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seyaryminamoto · 3 years ago

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Hey! Hope ur doing good. I wanted to ask ur opinion on Korra and what ur thinking of her story and how she’s like as a avatar. I’m asking because I’m always really interested in ur posts where ur analysing characters and their traits yk. Especially when they’re long. I just love reading them! I don’t think anyone has asked u this before at least not that I’m aware of. I’ve been scrolling through ur latest posts and haven’t seen that much asks about korra.

Oof... xD what a question.

People generally don't talk about LOK with me because that's... not really my area of expertise, for one thing, let alone of personal interest. I actually unironically loved LOK Book 1 when I first watched it, I binged that whole season in like 2 days or so, and I was sooooo eager for more...

... But then I got more and I ended up not enjoying most of what I got at all @_@

Because I didn't enjoy it, I generally don't touch LOK and don't bring up my grievances with it since the people who do love the show are within their rights to enjoy it without people like me talking about everything the show got wrong and everything it should have gotten right. I outright had in mind to make a huge set of posts to explain my takes on LOK, episode per episode... and then I didn't do it because it was going to take me waaaaaaay too long and I wanted to do stuff with my time that actually made me happier than that x'D

But anyway, with this in mind, if you really want to know my take on Korra, her story, her role as an Avatar and just... everything about her show? I'll put it under the cut.

Concept-wise, I loved Korra. Hell, I still remember how I first came across the character, got to know her in that first episode, and thought she was A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. I am one of those allegedly rare souls who absolutely vibed with Book 1 Korra and who ADORED the character to the point where, back in my not-so-fond time of being an admin in an ATLA group on a social media site I would rather not name (?), my admin identity was based on Korra herself :'D

This, I hope, should explain that I was not, unlike a lot of people, an insta-hater of LOK. I actually gave the show a chance and, on first glance, I loved Book 1 completely and I was so HYPED about the show's future based on this starting point. Later on, however, I discovered my creative juices were just... not jogged at all with LOK, whereas they were going completely bonkers over ATLA XD hence, I focused on creating content for ATLA, which slowly led me to treat the original show with a little more distance than I did at first. That helped me put a lot of things into focus, things that I didn't notice or acknowledge right away, both in ATLA and LOK.

The problems I ended up seeing in LOK upon later rewatches were problems a lot of people saw on their first approach to the show. They totally went over my head the first time xD but after acknowledging said problems, I genuinely thought that these unresolved issues would get better over time, that the show's upcoming seasons would patch up what hadn't been addressed properly in the first season and all such complaints would be unnecessary...!

... Boy, was I wrong.

First things first, what I loved most about Korra was how spirited she felt. She was so charged with personality and with life that I couldn't get enough of seeing the character reacting to the world around her. It was masterful in terms of animation and voice acting, more than anything, and I just LOVED the first episode of the show in particular because it introduced us to a wholly different concept for an Avatar, opposite to Aang in virtually every way that mattered. While I had no objective problems with Aang and his development, the way a lot of people did, I couldn't relate to Aang personally... but I could with Korra. She was a sheltered girl who had no real experiences beyond the world she had been locked inside and raised in... something I felt was terribly relatable to my own personal experiences :'D she was a severe social inept due to that upbringing, something slightly more extreme to relate to xD but even then, I struggled befriending people as a teenager and I found it pretty interesting to see a character facing a similar struggle.

It wasn't, at all, the same with Aang. He made friends relatively easily and quickly, bonding with people and becoming friends for life with them no matter how different they might be from him. He had all this worldly knowledge, even if outdated, and he had a huge trauma that was not relatable at all for me, despite I absolutely could empathize with his pain and loss. In Korra's case, her problems felt slightly more mundane and they resembled my problems, to some degree.

Seeing Korra grow and become a better person would have been, of course, my ideal concept of what this show would shape into. From the moment we're introduced to this character, she's not at all an ideal person. She's a child at the time, recklessly and carelessly breaking her own family home's walls simply because she discovered she has powers and nobody can stop her from wielding them. It's a fun choice for a character introduction, and yet... later reflection on the subject made me realize that this is indeed how Korra's problems as a character started. She could break a wall, she could make a mess of her own home, and her parents would only stand by and smile awkwardly, zero discipline enforced on her, zero consequences to be had.

Hence, it's no surprise that she neglects and dismisses discipline once she's older (with Katara's approval, too, which isn't completely surprising but certainly not helpful), and continues to dismiss it often in the rest of the season. When you introduce a character who has a flaw that can be SO detrimental, not only to her growth but to her relationships with others (her lack of discipline can absolutely cause unnecessary chaos, and it does very often in the show), the ideal course of action would be for the show to make the character reason with said flaw and realize she has to get a grip and not act like this anymore...

... But technically? The show doesn't do this with Korra at all. If anything? The writing in LOK just enables her, continuously, and holds her accountable for very few things, constantly praising her to infinity and beyond, disregarding the disasters she leaves in her wake. And it's not just with discipline, but with everything.

When you see a character like Korra butting heads with another stubborn character like Tenzin, it can be easy to sympathize with Korra if you have had authority figures in your life who were unyielding and barely ever were open to listening to you. But see... Tenzin is forced, constantly, to change and adapt to Korra. Korra, in turn, never has to do the same with Tenzin. Even when Tenzin is right, the narrative makes him wrong. Even when Korra has done things she shouldn't have (like the infamous destruction of the spinning wooden gates during that training exercise), she does nothing to make up for it. I'm still bothered, to this day, by thinking about how she destroyed something EXTREMELY valuable for the Air Nomads... and then it was Air Acolytes fixing it, and Tenzin supervising them, and Korra only showed up to say a couple of things and didn't even OFFER to help out with patching up what she broke, something that ends up feeling symbolic of Korra's journey altogether.

The more these things happened, the less relatable Korra became. The harder it was to feel that she was someone I could understand, even if the traits through which I had first bonded with her were still very much present in the character. But then the infamous love triangle/square/disaster started, and she became even less relatable, and a more unflattering character, than she ever needed to be. Her social ineptitude I mentioned earlier was slightly endearing at first, such as not knowing she needs money to buy any food, fishing in ponds where it's forbidden, and so on. But it wasn't quite so endearing when the show doesn't make her face true consequences for it in far more serious situations than the ones in the first episodes: people constantly focus on how wrong Mako was in the Makorrasami mess, and I won't pretend he's not wrong because he absolutely messed up too... but Korra was far from blameless. Korra absolutely shouldn't have experienced any sort of territorial jealousy over a guy who, yes, she liked, but with whom she has no established romantic relationship and who was well within his rights to date whoever he pleased. For all she could have known, he could have had a girlfriend BEFORE meeting Korra: what right did she have to be jealous of Asami's relationship with him, under any circumstances? It felt wrong, utterly. I've had brief crushes on people who happened to have other people in their lives, or who weren't interested in me, and I NEVER pretended they owed me anything or had led me on somehow... and yet that's 100% how Korra acts over Mako in Book 1, with no justification.

Then the show makes things worse when the whole subplot of Hiroshi's membership with the Equalists comes up. Korra's attitude around Asami not only feels terribly unfair for the most part, but when she's finally trying to put aside her childish jealousy, suddenly Hiroshi is a bad guy and Korra has evidence, only she doesn't, only she maybe does! And in the process, she keeps pissing people off in her constant pursuit for "the truth" at the cost of antagonizing her new friends, all of which ends up rewarding her, in the end, with Asami being dejected and depressed over her father being a piece of shit, while Mako concedes Korra was always right and he totally should have listened to her. Yeah, let's not count in the fact that Korra started out feeling frustrated and jealous that she couldn't get Mako and Bolin to come live with her in Air Temple Island, and that now she got exactly what she wanted at first, at the cost of uncovering a very dark and horrific secret that makes Asami's life pretty much a living hell.

The thing is... it's all convenient for Korra. It all falls perfectly into place for Korra. It's not fair to the character... because it doesn't challenge her in any way that counts. When Korra's character gets challenged in Book 1, it's usually by Tenzin or by Mako and who gets the final victory in any of these circumstances? Typically, Korra :'D it's always Tenzin and Mako realizing Korra was right all along and that her way of going about things is better or acceptable or agreeable...

... and as awful as it feels to say the words every Korra hater said and that I used to be in total disagreement with, the truth is that the show as a whole proves that the haters were right: Korra learned nothing.

It's frustrating because of how much potential her character has. She GENUINELY has that potential! But the writing, of course, is biased as fuck and that bias saw to it that her very agreeable and fun character traits would become actively detrimental for her character growth. Where it takes work for Aang to achieve certain things (like unlocking the Avatar State or connecting with his past lives), Korra could pull off those things whenever the plot required her to do so. Hell, even in the case of her "airbending punch", she unlocks airbending because according to the creators, the lock on her other three bending abilities somehow cleared the path for the airbending :'D it was not, like in Aang's case, a matter of being taught FORCIBLY how to connect with the earthbending side of his nature when given no other choice by Toph. It was not, like in Aang's case, a situation of learning firebending and accidentally going too far with the skill, causing him to swear off it out of fear of causing harm to other people. No, in Korra's case, it's just that the plot requires her to airbend and her airbending is NOT the kind of airbending we're used to. She didn't do what she does in episode 2, where she uses airbending motions to dodge attacks at the last moment... she didn't do anything she hasn't ALREADY been doing constantly: Korra just punched something, and a burst of air came from her fist. That's literally it. There's no real character growth required for her to reach this point, all she needed was for Amon to block her other three elements for her airbending to come through.

This is why Korra's arc fails. It's not because she's a bad character from the core: she absolutely IS NOT. She's got sooooo much potential and capacity for growth, and the writing just squandered that potential constantly, never challenging her with anything other than bending, constantly making adverse characters back down because she was too cool not to back down for, and never giving her a chance to deliver on the premise of her own show: this is the story of an Avatar who was an Avatar before being her own person. Aang is the exact opposite concept. Aang is in denial about being the Avatar when things start out, he doesn't even want Katara and Sokka to know who he is right away because "he didn't want to be [the Avatar]". With this as a starting point, what could have been a more interesting character to develop than someone whose ENTIRE life revolves around her role, her skills, her power... to the point where she has NO IDEA who she really is?

But the thing is... this show never delivers on that premise.

No, in fact, it constantly seems to think it delivered on it, and yet it never did.

It's not chance that Korra herself tells Tenzin she feels her story is unfinished in Book 4. That there's still so much for her to do and that this doesn't feel "over". It's a ridiculous and ironically brilliant thing for the writing team to feature because it seems to hint at and suggest that we WILL see more Korra adventures in the future, in comic book form! (as we did)

But... Aang's adventures were also brought to us in comic book form after his story was done. And there was no Aang mournfully thinking "wow this feels so unfinished" right before the credits rolled.

Gotta wonder why that's the case, huh? :')

Basically, the show had no purpose. And why didn't it have a purpose? Because Bryke and company were so busy trying to make people respect their show and their new protagonist that they didn't ever slow down to think about what kind of story they were telling. It's no chance that Book 1 feels like the strongest entry to me, to this day: it's the only one where they weren't constantly fighting the fandom by trying to prove that their show was worth our time. The fact that Book 2 has a literal scene of Tenzin telling Aang he's trying to be like him but failing, only for Aang to give the most obvious speech to him (you're your own person, you're valuable because of you, you don't have to be me, blah blah blah) tells us more than enough about the priorities of the showrunners when they were creating the overarching story of Legend of Korra: they had no idea what they were doing. All they wanted was for people to like it, and people didn't like it, so they doubled down on trying to make them like it by bringing out EVEN MORE fanservice and more characters consistently claiming Korra was THE BEST and that everyone should worship her.

Honestly, think about it: Tarrlok tried to cajole Korra into joining his gang and she actually agreed to it at one point, manipulated easily as she was. Unalaq wanted Korra on his team and manipulated her to get her to be his ally in opening the portals (and the worst part is he got away with everything in the end :'D). Zaheer outright wanted to kidnap Korra so she would be a Red Lotus member for whatever reason and he tells her, in Book 4, that "her potential is limitless", ergo, he admires her. Kuvira constantly tries to tell us she's "so much like Korra", and tries to convince Korra that she's right and that Korra should be on her team too. Every villain, with the exception of Amon unless I'm forgetting something, tried to convince Korra that she was "super special" (which, you know, water's wet?) and that she shouldn't be their enemy but rather, she should be helping them achieve their goals.

Aang faced a lot of villains in his own time, too. The first one was Zuko, who simply wanted to capture Aang to get rid of his banishment. The second one was Zhao, who wanted to capture Aang for his personal advancement and the Fire Nation's success in the war. The third one was Azula, who wanted to capture Aang, Zuko and Iroh for the Fire Nation's sake and because her father would approve of her, if she did. The fourth one was Long Feng, a manipulative bureaucrat who wanted to continue to hold absolute, tyrannical control over a city and thought the Avatar would be an obstacle for that. The fifth one was Combustion Man... who just wanted to kill Aang because that's what he was hired to do. The sixth, of course, is Ozai, who simply wants to kill Aang because he thinks that will guarantee his absolute victory in the war.

Of course, there are other lesser villains, but these are the ones that come to mind: not one of them tried to recruit Aang to their cause because he was powerful. Not all of them are notorious examples of great villains or antagonists, no... but Aang was an obstacle in their way. Aang was a problem to be rid of. Aang wasn't someone they could charm into joining their ranks: he was a problem. He was a kid who messed up their plans and ruined their biggest goals.

Korra, though? Korra, for most her villains, is an asset. She's capable of so many great and grand things that they think they'd be better off with her on their team than on the opposing team, which of course means that Korra has to prove she's "a good person" by not joining them no matter how compelling their arguments might be! (even if, in the end, she might wind up doing whatever they want her to do, as was the case with Unalaq). This would be interesting and it might even hold some sort of narrative momentum if only this tendency of villains who are actually Avatar fans ever broke its own, persistent and annoying and repetitive cycle: if Korra, at some point, was genuinely compelled to join one of them, the story would have been more interesting. Conversely, if any of them had eventually laughed off the notion of joining forces with Korra, for instance, then at least we'd have someone like the ATLA villains who simply thought Aang was a problem to get rid of. But the very tendency of writing villains who VALUE Korra is just another symptom of the same illness: Bryke and company wanted the whole fandom to worship Korra and had no idea how to achieve it, so they made even the villains get in on the Korra-worship agenda and they're constantly praising her to hell and back because that way maybe the fans will think Korra is great!

And it's just extremely sad... because they didn't have to TRY. They barely did. All they had to do was take her character seriously and build her up in a coherent way, without destroying the traits that made her loveable, relatable and interesting!

And yet that's exactly what they DIDN'T do.

Book 1, like I said, already had a lot of problems. Even then, this season is literally the only bit of LOK that I would look back on fondly, TO A DEGREE, because it actually had so much more potential than its own creators recognized. We're faced with writing problems that consist of Bryke thinking the key to creating a powerful female character is to pretend she's entitled to everything ever, no matter if she hasn't earned it, and to give her anything she could want. You know, only for her to conclude, later on, that she feels like she hasn't done enough and that she hasn't made enough progress :>

Book 2 doubled down on everything negative about Korra in the first season. It freaked me out to see it because I was genuinely telling people to not worry about Korra's development in the first season because it would get better in the next ones :'D that everything left unresolved and mishandled from the first season would be better in the future!

... And then it wasn't.

When I started Book 2 and the first scene was Korra abusing the Avatar State for... a game? It was about the worst sign pertaining what was coming in the future. After an entire episode, and a season-long arc, where Aang COULDN'T trigger his Avatar State because of his inner conflicts and his locked chakras and everything we know about, here's Korra taking advantage of the past lives' power for something as meaningless as a race against a bunch of toddlers. It was far from endearing, it was virtually outrageous for me, and I couldn't understand why the hell this was the first thing we're shown when starting a new season of the story that ended with a girl finally coming into her own as the Avatar by helping people with, yet again, a power-up granted to her by the sheer essence of plot convenience in the Book 1 finale. I didn't even HAVE a huge problem with that finale, personally, despite it felt too easy to sort things out that way... but seeing that this was how Korra was taking advantage of her fully-fledged Avatar powers was the strongest red flag they could have given us that early on.

Then, the rest of the episode continued and I was more than a little shocked to see no sign of the Korra I actually liked from Book 1 there. The playfulness was reduced to that single scene that was very unpleasant for the reasons I explained above, the enthusiasm was nowhere around... hell, most people used to find her pouting tendencies from Book 1 hilarious and I was one of them: no pouting, though. It was such a simple, casual design choice... and it's a choice they tossed aside because, what, the toxic fans who hated Korra had made fun of it, maybe?

The Korra in the first episode of Book 2 attempts to feel more mature. She's not. She's more soulless, though, she's definitely less herself, and she's got none of the spirit I used to love about her. Can I blame the animation for that feeling? Well, I can acknowledge that they didn't do her any favors, Studio Pierrot soooo dropped the ball with Book 2's many episodes they had to animate... but it's not only the animation, it's still the writing. There's this persistent need, through the first half of Book 2, to worsen Korra... in order to make Mako look better, most of all. And I've never been a Mako hater... but this is fucking bullshit xD you can't "better" a character by ruining the other one deliberately so that the one you picked looks better? The only thing you'll convince people of is that they both suck. And of course, doing this with Korra right after spending two years whining because people didn't like their main character is just absurd. Her character growth did NOT need for her to become a civil war advocate with nothing but violent reactions and responses to EVERYTHING.

Look, I know it has turned into a meme in the fandom and all... but the whole "I'm going to threaten this judge by holding his head between my very dangerous dog's open jaws" situation is appalling to me. This is NOT heroic behavior. And what the guy confesses is so stupid and pitiful it's even more pathetic to see Korra having to reach such extremes just to hear... that her uncle hired a bunch of criminals so he could somehow cause his brother to get himself banished? Like... for real? Are you serious? It's yet again an attempt to whitewash a "good" character (Tonraq, in this case), all be it to show how BAD the bad guys are, when there's absolutely no need for that. Tonraq could have messed up and been responsible for his mistakes. Unalaq could have just as easily taken advantage of that matter and become chief because the catastrophe his reckless brother unleashed just happened to play PERFECTLY into his convenient set of skills. I mean, the concept still feels bad at its core, but it's not quite as bad as "I paid a group of criminals to induce my brother to fuck up and awaken 'dark spirits' that will attack the city so that only I can save everyone and I will be the hero, haha!", like... as usual, there's no accountability. There's nothing the heroes can be held accountable for, because the bad guys are always to blame for everything. Even with a concept quite as baffling and STUPID as hiring a bunch of criminals just to fuck with your brother.

Anyway, back into the subject... Korra continues to act like she's possessed by some rage demon throughout Book 2, all the way until she gets mind-wiped, conveniently. Have I ever mentioned I HATE memory wipe storylines, more so when they're just a temporary, simplistic resource to generate cheap drama? :'D well, I hate memory wipe storylines, more so when they're just a temporary, simplistic resource to generate cheap drama.

The fact that Korra's whole insane behavior is somehow twisted into a finding a solution because "she connected to Raava" is, yet again, a way to see how no developments in this show makes the slightest bit of sense because they're in fact NOT related to character growth in the slightest. It's sudden random events that happen and that characters react to in completely unnatural ways: suddenly, after this random loss of identity, Korra regains her senses and she's a perfectly agreeable normal human being again (... though still devoid of many personality traits that made her fun in the first season, because they're gone forever :'D). She loses her connection to her past lives in yet another obvious metaphor of LOK being its own thing and not needing ATLA to build itself upon (which is fundamentally stupid considering THIS IS A SEQUEL ergo IT NEEDS THE ORIGINAL which ISN'T A BAD THING!!!), and we're somehow told that Korra doesn't NEED to be connected to the past Avatars because she's super powerful all on her own: there's zero build-up for this development, zero warning that she's going to turn into a giant blue spiritual Megazord and go punch Unavaatu in the nuts. Remember back in the day when people said energybending came out of nowhere, and that the lion turtles were too convenient, and that just featuring them in pictures in books at the library or in Piandao's mansion as statues was NOT build-up? Well, Korra's big spiritual transformation makes ATLA's last-minute deus ex machina MASTERFUL in comparison. This was such a jumble of random resources with no connection between each thing and the next that I just... I can't understand it. I seriously can't.

Then there's zero attempt to regain the bridge between Korra and her past lives. It's practically framed as "she's better now if she stands with her own strength". Korra's diehard fans went wild because look how STRONG our girl still is without the other Avatars! She's the BEST!

... When the truth is that there's no worldbuilding explanation for this extremely convenient power-up, let alone is there any SENSE in all these characters just briefly mourning the death of the connections only for it to be ignored and forgotten in the blink of an eye. It's a super artificial way to kill the chances for Korra to grow the way Aang did, to learn based on the wisdom of her past lives the way Aang could (and that as far as I know, Kyoshi did too in the novels). The past lives were NOT a crutch, not an obstacle, not a problem. They were actually pretty damn helpful when they wanted to be... hell, Aang bailed Korra out in Book 1 because the plot decided it was convenient! How exactly are we acting like her loss of connections to her past lives is a good thing now? It's honestly absurd, especially when they never did anything to fix this or restore it, or for Korra to properly mourn it after it happened. It doesn't feel like that much of a tragedy because it just has no bearing on the events of ANYTHING past Book 2's finale.

But then Book 2 ends with Korra deciding somehow that Unalaq, the uncle she killed and whom she was fighting all along, was right :> that the division between spirits and humans needs to end. Look... the concept is not that bad, I'll grant you that. But the delivery? The "I won't be the bridge between spirits and humans anymore!" concept? That's outrageous. Visualize the barrier between both worlds as a dam: Korra tore down the dam and said she wasn't taking responsibility for whoever got slammed by a massive tidal wave in consequence of her choices. That's what it feels like. Korra's entire experience with spirits so far is "I can waterbend them out of being evil", a concept just as outrageous as taking away the barrier itself... and she thinks that, as Vaatu is gone, by declaring they'll all have to learn to get along, everything's going to be peachy? How does anyone reach this conclusion? Spirits and humans have been shown to be fundamentally different. We've seen spirits in ATLA and they weren't cute and cuddly. Spirits can be DANGEROUS. Humans can be DANGEROUS. Let humans waltz into the spirit portals willy-nilly and vice versa, and it can be disastrous!

But no, Korra does this because Korra felt like it, on a last minute reflection on something with zero build-up until then, because it never occurred to her that Unalaq might have a point until that very final moment of the Harmonic Convergence. And then Book 3 begins...

... and we find her choices backfired on her stupidly because there's some crazy spirit wilds in the middle of the city she's sworn to protect :')

The show proceeds to show us the consequences of Korra's actions for the FIRST TIME, consequences she is grieving about and that she doesn't know how to sort out...!

... Only to then excuse the whole thing by saying that airbenders are suddenly a thing in the world again BECAUSE the spirit portals were kept open! :D oh YAY! Korra's choice was the RIGHT ONE! She fixed everything wrong with the world and the spirit wilds don't matter at all!

This is basically the way this show handled every challenge thrown at Korra. It's what they did with Korra's jealousy over Asami back in Book 1, which spiraled into all that drama and into Korra still being in the right in the end. Was it at a cost? A cost that didn't affect Korra personally at all, so who cares. Same goes for this: she doesn't fix the wilds, she just takes off on a trip to collect airbenders everywhere! And ironically that becomes the most dynamic moment of later LOK seasons for me, the very few episodes where Korra and her crew are looking for airbenders. Then that period ends bluntly when the true evil to end all evils, AKA Su Beifong, shows up for the first time and decides to take over the whole show just because she can :')

But as we're focusing on Korra, the truth is that Korra in the middle of Book 3 feels a little less unpleasant (USUALLY) than she does in Books 2 or 4. She's not greeeeat, but she's not that bad. Still, I don't entirely appreciate the whole bullshit Beifong family drama, so everything that shit splattered on is garbage to me xD Lin's constant efforts to keep Korra safe from a madman and his gang who are perfectly willing and eager to kill Korra are completely dismissed by not only Korra herself but by the very damnable Su... and Korra seems to have no moment of self-reflection about how wrong that is, about how Lin is actually trying to do her duty of keeping her safe, even if in a way Korra doesn't really like. There's nothing of the sort, she just does whatever is convenient for her, no thoughts or fucks given.

The true horror of Book 3, though, is when the new airbenders are taken hostage by the Red Lotus. This is truly the moment, the scene, where all my respect for Korra withered and died: Aang had known Katara for like 5 hours when Zuko showed up and terrorized the Water Tribe. In order to keep Katara and her people safe, Aang turned himself in to Zuko, no doubt hoping to escape when the right chance arrived, but he turned himself in anyway. He knew that, if he hid, if he resisted, Zuko could do WORSE to these innocent people than he already had. His personal fears were never important: Aang marched into that ship and asked Zuko to leave the Tribe alone in exchange for his surrender.

In contrast, Korra hears about the whole "Air Nation" being in danger of extermination in the hands of a creep like Zaheer, and she HESITATES. She DOUBTS. She is DRAMATIC and WEEPY... over turning herself in to save the airbenders, aka, the single thing she got right when she kept the portals open. AKA, the one nation EVERYONE has been hoping could be restored someday. The last thing left and necessary for balance to start coming back to the world for real and for the Hundred Year War's toll to finally decrease, if just a little, since the damage that period caused will never truly go away.

This was the very first population to be a victim of genocide at the hands of Sozin.

And Korra DOUBTS about giving herself up in exchange for their safety and freedom.

Look... it's just embarrassing. It's just insane. You can't present this as such a horrible threat, so much worse than the Fire Nation was for Aang, because it's not. Korra is already ten times as powerful as Aang is in ATLA's second episode, the show is CONSTANTLY telling us what a powerhouse Korra is: now, is she going against a team of four crazy bastards and she has NO IDEA what they'll do to her? Then at the very fucking least she could have come up with a plan to help the airbenders escape while keeping Zaheer and his crew distracted with her own extremely powerful bending, since the show has reiterated non-stop that no one is as cool and strong as Korra! SHE is what they want. How is it that hard to at least TRY to think outside the box and do something interesting for a change? How is this Avatar meant to be loveable and wonderful when she's unwilling to take risks and chances if they'll put her in danger, when other people she should value ARE in danger already, and she seems to prefer to stay safe herself? How are we supposed to root for this "hero" when her top priority seems to be... herself?

It's horrible. It's terrible xD I wish it weren't because like I said at first, Korra has SO MUCH potential, SOOOOO MUCH... and the writing team just did her so dirty. She didn't develop at all. She was stunted and stuck in this pitiful state of whining about nobody liking her while everyone worshipped the very footprints she left in her wake. She was unable to make the difficult choices that needed to be made because she was so wrapped up in her own selfishness and fears that she spent an episode making sad faces because "oh I guess I have to sacrifice myself to save all those people I supposedly am fighting to protect, woe is me". This is just... insulting, outright, for a character of this caliber. I know she's not supposed to be a genius on any level, but this is just more than that: an Avatar who hesitates to save others in the face of danger is an Avatar who thinks THEY are more important than the people they're supposed to protect. And they wanted us to think she was a fully developed Avatar when she acted like this? For real?

Finally, Book 3 ends with Korra poisoned, fighting a very weird, violent fight against Zaheer, flying around just as he did, while being close to death. The incoherence in Su pulling the metal out of Korra's stomach when it entered her body through her skin rather than via ingestion still gets me to this day. Like... you're saying Korra's bloodstream pushed most of that mercury into her stomach, dragging it all the way there, EXCLUSIVELY there, I don't know, at most maybe a bit in her lungs too? XD I mean, come the hell on. It was almost funny to see Toph pulling it out through the skin in the next season because the minute I watched that incoherence in Book 3 I just screamed everywhere that it made no sense to extract skin-based poison through a stomach pumping, and then Toph completely validated me xD still, Korra's Book 3 final struggle was very important for a lot of people because she was effectively handicapped for a time. She was depressed, she lost a lot of things, she seemed incapable of speech even, if I recall right... she was very badly wounded, that much is a fact and nobody can deny it :'D but... you know, it's kind of sad for Korra's whole grieving process over her wound to be as self-centered as it is. She's gone through a terrible thing, there's no denying that... but we see absolutely no sign of Korra saying or believing that she made the right choice, or that she's relieved the airbenders are safe, even if the cost was so steep... no. Basically, it's all Korra grieving and mourning her ability to move around and be her old self.

At this point? Korra effectively has been broken by the writing team to SUCH AN EXTENT that she doesn't even feel like herself anymore. I'd call it a destructive character arc if there was sense and purpose to it at all, but there isn't. It's all for EXTERNAL purposes, really, and that purpose is to make people feel bad for Korra. Which is just the most detrimental thing a writer can do in order to make their character likeable. Didn't we start out with a confident, clumsy, enthusiastic girl who had no concept of what the real world was like, but that innocence of hers was just outright endearing? And now... we're with a girl who finds the real world is pretty much shit on top of shit, a world that beats the everloving crap out of her, that destroyed her confidence and that left her feeling she was worthless just because she can't move around or bend.

... As a slight plug/side table thing, I literally have been posting a couple of arcs in Gladiator where Azula struggles with a pretty severe health problem. While she definitely would rather be back to herself and even has moments of serious panic upon finding she can't bend blue fire anymore, let alone with the strength she could before, she's not quite as self-involved as to think that this is a horrific tragedy. No, she's pulling through gradually, actively looking for ways to get better, and keeping a relatively positive mindset so she can confront this whole recovery without causing extra trouble to the people who are taking care of her. Granted, this comes after a massively long arc of character growth that also includes Azula having acted terribly, sooooo long ago, when she caught a simple cold and she refused to acknowledge it as such. She was reckless, she was careless, she wasn't listening to her healer's orders and did whatever she wanted, even if it nearly killed her. In her growth, she has learned better progressively. She's no longer as rash and reckless as she used to be, and she understands she has to be patient and show restraint with certain things. Her sacrifice, her physical suffering and impairment, is terrible... but the wound she took, and the severe damage her body suffered, helped her save her nation. When the alternative was an actual massacre of her hometown, the Azula I'm writing would never think her life is more valuable than ensuring her people are safe.

Thus my absolute shock upon seeing that Korra falls apart in such a self-involved bubble of misery because she can't be as strong as she used to be anymore. Like... I'm not saying this is BAD as a concept? But it doesn't look good when she managed to defeat the big bad AND succeeded at saving a whole population of an endangered nation with her sacrifice. Should she be dancing around happily? No. Should she be acting like her personal tragedy is more important than the salvation of the airbenders? I honestly doubt it. It's not a good look. A lot of people actualy really enjoyed this arc because they felt that it spoke to how hard disability can be, to how much a person can struggle to feel useful after they lose something they thought they needed... but instead of going on a journey of acceptance and growth, of understanding that she is MORE than her bending (something that this damn show has constantly implied she'll learn but she NEVER does), Korra just grows even more dejected and miserable than she ever has been, and we're just along for the depression ride.

It's not WRONG to depict a character depressed over a disability. What's wrong is for this character to have been on a potential journey to find who she is and she still doesn't have a clue, three whole seasons later. It's WRONG for this character and all her true, core traits to get beaten into submission by a mix of ruthless criticism by an extremely unforgiving fanbase and a staff of writers who were so desperate to please those fans and to bring them back to watch their show that they did ANYTHING to make them happy. Who, exactly, was happy to see Korra like this, though? Those who despised Korra and said they wanted her to die, basically? Is that the target audience they were going for, the people who dropped the show in episode 2?

Korra didn't need to go through what she did. She did because the writers had no idea what they were doing, as far as I can tell, something I've reiterated throughout this post. They had no true journey for her, no actual charted path for the character, and they made mistake on top of mistake and then pretended it was character growth: it was CRUEL. Giving Korra all these brutal beat-ups and taking away so much about her core traits, and I don't mean bending and past lives, but her SMILES! Her JOY! Her ENTHUSIASM! Her INGENUITY! Everything about Korra gets killed systematically, season by season, until we're left with a husk of a character who has no idea who she is after three seasons of attempting to find out the answer to that question.

And that same show ends without her having found that answer at all.

Why else would she think about how she feels like she has so much left to do? Why else would she feel her story is unfinished? Because Toph's lessons in the swamp are not enough. Because Zaheer's pep talk (which is such a stupid concept, my god...) is not enough. Because everyone's constant assurances and support are NOT enough: Korra has no idea who she is because this show DIDN'T LET HER DISCOVER IT. It's really that simple.

Her entire identity revolves around violence and fighting. Around conflict and bending. That's really the core of what they've let her build herself around, and then all the show did was constantly, consistently, reiterate that this WAS her and that she was great exactly as she was. When you have a whole story built around an imperfect protagonist who has every right to be as imperfect as she was, and you spend every waking moment telling her that she is PERFECT and that everyone who says otherwise needs to go down? The story sounds more like propaganda than an actual narrative journey xD it's what I'd expect to see if a dictator decides to make a movie about his life. It's NOT what I'd expect to see in the growth journey of a young woman finding her place in the world.

Book 4 then introduces us to a wholly new character, Korra-sans-personality, who happens to look a lot like Korra but has lost her sense of self and purpose to such an extent that she has become the B plot of her own show :> That still gets me to this day, man...

Korra then proceeds to try to figure out who she is in underground fighting rings. Because that's indeed where you find out who you are, I suppose, I should know considering I keep writing gladiator fights, right? xD but the kicker is that it's useless. Korra is haunted by visions of herself, posessed by the Avatar State and driven mad with grief and pain. She gets haunted by that vision all the way until she meets Toph, and then she has a Luke-Yoda situation going on with Toph that, yet again, gets us nowhere because Toph, where we would expect her to actually deliver proper wisdom and slam Korra with blasts of reality, just ends up being so irrelevant to Korra's growth that I can't remember any dialogues they had other than the time Toph explained the Gaang's adventures in the most disjointed and ridiculous way possible. It was a fun team-up, don't get me wrong... but it was pointless. Korra learned how the banyan tree connects with the whole WORLD?! Well, gee, that's great! And did she have to do something special to figure that out? Did she have to undergo trials and give things serious thought to be able to connect with the tree's spirit?

Oof, I don't even know but upon returning to the transcript (because nobody can bother me to actually watch this again, my god, no xD), I find that Toph actually also gave Korra the stupidest monologue in the show (or one of the stupidest anyways): the one about how she should LEARN something from her enemies! :'D

... When the fuck did anyone expect the Gaang to learn something from THEIR enemies? This line of reasoning is just... so outrageous. It's connected completely to the LOK obsession of making the villains these complicated, tortured souls (... except Unalaq) who had something of value to do and they just went about it the wrong way! But they were cool, though! They totally had the right idea, that's why Korra left the portals open! And that's why the Earth Kingdom has to become a republic! And that's why there should be a non-bending president in Republic City!

Aaaaaaand that's why this show sucks.

Like... Amon was interesting, I won't deny that. But see... Amon was WRONG. Amon wasn't just "going about things the wrong way", he was WRONG. People all around our world, without bending, are not born equal. The world does not provide them with equal opportunities. There's thousands of people who have everything they could hope for and MILLIONS of people who can't have anything they want. Inequality is bad. We are not arguing that it's good. But what we are arguing... is that the equality Amon advocates for is an equality DOWNWARDS. It's an equality that TAKES rather than giving. He's not unlocking non-bender chi-paths in order to let them bend so that this single factor that apparently gives benders a social advantage can be accessible for EVERYONE: nope, he's blocking bender chi-paths so that THEY can't bend. He's not empowering non-benders, he's depowering benders. And when you actually look at Republic City in Book 1...?

Just what do we see nonbenders doing? Going by the logic that benders constantly showcase their power so that most the people who don't do that AREN'T benders, we see one non-bender, presumably, selling a phonograph. We see one living as a hobo in the street. We see two living it up as the richest people in Republic City (three, presumably, if we count the cabbage cart heir whose father went from being a tortured soul in ATLA to being rich enough to start a company). We see a whole group of them living as completely ordinary people who got rounded up by a Tarrlok on the verge of insanity. We see a bunch of them being SUCH GREAT FIGHTERS that many benders can't even compete (as in, the Equalists). We see one as one of the top leaders of the United Nations' Armed Forces. Does this sound like an unequal society? Does this sound like ALL non-benders are living in dirt and suffering from the constant, persistent oppression of the VERY EVIL BENDERS?!

... And what about the benders?

Criminals. Working as base level blue-collar workers in factories. Entertainment, and getting paid very poorly even in success, going by Mako's reaction when his supposed payment arrives and his boss takes it all away right afterwards. We see them as part of the army, as part of the police. We see them as part of an admittedly very unequal council.

What does this tell me? Yes, politically, non-benders deserved representation, but it's not like they NEVER had it: Sokka existed! :'D and we know for a fact that he was the outright LEADER of this council in his time! So it's not like the city had some tradition along the lines of: "Hey, non-benders are not allowed to be in the council because you're inferior beings, go fuck yourselves," otherwise Sokka wouldn't have been part of that council, let alone its leader. Compare this situation to the actual, real-life situations of discrimination of people of certain communities and groups of people, be it racial or sexual or ethnical or religious minorities: how often do you see any of them in positions of power? When did we start seeing them there? It wasn't that long ago. But here? Here we know a non-bender was in power in this city at the very least like... 40-50 years ago. Hell, let's not even stick to Republic City: all the monarchs we know from the BIGGEST city in the Earth Kingdom are NON-BENDERS. Princess Yue in the Northern Water Tribe also was a non-bender, and there's no sign that her father was a bender either. Again, compare this to our real world: how many members of minorities in nations that oppressed them EVER held positions of power the way the non-benders did in ATLA AND LOK? Let alone 70+ years ago?

Ergo... it's just more of the same problems with worldbuilding: Bryke just cannot help but tell, don't show. It's bad, yes, that the council in Korra's time is just benders... but that's literally the only thing people can point to as evidence of inequality. It's literally the ONLY thing that gets resolved because it's the only thing that's a true issue. Amon basically turned bender-on-non-bender violence into his war standard because... his bender father abused him, sure. But he was a bender too :') hell, his father WASN'T a bender anymore by the time he's abusing him. Doesn't this say enough about how the problem is NOT the weapon, or the ability, but the specific individual who wields it? A non-bender with a sword can kill just as many people as a firebender can. Was he going to advocate for taking away all weapons from non-benders too? Honestly, Amon turns something into a huge problem by completely misinterpreting his own society, he victimized thousands of people, whether they were guilty of misusing their bending or not, and then the show wants us to think HE WAS RIGHT :') He was just extreme about it! That's really the problem!

Apply this to literally every other villain, only, Amon is the only one whose cause made at least a little sense despite a close inspection of the issue proves it really doesn't. Unalaq's crusade with spirits NEVER got an explanation and it's the stupidest plotline the franchise ever gave us. Zaheer and his nihilistic anarchic bullshit was basically just a terrorist doing fuckall and causing disasters, murdering as many important leaders he could under the banner of "liberating people" from whatever fictional chains Zaheer said existed around them. Sure thing that the Earth Queen was a piece of shit... but does that mean Zaheer's approach made any sense? :'D no, it doesn't. Does that mean Zaheer's solution was reasonable at all? No, it doesn't :'D But Toph says "he believed in freedom", and that's just fine and dandy, isn't it? His entire ideology is absolutely absurd, it's not even something worth breaking down the way Amon's is, and we're supposed to think "he had a point". Kuvira then is the anti-Zaheer and she wants ORDER, ABSOLUTE ORDER. And yes, that evidently is wrong too, just as Zaheer demanding for absolute freedom, zero societal structure, let people do whatever they want, is fucking ridiculous. Both are wrong! People don't deserve to be forced to be anything they don't want to be, the way Kuvira did, and people shouldn't be given the chance to do ANYTHING they want because, heh, next thing we know the entire world would be burning down when some really bad folks decide they can just kill whoever they hate because hey, why not? No consequences, after all! And so on and so forth, steal from anyone you want to steal from, do whatever you please and if you hurt someone in the process, that's not important. That's basically what Zaheer champions.

It's even childish, frankly, and the show's insistence that it's valid is even more childish. But the real reason all of this sucks is because these villains, boring and lame as they all are, ALWAYS WIN.

No, it's not because Korra didn't defeat them, she always does and saves the day :') but then she decides they had a point. Then she thinks maybe they were wise. Then she thinks maybe they were doing something useful for the world and she has to give it a chance even if most the time they're just exacerbating worse problems than the ones that actually existed. And the thing is that this obsession the show has with its own villains being justified... makes Korra something Aang never was.

It makes Korra a counterattacker.

It makes Korra a character who REACTS, rather than a character who ACTS.

She has NO initiative, not really, because the bad guys need to show up and step up for Korra to take them down.

Therefore, all the initiative in the narrative is with THEM. And Korra is only here to react and respond.

This turns Korra into a character with next to no agency. She's not a hands-on leader, she's not someone who inspects the city she's supposed to be dealing with and figures out solutions for mundane problems. She's not someone who gets called to help out with problems internationally when something unpleasant is going on. Nope, she's just reaction-girl, and she only gets to react to whatever's going on around her. Zero initiative, zero agency, at least as far as her narrative function is concerned. Because yes, Korra totally picks fights and does things when she wants to... but when it comes to the NARRATIVE? The villains are the ones who carry the narrative in this show. We're just watching how Korra will eventually stop them but they're the ones doing things constantly, often getting away with them or nearly doing so, and she keeps getting pummeled and wrecked by the enemies in the process, constantly going on depression sprees because everything she does fails, every choice she makes is wrong, she can't get anything right, and so on and so forth.

Thus why Korra's character arc just can't feel right. Thus why Korra is not the same character I grew so fond of the first time I watched this show. She still is in the position of reacting to Amon in Book 1, but her arrival in Republic City IS a sign of agency... and probably the only actual one she ever displays. Everything else she does, on broad narrative strokes, is responding to something else. She's never ahead of the curb, she's never choosing enterprises to undertake to help in important stuff like getting the city more organized after the plant mess happened, or investigating dangerous leads and complicated operations herself... no, she has to respond to whatever the villains did or whatever her own choices in responding to the villains result in, and so on and so forth. Meanwhile, Aang and his group take the initiative from the get-go because the Fire Nation IS the status quo at this point in time. They're the subversive elements who are fighting and contesting the Fire Nation's control. They're traveling the world, getting Aang some lessons in all the bending arts he doesn't know, making allies and enemies in the process, helping people pretty much everywhere they go, setting people free of Fire Nation tyranny in a myriad of ways...

Meanwhile, Korra is the enforcer of the status quo. Korra is the one who has to defend and protect it at all costs. The villains are trying to alter things, she has to stop them. Then, after stopping them, she ends up realizing they were right in some way or another, so by all means, the villains win the war even if they lose the battle. Again... how are we supposed to root for a hero like this? Why would we?

Anyway, back to Toph... Toph apparently taught Korra to let go of her fear of her previous enemies. There's no actual thought given as to why Korra fears them at all. What is she so afraid of? Why are they haunting her at all? Nope, she just has to deal with it which, as we know, is Korra's motto since she was 4. But then there's no reasoning given to why these villains scare her so much, why she's so worried about them even when they're not a threat at all anymore. Obviously someone is going to come here and say PTSD and psychological disorders do not obey logic... but see, neither does this show, so why is it pretending it does? :'D Korra supposedly works out her fears but she really doesn't, as far as I remember she gets another vision of herself back during her battle with Zaheer when fighting Kuvira and that makes her useless all over again... so, in short, this nonsense wasn't sorted out with Toph, hence the lesson was a waste and a failure. Korra is still afraid.

Fast-forward to Zaheer and Korra's latest misstep in the chronicles of her depression: he tells her she's still afraid and she says it's his fault, blah blah blah, Korra then proceeds to trust this dipshit to help her meditate past her blockage and oh my, it works! She has to ACCEPT what happened to her! Which, yes, is a difficult process that I'm not mocking... but this doesn't even get anywhere CLOSE to the ten thousand things Korra should really be pondering and meditating on. There's SO MUCH Korra has to resolve, so many things she has to deal with, and this whole subplot was brought out just to give her one thing to do that, ultimately, did NOT help her find the path into discovering who she was beyond the Avatar, beyond the extraordinary bending :'D As usual... how does this make any sense? How is THIS what we're supposed to be thrilled about in her growth process? If she can't even deliver on the very premise of the show at its very last legs, how could this show EVER reach a triumphant, glorious conclusion...?

Oh. By making Korrasami canon, of course.

Thus comes the time for the rant that was always meant to be:

KORRASAMI DESERVED BETTER THAN BEING CANONIZED THE WAY IT WAS

No, I'm not saying that mainstream media was ready for Korra and Asami to make out in front of the audience when the curtain was closing. No, I'm not saying that we needed more kisses and outwardly displays of affection. No, I'm also not saying it's Nickelodeon's fault that we didn't get that, because someone DID compile a resource a few years ago showing how Nickelodeon was actually pretty surprisingly progressive by even featuring documentaries and stories about kids coming out and pro-LGBT content in order to encourage young kids to accept themselves and each other as they are. Something Disney didn't do. Something I suspect Cartoon Network also didn't do. Hence, Nickelodeon might not have greenlit a fullblown Korrasami romance due to the complications of parents being twitchy and harebrained about the way cartoons are "indoctrinating" their children, but if Bryke had taken this concept seriously since day 1, I honestly don't think Nickelodeon would have responded to it remotely as badly as people think they might have.

Seriously, Asami being an equalist was an old concept they had for the character and it would have been AMAZING. Better redemption arc than ANYTHING the rest of the franchise ever did. I would have loved everything about it and I probably would have been shipping Korrasami like FedEx if Korra had been the one to give equalist Asami a chance to do better, to be her friend, even though Asami did all the things she did. It would have been a million times more powerful as a concept than ANYTHING LOK put forward.

But then they scrapped that concept and we wound up with what feels like a half-finished story when it comes to Asami. Korra and Asami's interactions largely take place in Book 3, where they finally start feeling more like they're friends... but look at any shonen anime, and tell me you cannot write a story, a friendship, between two characters of the same sex and inject it with as much romantic subtext as possible. Look at Naruto, where the whole lifeforce of the show was the relationship between two boys who were friends, rivals and everything they could possibly be, as they grew older and their bond continued to be what basically motivated them to do just about everything they ever did. Naruto was a huge story, insanely popular in a country with a generally terrible relationship with anything to do with homosexuality... and yet this manga was published there, the anime featured two kisses between these two characters, even (admittedly, they're not intended to be romantic but comedic), and it still went on to be one of the most successful anime and manga of all time. How, exactly, does anyone justify that Korra and Asami get like 3 palpable scenes of lead-up to a romantic relationship when there's so much content out there in media that features what feels like build-up for a romance WITHOUT going into romantic territory at all? It's really absurd to me. Korra and Asami could have had SUUUUUCH a good friendship, absolute goals friendship, with really fun dynamics... and they just didn't because the show was constantly sleeping on Asami and making her a satellite for every other character (Mako, her dad, Korra, hell, maybe even Varrick).

So. Korrasami deserved better. This ship is not bad, objectively speaking, and fic writers have done marvels with it. Canon dropped the ball with it SO HARD that I don't understand how people still can't have a more critical view of it. A fair number of people identified the "Korrasami is canon" move for the pandering it was, for the shield against criticism that it was, because ultimately, Bryke pretended their whole story was about which ship was going to be canon and effectively distracted EVERYONE from discussing that, oh no, Korra's development MAKES NO SENSE! :'D She got NOWHERE! She achieved NOTHING OF VALUE! :'D she just responded and reacted to everything else that had agency, decided THEY were right in the end and sulked about how bad she was at her job. Korra's growth is just... backwards, damn it. It's just wrong. We didn't see her coming even CLOSE to achieving her potential, if anything I'd argue she constantly did WORSE. And the show constantly pretends she's doing better!

*SIGH*

My conclusion about Korra's growth is a very depressing one. I've recently talked with a friend about another character from another franchise whose personal arc makes no sense. Upon discussing that, I kind of came up with a term that might fit the kind of character arc Korra went through. If this concept already exists, I take no credit for it... but what Korra went through is not a growth arc:

It's a humiliation arc.

This isn't about turning a character humble when she was haughty, it isn't about turning a character selfless when she was selfish... it's about humiliating her at every turn until she's virtually a husk of who she was at first. She gained everything she THOUGHT she wanted when she started out, things that were pretty shallow, all in all, but the tragedy of the character is that she actually never learned what she truly did want. She never understood who she was, and upon getting "what she wanted", she feels like something isn't right. Something is missing. She has all the approval of all her friends, all her mentors adore her, even her enemies think she's SO COOL, she has learned all four elements, spiritbending, metalbending, the Avatar State...! And yet she feels hollow. She knows her journey isn't over, worse yet, she HOPES it isn't... because the person she is, right now, is not who she ever hoped to be. She got "everything she wanted," at a cost she still didn't manage to understand: the cost was her true identity. The cost was her innermost self, the person she thought she'd find at the end of her journey and then she never did. The cost was her happiness, her enthusiasm for life, everything that made her worth rooting for: all of it is gone, and all the rewards, then, are meaningless because she can't even rejoice in her successes without constantly thinking she's a failure.

Hence... a humiliation arc. Why? To please people who hated Korra and compel them to watch as the character they have a hateboner for gets thrown under every proverbial bus the showrunners and writers could come up with. Zuko? Redemption arc. Aang? A solid growth arc. But Korra? Nope, she needs to be humiliated instead. That's where it's at when you're writing female characters, of course :')

Ultimately, LOK is full of wasted potential. Korra is a great example of it, not the only example, but still a great one. I genuinely, unironically loved this character when I first met her, and now I outright told Netflix to stop recommending the show to me because I don't care to revisit it, ever. Korra had so much potential as a character, her world and her setting also had a ton of potential, but everything got completely fucked over by a bunch of mediocre villains, all in all, who were completely sure they were great, and who convinced a LOT of people that they were, and suddenly Korra isn't the protagonist of her own story at all: every villain is more important to the plot of her story than she is. How does this make sense for her character? Why would this be the story we wanted to see? It flat out isn't, at all, at least for me.

So, in conclusion... Korra should have been better. Korra DESERVED better. Korrasami did, too. We could have had the greatest sequel to a pretty damn great TV show already... and we didn't because Bryke spent more time suffering over how to make people like their show than actually thinking about what they were trying to achieve with it. There's no purpose to it. People can talk all they want about Korra's spiritual arc but ultimately, that arc doesn't exist. There's no such thing as a spiritual arc because the last thing Korra learned in all this nonsense was anything spiritual. She never took long enough to really think ANYTHING through, and when she actually had that time (as in, her two years running around the world and escaping from everything), she didn't use it for anything other than struggling to go right back to who she used to be as a fighter. There were zero thoughts given to everything else.

This girl had it in her to be the greatest female protagonist we'd seen in media in who knows how long. She could be a symbol of female empowerment DONE RIGHT. Instead, she's everything done wrong. She's storytelling done wrong. And it's not at all her fault as a concept, as a character... it's, as always, a problem caused by writers with no sense of direction and very amateurish concepts of what storytelling needs to be. Nobody needed to be told Aang was great every ten minutes, the kid outright was going to be set to boil in oil in one episode because a village hated the Avatar and he, being the hopeless dork he is, was ready to face that until providence (or a gang of rhinos, rather) saved his ass at the very last moment xD Meanwhile, LOK is permeated, ALL of it, with people constantly reassuring Korra of what a talented powerful woman she is. Is that what strong female characters are? People with no confidence, who constantly lose more of it, who are humiliated by circumstances they can't ever overcome but then told "no no no, you're really strong and brave and the best!" and that's it? Really?

Korra may be one of the coolest fighters in the Avatarverse. Korra may be one of the coolest concepts in the Avatarverse. But Korra was never allowed to find out whoever the hell she was beyond being a super cool fighter and the Avatar. To this day, I wager, she has no idea. And to this day, her creators surely still think they did right by her when the reality of the matter could not be more different. She deserved better is what I say and what I will always say, and I really wish she could have been allowed to shine in a much more organic way than by turning into a giant Megazord and killing her own relative. Unfortunately, her backwards journey, instead of building her up into greatness, was hellbent on destroying her, and so we find ourselves with a completely demolished, heartbroken and helpless girl in the place of the hopeful, enthusiastic, innocent and charming one we met when the first episode aired. Seriously... is this the journey of a strong, young woman growing into her own? Is that all we have to look forward to? Not the silent, subtle peace Aang experiences at the end of his own story... but the life-shattering misery Korra had to face over and over again until she lost herself even more, despite she never even knew who she was?

It'll never be fair. It'll never be right. I love what I know Korra could have amounted to... but the potential she embodied was not explored in any way through the character we saw onscreen. And that's always going to be the ultimate tragedy in that story: Korra should have been MORE.

#futuristicbelieverjellyfish #oh boy I took forever with this one #I'm sorry #but I have too much to say :>#guess that's the flip side of not talking about LOK in general x'D #when someone brings it up I just start and don't stop #anyway #I hate that I have such a conflictive relationship with Korra's character #I really wish I didn't #but I stand by everything I say here #it's my personal opinion #so everyone's allowed to disagree #but I don't think it's really that wrong for me or anyone to say...#that she deserved better than the deal she got #soooo much better...

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