>OK. Caught up now, more or less, and I feel a bit like I've been in a
>fight, but I'll give them this much: As mid-act endings go, that was
>pretty satisfying.

It was definitely better constructed than the end of Book 1, I'll give it that. With Book 1 they were in the middle of post by the time they heard they were getting another order; with Book 2 they'd finished writing before knowing there was ANOTHER 26 coming by, but hadn't yet gotten a lot animated, so they had time to actually re-tool a bit with that in mind.

>Weirdly arbitrary, cosmologically questionable,
>and a bit hurried - they seem to be much better at maneuvering Korra
>into impossibly desperate situations than they are at getting her out
>of them without the machinery showing - but satisfying.

Legend of Korra has, for the most part, convinced me that the writers eyes are bigger than their stomachs. They keep trying to put thirty-episode ideas into twelve to fourteen episode containers.

And the ideas are solid, which can make it very frustrating. Amon was an excellent villain, as was Hiroshi Sato. The weird sociopolitical troubles involving bending privilege and the ideology behind bending supremacy in an industrial society were pretty cool. The complex interplay between Unalaq/Tonraq/the Republic/Varrick could have used more fleshing out. Asami could use, you know, an actual storyline and narrative agency. And oh man, Jinora and her freaky shaman powers and being some species of chosen one? That could be, like, three or four episodes by ITSELF.

> The
>Knifehead-to-Leatherback ratio is just way too friggin' high
>for my liking. It wears me down.

Yeah, you and a lot of people, myself included. It isn't even that Korra fails a lot, it's that there really doesn't seem to be time for her to succeed. In bigger seasons, we'd have had time to stitch in actual wins between the losses. I mean, fuck, look at AtlA. Aang actually dies at one point, they went the full Empire Strikes Back on us, but it was okay because it wasn't like he'd spend all the rest of Book 2 fucking up by the numbers.

I'd like to note that I am one of those guys who is a colossal Song of Ice and Fire fan and love love LOVE me a good and thorough calamitous self-destruction, even from my protagonists. And they kind of lost me on this one a while back, so... yeah. When a guy who thinks that Ned Stark's cavalcade of Lawful Stupid failure was a brilliant act of narrative subversion thinks you're just being a wee bit mean to your lead character, you gotta ask yourselves, how far from the pack have you strayed?

>and hey - that denouement did get one thing totally right!
>actually two. I was really afraid they were going to leave that scar
>on her face.

You know, when that happened, I had two thoughts in rapid succession:

1)"Oh God, are they going to give her a scar? Really?"
2)"Wait a second... that thing is identical to Lin's scar. Are they setting up some sort of Lin plotline parallel for Book 3? Okay, that might actually work."

Turned out to be moot, but I wouldn't necessarily have minded option 2.

-Merc
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