...They Pull Me Back In (2/26)

Spent more time discussing my Brain Sickness with my beloved show. Didn't discuss much of the plot of Book 2, but I still assert it's good despite the fact that it's a little bad. I contain multitudes, and am god's favorite princess

Book 2: Spirits

Let me address the elephant koi in the room; I have a sickness. I have a real issue. There are synapses that misfire and a gangrenous rot in my brain because of this show. I love this show and I hate what it has done to me. I spent years being one of the only people I knew who had seen it beyond Book 1. I had one friend (Shoutout Florry) in College who had both seen it and was as sick in the head about it as I. My love for the show is well known. I have had no less than six different people reach out to me about the announcement for the new show. Or who told me when I posted about it they were waiting to hear from me. This sickness is tangled around my brainstem like a cordyceps fungus. I was a bastard and I’m sorry to anyone who has ever heard me say the name “Zaheer,”

This came to a head in the pandemic. Korra was added to Netflix. I had nothing to do during the pandemic but be on social media and be mad. And I got mad. I spent hours with a white hot rage in my gut seeing people insulting my beloved show. I became exceptionally vocal about my adoration of it. I think had there been no Korra discourse, I’d probably be a senator by now, or at least a state assemblyman. But I was at the most miserable time of my life, during a global pandemic that made it the most miserable time in everyone’s life, and I had no recourse but to be on Twitter and Facebook because I had nothing else to do but be depressed.

Up until I deleted my Twitter account, my heart rate would spike whenever I saw “Korra” trending. This is not a joke. I am not exaggerating when I say I have a sickness. I am Gollum and Legend of Korra is my precious.

Book 2 is where the Nickelodeon meddling comes in. The Legend of Korra was supposed to be a one season show. The final moment of the story was supposed to be Korra regaining all four elements, her bending and connection to the Avatars restored by Aang (in her first ever conversation with her past lives! Sick! Another great story arc completed in that first season). The conflict was still open ended, much still left unresolved. But that was stuff that didn’t need to be resolved because the show was done. Not a cliffhanger, but a story where much could still happen down the line. Terrific final note for the finale.

Then they got renewed for season 2. Whoops! The animation took a significant hit. The phenomenal animation of season 1 was gone, and what we got instead was passable, but lacked the same oomph of the first season. This would be a trend that continued down the line.

I did not watch the last three seasons of Korra until my senior year of high school. I watched it on GoAnime or some other sight that was surely corroding my hard drive every second I watched. I could not pause or play the video without a pop-up ads filling the screen. I was informed frequently that not to tell my wife about this game in the banner ads along the side of the screen. It was rough work, it was difficult, and it was the only way to watch. Korra had never received any of the support that its predecessor did, so if you wanted to watch (without buying the DVDs) it was on terrible sites like that. But I did it, and did so gladly.

The season starts off with a panicked attempt by the writers to resolve plot threads they were not told they’d have to resolve, while also beginning a new story. It’s not great! They hit the ground stumbling, the Equalist revolution is resolved by the dissolving of the Bender Concil and the election of a non-bender president. So incremental gains through electoral politics. It’s not great, but it is fine! Because the Equalists are not communists. Their demands are not based on material conditions, or the labor theory of value. One of their staunchest supporters is an industrialist. Their demands were for the extinction of all benders (bad) and proper say and representation in the political process (good). So if you see it as a one-to-one analogue of communism (which you shouldn't, it's a show for children in a world whose material conditions are entirely incongruous with our own), sure it’s bad. But as slapdash fix to a problem that they did not believe they had to resolve, it’s fine!

The president is a cool character, a politicking and ineffectual bureaucrat who gets a lot of time to show how ineffective this solution is down the line. Hmmmm, almost like Korra addresses many of its criticisms within the show itself! Almost like it has rebuttals for many of its critiques!

Book 2 is the worst season of Korra, sorry to say. It’s sorta listless and has some awkward pacing. The new Team Avatar spends much of it split up and the side characters have little “important” to do. There’s a messy love triangle that people hate (I like it. Some of you just weren’t hot in highschool so can’t relate to the messy relationship drama [Authors Note: I was not hot in highschool and so I couldn’t relate, but I saw it happen often enough around me] Some people just forgot that teenagers are annoying and horny ig), there’s a flashback to the first Avatar that people say breaks canon (It doesn’t, actually!), Korra uses her Avatar state for frivolous reasons (And I wonder if the show calls her out on that and she learns and grows from her mistakes?) and people are mad that Korra lost her connection to the previous Avatars (Cry about it! Sorry your protagonist has to deal with obstacles!)

One criticism I see often levied against Korra as a whole is that the seasons each have their own villain. There is no one throughline antagonist, but it changes from season to season. This is not an issue in my eyes, but one of its greater strengths. It shows constantly the different forces and ideologies at play in this world, and how those actions have consequences. It is always about preserving balance, but what that balance is is disagreed on by each new villain. Each is doing what the Avatar is trying to, bringing order and harmony and balance, but in their own way. It’s not as simple as the Fire Nation’s “I want to burn the world because I am evil”, conquest and destruction for conquest’s sake. Beyond one casual reference to “sharing our prosperity with the world” (a weak excuse Ozai uses to justify imperialism in the Earth Kingdom), there’s no driving ideology to the Fire Nation that puts them in opposition to the Avatar beyond “you’re the only one who can stop us,”. Aang never had to stop and consider the other side’s position because the other side’s position was not justifiable. Not so with Korra!

In Book 2, it’s about the separation of the Spirit and Physical Worlds. These two worlds should not be separate, and conflict (manufactured, yes) arises from this division. Unalaq, Korra’s uncle and all around Bad Dude™, is goading Korra into uniting the two worlds so he can channel the power of Satan to take over the world. Classic bad guy stuff, it’s not the most inspired but it’s cool. Particularly because at the end, Korra agrees with him! Unalaq believes that the separation of the two worlds are a grave and unnatural injustice. The show agrees with him, it is unnatural, an overreach of the Avatar’s power. How can you achieve balance if the world’s that the Avatar is supposed to have jurisdiction over are separated in a totally arbitrary way.

In Season 2, episode 15 of Avatar the Last Airbender, Aang searches for Appa and finds himself in a zoo. The animals in the zoo are sad and cramped. The cages and pens are too small! The poor rabberoos and elephant mandrills are depressed. So our plucky hero, seeing animals chafe in captivity, intervenes; he builds a bigger zoo. Larger cages, bigger pens, more space for the wild animals to enjoy their captivity.

That’s not what Book 2 of Korra does. The artificial bounds and barriers don’t need to be modified or altered to maintain balance. They need to be ripped down. And so she does.

That’s my Avatar.