"Mr. McGee, don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry."

--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.

I take this opportunity to once again lament the loss of the AtlA creative team, especially Aaron Ehasz.

>The comics lost me at the beginning of The Search, and like a
>numpty I gave them until the end to of it to get me back on side. And
>they didn't, of course. In hindsight, it was pretty bloody optimistic
>of me to think they might. So that's that; not going back to that
>well again.

That's fair enough. Speaking for myself, I... hmm. If we're using analogies, I find enough worthwhile salvage from the comics to find it worth going back to that particular scrapyard repeatedly. For example: Kori Morishita. Amazing character concept, they never did anything at all with it. Yu Dao's internal struggles with the new world order; excellent idea and setup, weak-ass followthrough. Zuko making incredibly, insanely bad decisions as Fire Lord... actually, that part of The Promise was the only part of it that really DID work as intended.

(I can't really defend The Search, though. Like, at all.)

>Meanwhile on TV, TLOK started wearing poorly midway
>through Book 1 and never really looked back. I gave it the old
>college try - shit, I stuck around through the entire unrelenting
>three-month punch in the face that was Book 2 - but it never made the
>slightest effort to win me back; just sort of arrogantly took it for
>granted that I'd be staying anyway, because what else was there?

I think you may be ascribing motives to the writing team that don't exist; "we genuinely fucked this up and have no idea we did so" is a bit different from "ha ha, sucker, we're the only game in town!"

Honestly, for me, TLOK's problems boil down to two main things:

1) They keep trying to pack twenty or thirty episodes worth of ideas into 12-14. That's never going to work, and it's going to throw off your pacing and your characterization to an insane degree. Almost everything else flows from this; the ideas they have are solid, good ones. They just don't have the time to execute them. TLOK needs time to relax and breath, the same way AtlA did. AtlA had an entire episode about people goofing off and going on dates in Ba Sing Se! It had a second one just about Appa. (Which, I should add, was utterly gutwrenching.)

TLOK needs time for that. We need time for Bolin to take Korra on an eating tour of Republic City. Mako should be shown dealing with the fact that he's an uneducated street guy moving through a society that's utterly foreign to him. Bolin and Asami need to restore a classic Sato roadster together, and then Korra needs to make a completely ill-advised bet that results in her and Asami needing to win a rally race with said roadster. The Gaang had time to decompress in between crises. The Krew needs that as well.

2) Fucking Mako.

(Okay, it's more than just Mako. Mako the Person really isn't even a bad guy. But lord, Mako the Character and the writing decisions surrounding him... wow.)

> I'm not only not looking forward to Book 3, I'm
>dreading it, because I know in my heart they're going to do
>something horrible and I'm going to have to find a way to deal
>with it. The comics I can kinda-sorta get away with just ignoring.
>The TV show, not so much.

It seems doubtful they're going to do something that horrible. The most horrible thing that happened in AtlA was that Aang died, but he, well, got better.

I could just be an enormous optimist, tho.

>I seriously, seriously hesitated before posting this, because it feels
>a bit like airing the dirty laundry, which I was always taught was the
>Wrong Thing to Do; but I finally decided to go with it. They say
>transparency is a virtue these days, right? Well, it turns out making
>the sausage isn't always a tidy process.

I would submit, without trying to be insulting, that "I have strong negative feelings about a piece of art, and would like to share them with you" is not really something that should be considered at all shameful. It might be something you consider to be private, which is a different thing altogether, but it doesn't fall into the same league as something like "I'm a convicted felon" or "my father cheats on his taxes every year."

>It's like I'm actually branching out from "no-kill
>shelter for abandoned characters" to "rescue organization for abused
>ones".

You'd have to take in Lin if that were the case, tho. :)

(I am prepared to argue that Lin's character was abused as much, if not more, than Korra's in Book One.)

-Merc
Keep Rat

I wasn't speaking literally of the writers, but metaphorically of the series itself. In a literal sense, I expect you're right.

>1) They keep trying to pack twenty or thirty episodes worth of ideas
>into 12-14.

I believe the technical term is "blivet".

>> I'm not only not looking forward to Book 3, I'm
>>dreading it, because I know in my heart they're going to do
>>something horrible and I'm going to have to find a way to deal
>>with it.
>
>It seems doubtful they're going to do something that horrible. The
>most horrible thing that happened in AtlA was that Aang died, but he,
>well, got better.

Again, that's not the meaning I intended. I didn't mean horrible in the sense of some in-story atrocity, I meant it as in, "I no longer trust these people authorially. As such, I'm reasonably sure they will introduce some development or another (probably more than one) in the next 20-odd episodes that I do not want banging around unsecured in Korra's UF backstory, even at a century's remove, and dealing with that is going to involve tsuris."

>I would submit, without trying to be insulting, that "I have strong
>negative feelings about a piece of art, and would like to share them
>with you" is not really something that should be considered at all
>shameful.

And once again we're not quite on the same page. I wasn't talking about shame, I was talking about... how to put it... courting drama? It's an artifact of older times; I was taught a long time ago that discussing what might be termed "process problems" with people not directly involved in it was... gauche. It's sort of an extension of that thing actors do where they pretend that nothing's going wrong even when shit is unexpectedly and undesirably on fire. :)

>>It's like I'm actually branching out from "no-kill
>>shelter for abandoned characters" to "rescue organization for abused
>>ones".
>
>You'd have to take in Lin if that were the case, tho. :)

I have, kind of, but you haven't yet seen any evidence of it. Not as prominently as Korra, to be sure, but then I don't like her anywhere near as much, so I'm not as motivated to make it obvious.

--G.
Corwin knows her, but then Corwin knows a lot of dead, violent people. :)
-><-
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.