Legend of Korra: a long rant with some begrudging admiration at the end

[kimberly_t]

Be forewarned: this post contains spoilers for the Avatar: Legend of Korra one-hour season finale, if you haven’t seen it yet online. But there’s a lot of outright ranting about the series that I want to get off my chest first, so most of this post is spoiler-free; I’ll post another big ‘SPOILER ALERT’ warning just before I start discussing the

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[snapes_angel]

jimhines has been analyzing the weekly plots too. He and his son are also catching up with the origina" series. It sounds like we are all in agreement, though Iike Korra despite the show's inconsistencies. Pobody is nerfext, right? ;)

[ljlee]

Ooh, a Korra rant! I'm always up for those and agree with almost everything you said, though there's a couple of points of disagreement I'll get out of the way first.

"Katara mothered Aang most of the time, and idolized him the rest of the time; that does not make for a healthy partnership between equals."

That "mothering" you saw seemed to me a friend building up another friend and watching out for his emotional well-being, which is what good friends (and SOs) do. Aang similarly watched out for Katara's well-being in episodes like "The Southern Raiders" as he grew in maturity. Was there a lot of nurturing going on on her part? Absolutely, because that's what people do for people they love. I have favorably compared Katara's role to Gyatso's in an essay about relationships in ATLA. (Warning: Whole lot of pro-Kataang arguments and some digs at Zutara.) Part of the reason I love the pairing is because it reminds me a lot of my husband and me--when we're down we prop each other up, we smooth each others' emotional storms, and we learn

[ljlee]

Disagreement #2: Aang's Harem

"Aang should have taken up the offers he no doubt received from world leaders to establish a harem for him, instead of limiting his genetic material input to just one woman’s children."Whoa whoa, what? Aang should have had sex with women he might not particularly have wanted to and had oodles of children that were too numerous for him to love? And here I thought he was a person, not a stallion for the continuation of his breed

[ljlee]

Minor disagreement: Katara's post-war role

"The big flashback scene we got that showcased Aang, Sokka and Toph? No sign or even mention of Katara at all. Aang basically led the city, Sokka sat on the city council, Toph led the police force, but Katara? The World’s Greatest Waterbender? Oh, well, she was probably home with the kids."

The flashback was about a specific sequence of events involving Yakkone, and just because Katara wasn't active in that sordid affair doesn't mean she did nothing but take care of her kids. Toph and Sokka were involved as members of law enforcement and the judiciary, while Aang was the Avatar, but those three aren't the sum total of public roles. Not only do I see nothing wrong with staying home with kids, it's not even true that childrearing was all Katara did or that she was absent from Book 1. You do realize she's actually in Book 1 and deeply involved in Korra's training, right? Avatar's wife or no, there's no way she's getting that gig unless she were an experienced Waterbender and probably really

[loopy777]

Actually, Book 2 revealed that isolating Korra was all her father and Tenzin (mostly her father, but Tenzin went along with it), and they lied to her and said it was Aang's wishes.

But don't worry, Aang is still tarnished in that it's revealed he showed blatant favoritism to Tenzin over his other kids, to the point where Kya's greatest fear is revealed to be family ties. Yeah.

[ljlee]

I don't get why the deception was necessary, but I'm sure it makes sense in context. Or not.

Yeah, I heard about the favoritism via pop culture osmosis and loved it, though I wouldn't call it tarnished so much as humanized. (I wish LoK had done a lot more of this with the Gaang, though as lavanyasix argued the clues are there with the mess the UR is in.) Didn't know it had hurt Kya so badly, though. Most parents have favorites--I'm sure Katara did, too--but good parents are adept at hiding it. I read about a sociological study where they did a compare-and-contrast of a mother's privately admitted favorite and whom her grown children thought her favorite was. In a number of cases all the children thought they were their mother's favorite child, lol. Obviously Aang didn't have this kind of savvy, being clueless about the protocol of nuclear families.

[loopy777]

Eh, I don't mind Aang being more invested in Tenzin than the other two, but I have a problem with how obvious it's implied to have been, and the depth of the hurt that Aang did to his family as a result. I don't really see that as naturally stemming from Aang's fatal flaws, considering the impact.

[akiko]

You know what I was expecting/wanting at the end? For Jinora to have to merge with/become Raava to save her/bring her back and then merge with Korra. THAT would have been narratively interesting. THAT would have had Consequences. (And there's precedent! Yue!)

But in LOK, every time Bryke were faced with a narrative decision, they went with the easier one: Aang giving back bending; Amon being a bender all along; dropping the entire inequality ball. That is lazy writing, lazy storytelling, and boring.