Korra - Season 3

[Fianna]

Chuck's review of The Legend of Korra 3x01 is up on YouTube. We'll see how long that lasts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-9ueg2A3ls

[Nobody700]

Normally I don't like when a person keeps on harping on the same thing in quick succession... but i'll let it pass here because Tenzin's speech is SO BAD that SF Debris could have made it last an hour and it woulda been fine, because of how MYOPIC Tenzin was at that moment. Plus his comment on fuck the poor feels real given they are the main victims while Tenzin is fine in his temple miles away from everything.

[Deledrius]

It's really at the heart of the problem with the Korra series as a whole. Even when it struggles to improve, the problems with the underlying philosophy shown here as a result of the bad choices made in Season 2 just keep coming back and are never addressed; at best the show tries to just move on with excuses like the one Tenzin gives here as if that makes it okay.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

I'm really excited to see him cover more Korra, especially because season 3 is when I think the show really comes into it's own. Sorry though that he has to jump through so many hoops just to get this posted on youtube.

[Fianna]

Maybe the idea was, we're starting with an older, more experienced Avatar who already had three of the four elements mastered. So, to compensate, Korra had to select wisdom as a dump stat.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

I mean Korra would not be the first avatar to have a low wisdom score.

[Winter]

I mean Korra would not be the first avatar to have a low wisdom score.

At this point, based on all the Avatar's we've seen so far, the Avatar being a Fuck up isn't a bug but a feature.

[Deledrius]

The difference is we see those after-the-fact, through visions or tales told to our protagonists, as life lessons.

With Korra we see it happening as it happens, and the narrative rarely (if ever) holds her and the people around her to task for it.

That's a very different experience.

[Winter]

The difference is we see those after-the-fact, through visions or tales told to our protagonists, as life lessons.

With Korra we see it happening as it happens, and the narrative rarely (if ever) holds her and the people around her to task for it.

That's a very different experience.

Let's go over the list real quick of Aang's Fuck Ups that we witness during the modern times and without counting flashbacks.

Book 1

Lead Zuko to Katara's Village by going into a place he was told specifically not to go into.

Nearly got killed by a giant sea serpent.

Got himself, Katara and Sokka arrested and his friends almost executed.

The Great Divide

Lied to Katara and Sokka about their father trying to contact them and withheld information from Bato just so his friends wouldn't leave him.

Ignored Jeong-Jeong's advice to control himself and got Katara's hands burned.

Book 2

Trusts the general. Hey if we're going to get annoyed at Korra for trusting people who she has no reason to distrust at first why not hold that against Aang too?

Allowed himself to be arrested by people who were clearly insane to try and prove his past life's innocents.

Failed to save Jet, didn't save Appa (that was Zuko) and failed to complete his spirit training (which never really goes anywhere which always bugged me).

Book 3

Not really much to talk about here but that's less to do with Aang's character development and more due to the show moving it's focus towards Zuko and treating him as the main character.

As for TLOK not holding Korra to task for what she does. She doesn't do that much wrong. Yes leaving the Spirit portal open makes little sense but the stuff with the vines and the Portals getting open in the first place was her being tricked and later forced to do so by Unalaq. Yes, Korra is responsible for leaving the Portals open but the spirits do basically nothing to the humans and the vines are a result of Unalaq's attack on the city.

I've said this elsewhere, don't blame the victim for getting hurt.

And that's not even getting into what goes on with Kyoshi, Kuruk and Yangchen. Forget balance, the central theme of Avatar seems to be "Cleaning up your past lives mess."

[Lazerlike42]

I have very mixed feelings about Korra. It's generally looked on rather poorly and in most ways I don't agree with the standard criticisms that you'll see. I think the series is a lot better than it's given credit for.

On the other hand... I also think there is a fundamental problem with The Legend of Korra which runs throughout but starts to be especially noticeable in the third season and which does ruin the whole series for me.

To best explain this problem, we need to go back to The Last Airbender and the character of Ty Lee. I think the original Avatar series is exceptional and almost without flaw, but one nitpick I would point to is the character of Ty Lee, who I think is just far, far too powerful to the point that it's obvious that she is only ever defeated because of plot armor. When the writers decide she needs to be bested in a fight, she's bested in the fight but it's never in a way that really feels consistent with the character as she's presented overall.

The thing about Ty Lee is that in concept, she's a pretty interesting foil to benders. She's not a bender, but she can temporarily paralyze their ability to bend and completely counter them. This is a pretty good idea for a power/character, and in fact it almost feels like a necessary type of power to exist in a fictional universe which is going to have both benders and non-benders fighting side by side. I tend to think of Ty Lee almost like a well defined character class in an MMORPG: she is a non-magic user who is a hard counter to magic users. It's pretty cool.

The problem is that Ty Lee is also basically a hard counter to non-benders as well, and this makes her feel way too powerful in the series. Not only can she shut down benders completely, but she can also paralyze Sokka or whatever other non-benders she is fighting with, and she's so fast and so agile that basically nobody can prevent her from doing her thing. This is why the best episodes that feature Ty Lee are ones like the Drill where she is put in a position to showcase her abilities against one group of characters while physically blocking her off from other characters who are able to "win the battle" without her interference. I think Ty Lee would be a far, far better character if she was able to shut down benders' abilities but could not do the same to non-benders.

Now in Korra, the problem is that each subsequent villain is essentially a one-upped version of Ty Lee. Because the series has a different primary antagonist each season, it wants to keep making them greater and greater threats and so it makes them more and more powerful in ways that really start to bother me just as Ty Lee's character bothers me. They just get too powerful, especially when we get to Kuvira. This is an issue for me in its own right.

There's also another side to this that comes up at various times throughout the series: unlike The Last Airbender, Korra features a fully realized Avatar. As Chuck points out in one of the earlier Korra videos, Aang's struggle is essentially external whereas Korra's is internal, and so I don't mean to discount that part of her character growth or say that she is flawless, but in terms of her raw power level, she's got it mostly figured out by the end of season one. And, there is another problem: Korra was made after The Last Airbender, meaning that everyone watching Korra has seen the finale and knows what a completely unstoppable force of nature an Avatar in the fullest form is. The Last Airbender does show Aang in the Avatar state a few times throughout the series, but always in a chaotic, out of control, undirected way. It doesn't show what that looks like when the Avatar is fully in control until the finale, and rightly so, because after we see what it looks like in the finale we would never be able to take any threat seriously again... it's essentially an "I win" button. Sure, it comes with the risk associated with being killed while in the Avatar state, but after we see Aang fight Ozai we would never really take that as a meaningful risk.

In fact, so aware of this and so intent upon this were the creators that the final episode of the series in which this all happens is literally called "Avatar Aang." It's the episode where we finally see Aang really and truly in his "final form" as the fully realized Avatar (not that he wouldn't continue to grow afterwards, but you get the idea).

However the entirety of Korra had to be created for an audience which has probably already seen "Avatar Aang." You can't have villains that seem like the latest and greatest threat when everybody knows what Korra can do, and so the series has to do something about this, and so even as each season gives us a new, even more super-powered villain, we also keep getting various ways of knocking Korra's power level down. For me, it winds up feeling forced and really taking away from the series as a whole. Why is Korra severed from the other Avatars? Why is Korra poisoned by Zaheer? Why does anything happen to her? It's often not because it's especially interesting, but because it makes the enemy stronger in a way we would have a hard time accepting on their own merits. The whole idea of the Avatar facing struggles that are primarily internal was a good idea and the series does try to lean into this a bit, but ultimately it never really commits to the idea and keeps finding ways to make some external villain or setback or conflict the focal point of Korra's difficulties. I think this is the biggest reason the series just never really works for me.