Y'know... actually, in the final analysis, I think I'm just as glad that happened, because I simply can't be arsed with those guys.

I touched on this briefly in the TTA thread, then steered away from it because I didn't want to get into it over there, but I have to admit: For all that I have a great and obvious love for the title character, I... don't really like The Legend of Korra very much so far. As with the previous Avatar series, the worldbuilding is very clever, the art design is beautiful, the production values are first-rate, and the standard of quipsmanship is fair-to-superb... but the story itself leaves me cold. No, not cold. Annoyed. Annoyance is too warm for that phrase. Most of this has to do more with me than with it, let me just acknowledge that up front. By a series of coincidences that must be experienced to be believed, the way Book I is set up might have been deliberately constructed to press my go-away buttons.

Caution: Here be spoilers, sort of.

I think the thing that bothers me most is that the people responsible for the overall story seem to be recent graduates of the Davies-Moffat Institute for the Advanced Study of Protagonist Abuse. Virtually any time Korra or any of her allies does anything really impressive and fun to watch, it's a fairly safe bet that it's only there to get their (and the viewers') hopes up before a painful and humiliating defeat, usually at the hands of someone who cheated in a blatant and frankly offensive manner. Even in the end, the heroes don't win so much as somehow not quite manage to lose, largely no thanks to themselves.

That shit does not take very long to get old to me. If I wanted to experience a setting in which the universe routinely punishes the protagonists for the simple gaucherie of being heroic, I'd - oh. Right. I do watch Doctor Who. So I'm already getting enough of that vitamin, I should think.

Couple that with the fact that I found the constantly reiterated subtext of the A-plot spectacularly creepy - I mean, the main villain spelled out in, what, episode three that his plan was to toy with the plucky heroine for a while and then violate her person at a later time and place of his choosing? Which he then proceeded to do, just as promised. Sure, it's metaphorical, but seriously guys Jesus Christ - and, well, yeah. Not so much.

I dunno. Maybe they were shooting for More Mature Storytelling - the main character's a few years older than her predecessor, dealing with different problems with a different approach. If so, though, I think they fumbled it a bit. I mean, the original show was one that had genocide front and center in its backstory and centered around a desperate race to prevent another one, and it still managed to be whimsical and lovable. This one... doesn't, most of the time. At least to me.

But on the other hand, don't get me wrong - I've loved characters from way worse shows. And it really is beautifully made. It's like Bill Bailey said about Mamma Mia: "It's like being beaten to death with an IKEA chair. It hurts? But you've gotta admire the craftsmanship." :)

--G.
Also: One of the villains is Georges Batroc with shark sticks. I can't get behind that.
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>Y'know... actually, in the final analysis, I think I'm just as glad
>that happened, because I simply can't be arsed with those guys.

You may or may not be aware of this, but I feel it worth pointing out that LoK did not have a writers room in the same way ATLA did.

ATLA wasn't just the Mike and Bryan show. They had a whole slew of writers doing quality work. In particular, they had Aaron Ehasz, who wasn't afraid to get in their faces and tell them "no, this is a bad idea. Let's do this instead."

Ehasz was responsible for Toph. Originally (and this is made fun of in Ember Island Players) Toph was going to be just a generic muscley dude. The silhouette of the Earthbender in the opening credits was the proto-Toph, who eventually became Sud, Roku's earthbending master.

Ehasz marshaled the team together and told them "Listen. It has to be a girl. And preferably, it has to be an awesome girl. We've done some work on concepts here we think you'll like." And he made the case and sold the idea.

For a lot of people, if you go through ATLA and check the writing credits on your favorite episodes, you'll find Ehasz' name.

That wasn't the case with Korra. It was all Mike and Bryan all the time, and I feel it suffered for it narratively and structurally, though for different reasons than you do.

>I think the thing that bothers me most is that the people responsible
>for the overall story seem to be recent graduates of the Davies-Moffat
>Institute for the Advanced Study of Protagonist Abuse. Virtually any
>time Korra or any of her allies does anything really impressive and
>fun to watch, it's a fairly safe bet that it's only there to get their
>(and the viewers') hopes up before a painful and humiliating defeat,
>usually at the hands of someone who cheated in a blatant and frankly
>offensive manner.

I'm actually a little curious as to what you mean by 'cheating.' The Wolfbats were certainly cheaters, but... well, Korra wasn't just playing sports. She was fighting a counter-revolution. You can't really 'cheat' in that context. I mean, what, were the Equalists supposed to do, just line up and allow themselves to be bent at until they lost?

>Even in the end, the heroes don't win so much as
>somehow not quite manage to lose, largely no thanks to themselves.

The cherry on top of that sundae is that at the end Korra gets her hurts all kissed better in a deus ex machina. "Well, Korra could go on an epic spiritual journey to regain her bending... nah, fuck it. Aang to the rescue."

My views on the matter are most succinctly summed up by this.

>That shit does not take very long to get old to me. If I
>wanted to experience a setting in which the universe routinely
>punishes the protagonists for the simple gaucherie of being heroic,

You know, I really wanted to argue with this point. I did.

Then I remembered how I literally teared up when Lin got captured and de-bent. I mean, my god, the parallels. She was fucking up Equalist airships in a deliberate homage to the way her mother was doing in the finale of ATLA, only it didn't quite have the same happy ending because Lin lacked a Sokka to catch her when she fell. And she did all that so that the guy she is maybe kind of still in love with could escape with, oh yeah, the much younger women he left her for and their kids.

That was some powerful shit.

And then we find out it counts for precisely dick because Tenzin and his high-stepping brood got captured off-screen between that episode and the next one! What the hell happened there, Tenzin? Did you stop for tacos on the way to the Fire Nation and let them catch up?

Someone making a sacrifice that turns out to be pointless can be written well. This? Was not. It was a grave disservice to Lin as a character and utterly devalued her.

>Couple that with the fact that I found the constantly reiterated
>subtext of the A-plot spectacularly creepy - I mean, the main
>villain spelled out in, what, episode three that his plan was
>to toy with the plucky heroine for a while and then violate her person
>at a later time and place of his choosing? Which he then proceeded to
>do, just as promised. Sure, it's metaphorical, but seriously guys
>Jesus Christ - and, well, yeah. Not so much.

I actually found the constant focus on Amon... off-putting in the opposite way from that. It was almost like he was a Scooby-Doo villain; you beat him up and rip off the mask and everything is all better.

The Equalists were sold as a popular uprising, an expression of very severe economic and social problems in Republic City. Amon was a symptom, not a cause. Movements like that can't be easily dealt with by violence and taking down Amon will just cause two more to appear.

I honestly think (I've gone round-and-round with Phil on this) that the Equalists would have worked better as a cadre of supervillains rather than a revolutionary organization. If you're not going to deal with the complex social problems you've created in a mature way, don't create them. Just make the Equalists a tiny group of crazy fanatics with advanced technology and unleash them.

>I dunno. Maybe they were shooting for More Mature Storytelling - the
>main character's a few years older than her predecessor, dealing with
>different problems with a different approach. If so, though, I think
>they fumbled it a bit. I mean, the original show was one that had
>genocide front and center in its backstory and centered around
>a desperate race to prevent another one, and it still
>managed to be whimsical and lovable. This one... doesn't, most of the
>time. At least to me.

I feel that this is a function of the pacing, about which I have... opinions.

LoK manages the unique task, in my view, of being both understuffed and overstuffed at the same time. Because it was only twelve instead of twenty, everything was rush rush rush rush. Big important things happened! And then more big important things happened, and more ones, and MORE ones, and then we had a fight and then it was over.

There was very little time for character building, or for them to really just let the setting breath. Bolin got, what, like half an arc? I think he has maybe four lines in the final two episodes. Asami had an arc but it was... kind of truncated. We didn't get time for Republic City itself to become a fully realized character, the way Ba Sing Se and the Fire Nation did.

Contrast that with ATLA. ATLA had time for "Tales of Ba Sing Se," which is literally nothing but the cast bumming around the city for a whole episode so we, the viewers, can learn about them. (Or in Iroh's case, damn near get our hearts broken.) It had "Zuko Alone," an entire episode about just Zuko's backstory that doesn't drive the plot massively forward at all. It had "The Beach." It had a whole arc about just Appa getting lost and then getting found again. The first season had time for a whole bunch of villages of the week. The third season had "The Runaway" and "Nightmares and Daydreams" and "the Ember Island Players."

They needed to slow down, and take their time.

>Also: One of the villains is Georges Batroc with shark sticks.
>I can't get behind that.

Screw you, the Lieutenant was awesome and I hope he takes over the Equalists and does the job ten times better than his old boss did. :)

(Also shut up Batroc is amazing.)

-Merc
Keep Rat

And hell, he invented parkour before it was called parkour. :)

I'll concede that the characters aren't necessarily cheating. It is, after all, as you note, not a game. They're only using the tools they have at hand. But those tools? Are monumentally unsatisfactory to me. Chi blocking and bloodbending are both cheap, cheap shit. They're the kind of thing desperate Dungeon Masters bust out when the stuff they thought would give the party a hard time didn't work and the Doritos are running low. Nope, you can't, 'cause........ magic items don't work in this room. Or cleric spells. 'Cause I said they don't! Shut up. Melee attacks from goblins have always caused 1d4 points of DEX loss for six rounds. You're gonna stop whining if you want any more of this Mountain Dew, pal.

>I actually found the constant focus on Amon... off-putting in the
>opposite way from that. It was almost like he was a Scooby-Doo
>villain; you beat him up and rip off the mask and everything is all
>better.

... Yeah, see, I think the main difference there is that the villains in Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? tended not to be so... how can I put this delicately? Epically rapey. I'm not good with that before the watershed, even if it's wearing a Richard Nixon mask and pretending to be about superpowers.

--G.
Also, platinum robots armed with grappling hooks that are conveniently also tasers, for fuck's sake? Is "Hiroshi Sato" actually an alias employed by the notorious racketeer, war criminal, and international arms dealer Miles Mayhem?
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Ah, I get what you're saying now.

I kind of disagree with you on this one. Amon's bloodbending would have been deeply cheap if, say, he'd been training tons of waterbenders to do it en masse. (It's been noted by many people that bloodbending is, basically, the god mode of bending; there is no defense against it except for another, stronger bloodbender.) But with just him and just Tarrlok? I was okay with that.

As for the chi blocking, I just straight up don't have a problem with that at all. It's pressure-point martial arts, that's been used in tons of settings.

It's worth noting, however, that much of LoK revolves around taking the stuff that was weird and unique in ATLA and democratizing it. Metalbending was Toph's ultimate special shit... and now there's a whole cadre of people who do it. Lightning was Azula and Ozai's ultimate move (even Iroh couldn't do it, or if he could he never did) and now even guys like Mako who have no formal training can do it.

In the same way, chi-blocking was Ty Lee's "I am special and awesome" thing, and it was expanded outward into a more widespread discipline.

I will grant that, aesthetically speaking, it might have worked out better if the Equalists had been using purely technological means to even the playing field, but that would have carried unfortunate implications about modernity.

>... Yeah, see, I think the main difference there is that the villains
>in Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? tended not to be so... how can I
>put this delicately? Epically rapey. I'm not good with that
>before the watershed, even if it's wearing a Richard Nixon mask and
>pretending to be about superpowers.

Hmm. I guess it is... different... since Korra is a lady. I just sort of saw him violating all benders every which way and hadn't quite gone down that particular level of squick.

(I just have trouble taking Amon seriously, really, so when he makes threats I see a petulant idiot mouthing off. His plans are bad to the point you have to wonder if they're deliberately so.)

>Also, platinum robots armed with grappling hooks that are
>conveniently also tasers, for fuck's sake? Is "Hiroshi Sato"
>actually an alias employed by the notorious racketeer, war criminal,
>and international arms dealer Miles Mayhem?

The platinum part baffled me, I must admit. All they had to say was "we've advanced our refining of metal to the point that there are no longer any impurities within it for an earthbender to grab hold of." That would have been it.

I don't think you of all people, given some of the more outre armaments on the mecha you've fictionally designed and deployed, can get too upset about grappling hooks + tasers. :)

In fact, given the stunning idiocy the metalbender cops demonstrate throughout LoK, building tasers into everything is definitely the way to go. Even after constantly seeing their colleagues taken down with electricity, they continue to wrap themselves in metal armor and hurl conductive restraints at their enemies. You're earthbenders! Get out of your armor and hit them with a rock! Rocks are non-conductive and fly through the air to connect with peoples heads real good!

-Merc
Keep Rat

What a surprise.

>In fact, given the stunning idiocy the metalbender cops demonstrate

There is that. They're undeniably imbeciles. And they lack even the atavistic vestiges of critical thinking ability required to avoid becoming Wholehearted Pawns of Evil, which is always a big plus in a law enforcement operative! I like to think that, on the rare occasion when one of them somehow manages to blunder into Valhalla (presumably through no fault of his own), the first thing Toph does is headbutt him unconscious. The whole thing is frankly an embarrassment. And don't even get me started about what she did when Lin got there.

--G.
"Oh man, Corwin, you should've been there for my midlife crisis. You might've been able to stop me from founding the SS."
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I'd like to note that the blame for this rests 100% on Phil's shoulders, as he spent something like two years encouraging me to express my opinions here rather than just in private to him.

I'm too much Merc for just one man to satisfy, apparently. :)

>I like to think that, on the rare
>occasion when one of them somehow manages to blunder into Valhalla
>(presumably through no fault of his own), the first thing Toph does is
>headbutt him unconscious. The whole thing is frankly an
>embarrassment.

Credit where it's due; the metalbender cops are pretty good at fighting in general. I mean, they manage to capture a 3/4ths realized Avatar in under five minutes, which is something the entire militarized might of the Fire Nation couldn't do to just one airbender for a whole year. They were just too stupid to adapt when someone build a fighting force designed specifically to take them down hard.

Couple that with the fact that Valhalla doesn't really require you to be of sterling moral character to get in, there's probably a whole bunch of'em there. The Equalist uprising alone probably killed a bunch of metalbender cops who were only trying to defend their colleagues and/or the civilians in their charge, which is one of the sine qua nons of getting your Valhalla parking validated.

>"Oh man, Corwin, you should've been there for my midlife
>crisis. You might've been able to stop me from founding the
>SS."

Hey, Toph is just continuing a long and proud tradition of supremely badass earthbenders founding explicitly authoritarian institutions that get entirely out of hand. She and Kyoshi could write a book about it!

My own personal theory is that the institutional culture of the metalbender cops and the RCPD in general is probably Toph's fault. Her leadership style was likely pretty gung-ho and focused on getting people to obey her through sheer force of will backed up by implied physical threats and the august majesty of the law.

You can lead pretty well that way, but when you establish an atmosphere of "the Chief is always right, and if you cross her you'd better watch out" you're going to attract a lot of people who enjoy having that kind of power to throw around, and after you leave you may be surprised at the turn your successors take, as their moral compasses may not be firmly as affixed as your own is.

-Merc
Keep Rat

... which is pretty bizarre, if you think about it, because is there any character in the first show who is less interested in the August Majesty of the Law than Toph Beifong (apart from the ones who are so insane they have springs visibly sticking out of their heads)? For her to then turn around and found the Reichssicherheitshaupamt implies either a massive change in outlook or a serious head injury; possibly both. That must have been a biblical midlife crisis.

--G.
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Well, it's less the desire of the August Majesty of the Law, as her behavior as Earthbending Sifu to Aang. Lots and lots of Do As I Say AND Do, involving lots and lots and LOTS of very heavy things, usually flung at the student's head to get them to stand their ground. This behavior also comes to light in The Promise, where we see her set up the first Metalbending Academy, and try to teach students other than Aang. They eventually got the hang of it, but it was rougher than a komodo rhino's backside for a while there.

--- Philip

	Philip J. Moyer Contributing Writer, Editor and Artist (and Moderator) -- Eyrie Productions, Unlimited CEO of MTS, High Poobah Of Artwork, and High Priest Of the Church Of Aerianne -- Magnetic Terrapin Studios "Insert Pithy Comment Here"

Could have been one of those gradual, unintentional things. Toph may have been all about breaking the rules, but that really only applied to her. SHE could break the rules, because she's Toph and special and awesome. Other people are Not Toph.

I don't know if you've read the comics, or indeed have any interest in doing so, but the seeds of Toph's evolution into a more law and order type are planted there.

(Spoilers)

Basically, Toph really liked teaching Aang. She felt like she was really making a difference, helping the world. Plus it involved berating people until they did what she wanted them to do, and she especially loved that part. So she started up her own metalbending dojo... which involved a lot of yelling at her students and threatening them when they tried to quit.

On top of that, it is rather heavily implied that to be a metalbender, a good one, you have to be kind of insane. Toph's initial cadre of students are all emotional basket cases whose ability to force metal to bow to their will stems from the fact that they're unique mixtures of both crazy and disciplined. So imagine a bunch of cops who have that kind of damage rattling around in their heads.

And while that's happening, the Gaang begins to deploy Toph as sort of a riot-control device. When they want to cow a giant crowd or intimidate people into settling down and not, say, starting a race riot, they get Toph to shout at them and threaten retribution. They're not a plucky band of rebels anymore; these are people who can get in to see any leader on the planet without any advance notice. They're establishment now.

Spend a couple decades being The Man and you could easily evolve from the person who started running grifts essentially as a way to pass the time to someone who thinks that what the city needs is someone to slap it around until it learns what's good for it. It worked on the Avatar, right? So it must applicable to entire populations as a whole!

EDIT: And of course, while I'm composing this, Phil beats me to the punch in a much more concise manner.

-Merc
Keep Rat

Similarly, in the modern (FI) era, you have the EoJ - or as some would have it, Gryph and his fellow immortals and their super-powerful enforcers, just a change of uniforms away from being Big Fire.

(This morning, on another episode of "Merc Has Opinions...")

The IPO was specifically designed to be free from oversight and to have it's sanction provided by... itself. Well, technically, according to one of the old "Ask Gryphon Anything" threads ("Go ahead, ask me anything") the IPO is the enforcement arm of the Babylon Foundation... which is an NGO and, presumably, was highly selective in who it let become a voting member.

This is much different from how the real-life Interpol works, which is more of an administrative umbrella than a classic LEO.

To a certain extent, that doesn't matter for the purposes of UF, as the IPO exists, I believe, to allow Ben to write stories about awesome super-cops who are taking down equally awesome super-criminals and saving the Galaxy. The political aspects exist to give a backdrop to that.

I, personally as a reader, have always been a bit bothered by that disconnect; a lot of the IPO plot threads are explicitly political in nature (see: Clark, Willian Morgan, and Alliance, Earth) and that's always put the notion front and center into my mind that there would be plenty of good and decent people who have qualms about the IPO because it was designed to not have democratic legitimacy and is run by people who are answerable to no-one and have a history of taking direct unilateral action.

This was touched on very briefly as part of the now-obsolesced Day of Infamy; Jean-Luc Picard, who is a good man and a good officer, with his head screwed firmly on straight and not a single naive bone in his body, is prepared to be convinced that Gryphon and his cadre of supreme badasses are ready to topple the Federation by military coup.

I loved that scene. Nice exploration of how difficult it is to scale being a lone hero up into being an establishment figure who is expected to play nice with other establishment figures.

-Merc
Keep Rat

I always used to think it was a myth that some people think too much. Particularly when you demonstrated right up front that you did get the idea:

>To a certain extent, that doesn't matter for the purposes of UF, as
>the IPO exists, I believe, to allow Ben to write stories about awesome
>super-cops who are taking down equally awesome super-criminals and
>saving the Galaxy. The political aspects exist to give a backdrop to
>that.

PROTIP: You're absolutely right about this, and the "certain extent" you specify is, in fact, "all of it". :)

--G.
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--G.
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Though I am forced to wonder, given the news about the 12th Doctor and his previous roles, whether or not any stories involving galactic intrigue at any level will involve a belligerent Caledonian spin-doctor with an incredible gift for inventive profanity...

---
"Yeah, I'm definitely going to hell/But I'll have all the best stories to tell" -- Frank Turner, The Ballad of Me and My Friends

"Who's that asset we've got, you know. The hairdresser. The space hairdresser and the gay cowboy. He's got a tinfoil pal and a pedal bin, uh, his dad's a robot and he's fuckin' fucked his sister. Lego! They're all made of fuckin' Lego."

"You mean Skywalker and Solo?"

"Aye, those cunts, yep."

Oh, I haven't forgotten. It's just that a lot of those classic pulp heroes also got up to stuff that would be, if not for their iron-clad narrative assurance of being Good Guys, ****ing horrifying. (Doc Savage's casual and routine use of non-consensual, personality-altering brain surgery to rehabilitate criminals comes to mind. Then again, that comes from a time when lobotomies were an actual and merely uncommon medical procedure, and the only really remarkable thing was that he'd "perfected" it, something real doctors were still "working on" and considered an entirely worthy goal, rather like sequencing the human genome.)

At the time, criminality (at least of the non-"evil mastermind bent on world domination" sort) was thought of as a pathology, not a lifestyle choice, and Doc, being the greatest physician of all time, had simply cured it. The criminals he cured were assumed to be as pleased with the outcome as any other successfully treated sufferer of a debilitating disease would've been.

The past is a foreign country, etc. :)

Interestingly, there's a flavor of this in the end of Avatar: The Last Airbender as well - and unlike Doc's cure for crime, Aang's little habit of taking the superpowers away from people he didn't agree with would end up setting a dangerous precedent. The kind of precedent one likes to imagine his successor eventually thanked him for with one of those one-knuckle punches to the top of the head. :)

--G.
"Ow! What was that for?" "Thinking you're so goddam clever."
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*spittake*

Monitor cleanup in post 34!!!!!

>I kind of disagree with you on this one. Amon's bloodbending would
>have been deeply cheap if, say, he'd been training tons of
>waterbenders to do it en masse. (It's been noted by many people that
>bloodbending is, basically, the god mode of bending; there is no
>defense against it except for another, stronger bloodbender.) But with
>just him and just Tarrlok? I was okay with that.

My issue with Amon using bloodbending to permanently strip benders of their bending ability is how it cheapens the climax of the original series. When Aang strips Ozai of his firebending, he has to do so with energybending, which he uses at explicit risk of his own life and bending ability. It's a big deal, and a triumph because it lets him accomplish the seemingly-impossible task of stopping Ozai, permanently, without killing him, and it demonstrates just how much Aang has grown over the course of the story.

Yet Amon can do the same thing, without the risk to himself, and even another bloodbender can't undo it.

>As for the chi blocking, I just straight up don't have a problem with
>that at all. It's pressure-point martial arts, that's been used in
>tons of settings.

Ty Lee could do it temporarily in the original series; mixing that knowledge with bloodbending is a decent explanation for the how. But there's no logical reason that another bloodbender who knows how chi blocking works couldn't undo Amon's work. That wouldn't extend to granting bending to non-benders -- that'd still have to be exclusive to energybending, if it's even possible to begin with.

Perhaps the next series will expand upon it. I'd accept it if it turned out the reason Katara couldn't heal what Amon did was because of very specific knowledge he had but she did not. But, after Korra uses energybending to restore herself and a few others, she's able to teach Katara how to do so with bloodbending (i.e. restoring the chi flows that Amon disrupted). There's good reasons for not wanting those techniques disseminated beyond the two of them (and maybe a few others that are trustworthy), but it'd make that bit more acceptable.

It'd be better if they hadn't painted themselves into a corner with that particular idea, in terms of narrative and character arcs, because it works, in terms of forcing Korra to grow as a person and as the Avatar.

"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding

I once encountered a piece of fan art which took the tongue-in-cheek view that Katara was deliberately sandbagging, because Aang asked her to - "Look, do me a solid here or she's never gonna come and talk to me." That's a deliberately snarky take on a serious matter, and it still works better for me as an explanation than anything put forward on screen. :)

--G.
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>>Maybe they were shooting for More Mature Storytelling - the
>>main character's a few years older than her predecessor, dealing with
>>different problems with a different approach. If so, though, I think
>>they fumbled it a bit. I mean, the original show was one that had
>>genocide front and center in its backstory and centered around
>>a desperate race to prevent another one, and it still
>>managed to be whimsical and lovable. This one... doesn't, most of the
>>time. At least to me.
>
>I feel that this is a function of the pacing, about which I have...
>opinions.
>
>LoK {... both understuffed and overstuffed ...}
>
>There was very little time for character building, or for them to
>really just let the setting breath.
>
>Contrast that with ATLA. {...}
>
>They needed to slow down, and take their time.

I agree on this; it would have been better if they had 20 episodes instead of twelve, allowing for more involved backstory on the brothers, Asami, Tenzin and Co, the Equalists having a valid point (allowing us to see more of the Triads oppressing people, which would also tie into Mako and Bolin's backstory, and the City Council having failed, being all benders from outside nations), giving more overall space and breather episodes.

There's just one problem with that wishful thinking -- they didn't HAVE those episodes. The initial conception was for Legend of Korra as a standalone 12-episode miniseries. That's all Nickelodeon planned for, and all Bryan and Mike were allocated for. In order to tell their story (primarily about Korra, not the Equalists or Amon or Republic City's growing pains or Technology vs Spirituality), they had to get all the essentials out front and FAST, since during the writing phase they had no idea if there was going to be a Book 2 -- it had to be self-contained on the likelihood that there wouldn't be anything else. In fact, that was the same situation with Avatar: The Last Airbender; things could've been wrapped up with the end of Book 1 with The Siege of the North, with the optimistic tone that "yeah, we still have to defeat the Fire Lord, but hey, we survived Admiral Zhao's siege and Katara's now a master waterbender, now let's have more adventures!" and sail off into the sunset.

Book 2 wasn't green-lighted until early March 2011 -- after writing and storyboarding for Book 1 had completed and animation and voice acting were well underway, somewhat too late to change the train on its tracks. And Book 3 and 4 were not green-lighted until July 2012, just after LoK Book 1 finished airing. For that matter, they're working on the storyboards for Book 4 "now" (July 2013) while finishing production on Book 2. That's just how weirdly arranged TV animation pacing gets these days.

Could they have interleaved the stories better, world-built better, if they had more episodes and knew that they were going to have three more books to go? Probably, yes. But that's not the episode structure they had going in, and chose not to use for the next ones.

Which leads into the next point:

>You may or may not be aware of this, but I feel it worth pointing out
>that LoK did not have a writers room in the same way ATLA did.
>
>That wasn't the case with Korra. It was all Mike and Bryan all the
>time, and I feel it suffered for it narratively and structurally,
>though for different reasons than you do.

Yes, this was a problem as well. More inputs are generally good, and for Book 1, they didn't have that - but they did have Joaquim Dos Santos and Ryu Ki-Hyun, who also had significant input, and who had worked on the original series. However, when Book 2 was green-lighted, they brought back several other of the old writers, including Josh Hamilton and Tim Hendrik, to work on things while Bryke managed production of Book 1, if that helps any. So we'll just have to see for Book 2 and beyond.

>>Even in the end, the heroes don't win so much as
>>somehow not quite manage to lose, largely no thanks to themselves.
>
>The cherry on top of that sundae is that at the end Korra gets her
>hurts all kissed better in a deus ex machina. "Well, Korra could go on
>an epic spiritual journey to regain her bending... nah, fuck it. Aang
>to the rescue."
>
>My views on the matter are most succinctly summed up by
>this.

Upon reflection, I honestly think that would've been the wrong way to take it.

As we see people getting de-bent, we learn that A) this is something "the best healers in the city" (from Tahno) can't fix, and B) this is something Katara can't fix, who is a master waterbender, healer, and somebody who knows bloodbending as well - possibly the strongest heroic waterbender in the world. If Katara can't fix it, then there's really not much hope for anybody else to do it, outside of extreme extra-ordinary measures.

Waterbending healing uses one's chi to work on another's chi paths to fix the body to a degree, but it's not a cure-all. Bending uses one's chi and one's chi paths (and one's attunement and awareness of the same) to affect the world around them (we learned both of these back in ATLA). However, Amon's bloodbending disrupts a person's chi and chi paths enough that bending becomes impossible. In effect, making their chi paths like a non-bender's. And if it was as easy to 'activate/re-activate' chi paths to allow anybody to become a bender, that knowledge would've been desperately desired by a lot of people -- including probably various Equalists.

With that in mind, Korra's state at the end was literally an unsolvable problem. She was physically incapable of bending three of the elements, but her airbending had finally activated since Amon hadn't cut that one out (since he didn't have any practice on any other airbenders) and she was pushed to a point where not defending another person would be unconscionable. No amount of training would allow her to reconnect to the other three that way, and would only lead to more heartache. (If only training, will, and spiritual awareness was what was required to become a bender, there'd be a lot more benders out there who were originally non-benders -- heck, we'd have Air Acolytes spontaneously becoming Airbenders.)

In the end, Korra's whole identity is challenged. She's been having it challenged, old assumptions broken down, all through Book 1 as she experiences the rest of the world through Republic City, but this is the capstone: Is she a valid person without being the Avatar? That's what it's all built up to. And once she realizes that, one way or another, her life goes on -- THAT'S when it finally clicks and Aang shows up. She has an identity beyond "I'm The Avatar, Deal With It", and it's time to find out who that Korra is (especially for Korra herself). Yes, she may backslide a bit, but it's all part of her growing process.

No, instead, we're getting Korra's epic spiritual journey in Book 2, Spirits, where we get to learn a LOT MORE about the Spirit World and the spirits (and the origin of the Avatar and why it exists) than we ever did in the whole entirely of ATLA (really, all we had were Hei Bai, Tui and La, Koh, Wan Shi Tong, and The Painted Lady over 61 episodes, and Aang stating he was the bridge between the two worlds without major elaboration). I think I can live with that trade-off.

(also, the "Epic Journey To Learn The Remaining Elements Again" story has already been done. If I wanted to see it again, I'd re-watch Avatar The Last Airbender. That's not the story they've chosen to tell this time around -- they want to tell Korra's story, not Aang's story, retreaded.)

>>That shit does not take very long to get old to me. If I
>>wanted to experience a setting in which the universe routinely
>>punishes the protagonists for the simple gaucherie of being heroic,
>
>You know, I really wanted to argue with this point. I did.
>
> {Lin's so-called-sacrifice}
>
>And then we find out it counts for precisely dick because Tenzin and
>his high-stepping brood got captured off-screen between that episode
>and the next one! What the hell happened there, Tenzin? Did you stop
>for tacos on the way to the Fire Nation and let them catch up?

No, the Equalist airships were faster than Sky Bison. Lin explicitly said they were gaining on them, and we honestly have no idea what the top airspeed of Sky Bison and the various airships in the show really are. Amon and Hiroshi Sato had quite a lot more material assets than anybody was expecting (take note of how many airships, mecha-tanks, and biplanes show up in the last three episodes), how do we know they weren't pulling in more airships from elsewhere to pursue or intercept after Lin took down the one and the other returned with her captive? We know they have radio, and the Equalists had a lock on communications by that point.

>Someone making a sacrifice that turns out to be pointless can be
>written well. This? Was not. It was a grave disservice to Lin as a
>character and utterly devalued her.

I'd like to tell you a story about another protagonist who made a great sacrifice, which at the time seemed like the ultimate sacrifice, and then at the end found out he could have it all, anyway:

Once, there was a boy. He met a girl, who happened to love another, but they developed such a rapport that he found himself falling in love with the girl (and the girl, despite herself, found herself falling in love with the boy), and aside from the fact that girl still loved and longed for another (and hoped to get back to that person one day), things were pretty keen.

And then the boy had a quest. One that caused him to cross paths with the person of the girl's affections. He fought for that person, tried to set things right, ended up getting the girl involved -- and out of love for the girl, out of the love that girl had for the other person, he made the ultimate sacrifice to get those two people together and accepted the burden the other person was being forced into.

For a time, everything was relatively happy, and then circumstances conspired for the boy and the girl to actually be told by the person that they'd both sacrificed for to "get over yourselves and consummate already", and in the end they did, and they were all happy...

... and the flack we got for writing the story of Corwin Ravenhair, Utena Tenjou, and Anthy Himemeya like this, stating that Corwin's sacrifice was pointless because he got what he wanted anyway, was rather... heated. ^_-;;

The point I'm making here is that from the perception of the characters at that moment of the sacrifice and the perception of the readers/watchers at that moment of the sacrifice are the most important judge of the value of a character's sacrifice, and does not in ANY WAY devalue the character if that sacrifice is undone afterwards (either positively or negatively).

As far as Corwin knew, at that moment, it was all or nothing -- he either takes the pain of being the Pillar RIGHT NOW, or the woman he loves (Utena) and the woman she loves (Anthy) are forever separated and locked apart. He did not possess foresight that several years down the line he'd be in a three-way relationship with them with a baby on the way.

As far as Lin knew, at that moment, it was all or nothing -- she either takes down those airships that she can see RIGHT NOW (either sinking them with her on them, or forcing them to take her back as a captive), or Tenzin (the man she still cared for) and his family (who she'd seen that he loved and knew they were the last survivors) get captured and made an example. She did not possess foresight that they would get captured sometime after she left.

Characters don't have foresight (unless they're specifically written as reliable oracles). Readers and Viewers don't have foresight (until they read the book or watch the show again). Judging their actions and reactions with 20/20 hindsight, I feel does them a disservice.

>The Equalists were sold as a popular uprising, an expression of very
>severe economic and social problems in Republic City. Amon was a
>symptom, not a cause. Movements like that can't be easily dealt with
>by violence and taking down Amon will just cause two more to appear.
>
>I honestly think (I've gone round-and-round with Phil on this) that
>the Equalists would have worked better as a cadre of supervillains
>rather than a revolutionary organization. If you're not going to deal
>with the complex social problems you've created in a mature way, don't
>create them. Just make the Equalists a tiny group of crazy fanatics
>with advanced technology and unleash them.

I think this is the other crux of the issue regarding pacing and storytelling -- "What is the story supposed to focus on?" In this case, I believe the primary focus was on Korra. The Equalists, Republic City, Pro-Bending, heck even the rest of Team Avatar (Mako, Bolin, Asami, Naga, Pabu) are, in the end background for the journey Korra takes from somebody who is socially isolated, fixed on a single identifying quantity ("I'm the Avatar", etc), and unfamiliar with employing active concepts such as teamwork, friendship, and patience, to somebody who is a team player, values her friendships, is willing to wait (even if grumbling about it), and learns empathy for both her friends and her enemies. Sure, she's still ready and willing to punch people in the face to get her way, but she learns more when to do it, when not to, and for what reasons (not just to project the power of the Avatar).

Did the background filling-in suffer, due to the 12-episode format? Yes, it did. But it doesn't invalidate the existence of the background in the first place, nor does it invalidate some of what they were trying to tell. The Equalists were not an organization that Korra could deal with by punching each and every chi-blocker, mecha-tank, and airship in the face, as much as she may have desperately wanted to. They were something that had to be fought cooperatively and ideologically -- Korra planted the idea that Amon wasn't who he said he was among his followers before she was put in a position to remove the mask of his identity via his bloodbending (the Lieutenant) and waterbending (the rest of the people).

The story was about Korra learning to deal with problems with different approaches, and accepting other people's help in confronting them, not an extended socio-political analysis of bender vs. non-bender class warfare with Communist overtones during an industrialization boom. A tiny group of crazy fanatics with super-tech would've been entirely unsympathetic, and not conducive to Korra learning several important life lessons along the way.

If anything, the fact that we're having debates about the whole idea of the Equalists is a win on the writers' and creators' part, since that means we're thinking about the background of the world and figuring out the nuances and fiddly details without having them explicitly spelled out for us.

In summation, in my opinion the crux of the series is Korra's journey to becoming a more fully realized person, beyond her identity of the Avatar, and if she encounters a lot of hard knocks along the way to break down her old assumptions, so be it. Could it have been paced and plotted better? Yes, but that would have required more episodes than they were originally allocated. Now that they've got three more Books to play with, we should hopefully have a more nuanced learning curve for our plucky protagonist, while learning along with her how the world of Avatar has further changed in the past 70 years from Aang's time.

--- Philip

	Philip J. Moyer Contributing Writer, Editor and Artist (and Moderator) -- Eyrie Productions, Unlimited CEO of MTS, High Poobah Of Artwork, and High Priest Of the Church Of Aerianne -- Magnetic Terrapin Studios "Insert Pithy Comment Here"

I've not actually watched LoK yet, so I may be way off base here but...

From what I'm reading in this thread those two sacrifices are handled very differently in the story _around_ the scenes (insofar as I can tell, the LoK _scene_ is being given full credit) and that's the difference.

Corwin gave up his happiness for Utena's happiness and achieved that. (And in the end he gets to reclaim what he thought he was giving up _because_ his sacrifice led to Anthy loving him.)

Lin gave up her freedom (for given value of gave up) for Tenzin's freedom... and didn't manage to accomplish that. (And then someone else was the BDH and freed them both, I think).

The complaint appears to be that Corwin and Lin both made sacrificial plays for the sake of others but Corwin succeeded and is eventually rewarded for his heroism. Lin, on the other hand, through no fault of her own, failed and her sacrifice had no consequence on the story. (If she'd done nothing, Tenzin's family get captured, but this happens anyway).

Then again, in UF trying to do the right thing generally gets rewarded. Even in TLA (which I _have_ watched) the road to success seems to lead through several circles of hell.

Well, it's worth noting that an apologist (and usually that term implies someone is being disingenuous) and someone who has an honest difference of opinion will sound pretty much the same. So no worries there. This is the internet. After porn, it's primary purpose is intemperate discussion. :)

For my own part, I'll try not to sound relentlessly negative in my opinions, although I'm pretty sure that ship has likewise sailed.

>I agree on this; it would have been better if they had 20 episodes
>instead of twelve
>
>...
>
>There's just one problem with that wishful thinking -- they didn't
>HAVE those episodes. The initial conception was for Legend of
>Korra as a standalone 12-episode miniseries.

Indeed.

But here's the rub: when you don't have enough time to give all your plot threads the attention they deserve, you don't try and cram them all in anyway.

What you do is scale back. You identify what needs to be done, the vital essence, if you will, of your story, and you get less ambitious. You cut out everything you don't need.

My opinion is that you should never, as a writer or an editor, be afraid to ruthless murder good, even excellent, ideas and leave to die on the cutting room floor in order to create room for other, more vital material to flourish.

Concrete example: pro-bending. Was pro-bending awesome? Yes. Yes it was. It was fun to watch, had some excellent drama, and as a history nerd, I was particularly drawn into the whole match-fixing aspect of it, which has exact historical parallels to how boxing matches were rigged in the 20s and 30s.

(Sidebar: the failure to pay off Shiro Shinobi was something of an oversight on the part of whoever rigged it for the Wolfbats. Back when radio was the primary method of dissemination for this sort of thing, getting the play-by-play guy onside was key; even if the people ringside saw the fix was in, the millions of people listening wouldn't know because they can't see.)

But I am also absolutely of the opinion there should have been much less of it, in order to make room for the Equalist plotlines, which necessitated things like 'Tarrlok has to give an awkard exposition dump that isn't anywhere near as well executed as the one in Zuko Alone is.'

It's even more egregious when you consider that Mike and Bryan have been adamant that they only wanted twelve rather than twenty, so they could be more focused. That's a legitimate desire, but if you push for a shorter story length, you kinda gotta structure a shorter story to go with it.

>Yes, this was a problem as well. More inputs are generally good, and
>for Book 1, they didn't have that - but they did have Joaquim Dos
>Santos and Ryu Ki-Hyun, who also had significant input, and who had
>worked on the original series. However, when Book 2 was
>green-lighted, they brought back several other of the old writers,
>including Josh Hamilton and Tim Hendrik, to work on things while Bryke
>managed production of Book 1, if that helps any. So we'll just have
>to see for Book 2 and beyond.

This is part of what has me super excited about Book 2. :)

>>My views on the matter are most succinctly summed up by
>>this.
>
>Upon reflection, I honestly think that would've been the wrong way to
>take it.
>
>As we see people getting de-bent, we learn that A) this is something
>"the best healers in the city" (from Tahno) can't fix, and B) this is
>something Katara can't fix, who is a master waterbender,
>healer, and somebody who knows bloodbending as well - possibly the
>strongest heroic waterbender in the world. If Katara can't fix it,
>then there's really not much hope for anybody else to do it, outside
>of extreme extra-ordinary measures.

At this point I'd like to note that while I get that Katara can't fix what Amon did (if someone cuts out my eye, someone else who is equally skilled with a knife can't put my eye back in, after all), I remain astounded that neither she nor anyone else could tell what he was doing.

"Some loon is claiming he has the power to cut bending out of your soul and apparently is making it happen" is the sort of thing that's going to attract worldwide attention. Plenty of benders are rich and powerful, rulers of nations, and even leaders who aren't benders themselves utilize bending as a national resource. (Chief Arnook, for example, couldn't bend, but ruling his nation would have been impossible without Pakku and his waterbenders.)

The people Amon de-bent would have received the finest medical care in the world free of charge. Spiritualists and chi-blocking masters, experts in their fields, would have been awoken in the dead of night by anxious govenment officials bearing suitcases full of yuans and ushered onto red-eye airship flights to the Republic.

None of that is going to matter if it turns out Amon has the same mojo Aang did. But simply utilize an utterly mundane, if horrifying, technique? Someone would have figured it out and real fast to.

>With that in mind, Korra's state at the end was literally an
>unsolvable problem. She was physically incapable of bending three of
>the elements, but her airbending had finally activated since Amon
>hadn't cut that one out (since he didn't have any practice on any
>other airbenders) and she was pushed to a point where not defending
>another person would be unconscionable. No amount of training would
>allow her to reconnect to the other three that way, and would only
>lead to more heartache. (If only training, will, and spiritual
>awareness was what was required to become a bender, there'd be a lot
>more benders out there who were originally non-benders -- heck, we'd
>have Air Acolytes spontaneously becoming Airbenders.)

Part of the reason the Air Acolytes are around is that Aang and Tenzin are kind of hoping that one day, some miracles of that nature are going to happen.

Also, Mike and Bryan have been explicit that, indeed, it is possible to become a bender purely based on training, will, and spiritual awareness. (Part of this is because they explicitly don't want it to be a bloodline thing; that has Unfortunate Implications.) It's just that if your spirit hasn't reached that point naturally, it's really fucking hard, a spiritual achievement right up there with achieving nirvana.

>In the end, Korra's whole identity is challenged. She's been having
>it challenged, old assumptions broken down, all through Book 1 as she
>experiences the rest of the world through Republic City, but this is
>the capstone: Is she a valid person without being the
>Avatar?

I actually disagree strongly with this.

If anything, Book One spends it's time re-affirming all her old assumptions. All she had to do to defeat Amon was beat him up, after all. It was a straighforward confrontation over whose dick was bigger and it turns out it was Korra's.

Korra doesn't really spend any time developing her spirituality or working through her blocks. She spends some time in a box and gets a message in a bottle from Aang, completely backs into airbending almost by mistake, and then is declared to have broken through all her issues and gotten Avatar State goodness from Aang, because... she was sad? That's all it takes? Aang was an incredibly spiritual dude and he needed intense training from a Guru (which he fucked up) and then to face the Fire Lord on a day of vast cosmological significance and almost die in order to become fully realized. But no, hey, they can just hand that shit to Korra.

Korra got her ass kicked, and then someone else came and made it better. Story of her life this season. Aang had allies who lifted him up when he was down, but ultimately he EARNED his shit. Korra has largely been handed it.

>That's what it's all built up to. And once she
>realizes that, one way or another, her life goes on -- THAT'S when it
>finally clicks and Aang shows up. She has an identity beyond "I'm The
>Avatar, Deal With It", and it's time to find out who that Korra is
>(especially for Korra herself). Yes, she may backslide a bit, but
>it's all part of her growing process.

Again, I didn't see this at all.

Korra grew and learned during her time in Republic City, because Korra, despite being kind of bad at it, is all about growing and learning. She throws herself into it with her whole heart and its great to watch.

She also fails at it. A lot.

Nothing wrong with that. Picking yourself up off the dirt and having another go are important things. But the show kind of acted like she'd achieved some great success when, well... she really didn't. She lucked into her accomplishments for the most part.

And I feel that compares rather poorly to Aang's journey. Aang always, always had to choose, to fight and to grow. He got nothing at all for free. He was the Avatar, and even though unrealized and a child, the choice was always on him.

The Ocean Spirit didn't forcibly possess Aang at the north pole; he had to choose to open himself up to it and accept the (rather horrific) consequences because that was the only way. He choose Katara over becoming fully realized, and that had consequences.

This isn't to say he doesn't have help, or guidance. The other Avatars and some spirits helped him the best they could, but they could only guide. Roku and Yue didn't pull Aang out of the ocean and pump the water from his lungs; he had to DECIDE not to die at sea and re-incarnate.

We never really see Korra growing in this way. We know she's changed because we're told she has changed, rather than being shown it.

>No, instead, we're getting Korra's epic spiritual journey in Book 2,
>Spirits, where we get to learn a LOT MORE about the Spirit
>World and the spirits (and the origin of the Avatar and why it exists)
>than we ever did in the whole entirely of ATLA (really, all we had
>were Hei Bai, Tui and La, Koh, Wan Shi Tong, and The Painted Lady over
>61 episodes, and Aang stating he was the bridge between the two worlds
>without major elaboration). I think I can live with that trade-off.

You, sir, make some very strong points here. :)

I should add that despite what may seem my relentless negativity, I am super fired up for Season 2.

>>Someone making a sacrifice that turns out to be pointless can be
>>written well. This? Was not. It was a grave disservice to Lin as a
>>character and utterly devalued her.
>
>I'd like to tell you a story about another protagonist who made a
>great sacrifice, which at the time seemed like the ultimate sacrifice,
>and then at the end found out he could have it all, anyway:
>
>...
>
>... and the flack we got for writing the story of Corwin Ravenhair,
>Utena Tenjou, and Anthy Himemeya like this, stating that Corwin's
>sacrifice was pointless because he got what he wanted anyway, was
>rather... heated. ^_-;;
>
>The point I'm making here is that from the perception of the
>characters at that moment of the sacrifice and the perception
>of the readers/watchers at that moment of the sacrifice are the
>most important judge of the value of a character's sacrifice, and does
>not in ANY WAY devalue the character if that sacrifice is undone
>afterwards (either positively or negatively).

I have a tend to approach art in a holistic fashion, evaluating them as coherent wholes rather than as bits and pieces. I often fail at this, mind you, because it's nearly impossible to come up with a consistent critical rubric. But it is how I do things. For example: I think the last season of Battlestar Galactica was actually so bad it retroactively made the entire rest of the series worse.

But anyway.

You say that the value of a characters sacrifice can't in any way devalue the character if it's undone later on. That's entirely true!

But it can devalue the story, and it can be disrespectful of, and devalue, the sacrifice itself. Corwin the character isn't devalued because the stuff he did turned out to not be an impossible burden, but one could argue (and I'll note that I personally would not; but you could do so without being inconsistent) that the story suffered because of it.

>As far as Corwin knew, at that moment, it was all or nothing --
>he either takes the pain of being the Pillar RIGHT NOW, or the woman
>he loves (Utena) and the woman she loves (Anthy) are forever
>separated and locked apart. He did not possess foresight that several
>years down the line he'd be in a three-way relationship with them with
>a baby on the way.

To be fair, that connection is pretty tenuous. Corwin of all people knows that as long as you're still alive, the future is full of all kinds of wonderful and unforeseen possibility.

>As far as Lin knew, at that moment, it was all or nothing --
>she either takes down those airships that she can see RIGHT NOW
>(either sinking them with her on them, or forcing them to take
>her back as a captive), or Tenzin (the man she still cared for) and
>his family (who she'd seen that he loved and knew they were the last
>survivors) get captured and made an example.

And that's what makes Lin immeasurably awesome.

>Characters don't have foresight (unless they're specifically written
>as reliable oracles). Readers and Viewers don't have foresight (until
>they read the book or watch the show again). Judging their actions
>and reactions with 20/20 hindsight, I feel does them a disservice.

Judging their actions and reactions, yes. But... hrrm.

The whole thing with Lin's sacrifice ending up being pointless is something that occurs at the meta level. Within the story itself, her sacrifice was an amazing act and nothing can ever take that away from her ever.

Narratively? It was badly handled. There are ways to adroitly handle "this person is about to make an enormous sacrifice that will turn out to be pointless because it changes nothing." I love tragedy! Ned Stark betraying his honor to save his family and his life and then dying anyway is one of my favorite things in the world, for example.

LoK dropped the ball with Lin, though. It was a total bait and switch to begin with. I don't mind being misled by a story, but they presented Lin as having achieved victory and then took that victory back in a perfunctory manner off-screen in order for us to get a cheap shock when Tenzin and his kids ended up onstage about to be lynched.

It was, I feel, disrespectful to Lin, who is a good character and deserved better.

It's worth noting, by the way, that this is applicable even to characters who aren't good people. Being a good character and having the story treat you with respect are divorced from in-universe conceptions of character. Akio in SoS is a great character, for example, and you and Ben always treat him with the dignity and respect he deserves despite the fact that he's truly vile as a person. He's never turned into a joke and his plotlines aren't treated in a perfunctory fashion.

>I think this is the other crux of the issue regarding pacing and
>storytelling -- "What is the story supposed to focus on?" In this
>case, I believe the primary focus was on Korra. The Equalists,
>Republic City, Pro-Bending, heck even the rest of Team Avatar (Mako,
>Bolin, Asami, Naga, Pabu) are, in the end background

All of those things matter, though! Plot matters. Structure matters. Not writing storytelling checks your ass can't cash matters.

I mean, ATLA wasn't really about defeating the Fire Nation; it was about Aang becoming the Avatar. (Really, probably every Avatar's life story ends up turning out that way, because the whole point of the Avatar is to eventually become itself.) But that didn't mean the whole "defeating the Fire Nation" thing could just be ignored or handwaved.

Although I will admit that ATLA was as much about Zuko as it was about Aang, whereas LoK is more obviously just the Korra show.

>The Equalists were not an organization that
>Korra could deal with by punching each and every chi-blocker,
>mecha-tank, and airship in the face, as much as she may have
>desperately wanted to.

... except that that is, in fact, how they were dealt with. Korra and the Krew hit them until they fell over. That was her plan! When she and Mako went off to confront Amon the entirety of what she'd decided to do boiled down to "if I can get close enough to him I can rip off his mask and beat him with it." She completely and totally lucked into finding out that Amon had an Achilles heel; she didn't make a deliberate effort to undercut his organization and deal with the underlying issues that made the Equalists a going concern in the first place.

>They were something that had to be fought
>cooperatively and ideologically -- Korra planted the idea that Amon
>wasn't who he said he was among his followers before she was
>put in a position to remove the mask of his identity via his
>bloodbending (the Lieutenant) and waterbending (the rest of the
>people).

Yeah, but that was her backup plan. She came up with that idea because she stumbled over Tarrlok and had about ten minutes to implement it. Her entire plan before that was "hit him until he falls over."

>The story was about Korra learning to deal with problems with
>different approaches, and accepting other people's help in confronting
>them, not an extended socio-political analysis of bender vs.
>non-bender class warfare with Communist overtones during an
>industrialization boom. A tiny group of crazy fanatics with
>super-tech would've been entirely unsympathetic, and not conducive to
>Korra learning several important life lessons along the way.

They would have been, yeah, but as I said; if you don't have time to deal properly with the Equalists being complex, non-irreducible villains, don't make them like that.

>If anything, the fact that we're having debates about the whole idea
>of the Equalists is a win on the writers' and creators' part, since
>that means we're thinking about the background of the world and
>figuring out the nuances and fiddly details without having them
>explicitly spelled out for us.

Kinda-sorta. Just because something is controversial doesn't neccessarily mean that the writers came up with something self-evidently awesome. That said, LoK is, in fact, pretty awesome. It just has... a whole lot of issues the original series didn't have.

>Now that they've got three more
>Books to play with, we should hopefully have a more nuanced learning
>curve for our plucky protagonist, while learning along with her how
>the world of Avatar has further changed in the past 70 years from
>Aang's time.

I'll give this a resounding "hell yes." What we've seen of the first episode of Book 2 has me pretty hopeful; paradoxically, the fact that Korra treats what she's learned so cavalierly (abusing the Avatar State to win races with ten year olds, claiming to have already mastered airbendeing) has me excited; while I feel it validates my view she hasn't learned much, it means the show itself is acknowledging she's got a long freakin' way to go.

-Merc
Keep Rat

In that light, it's a bit tragic that she's also almost entirely unlikeable. I understand this is not a crippling flaw to everyone's eyes, but I have a challenging time caring what happens to jerks, even morally upright ones. :)

>Yeah, but that was her backup plan. She came up with that idea because
>she stumbled over Tarrlok and had about ten minutes to implement it.
>Her entire plan before that was "hit him until he falls over."

That just shows she's good at statistics! Hitting the bad guy until he falls over is the best plan at least 78% of the time. She's just workin' the numbers.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

This (and everything that comes after it, which I've snipped) is giving me some very unhappy flashbacks to Star Wars - both the ones that were good, and the ones that (IMO) weren't, and why they turned out that way.

"No, George, that's stupid. Also, you still can't write dialogue for ****."

Bear with me here, while I pull my wrong-headed ideas and assumptions out of this thread to explain and clarify.

First off, as I noted up top, I never knew Korra existed until she and her series turned up in UF (this is nothing new when it comes to me and more modern UF).

Same thing here - I did not know that ATLA was a series on Nick. Never heard of it, until Korra showed up in UF (I had to figure out what ATLA stood for from context). I knew of the Airbender movie - never saw it, but I knew enough to know it wasn't the same thing as Cameron's "Avatar" - and I'd heard nothing good about it. An animated movie doesn't usually come from a void (unless you're Pixar or its competitors), so, since I hadn't heard of anything related on TV here, well, to my wildly off reasoning, the ATLA movie had to be imported and based on some ATLA anime series, which (and I *really* should know better than this) meant the anime series had to be bad too.

And so I spent all this time thinking 1) the movie was bad (which you say it was), and 2) the movie was based on bad anime (which it apparently wasn't, anime, I mean - does an anime of this exist?)

So, sales and ratings mean nothing if you've never heard of the product, and I don't usually watch the Nick channels, at least not enough to have ever picked up on it.

Hope that doesn't get me banned for stupidity or something ;)

Jeanne

	Jeanne Hedge http://www.jhedge.com
"Never give up, never surrender!"

NOTE: M. Night Shyamalan's* The Last Airbender is in fact not an animated movie. That's... probably part of the problem with it.

>And so I spent all this time thinking 1) the movie was bad (which you
>say it was), and 2) the movie was based on bad anime (which it
>apparently wasn't, anime, I mean - does an anime of this exist?)

Not that I know of. Avatar: The Last Airbender was an original production for a US television network. The animation was done in Korea, but the writing and production team and the original voice cast were Americans (or possibly Canadians, you never know who's Canadian in American TV and movies :). If an anime series did exist, it'd be along the lines of those anime shows a few years ago that were based on Marvel Comics licenses. (I frankly can't see why they'd bother; the original looks like anime anyway.)

--G.
* aaand there's the other problem with it.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

See. I've been REALLY confused...

Then the other problem is Shyamalan. IMO he's only made 1 good movie, and has been living off whatever reputation that gave him ever since.**

So with this conversation, I went over to IMDB to see who was in the cast. Katara's Grandma, voiced by Katharine Houghton. Now there's a credit I never thought I'd see - I thought she'd made a few movies in the 60s and 70s, and retired.

Movie time (especially for the youngsters) - Katharine Houghton's only truly major acting role was in her movie debut - 1967's "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner". She played Joey, a young woman who came home from vacation engaged, and planning to get married within the week, to Sidney Poitier. Her parents were played by Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. She was also Hepburn's niece. (if you don't know who Poitier, Hepburn, or Tracy are, you're never allowed to watch a movie ever again). Despite how preachy it gets at times, it's one of my favorite movies and Tracy's final speech at the end is terrific.

Now go find out who Eva Marie Saint is - she voices Katara in Korra. (that was a bigger casting shock for me)

>* aaand there's the other problem with it.

** as you may have guessed, The Sixth Sense

Jeanne

	Jeanne Hedge http://www.jhedge.com
"Never give up, never surrender!"

It makes me envision what the show would be like if it featured the rest of the cast of Grand Prix. Yves Montand and Toshirô Mifune would've been epic as the bad guys. Françoise Hardy as Asami Sato...

--G.
"No. There is no horrible way to win. There is only winning."
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I have nothing to add to this particular part of the sub-thread except that the "is ATLA an anime" arguments that took place circa 2005-2008 were... heated.

I usually refer to it as an anime, despite being made primarily by Americans using a Korean production company. (If the Korean thing was a disqualifier plenty of series made by Japanese people wouldn't count as anime either.) Other people just call it a cartoon. Either is fine, although folks with dogs in that particular race could get... rather ugly and personal at times.

-Merc
Keep Rat

There's a shock.

I remarked to Phil the other day that Avatar is apparently very popular in the Quarian Union. Certainly it's got itself a fighty, fighty fandom. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.