Zaheer Stan Account (2/27)

Oops this is 2,300 words about Zaheer. Oops this is me restricting myself. This is restraint. I love you Zaheer, you're the best villain in the franchise. I think I need to get my head scanned because there is a hole in my grey matter that this show, and online discourse during quarantine, burned there.

Book 3: Change

This season altered the wiring in my brain. My life is split into two distinct epochs, before watching this season, and after. I am not really exaggerating. This season was so good it blew my mind. The questions raised, the ending, the villain (My now deleted twitter was “Zaheer Stan Account”) are some of my favorite in the entire ATLA franchise. I don’t think there’s any villain as compelling as Zaheer in animation. That’s my husband. That’s my best friend. That’s the coolest guy in the world.

Season 2 ended in a strange place; Korra had her connection to all previous Avatars severed when Satan ripped an angel-kite out of her and slapped it a lot. This is great. I am totally pro that. Way to make your character deal with difficult and evolving situations! That’s good and compelling writing! It also ended with the union of the spirit and physical worlds; the barriers are worn thin and the two worlds can interact freely. Also cool and great. To all the people I saw on instagram reels saying that Korra doing this made her a moron, I am sprinting to your coordinates with ill intent.

Season 2 was also supposed to be the last season, but they were again renewed. Thankfully this time they were renewed for 3 and 4, so they knew what they were working with and nothing could ever go wrong again! While season 1 and 2’s connections are tenuous, season 2-4 are all building directly on the consequences of the previous season. In this case, Harmonic Convergence (The giant temporal mcguffin that Book 2 was built around) results in a very shocking change in the status quo indeed; Air Bending is back! The spiritual and natural worlds colliding have resulted in the balancing of the elements. People the world over spontaneously develop airbending, including Aang’s originally non-bending son Bumi!

Let’s take this off ramp to the rest area called “Aang being an imperfect dad was actually good writing”. They have a McDonalds and a Starbucks. Stretch your legs for a bit, we’ll be here for a bit. Aang had three children, Bumi, Kya, and Tenzin. Only Tenzin was an airbender. Aang, if you may recall from the title of the previous show, was the Last Airbender. The Last. The only remnant of his cultures and traditions. The last one. After him, the last airbender, all of that knowledge, history, and ways of knowing will be gone. Because he is, and let me reiterate, the last airbender. Are we all on the same page here about how many airbenders there are? Because as of Tenzin’s birth, there are two of them. In the entire world, two people capable of airbending and connecting to the culture that is explicitly tied to bending. There are no non-bending Air Nomads. If you’re an Air Nomad, you’re an airbender (of which Aang was the last, by the way).

So Aang, beyond all the responsibilities of Avatar, all his responsibilities of being a father, now has the responsibility to pass on Air Nomad knowledge to Tenzin, because otherwise the entire race, culture, and people will be extinct. Forever. The great temples will remain tombs, occupied only by those who move in like hermit crabs. That is the pressure on Aang’s shoulders. And so he spends a lot of time teaching Tenzin, his youngest, about Air Nomad culture and becoming an airbender. He does this at the expense of his other two, who resent the preferential treatment and long stretches of time with an absent father. People get mad at Korra for this because they “can’t believe they made Aang a bad father!”. Sorry the 12 year old kid changed and handled the immense pressures of the world/being the only remaining herald of his way of life imperfectly. I guess it would’ve been cool if everything that ever happens in media is totally perfect and no character ever makes mistakes or misjudges priorities. I think the media you are looking for is television static.

I really cannot form any opinion on this aspect of Aang’s development beyond “Oh yeah, that makes sense!”. That’s really all I have to say about it, I don’t know what other arguments there are to be made. Aang isn’t real so please take your daddy issues out on the flesh and blood guy that lives in your childhood home, let’s not project onto the traumatized child who blames himself for the erasure of his culture imperfectly attempting to right that wrong through Tenzin.

Okay, everyone back in the car! Did you pee? Okay because we’re not stopping again.

So while there are some air acolytes, people who respect the and try their best to preserve airbending culture, they are unable to truly ingratiate and connect because they are not, and never will be, airbenders.

Well, maybe not never.

Ladies and gents, it’s Zaheer time.

Zaheer is the baddest dude on the planet. He’s so dangerous as a non-bender that they lock him at the top of a mountain and slide rice through a crack in the door. The baddest dude on the planet. He begins espousing on the teachings of the air bending guru, Laghima. The guru lived thousands of years ago, and wrote about philosophical ideals such as attachment and instinct. He became so detached from the world that he could fly. Not glide like other air benders, but hover, totally untethered from any natural law. He then reveals that, oh shit, he can airbend too! And he is, as previously discussed, the baddest dude on the planet, so he escapes handily.

I love Zaheer. He’s the leader of the Red Lotus, a splinter faction of the White Lotus that sees it, the Avatar, and any form of control as oppressive. His ideology is militant Rousseauist. Man is born free, everywhere else he is in chains. The only way to remove the chains is to break them. Any attempts at reforming the chains just reforges them in different configurations. He’s an anarchist who wants to eliminate all forms of authority to allow the people to claim their own destiny. People will say he’s a bad example of anarchism, to which I respond that is is a children’s show, sorry they don’t have mucho texto to explain every nuance of your specific brand of anarchism that is also indistinguishable from what Zaheer espouses but with a few more SAT words. He makes his arguments, flawed as they are, but he is so bought into them that even Korra considers their legitimacy. That’s good! Another season where the main villain challenges Korra’s understanding of her role and the society she is fighting to uphold. Is “Balance” as she understands it flawed? Can balance ever be achieved in a world where such oppressive power structures exist and proliferate?

The reason he’s such a compelling villain in this universe is because he’s using the teachings of the non-violent air nomads and using them to justify violent upheaval. It is such an upturning of our established understanding of the world that the characters, and the audience, have occupied. Air Nomads are pacifists, Aang used violence as a last resort to create balance. But Zaheer, inspired explicitly by Air Nomad philosophy, asserts the opposite. The natural order is disorder, ever changing like the wind. When I realized that we were getting an air bending main villain, I think my hair stood on end and electricity arced between the tips of my fingers. It is the coolest choice this franchise has made.

The reason Zaheer is also the baddest dude on the planet is because he’s right. The Earth Kingdom is a bloated, festering, shambling corpse ruled by a despot who kidnaps her own citizens to press them into military service. Squalor and poverty in the Earth Kingdom seems even worse than it was during the Hundred Year War. And so Zaheer steps in with his Boys Brigade and makes things right. He rips the air from the Earth Queens lungs (A dangerous form of airbending we have never seen before! A move so anathema and repulsive to what Aang stands for that it just stirs the blood! Yes! This is how you confront and deconstruct the established assumptions about the world!) and hops on the radio and says “The Queen is dead. There is no coronation for a new one. You’re free from your oppressor. Take your destiny in two hands,”. Team Avatar flies over a Ba Sing Se that is ripping itself to shreds, the vulture and the carcass.

It’s the sort of violent revolution that internet leftists love to fantasize about, warts and all, but are also mad at Korra for representing. Sorry the villainous characters didn’t sit down and post a long wordy meme about it first!

Zaheer’s aforementioned Boys Brigade is comprised of Ghazan, a lava bender (Badass), Ming Hua, an armless waterbender who uses water to create deadly facsimiles of arms (Badass), and P’Li, Zaheer’s tall queen who loves her short king who is also a combustion bender (Let’s actually go). They are so cool, a multinational coalition of bad boys whose clarity of purpose is absolute. I love them all. They’re an anti-team Avatar, a warped reflection challenging them both physically and philosophically.

I’ll take a brief interlude to say that Henry Rollins nails it. His delivery is strange and stilted, but he delivers every line with such conviction. I loved this guy from the first line. It was a point of pride for me when friends and colleagues would watch Korra at my continued insistence or annoying posting on social media, who would reach Book 3 and send me some variation of “Oh I get it. I get why you’re obsessed with this guy”. And that’s because he’s the baddest dude on the planet.

Zaheer and the Boys Brigade attempt to kidnap Korra to kill her in the most metal (har har) way possible. They are going to chain her up, flood her system with mercury to force her into the Avatar State, and then kill her. Evil. Evil scheme. I love it. It’s fucked up and vile and it’s horrible and I love it.

In order to get Korra though, there is a huge fight that results in the death of P’Li. P’Li’s death is insane. In a season that included a woman having the oxygen torn from her lungs, in a series that includes a fratricidal murder/suicide, I’ve rarely been as shocked as I have been by a cartoon character being forced to blow up her own head. It’s sick and it’s dirty and it shows how much the franchise has grown up since then.

And then Zaheer, who has been an air bender for only a few months, does what Aang never could. Without any earthly attachments because of P’Li’s current condition, Zaheer jumps off a cliff with Korra in hand, and begins to fly. Poggers. So so so hype. In college I watched this episode in a room of friends and someone asked why he could do that and I responded in the most annoying way possible. Comic Book Guy “UM IF YOU HAD PAYED ANY ATTENTION” sort of shit. I’m sorry for the brain sickness this show gives me, I’m sorry I can’t be normal about it.

Korra’s father is saved by a random woman who should have been given more to do throughout the season because when they hang on her face for around 2 minutes after she says her name is Kuvira it didn’t have any real significance. If I could change things about Book 3, that would be that. Give Kuvira more to do because it would make Book 4 so much better.

So Zaheer has captured Korra and Team Avatar tries to save Korra. She’s slipping in and out of the Avatar State, her body struggling to stay alive, and the fight between her and Zaheer is so good. It’s one of my favorites of the series, brutal and difficult to watch at times. It’s uncomfortable to see someone slowly poisoned to death. While they do eventually get the mercury out of her system, Korra is much reduced and hardly able to stand. Her responsibilities as peacekeeper are transferred to the new Air Nomads. The final shot of the season, of the great victory over the Red Lotus, is a shot of Korra (someone who so unlike Aang prides herself on her physical attributes, whose prowess in battle defines her) shedding a tear as she sits in a wheelchair.

That’s television baby. That’s so good. What a way to end the season. The Earth Kingdom is in turmoil, the Air Nomads have a new purpose, and our protagonist is at the lowest point she can be. Where do we go? What do we do from here? It’s great. I love that ending, what an absolute downer, and what a great place to pick up the next season.

I’ve noticed that I’ve very rarely talked about the characters in these posts. I’ve not said the names of anyone in Team Avatar once. I’ve nary mentioned Pabu. And that’s because I think Korra, more so than ATLA, is defined by its villains and their philosophies than the characters themselves. Team Avatar is the rock that is being washed away by these increasingly difficult to overcome waves. I like how LoK exists to challenge and critique the previously held beliefs of the world, where ATLA didn’t because we were learning about the world episode by episode. There’s more I could say on each of these characters, on my beloved Bolin and Asami, but I’m not nuts. I’m not going to write two thousand words about the protagonists.

That’s a right reserved exclusively for the villains.