LAST EDITED ON Jun-29-14 AT 03:05 AM (EDT)
 
>Honestly? I got the impression Tenzin genuinely believes Korra
>is gonna figure her shit out. Tenzin believes in Korra! Just, like, in
>general. At worst, I'd concede that he's really bad at expressing this
>belief, but Tenzin is a deeply, painfully awkward person in general.

Maybe. He always sounds to me like he's just barely not rolling his eyes when he makes any response to any expression of frustration or doubt that comes out of her, and since that usually seems like basically all she does in his presence (which is its own Tiresome Thing), that's basically all the time.

>(I actually believe, and I think the series bears me out on this one,
>that Tenzin is perpetually terrified that people will discover he's a
>bit of a fraud. The irony being, of course, that everyone in the whole
>world is scared of that all the time.)

I am beginning to suspect that the newtype airbenders of the second century would be a lot better off if none of Aang's children had been airbenders and the Old Air Nomad Way had died out. Without the overarching tie of their being descendants of a real Air Nomad (which was a prereq for my own conception of the third-century Air Commonwealth in UF before this shit hit the fan), I can't see a re-creation of the old Air Nation in the modern age working. Sure, the alternative would be messy for a generation or two while they got their new-version shit together, but then they'd be, you know, functional parts of society, as opposed to strange, self-marginalizing anachronisms trying to live by the precepts of a culture that they have no actual thing to do with apart from that one physical ability.

I stand by my earlier assertion that no one (apart from Tenzin, who took after Aang and is therefore not very bright) should have been surprised that it's proving difficult to generate enthusiasm among modern persons for joining the Society for Uncreative Anachronism. It's like Mennonites deciding to start recruiting 21st-century muggles based solely on their ability to grow beards. It's never going to work, and no reasonable person ought to have expected that it would.

>Lin did interject to save Raiko and Korra's collective asses when they
>were about to have a knock-down drag-out argument in public, in
>front of the press.

Yeah, see, that's what I'm talking about. I have a completely different view of that scene, to wit: Korra was winning. For once. And then Lin cockblocked her. Again.

>There's just... that wasn't going to go
>anywhere good if allowed to continue, regardless of who was right.

Sure it was. It was going to go to the place where Korra won an argument for once and the press were there to report on it.

Well, OK, no, because this is The Legend of Korra, and even Korra winning an argument with righteous fury somehow will always manage to get spun into Korra seeming childish and stupid. Right. Sorry. I forgot where I was for a second. You're completely right about that.

>Imagine if Churchill and Atlee... had been about to get into a public
>screaming match with each other with a million cameras and microphones pointed
>at them.

Have you ever read Hansard? That happened all the time. Parliament is way better than Congress. :)

>I don't think it is entirely reasonable for Raiko to be fully up to
>date on Korra's whole personal... situation. I mean, there's plenty
>else to indict the guy for.

I thought Korra had that pretty well surrounded before Lin got in her way.
Never mind that she just got out of prison after serving 13 years for the crime of being prematurely awesome. It's a matter of fairly public record that her own uncle conquered her country and pretty near killed her before merging with Hedorah the Smog Monster and trying to eat her adopted (and unappreciative, and frankly unworthy) hometown, at which point she had to disintegrate his ass for the Public Good. And that, in retrospect, it's obvious that they all should have listened to her and gone down there with proper armies and mullered his ass before he had the chance to do it. That was all in the papers, and I submit that it is the job of a person in Fuckstick's position to have read and understood them.

(People In Authority being shown that they should have listened to someone, and then turning around and not listening to that someone again the next time so that the Plot Will Advance, gets on my tits. It's my biggest beef with the Mass Effect games (apart from the end of the third one) and the reason why I find the DreamWorks Dragons of Berk TV shows a lot less appealing than the movies, and hey, look, it's Raiko's whole entire thing!)

Anyway. I don't think I'm expecting too much of Korra at seventeen if I just wish they'd let her be as great as Katara was at fourteen. I mean, that's a high bar, but it's not unreasonable. And what's really frustrating me, if I haven't gotten it across, is that I believe she would be if they just let her get on with it and stopped deliberately tripping her (looking at YOU, second vines scene). I don't think she's really anything like as miserably hapless as they're constantly forcing her to be. Particularly after last season's mostly-red scorecard, it's starting to reek of authorial interference for the sake of artificially raising the stakes, and that just fucks with me.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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