Anyway. I'm gonna hit up the complete series + the finale in here, like I do. Warning: long. Really long. "Took me four hours to write this" long. But I do it out of love.

This is definitely the strongest of the three extant seasons of Korra so far. Given the major, extreme plotting and pacing issues that the first two had, that may not be saying much, but I think it rises above "the best of a bad lot" to "legitimately good season."

Let's talk finale first.

I'll be honest, I was surprised. I didn't think we'd wrap the entire season up like that. I had thought there was a strong chance we'd need to roll into four to resolve everything. I mean... we kinda do? The Earth Kingdom has all fallen to pieces and Korra needs a bunch of physical therapy and to start recovering from her PTSD. But it was as clean a break as the last two. That shocked me.

Oddly, for all that, it was a bit... I'm not even going to say it was meh, because it wasn't, but it was very by-the-numbers. There were a long string of fights and reversals before everyone beat down their respective bad guys. Even the weird power revelations were just sort of "well, okay. This makes sense, but...".

It does make total sense that the airbender superpower is unaided flight. Although I will note at this point earthbending has two superpowers to the single superpower the other forms do.

I was deeply shocked that they actually killed someone, although in hindsight they telegraphed the fuck out of it. The franchise as a whole has never shied away from that when necessary, but it has been extremely rare and usually... higher-impact than this. I didn't really care about P'li, you know? Not like I cared about Zhao and Jet and were invested in them as characters. I even cared more about Combustion Man. They made some token attempts to build her up but... she wasn't really there.

Also, is it just me, or does anyone else think Nickelodean edited out the sound of her head getting blown off? That smash-cut to Zaheer seems... off to me. Like, how the hell do you know what just happened to your girlfriend, buddy? It seems like there should have been the sound of her detonating in there somewhere, like when Combustion Man are it. I can't help but think that was a TV edit.

(I really hope that P'li died because her head exploded, at least. Otherwise, she slowly died trying to scream as molten metal filled all of her head-orifices and melted through her skull into her brain. That's a fate I wouldn't even wish on Ozai, and I wanted to see Sokka beat Ozai to death with a whalebone.)

The Red Lotus, I have to admit, have a really solid plan. They fucked up the execution, because this is a group of crazy fuck-ups, but I bet Zhao wishes he'd thought of this one.

And... the denouement.

This one is gonna put me in the distinct minority around here, but I actually liked it. I kind of am interested in where this is going, you know? I want to see Korra put her life back together after having now spent two years as a Professional Avatar and having it take a huge toll on her. One of the things that always struck me as vaguely unreal about AtlA was the way Aang never seemed to grieve for the world he'd left behind and the fact that he's an outsider living in a strange land fighting in a war of genocide and being possessed by giant ocean spirits that use his body to kill thousands of people. Kid was either the most well-adjusted person in the world (HA) or was repressing a lot of shit.

So I want to see Asami taking Korra on long walks around the island and sitting on the docks holding hands with her as they watch ships go by. I want to see the day Korra walks down for breakfast for the first time under her own power and everyone has no idea if they should stand up and cheer or be totally nonchalant about it. I want to see Bolin's increasingly manic, crazy, and highly inappropriate "Cheer-up Korra" plans. I want to see Lin and Korra finally get along because now Korra knows what it is like to be all messed up inside and it isn't fun. I want to see Korra eventually become 90% her former self but 10% different (and, in her friends eyes, strange) because of all the stuff that's been done to her soul, and she feels like she's okay now but people keep looking at her like she's some kind of Pod-Korra (or even worse, made of candyfloss, which she cannot abide) and that makes her want to scream at them until they go away.

You know the massive rebuild project our hosts had to do on Utena through the course of the first two Symphonies? That. I wanna see that. I love stuff like that. I eat it like candy. "Rising from the ashes like a motherfuckin' Phoenix" is one of my favorite kinds of story arcs. It's why I was angry at how The Search turned out and intensely, passionately invested in Desolation Angel.

And unfortunately before you can walk a character through that kind of arc, you have to smash them to pieces first.

I'm okay with that.

Having said that, I'm not sure I trust the production team to do this right. I'm thinking this is just a cheap way to close the season out on dramatic note and within one episode of season four Korra will be up and about and magically back to normal again. If you're not going to invest the effort of lovingly and painstakingly building a character back up, don't detonate them to begin with.

We shall see.

I have some more thoughts on Korra. I think that I have, finally, figured some important stuff about her as a character. But that's gonna go down at the end, where it is more appropriate.

Random closing thoughts that don't really fit anywhere else...

I love that Asami picks locks with an old-school hairpin. She doesn't need hairpins, of course; her hair just dries like that. But she carries them anyway.

Opal is so totally over Bolin. I mean, really. Did you catch her expression and tone of voice at the end? That is the expression of someone at the tail end of a summer romance wondering how to let the other party down gently.

Kai, you aren't a waste of space as a person. Good for you! You've grown. You are still a badly-executed character with an abrasive personality. You get props as a human being for growing beyond your limitations and I have trouble staying mad at anyone willing to go to the wall for Jinora. This doesn't mean I want to ever see your face or listen to you ever again. You can pick up your last check up front.

Good lord, Jinora looks exactly like her grandfather with her head inked up and her hair shaved. Girl, you need to grow that stuff back ASAP, because you do not look good.

Raiko, you were probably the last person Korra wanted to see at that specific juncture, and you didn't apologize. I am gratified you recognize that Korra has a job to do and you would like her to do it, but so far you have been not helpful. And you don't even have the excuse that you're trying to look out for the Republic and that something the national interest will not line up with the Avatars global mandate. You need to shut your wordhole and stay away from her until she at least doesn't need to be wheeled around by her girlfriend anymore. You have a country to run, filling the hours should be no problem. Go annex part of the Earth Kingdom, now is a great time for that.

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So that was the finale! Let's talk about the season a whole, shall we, since that's who it is supposed to be viewed?

I'm in a list mood today. Let's try a bulleted list. We're gonna go pros-and-cons to start with.

Pros:

• Narrative Coherence

Season three doesn't roll that way. The narrative doesn't try and make us think, for example, that President Raiko is justified in his actions while actually showing him being a colossal d-bag. We're never supposed to think "maybe the Earth Queen has a point." Nothing like that happens. So that's good.

There is one standout failure here; but I'll talk about Kai down in cons.

• Plotting

Season two isn't quite that bad, but it starts off about a shoehorned-in tribal divide and political squabble between their royal family, then suddenly its an origin story, when it isn't about industrial espionage. Then the stakes get really high really fast, there's a bunch of interconnected spirity vignettes, Jinora randomly becomes some sort of angel, spirits are back!

Season three? None of that. It starts off with some establishing stuff, like you do, there's some revelations, a jailbreak, and everything moves forward seeming very organic. Everything interleaves nicely, the Red Lotus thread interacting with the globe-trotting Air Nomad thread with the Earth Kingdom stuff. Everything flows logically and has a point. This isn't to say it is always well-written (we'll get to that down in cons) but it makes sense. They even manage to make room for the Beifong families dysfunctional past without it being weird.

• Character Use/Characterization

Where it has traditionally fallen down is using them. Lord love a duck, I think Asami is the bee's knees, but up until this season she has been eminently superfluous. She has half of a plotline at best in season one (which puts her behind Bolin, who had three-quarters of one) and barring the relationship stuff, she could actually have been 100% replaced by her dad without changing hardly anything. She does a little better in season two, until she gets benched during the finale.

And it isn't just her. Katara isn't used well. Desna and Eska are shockingly weak where they should be strong. I already mentioned Bolin, who until recently has been "Sokka without the brains."

Season three is so much better than this it isn't even funny. Asami and Korra go driving together! Tenzin is awful at mentoring! Pai sho games while on stakeout! The Earth Queen is a giant bitch! Missing grandparents! Supervillains kissing! Mako and Bolin getting cheeky with said supervillains while in a paddy wagon! Asami fixing an airship and winning over airmen! She picks locks with hairpins too, how cool is that? Jinora continues to be some species of chosen one!

Even the Red Lotus, who I have many negative things to say about, worked pretty well. They acted exactly like you'd expect dedicated, zealous revolutionaries to act. In particular the whole "we care about each other deeply, as a family" combined with the "we have no regard for individual human lives; the death of any one person is regrettable in pursuit of our utopia" thing that is an actual real observed thing in close-knit groups of radicals. They were failures in other ways but not in that.

Everyone has something to do and someone to talk with and its so great to watch. The series has been desperately gasping for that since practically day one.

The previous three points (a coherent narrative, a well-constructed plot, and good characters) are of course the bare minimum components you need to assemble a story and get it out on the road. But wait, there's more!

• Setting Use

Republic City is a great set piece. So are the Water Tribes. But good lord. There's a whole giant world out there! One of the great strengths of AtlA was the globe-trottingness. The icy cities of the frozen north! Ba Sing Se, the Si Wong Desert, the Fire Nation archipelago!

Moreover, LoK is explicitly a sequel series, building on and extending the previous one. It is baffling and frustrating to see none of the places we became attached to grow and change along with the world.

Getting the Krew out of the Republic and sending them on a road trip is the best decision the writers have made in forever. I do wish we'd had them tooling around in Asami's awesome air fortress more, but we saw so many interesting places. Misty Palms, Zao Fu, seeing Ba Sing Se again was amazing. And the deliberate callbacks of those establishing shots to City of Walls and Secrets was superb. The secret Water Tribe prison was pretty neat. The sand shark sequence, oh man.

• Asami

And Asami is the one taking care of her at the end! I teared up when she took Korra's hand and knelt down beside her. That's not hyperbole. Literal tears. She did up Korra's hair and made her pretty for Jinora's special day, you guys.. I just... wow. Amazing.

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So those were the high points, for me. Now we move on to...

Cons:

• Pacing

But it does feel off.

And the lack of time to do what you need to do leads into...

• Unrealized Villains

Like Unalaq and Amon they have no time to breath, and we never really get to know them on a personal level and bond with them as characters.

Remember Zhao? Ozai's Angels? Long Feng, even? We had time to get to know them, to see them turn into characters we actually cared about. AtlA hewed to one of the core tenets of storytelling; show, don't tell.

TLOK falls over on this with the Red Lotus. Severely. Who are these people? They have compelling plot hooks! An armless waterbender? Another combustion bender? Their messianic non-bender-cum-airbender leader? Yes! Good! You have an impressive squad here. Well done!

How did they meet? Why are they signed on to this powerfully crazy brand of anarchism? Did Aang do something to them, or what? Is this just a reaction to the autocratic nature of the world around them? What is their damage?

We knew what Azula and Ty Lee and Mai's damage was. And Zhao's. And Ozai's. But we didn't know what it was because someone narrated their backstory. We know because AtlA deftly painted a picture, devoting a lot of time to it. TLOK, on the other hand, desperately tries to shoehorn in P'li's tragic backstory right before she eats it.

This is an ongoing issue.

And that leads into...

• Kai

The sort of mildly sociopathic shenanigans Kai gets up to are only understandable and/or endearing when we have a clear understanding of why the character in question is doing that (letting us empathize with them) or if they're subverting expectations and stereotypes by doing it.

Let's take a look at Toph, since I really feel like Kai was meant to be a new Toph.

Can you imagine watching The Chase without having seen The Blind Bandit? Toph is already deeply abrasive (by design!) in that episode.

But without her establishing episode, where we learn about her messed-up childhood and why she is the way she is, the viewership would, I feel, be completely and utterly without sympathy. Instead of being "man, I hope she and Katara learn to get along" it would be "who the fuck is this new girl and who the hell does she think she is, talking to Katara like that. Katara has been engaged in saving the world for the past three months, what the hell have you been doing, mud bitch? You apologize right now! In fact, no, you know what? Too late! Don't apologize, you're fired. Aang can do better than you as a sifu!"

That's what happened with Kai. We don't know about his specific motivations, so all we see is what we see, and what we see is deeply unsympathetic. There's no room for empathy. And this may be unfair, but it is heightened by the fact that he's a boy. People like mouthy, brassy, bratty girls. They have "spunk." Boys who behave the same way are little monsters.

(Oddly this male/female dynamic seems to reverse itself when you're dealing with adults rather than kids.)

The series makes the same mistakes with Kai it made with Mako in season one; how the narrative expects us to react to him is different from the actions we see on-screen. Bad form.

• Lin

Which is why the way they come so close and yet keep missing continually irks me. It has been established that Lin is pretty deeply devoted to Korra (and Tenzin, for that matter) as matters of honor, duty, and affection. We can see this in the actions she takes; she goes after one of the most powerful men in the world just on Korra's uncorroborated say-so. She sacrifices herself and her bending on Tenzin's behalf. Every time she thinks Korra is in trouble she drops everything and flies to her side. I'm amazed she still has a job as of season three, when she bails on Republic City in order to go play bodyguard.

But then when she's actually around Korra, she's written as a petty bully. I don't... think this is intentional? I think they're going for "irascible curmudgeon." But when Lin is yelling at Korra about how she needs to go someplace safe and hole up, I don't hear a woman who is so petrified about Korra getting her ass killed she sits up late at night wondering what fresh insanity the Avatar is pulling right this second, which is what I think they're going for.

Instead she comes off as a weird control freak.

Lin's relationship with Korra is never more productive than when they aren't around each other. Isn't that so weird? When Lin is racing to try and save the day or pursuing leads or just straight-up needs to beat someone face in, she and Korra get along great. Put them in a social situation and there's yelling and hurt feelings.

This can't be what is intended, which means someone somewhere is doing it wrong.

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Overall, I'm quite pleased with the season. We're still not back up to AtlA levels, but we're getting there.

Importantly, this season had a higher proportion of episodes I felt like watching multiple times for reasons other than research than any of the two previous ones. With season one, it's like "okay, I'll spin up the series premiere and some of the probending stuff and that's it." With season two, it's basically only the stuff with Avatar Wan and maybe the spirit world trip. Maybe some Varrick stuff, I love Varrick, but that's it.

Season three is something I'll go over more than once just because I like it. That's a big win for me.

And, finally, down here at the end... I have some thoughts about Korra.

I've been trying to understand Korra as a character rather than a person for awhile now, and I kept feeling like I was not getting something. It wasn't a case of me feeling like I was missing anything, just a case of "I know I have all the information I want, I just can't seem to put it together."

A couple days back I think I got it.

Korra is being written like Aang. And it isn't quite working because she isn't Aang.

The role of Avatars, all of the Avatars, going right back to Wan, seems to be to have the shit kicked out of them constantly by the world, and to only occasionally have wins. Sometimes those wins are big, huge wins, but no Avatar that we know about has had a very high batting average.

Let's step all the way back. Wan was basically a screw-up, right? He screwed up with Raava and Vaatu, and most of his life was spent correcting that. And it was a mixed bag, yeah? He locked Vaatu up (a temporary solution) and then spent the rest of his life, it is implied, fighting unsuccessfully to restore balance to the world. He dies on a battlefield and passes that burden onto his next life.

I'm going to skip over Yangchen because we know next to nothing about her. What do we know about Kuruk? We know Kuruk seems himself as a failure. He wasn't doing his job, and he feels like he lost his wife to an evil spirit because of it. Maybe after that he shaped up and was the best Avatar ever, but what we're shown is him failing.

Kyoshi? We know two things about her; she stopped Chin the Conqueror and created the Dai Li. Batting .500 there, Avatar Kyoshi.

Roku? Roku mishandled Sozin on multiple separate occasions, one of which led to his premature death and opened the way for the Hundred Year War. I'm sure he did other things well, but again, what the series shows us is a deeply flawed Avatar making some bad choices and/or getting slapped around by the universe.

And that brings us to Aang.

Who largely isn't any different.

Aang's first act as Avatar was to fuck up and freeze himself for a hundred years, depriving the world of its primary peacekeeping authority on the eve of a genocidal war. After that, he largely spends the first season running, hiding, and taking draws off the Fire Nation when he isn't being outright defeated. There are a lot of wins in there... but they're little wins. Jailbreaks of a small number of captive earthbenders. Helping Hei Bai. His biggest, clearest win is probably in The Great Divide, which is widely regarded as the worst episode of the series.

In between those small wins, he's being beaten up by archers and chained up spread-eagled by Zhao (why do people like to spread-eagle Avatars like that? The Earth Queen had the right idea with that full harness and mask) and needing to be rescued by Zuko. When you need Zuko to rescue you you are in a bad way. His mere presence on Kyoshi Island draws down the wrath of the Fire Nation and all those nice people who welcomed him got their homes burnt down. He very nearly poisons his relationship with his only two friends (Bato of the Water Tribe) with his neediness.

And then we hit the season finale, where his role is to get kidnapped by Zuko, rescued by his friends, solve an easy riddle, and then lay back and think of the Air Temples while the Ocean Spirit possesses him and kills a shit-ton of sailors, something that probably horrified him after he woke up.

The thread largely continues through seasons two and three. He dies at the end of season two. Season three? Day of Black Sun is a huge debacle, and frankly his win against Ozai is more than a little accidental; what if Ozai hadn't smashed him against a rock just so? He'd probably have died. There are wins in there (he handled the Sun Warriors well) but if you think about it, the entire back half of season three either doesn't involve him (Boiling Rock) or involves him being petulant and/or oblivious (Southern Raiders, Ember Island Players, much of Sozin's Comet) a lot.

This continues into the comics. I could go into a lot more detail, but I think people get the gist.

And then we move onto Korra.

Who is being written the exact same way Aang was.

And it isn't really working, is it?

They don't have time to interleave in small wins in-between Korra getting her ass kicked by the universe, like they did with Aang. And they hide the fact that Korra is getting her ass kicked a lot much less well than they did with Aang. Usually with Aang, him being wrong or losing ended with him and his friends piling onto Appa and running far, far away. With Korra it usually ends with her getting physically brutalized. The former is easier to disguise as a draw than the latter is.

Also too... you know how I said Kai should have been a girl? Well, Korra getting beaten up and brutalized is different than Aang getting beaten up and running away because Korra is a headstrong, independent, powerful woman and that means the dynamics surrounding her are much different than those surrounding a carefree twelve-year-old boy.

I know there are some people here who find gender politics tiresome, but gender politics do in fact enter into this. Ben has commented in the past about how it took him awhile to realize the weird rapey undertones (and overtones!) present in season one. While I agree with him I don't think those themes are intentional (though they clearly exist) they wouldn't be nearly so strong if literally everything about season one were the same except that Korra was a boy, would they?

Gender matters. It just does.

I feel like I understand the series a lot better now. The writers aren't beating up Korra out of some perverse desire to beat up their second-finest creation. (Finest: Asami.) They're doing it because that's what happens to Avatars. It just so happens that this particular Avatar, and the fact that they keep fucking up their pacing, makes it so, so much less cool when it happens to Korra as a character as when it happens to Aang as a character.

I'm not necessarily happy about this fact, but it does make me happier. I usually try and engage with pieces of art on their own terms rather than my own, and having a clear understanding of the dynamics at play here means I can stop expecting the series to be something it is not.

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I might come back and clean this up a bit latter. I just wanted to get it out there.

-Merc
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