She's received several fairly legendary ass-kickings so far.

In fairness, it is entirely possible she will do something really, positively spectacular in this evening's finale. It consists of the 25th and 26th episodes of the series, though, so proportionately, it'll have to be pretty damn towering to balance the run-up.

I want this much understood, though: I am deeply, madly, passionately in love with the character herself. As a concept, as a design, as a visual and a voice, she is sublime.

But the show itself? Fuck me, what a slog. There's a place for Adversity Over Which to Triumph, sure, but these guys are worse to their heroes than the Doctor Who team. Abusive ain't in it.

Mileage may vary. I have had it put to me that I just want everything to be easy mode. lol lrn2play noob, as they say in online gaming. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Speaking only for myself, I actually think that Book 1 hangs together better than Book 2 as a narrative whole... but that Book 2 has individual episodes (and one individual arc) that is better than anything in Book 1 and rivals the strongest parts of AtlA.

I'll wait until people who didn't obsessively stay up very late last week to watch early have seen to go off on a real tear, tho. :)

-Merc
Keep Rat

... which bodes poorly, since Book 1 doesn't actually do that very well.

Oh dear.

--G.
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Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

--- Philip

For myself, much more in concept than in execution, I'm afraid.

On the other hand, it's in excellent company.

--G.
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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.

My words were not configured explicitly as those of praise, no.

-Merc
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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. 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.

The problem remains, though, that... well, OK, let's use Pacific Rim as an example. (Anybody out there hasn't seen it, this is gonna mean nothing, but that's your own fault, where were you. :) Imagine a twelve-hour version of Pacific Rim where, before the hugely satisfying and downright fuck-yeah! Gipsy Danger vs. Leatherback fight, there are, like... forty Gipsy Danger vs. Knifehead fights. The kind where there are some nice visuals and good moments, but the ending is always the hero lying face-down on a frozen beach. That's The Legend of Korra so far. Forty frozen-beach moments for one CONEX double punch to evil's head. The Knifehead-to-Leatherback ratio is just way too friggin' high for my liking. It wears me down.

So yeah. Afraid my analysis of a bit ago is going to have to stand. I love Korra herself on many levels, and her world is very interesting, but her canonical adventures appeal to me much more in the abstract than the concrete, to date. So far, I can mostly work with it for UF purposes - I've managed with far, far worse. It does make for the occasional long damn day in the office, though, particularly as I have colleagues whose mileages vary. There's nothing wrong with that! I do not morally censure differing views of fictional productions. But it does make life more challenging sometimes. :)

--G.
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.
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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.

(For reference, StrikerS has the lead character of Nanoha Takamachi exterminate her main tormentor in the final episode in an extremely satisfying manner, but the 12 episodes leading up to that point are one non-stop brutalization of Nanoha and the rest of the main cast. It went past the point of gratuitiousness and kept right on going.)

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

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
Keep Rat

Well... some of them are. Phil and I differ on this as so much else to do with TLoK, but I'm really not impressed with the Oh, And There's An Evil Avatar Spirit Too, Did We Forget To Mention That? thing. I mean, giving the Avatar Spirit its own dialogue was iffy enough, but the Evil Avatar thing was like the time on Quantum Leap when they introduced - and so called in the promotional materials - an Evil Leaper From The Future. What? Seriously?

I realize that these guys have a giant hard-on for the Confucian universal duality principle, but... no. Suddenly Revealed Evil Anti-Avatar falls with a hollow plonk to the bottom of my Bullshit Well.

(And why is he so much better at it? That spirit's been in a box for 10,000 years and then it possessed that world's equivalent of a malevolent Catholic cardinal, and yet together they can repeatedly trounce the extremely-well-trained host of the spirit with 10,000 years of field experience without even really trying? I'm, I just, what? No.)

>1)"Oh God, are they going to give her a scar? Really?"

In the interest of full disclosure I should note that I do not, in itself, object to thie occasional decorative facial scar (I mean, well... Cammy, right?). I was mainly just concerned about the retroactive model violation it would've caused. :)

--G.
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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.

Here is a weird coincidence: Last week I read Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg's The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries for my Early Modern Europe course. This concerns the peculiar adventures (and Inquisitional misadventures) of a group of people in the Friuli region of Italy known as the benandanti (literally the "good walkers"), who claimed they were chosen by angels to do battle with witches, and who were - inevitably - persecuted by the Church as witches themselves.

The reason I say this is a weird coincidence is because on Thursday afternoon I happened upon this passage, which is a quotation from the testimony of a benandante to the Inquisition regarding the methods they used:

The benandanti, then, were a group of people who claimed that they went out at night through astral projection and defended the public against evil spirits, and that their technique was fraught with certain... logistical concerns.

Hmm. :)

--G.
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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.

Ah, the benandanti -- when I wrote GURPS Shapeshifters a decade ago, they were easily the favorite of my topics. (Why were they in Shapeshifters? Because at least some varieties claimed to astrally project as wolves to harry the forces of Hell.)

One reason I liked them so much is that despite several centuries' work on them, the Church never actually broke the benandanti; the witch hunts ended before they could get members of the benandanti to admit to more than, roughly, "oh, all right, we're witches, but we're God's witches".

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

There is a hilarious flavor of labor dispute in the Inquisition's interactions with the benandanti in Ginzburg. It's as if the Church of Rome is the evil-fighters' union and the benandanti are indie operators working their side of the street without paying up.

--G.
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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.

That's it! That's it exactly!

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

Oh man, the benandanti were awesome. People have been mining them for use in fiction for ages; Guy Gavriel Kay, of "I helped put together the Silmarillion" fame filed the numbers off of them and has used them in a number of his books, most notably Tigana and a little bit in Ysabel.

I'll have to check out that Ginzburg, as I've not actually ever read a proper scholarly treatment of them.

-Merc
Keep Rat

>> 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.

OK. I promise this is the last time I'm going to go into detail about this.* Today I got to thinking: maybe I'm being unfair about this ratio thing. Maybe this is a manifestation of my perceptions over time, the way anecdotal evidence often ends up failing to match the actual statistical outcomes.

So, being trained both as a historian and an engineer, I did the decent thing. First I did some research and then I did some math.

Here is a list of all the significant points I could find, during a review of the first two series of The Legend of Korra, in which Korra notched what I viewed as a success or failure. In fairness, I will admit that some of these are subjective, as are the thresholds above and below which I decided not to count events at all. I left out, for instance, almost everything to do with her decisions regarding her personal life, and included meaningless wins at pro bending, which, in hindsight, I think skewed the numbers for Book 1 a bit to the positive side, but leave it. Book 2 speaks for itself despite that discrepancy.

Book 1: Air

Victorious in her firebending trial (but patronized by the White Lotus Masters)
Victorious against the Triple Threat Triad
Defeated (and humiliated) by the metalbender cops
Defeated by the airbending gates
Defeated by the airbending gates (again)
Victorious (barely) in her first pro bending match
Defeated by Amon's gimps
Victorious against the Equalist Doorman
Played for a sucker by Tarrlok
Defeated by Amon's gimps (again)
Victorious against the Buzzard Wasps (after serially screwing up the entire day, but we'll count it)
Played for a sucker by Tarrlok again and Amon
Defeated by the refs (not really the Wolfbats)
Victorious (sort of) over Lt. Batroc
Defeated by the mecha tanks
Humiliated by Tarrlok
Victorious over some random Equalists
Humiliated by Tarrlok again
Defeated by Tarrlok
Victorious over her captors at the cabin, if you can call being able to run the hell away a victory
Ran away from the Equalist attack on Air Temple Island
Outwitted by Amon
Defeated by Amon
Victorious (not very satisfyingly) over Amon

Wins: 9
Losses: 15
WIN PCT: 9/24 = 37.5%

Book 2: Spirits

Defeated by Unalaq's Reichstag-fire spirit
Played for a sucker by Unalaq
Defeated by more conveniently appearing dark spirits
Played for a sucker by Unalaq (I might as well just make a macro of this line)
Able to open the Southern Spirit Portal (although, should this really be green, considering?)
Played for a sucker by Unalaq
Played for a sucker by Unalaq
Played for a sucker by Unalaq
Ran away from the situation at the South Pole
Ignored by President Raiko
Played for a sucker by Varrick
Betrayed by Mako
Undercut by President Raiko
Defeated by the ocean spirit
Not even in basically three entire episodes
Successfully pacified some spirits
Played for a sucker by Unalaq
Defeated by Unalaq
Undercut by President Raiko again
Defeated by dark spirits again
Unable to prevent Vaatu's escape
Defeated by Vaatu
Defeated by Unalaq
Defeated by Unalaq/Vaatu, until Jinora suddenly shows up and presses the reset button
Victorious over Unalaq/Vaatu, finally

Wins: 3
Losses: 21
WIN PCT: 3/24 = 12.5%

TOTALS SO FAR
Wins: 12
Losses: 36
WIN PCT: 12/48 = 25%

So, well, there are the numbers. You tell me. Is it just me wanting easy mode, or is this show, in fact, fucking brutal to its title character? And the higher win-loss ratio in Book 1 cannot numerically reflect how monumentally unsatisfying most of the wins she eventually managed even were. (She didn't even really beat Amon so much as he ran past her with scissors and she tripped him. That's about as vindicative an experience as beating a speeding ticket on a technicality.) The most satisfying fight she had in the entire first season was her victory over the Equalist Doorman, for Christ's sake, and several of her logged victories were playing a game, and so probably should be weighted downward if I wanted to do the more complicated math involved.

Twelve point five percent. It truly boggles my mind.

And the hell of it is, it wouldn't bother me if the show was just so bad I didn't care what happened in it, but it's beautifully made and its protagonist is one of my favorite fictional characters anywhere, at any time, ever - so it hurts, it genuinely hurts that virtually all they ever show her doing is losing fights, walking into closed doors, checking the wrong box, backing the wrong horse, kissing the wrong man, and shedding tears of pain and humiliation. It hurts and it makes me angry, and that's why I keep banging on about it here, because it makes me feel like I'm being played for a sucker over and over again for being a fan in the first place. Kick the football, Charlie Brown!

--G.
* At least until Book 3 comes along and - I very much fear - shows me I hadn't seen anything yet.
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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.

Season 1 - 9 wins, 15 losses, 24 total - 37.5% win
Season 2 - 3 wins, 21 losses, 24 total - 12.5% win
Overall - 12 wins, 36 losses, 48 total - 25% win

I agree, though, that it's a totally horrible record.

--------------
Lime2K
The One True Evil Overlord

You're right, what I calculated is the win/loss ratio expressed as a percentage.

Damn, yo. That's even worse.

--G.
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zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

...dammit murphy!

-----

"V, did you do something foolish?"

"Yes, and it was glorious."

But how do they compare to second half of season 2 through Children of Earth vintage Torchwood? At this point, that's sort of my benchmark for a creator deciding "hey, let's take this fun romp of a series, burn it to the ground, piss on the ashes, then heave the whole pile into a manure pit."

	-={(Astynax)}=- "Torchwood: Taking 'Breaking the Cutie' to a whole new level."

Hell if I know, man, I never watched Torchwood.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

-Merc
Keep Rat

A YMMV discussion, as I completely agree with Astynax re: Torchwood.

As for Korra, wasn't it nice to see a US production of Evangelion?

"Korra's back!"
"And she's a blue giant!"

Jeanne

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

For what it's worth, the look she gave Mako when Korra reunited with him was a pretty clear "Oh NO you DIDN'T, fsck this not again" reaction. Even Bolin could see that yeah, this wasn't going to turn out well. Yes, it would have been lovely to have her have a scene with Mako to chew him out ten ways to sunday, but I'm willing to chalk that up to the pacing problems they've had with the series so far, and the fact that the world was nearly ending. Having it after Unavaatu was defeated would've broken up Korra's denouncements, too. So I'm not sure where it would best fit, overall. :/

Still, I think it can be taken as a given that a Masami relationship is not happening again. Otherwise there may be rioting in the streets. :/

--- Philip
(also, the facial reactions of most everybody else in the room when Mako said the fight "wasn't that bad" was a pretty clear indication that this was Not Cool. Seriously, it's good that it was acknowledged, even if not discussed. Ahhh, god bless Studio Mir...)

	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 (who is pinning his hopes on Korrasami friendship in Book 3 as they visit the Earth Kingdom, which should help some on Asami's end. Ah well, at least the wait should be shorter for Book 3 vs. Book 2.)

Uh, yeah, more-than-mildly disappointed that Korra's line in the denouement ("yeah, I remember") wasn't followed by some slightly more broadcastable variation on "you unbelievable asshole" and some percussive facial maintenance of one kind or another. Grodd almighty, even if I liked the guy (and I don't), exploiting AMNESIA to try and walk back the end of a relationship? That is a serious, serious party foul. That's "and by the way, if you ever come near me again, you won't NEED a spirit portal to see the Other Side" territory, not a kiss and a sorry-it-just-didn't-work-out. (headshake)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

While I hate to be put in the position of defending Mako, I'm pretty sure Mako wasn't so much "trying to walk back the end the relationship" as he was "trying to figure a way out of this that doesn't end with Korra doing to me what she did to my desk the first time I dumped her." His actions scream "oh God, I have to dump her again" to me rather than "woohoo, do-over!"

I mean, yes, that's a bit gutless, but it's not precisely a giant dick move.

-Merc
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