supported Makorra as endgame, but the best case scenario I could imagine was that Korra ended the series single, and I would have been happy with that.

Instead, every flirtatious moment that I had convinced myself was accidental on the part of the writers was validated. It wasn't wishful thinking, it wasn't me watching the show through queer goggles, it was real and intentional and I felt seen. This absolute longshot thing was acknowledged as possible.

Whatever its flaws and however many other queer stories we get, I don't think anything else will ever hit me the same way.

[Image Description: A digital painting of Korra and Asami, shown from the chest up in their formal wear as seen in the finale episode. Korra sits nearer to the viewer, but her face is turned towards Asami so we see only the back of her head. Asami is leaning in to kiss her, her face partly obscured, though we can see her eyes are closed. The second image shows the same concept, but drawn 10 years prior. /end ID]

[owldee]

Jeremy Zuckerman deconstructing the final musical cue for The Legend of Korra [x]

     To me, this show is really about finding yourself. I knew what I wanted to do with it because I’d wanted to develop the end credits for the whole series. That’s my favorite cue in the whole series - such a simple little thing. When Korra started, I was emotionally going through some stuff. Both my parents had died. My dad had died suddenly in the middle of Avatar and my mom died suddenly right before Korra and I was just like, fuck this man. I’m just laying my emotions out a little bit. And it made sense to me because Korra was a teenager and teenagers go though a lot of stuff emotionally. All along I’d been looking for an opportunity to extend that end credits and I never could find one until that last scene, so when I watched that last act and I knew it’d work definitely, I was so happy. I would get spotty notes, which tell me where there needs to be music. The final episode spotty notes: Transition to score for this last sequence. They will hold hands and turn to each other in the end, so we’d like to have a more romantic feel for this last sequence to support the intention that these lovely ladies are going to get together. I was totally surprised. I couldn’t sleep – I was so happy.      You start with this pitch percussion. Then we have these strings in the background that are just doing these really simple long notes. I wanted to keep it pretty minimal so we had room to grow. Also, it’s a very sorta peaceful moment, you know, they’re looking across the water and you realize they’ve really come a long way together and I just wanted to reflect that a bit. The end credits melody starts with the zhonghu and then it goes out of the range of the zhonghu, so erhu takes over. Erhu is a two string Chinese instrument. There are no frets or anything, so it’s extremely vocal with a lot of sliding into notes and sliding around and it’s extremely lyrical. That arpeggio part is a kalimba and for the end credits it’s only kalimba, but for this I sweetened it with some pegasus. Pegasus is a pitch percussion instrument with mallets, and then there’s the glockenspiel. It’s really simple, but together it sounds layered. And the strings now are playing the melody instead of zhonghu. I’m just using a trio: violin, viola, and cello. So here Asami shows up, and there’s things called shippers, which is a thing I had never known about until way into this show. And it’s these tweens and adults of all ages that vie for these different relationships and characters getting together. There were people who wanted Korra and Asami to get together, and so when Asami shows up it’s this moment for all these fans and it’s clearly a romantic moment. The Chinese instruments left for a little moment to give us some room and now it comes back with the end credits melody and it’s sorta wrapping up here to the last build. Korra and Asami are talking about how maybe they should go away together - a kid’s show showing a bisexual relationship and I wanted the music to reflect that this is a historic moment.      One of the first things I wrote in the series – the Avatar series – became a really important simple little theme. I kind of wanted that to come back for me, selfishly. People who had been through this show and are thinking, oh my god this franchise – this whole thing that I’ve been through and this experience and I was a kid when I watched this show and now I’m a teenager or young adult or whatever – this series is coming to an end and we’ve all been through it together: fans, all the production, and the crew. This huge chunk of life had just zipped by. And so I end on this little melody that is from the first series. All this time has passed, and I wanted them to sort of feel all that time.

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a vacation, just the two of us

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 the one true pairing

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CONGRATULATIONS

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Korrasami is canon. You can celebrate it, embrace it, accept it, get over it, or whatever you feel the need to do, but there is no denying it. That is the official story. We received some wonderful press in the wake of the series finale at the end of last week, and just about every piece I read got it right: Korra and Asami fell in love. Were they friends? Yes, and they still are, but they also grew to have romantic feelings for each other. Was Korrasami “endgame,” meaning, did we plan it from the start of the series? No, but nothing other than Korra’s spiritual arc was. Asami was a duplicitous spy when Mike and I first conceived her character. Then we liked her too much so we reworked the story to keep her in the dark regarding her father’s villainous activities. Varrick and Zhu Li weren’t originally planned to end up as a couple either, but that’s where we took the story/where the story took us. That’s how writing works the vast majority of the time. You give these characters life and then they tell you what they want to do. I have bragging rights as the first Korrasami shipper (I win!). As we wrote Book 1, before the audience had ever laid eyes on Korra and Asami, it was an idea I would kick around the writers’ room. At first we didn’t give it much weight, not because we think same-sex relationships are a joke, but because we never assumed it was something we would ever get away with depicting on an animated show for a kids network in this day and age, or at least in 2010. Makorra was only “endgame” as far as the end of Book 1. Once we got into Book 2 we knew we were going to have them break up, and we never planned on getting them back together. Sorry, friends. I like Mako too, and I am sure he will be just fine in the romance department. He grew up and learned about himself through his relationships with Asami and Korra, and he’s a better person for it, and he’ll be a better partner for whomever he ends up with. Once Mako and Korra were through, we focused on developing Korra and Asami’s relationship. Originally, it was primarily intended to be a strong friendship. Frankly, we wanted to set most of the romance business aside for the last two seasons. Personally, at that point I didn’t want Korra to have to end up with someone at the end of series. We obviously did it in Avatar, but even that felt a bit forced to me. I’m usually rolling my eyes when that happens in virtually every action film, “Here we go again…” It was probably around that time that I came across this quote from Hayao Miyazaki: “I’ve become skeptical of the unwritten rule that just because a boy and girl appear in the same feature, a romance must ensue. Rather, I want to portray a slightly different relationship, one where the two mutually inspire each other to live - if I’m able to, then perhaps I’ll be closer to portraying a true expression of love.” I agree with him wholeheartedly, especially since the majority of the examples in media portray a female character that is little more than a trophy to be won by the male lead for his derring-do. So Mako and Korra break the typical pattern and end up respecting, admiring, and inspiring each other. That is a resolution I am proud of. However, I think there needs to be a counterpart to Miyazaki’s sentiment: Just because two characters of the same sex appear in the same story, it should not preclude the possibility of a romance between them. No, not everyone is queer, but the other side of that coin is that not everyone is straight. The more Korra and Asami’s relationship progressed, the more the idea of a romance between them organically blossomed for us. However, we still operated under this notion, another “unwritten rule,” that we would not be allowed to depict that in our show. So we alluded to it throughout the second half of the series, working in the idea that their trajectory could be heading towards a romance. But as we got close to finishing the finale, the thought struck me: How do I know we can’t openly depict that? No one ever explicitly said so. It was just another assumption based on a paradigm that marginalizes non-heterosexual people. If we want to see that paradigm evolve, we need to take a stand against it. And I didn’t want to look back in 20 years and think, “Man, we could have fought harder for that.” Mike and I talked it over and decided it was important to be unambiguous about the intended relationship. We approached the network and while they were supportive there was a limit to how far we could go with it, as just about every article I read accurately deduced. It was originally written in the script over a year ago that Korra and Asami held hands as they walked into the spirit portal. We went back and forth on it in the storyboards, but later in the retake process I staged a revision where they turned towards each other, clasping both hands in a reverential manner, in a direct reference to Varrick and Zhu Li’s nuptial pose from a few minutes prior. We asked Jeremy Zuckerman to make the music tender and romantic, and he fulfilled the assignment with a sublime score. I think the entire last two-minute sequence with Korra and Asami turned out beautiful, and again, it is a resolution of which I am very proud. I love how their relationship arc took its time, through kindness and caring. If it seems out of the blue to you, I think a second viewing of the last two seasons would show that perhaps you were looking at it only through a hetero lens. Was it a slam-dunk victory for queer representation? I think it falls short of that, but hopefully it is a somewhat significant inching forward. It has been encouraging how well the media and the bulk of the fans have embraced it. Sadly and unsurprisingly, there are also plenty of people who have lashed out with homophobic vitriol and nonsense. It has been my experience that by and large this kind of mindset is a result of a lack of exposure to people whose lives and struggles are different from one’s own, and due to a deficiency in empathy––the latter being a key theme in Book 4. (Despite what you might have heard, bisexual people are real!) I have held plenty of stupid notions throughout my life that were planted there in any number of ways, or even grown out of my own ignorance and flawed personality. Yet through getting to know people from all walks of life, listening to the stories of their experiences, and employing some empathy to try to imagine what it might be like to walk in their shoes, I have been able to shed many hurtful mindsets. I still have a long way to go, and I still have a lot to learn. It is a humbling process and hard work, but nothing on the scale of what anyone who has been marginalized has experienced. It is a worthwhile, lifelong endeavor to try to understand where people are coming from. There is the inevitable reaction, “Mike and Bryan just caved in to the fans.” Well, which fans? There were plenty of Makorra shippers out there, so if we had gone back on our decision and gotten those characters back together, would that have meant we caved in to those fans instead? Either direction we went, there would inevitably be a faction that was elated and another that was devastated. Trust me, I remember Kataang vs. Zutara. But one of those directions is going to be the one that feels right to us, and Mike and I have always made both Avatar and Korra for us, first and foremost. We are lucky that so many other people around the world connect with these series as well. Tahno playing trombone––now that was us caving in to the fans! But this particular decision wasn’t only done for us. We did it for all our queer friends, family, and colleagues. It is long overdue that our media (including children’s media) stops treating non-heterosexual people as nonexistent, or as something merely to be mocked. I’m only sorry it took us so long to have this kind of representation in one of our stories. I’ll wrap this up with some incredible words that Mike and I received in a message from a former Korra crew member. He is a deeply religious person who devotes much of his time and energy not only to his faith, but also to helping young people. He and I may have starkly different belief systems, but it is heartwarming and encouraging that on this issue we are aligned in a positive, progressive direction: “I’ve read enough reviews to get a sense of how it affected people. One very well-written article in Vanity Fair called it subversive (in a good way, of course)… I would say a better word might be “healing.” I think your finale was healing for a lot of people who feel outside or on the fringes, or that their love and their journey is somehow less real or valuable than someone else’s… That it’s somehow less valid. I know quite a few people in that position, who have a lifetime of that on their shoulders, and in one episode of television you both relieved and validated them. That’s healing in my book.” Love, Bryan

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#face of the owl #i don't even have words anymore #can i just #never speak again #words aren't enough to express what i'm feeling #i mean my face doesn't know what it's doing either #am i laughing am i crying i just don't kNOW

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we popping the BIGGEST bottles when makorra happens tomorrow

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KORRASAMI ISN'T ACTUALLY CANON!

The creators were forced to do it! Please don’t be fooled, Makorra was supposed to be endgame but some stuff happened. Bryke just made a post explaining everything here !!!!! 

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omg blast from the past

in retrospect “tell your bi friends i said bye” is much funnier and more correct

Korra Pilgrim #5

“Gay friends?”

(Korrasami kiss by capnorannge)

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might queue some old stuff for korrasami eve tonight…

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begging someone to do a video essay on how korrasami holding hands in the finale led to caitvi sesbian lex scene pls

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