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| Friday, September 28, 2012 02:11 PM |
| (Last updated on Tuesday, January 6, 2015 09:23 AM) | | On the Viewer - The Legend of Korra: Book One - Air |
 by Fëanor |
(Updated to fix an embarrassing mistake; I mixed up Mako and Bolin!)
I suddenly remembered the other day that I'd never actually gotten around to watching the last episode of the first season of Legend of Korra, the sequel to the brilliant animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender (see my posts on that series here). I've now remedied this error, and here I am to tell you about it!
The creators of Avatar took some rather courageous risks when creating this sequel. Not only did they set it years after their first series - killing off most of their original characters, growing and changing the world they'd created in fundamental ways, and focusing this story on a completely new set of characters - they made the main character as opposite from their previous main character as they possibly could. When we met the last Avatar, Aang, he was a young boy with a mastery over only one element: air. He was peaceful, fun-loving, spiritual, a bit shy, and against violence in any form. When we meet Korra, the next reincarnation of the Avatar, she's already a teenager, and she's mastered every element but air. This means she's also lacking a connection to her spiritual side. She's anything but shy - one of the great scenes in the series is a flashback to the moment when the White Lotus society arrives at her door to confirm whether she is truly the Avatar. Though still a little child, she bursts into the room screaming, "I'm the Avatar! Deal with it!" and starts shooting rock, water, and fire all over the place. She's got a temper, and is quick to barge into a situation and start busting things up before getting a complete idea of what's going on.
Korra comes from the Southern Water Tribe, so she's received teaching and encouragement from a now very old Katara, one of the few characters from the first series to survive into this one. (Although really there are plenty of connections to the original series here, and flashbacks to the time between the two series, so diehard fans of that show won't be entirely disappointed.) To learn airbending, Korra ends up traveling to the capital of the modern world, Republic City, to study with Tenzin, Aang and Katara's youngest son, who now has many children of his own, all airbenders. And this is another way in which this show goes in the opposite direction of The Last Airbender. Where Aang spent his time constantly on the move, trying to learn how to bend the other elements and keep out of the way of the Firelord's soldiers, Korra quickly settles down in Republic City and stays there for the entire season.
When we get to Republic City, we learn right away how much the world has changed since Aang's time. Republic City is not a village of wooden houses; it's a real city with tall buildings and cars and steam-powered machinery. This is a world vaguely similar to Earth in the early 20th century. And the city is in the midst of a political and social crisis. Besides being plagued by various bender street gangs (one of which Korra clashes with almost immediately, wrecking a street and getting herself in trouble with the city's police chief, Lin Beifong, the bad-ass, hard-as-nails daughter of Toph, Aang's old earthbending teacher), the city is also under a more insidious attack from a mysterious, masked, anti-bending terrorist known only as Amon. His Equalist movement is gathering many followers and is threatening to rise up in revolt and bring down the government. The members of the city council have different ideas about how to handle this; Tenzin wants a patient, democratic approach, but the slimy politician Tarrlok wants to come down on Amon with an iron fist, without bothering about preserving freedom or avoiding collateral damage.
Meanwhile, Korra is distracted from her Avatar duties by the discovery of a professional bending league and a struggling but talented team known as the Fire Ferrets, which is made up of the handsome, brooding firebender Mako and his brother, the goofy, fun-loving earthbender Bolin (who reminds me strongly of Sokka from the original series). Inevitably, Korra ends up joining the team, and getting tangled up with them in a complex love triangle (which becomes a love rectangle when the beautiful, rich non-bender Asami shows up and literally knocks Mako off his feet). The original series played briefly with the idea of bending as a sport, spending an episode or two dealing with an underground, professional wrestling-style league, but here it's become a popular, serious sport, with a rather complex rule set that you have to pick up as you go along. It's fun stuff.
But Korra's relationship problems and struggles in the stadium begin to seem less important when it's revealed that Amon has somehow gained the power to remove people's bending permanently. How can she and her friends fight such a terrible enemy, when he has dangerous new technology and half the population backing him up?
I was really impressed that Legend of Korra decided to focus on the complex relationship between benders and non-benders, and take on the rather difficult social, moral, and ethical questions that would inevitably arise in a society where only select members of the population had superpowers. These are issues the original series never touched on. Unfortunately, Korra ultimately backs away from these issues, in part by making the leader of the Equalists an unmitigated villain.
[WARNING! SPOILERS!]Really, the series disappointed me in a number of ways. I feel like it would have been a lot more interesting if Amon had been a sympathetic character, and Korra and the other benders had really had to change their thinking in response to his movement. I also think it was interesting to create a romance between a bender and a non-bender, and I kind of wish Mako had stayed with Asami, and Korra had had to deal with that. It seemed like cheating to have Korra's unrequited love for Mako suddenly become requited at the end. I also wish Korra had remained without (most of) her bending for longer. An Avatar without bending is a really interesting concept. How would she and her friends have dealt with that? But instead her power is almost instantly restored via a bit of a deus ex machina (although it is a reasonably believable deus ex machina, aligned with what we learned about the Avatar and his powers at the end of the first series). There's also never really a satisfactory explanation for how Amon is able to remove people's bending. In the first series, the strong implication is that this kind of power is reserved for the Avatar only. How did an (admittedly unusually strong) waterbender get it? There are also some moments of pretty poor writing. The low point of the series as far as this goes is probably a pair of back-to-back episodes: "When Extremes Meet" and "Out of the Past." There are a lot of great ideas in these two episodes, but also a lot of really poor ones. Tarrlok has, up until this point, been a fantastic, utterly hateful character who's brilliantly manipulated everyone around him into giving him exactly what he wanted. It's a little hard to understand why he would suddenly decide the solution to his problems would be to forget all of that, get into a physical confrontation with the Avatar, and then lock her up in his basement. Admittedly, she had been getting a bit harder to control, but he still really seemed to have the advantage over her psychologically and politically. He does at least succeed in completely incapacitating her by locking her into a metal box. However, when Amon shows up and finds her in this position, practically gift-wrapped for him, he inexplicably tells his men to take her out of the box. Meanwhile, he stays upstairs twiddling his thumbs, waiting for them. For God's sake, why? She's in a box! She's right where you want her! And knowing how dangerous she is, why would you send your lackeys to take care of her instead of seeing to it personally? And then, when she does inevitably get past his men and slide away, Amon just... lets her go. For no reason that I can see. He and his men could easily have tracked her and chased her down, seeing as how she was weak and alone and the ground was covered in snow. It's just painfully obvious that all this happened because the writers needed her to get away and they couldn't think of a better way to do it, and that's disappointing.[/WARNING! SPOILERS!]
All that being said, I really did enjoy the show. It has the same cleverness, wisdom, humor, warm humanity, and exciting, well-choreographed action scenes of the original show. Korra is a great character, flawed and interesting, and I love Tenzin and his entire family. His kids are hilarious. Also, Lin Beifong, like her mother before her, RULES ALL THE THINGS. She's so ridiculously awesome. And the conclusion of Tarrlok and Amon's stories is surprisingly dark, brutal, and moving.
I understand there is going to be a second season. I'm curious to know where the show can go from here, as everything seems to have been resolved at the end of this season (some of it rather abruptly). Regardless, I'm looking forward to seeing it! |
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