Lizuka wrote: ↑Sun May 13, 2018 8:21 am
I feel like they never realized who exactly they wanted Mako to be or what kind of character they wanted out of him. He just jumps back and forth between this smug, distant jerk to this mopey put-upon guy to a boring everyman to easily riled up to super easy-going and there's just no rhyme or reason to any of it. It feels like they came up with one thing for him, the romance with Korra, and when it didn't take off they had no clue what to do with him but didn't want to just drop him from the cast.
Really one of my complaints with the show in general is that last point. There are tons of characters who just lose all purpose to the plot - honestly Asami's a pretty good example of it herself, especially in season three (and really season two, given the Varrick plot ends up just going around in a circle to the payoff being them ending up with a boat when they already had one to start with) - but they won't just cut.
The real problem with Korra comes more from the writers not having the time they needed to flesh out the story. It's the same thing with The Star Wars Prequels ,arguably the Disney Era films & Dragon Age 2 and all can be summed by a quote from Shigeru Miyamoto and while he was talking about games really this applies to stories in every media.
“
A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever.”
And so far the best overall stories of TLOK has been, in my opinion, Turf Wars as Michael Dante DiMartino had four years to figure out where everything went and where he wanted to take the story and he had the mistakes of the past to learn from.
As I said before, Turf Wars is pretty much Book 1 Air done right with it being mainly a romance, keeping the action 99% in Republic City and uses multiple plot lines all at once. Unlike Air, the romance is good, we get to see more of RC instead of staying in one or two locations and the plot lines are actually connected in a logical way so it all flows together nicely.
It even handles multiple villains a lot better then Air did. In Air the main threat was supposedly Amon and the Equalists but they didn't really do that much while Tarrlok played a much bigger role in leading RC to ruin. Here, all the villains actually play a part in making things worse but the main threat is Tokuga and the Triple Threats.
It's admittedly a lot more condense because the story has to fit into 3 issues each one lasting about 75 pages each but it does a good job at balancing all the verious plot threads. The main focus in on Korra and Asami and their relationship but it takes time out to focus on the other characters and makes good use of them.
Mako and Bolin for example have a much smaller role in TW then they did in the main series, same with Lin, Tenzin, Varric and Zhu Li, and Zhu Li's subplot is her becoming President. And the funny thing of it is, I think there are more characters in TW then there was in Air and yet everyone gets their moment in the sun without taking attention away from what we're all really here for, Korrasami.
For me TW proves that if Mike and Bryan had more time to develop TLOK we would have had a better series, one that might have been as good as The Legend of Aang. It's still not without it's flaws but said flaws are fewer and far between then they were in the TV series.