The Legend of Korra, 2012-2014

Legend of Korra is a successor to the very famous and well-regarded Avatar: The Last Airbender. Both are animated TV series from Nickelodeon meant to evoke the style of Japanese anime but made by and for Americans. Primarily geared towards young adults and children, the series nonetheless have garnered fans from more mature audiences, which is not so unusual for the “Hollywood” children’s shows since these are apparently designed with the parental viewer in mind as well. I watched Avatar as a child back when it was released in the 2000s, but just watched this successor with Nicole in the early 2020s, about ten years after its release. 

As a refresher - Avatar takes place in a fictional Asian-inspired, mildly-steampunk world divided in four nations, each associated with one of the elements of fire, water, earth, and air. The nations each produce a fraction of people with a magical or mystical ability to “bend” their associated element, allowing a telekinetic ability to manipulate the element. For example, the water bender may levitate the water, freeze it, and use it to heal, etc. Each nation and element has a cultural temperament and specific martial art bending style that plays into the archetypal qualities of the associated element: the Fire Nation is warlike and modeled on Japan; the Southern and Northern Water Tribes live naturalistically at the poles in a manner like the Inuit or Siberian peoples; the Air Nomads following a monk-like lifestyle, modeled after Tibet; and the Earth Kingdom, modeled on dynastic Imperial China, possess the most “settled” society. 

The Avatar is a neutral spiritual and political leader uniquely able to bend all four elements, surpassing the otherwise universal limit of one element. Furthermore, the Avatar is reborn with knowledge of his or her previous Avatar lives, allowing the latest Avatar to draw on the predecessors’ wisdom and knowledge. The figure of the Avatar serves to maintain peace and balance among the four nations as well as be a bridge between the spirit and material worlds. 

Korra begins about 70 years after the end of the Avatar series. During Avatar, the Fire Nation finally fails in its attempt to conquer and dominate the other nations, but the world is changed, including with the creation of a new multinational state called the United Republic. The eponymous character is a Southern Water Tribe girl who very quickly learns water, earth, and fire bending. She is raised cloistered away from the world in her own training facility and is a hot-headed and ambitious girl with some kind of block preventing her from learning airbending. 

Korra attempts to complement rather than continue the themes and focuses of its predecessor. In quite the opposite situation to that of Ang, Korra begins the series with a nearly full suite of bending abilities and yet little emotional and spiritual groundedness. She cannot connect with the previous avatar lives and cannot air bend because she cannot slow herself down, be patient, and connect with spirituality in the least. Therefore, her path to grow is new rather than retreading that of Ang, which is welcome. It is clear to me that the showrunners also wanted to impart some serious wisdom to the viewers. Korra deals with issues such as PTSD and learns about how to deal with and learn from suffering. Korra shows the viewer that confronting one’s past and problems helps in growing one’s abilities, confidence, and happiness. The characters deal with multiple competing ideologies, such as “Equalism'' which advocates greater equality between benders and nonbenders, and anarchism with its investigation into balance between freedom and law. In my opinion, the showrunners were much more ambitious in their pedagogical goals and were relatively successful. Artistically, the aesthetic of the show embellishes more its steampunk side, and the associated themes of bender vs nonbender, tradition vs technology, are all further developed.

Avatar featured an incredible storytelling structure - it follows a well-executed and familiar coming of age story for the genuine, earnest, and kind protagonist, Ang, while at the same time developing a parallel complex redemption and maturation story for the initial antagonist, the angry, sensitive, and driven Prince Zuko of the Fire Nation. In a mirrored narrative inversion of the development arcs for the two characters, Ang must mature to become a full fledged avatar, connecting to his inner previous lives and mastering the elements, in order to defeat the arch-villain Fire Lord, while Zuko must choose to either redeem himself as a pure villain in the eyes of his father by capturing Ang or as a complicated hero in the eyes of the world by helping Ang stop his father and restore balance. Both characters change substantially over the series independently and together. The full storytelling arc featured season-long subplot and sub-villains (Fire nation admiral, Zuko, Azula, etc) all in the end connecting to and building towards the climactic confrontation with the arch-villain fire lord. 

Korra as a narrative series unfortunately fails to display the same level of storytelling genius as its predecessor, suffering from a lack of overarching story and any satisfyingly complex narrative analog to that of Zuko. The villains for Korra are more or less independent of each other and limited to each season, without any significant build up towards a climax. They do each provide some interesting and challenging ideological lessons, but their narrative utility is more limited. In the final season, I felt that the writers included many callbacks to the previous characters in the form of the final villain, somewhat combining all of their features into one in an attempt to tie everything together after the fact. Korra does develop her emotional intelligence and spirituality over time, but I don’t feel she or any of the other characters experience transformations to the extent that Ang and Zuko did in Avatar.

In my opinion, the worst element of the narrative was the ordering of the villains. The second season features by far the highest stakes - the villain teamed up with the most powerful evil spirit to form a dark avatar and wanted to literally plunge the world into ten thousand years of darkness. Korra succeeded in defeating this ultimate villain, becoming the ultimate hero. Afterwards, the following plots felt confused or superfluous to me, essentially boiling down to: how could the ultimate hero ever lose again? This particularly undercut the impact of the following season, which was the best and relied on a sense of physical and emotional risk to Korra’s person for its stakes.

In Korra, fearful of being too beholden to Avatar, I think the showrunners actually avoided Avatar to their own detriment. Korra never really explores the lives of the previous avatars and never really connects with Ang, which is a missed opportunity. It would have been risky to bring in such a dominating character that could potentially overshadow Korra, but there was much remaining room for exploration in Ang’s character, particularly as an adult rather than a child.

This also meaningfully shifted the avatar state away from its depiction in Avatar, which felt like too great of a break. The new origin story for the avatar state attempted to explore the ideas of yin and yang balance, even to suggest that darkness and light both reside within each other, but the light and dark spirits that personified these themes were too simplified to really express these subtle gradations. The showrunners explicitly explored a mythical origin story to the avatar state instead, which I believe was a mistake - showing too much destroys the aura of mystery and importance, and there are many examples of this in narratives (Alien movie, Forerunners in Halo, etc). This myth however featured some of the best art of the art.

Korra features a lovable cast of characters in the form of Team Avatar, the name for all of Korra’s friends and allies, such as Mako and Bo-Lin, Asami, Varyk, Tenzin, and so on. These side characters go through nice contained maturation processes themselves, each learning to overcome some fundamental limitation. For example, Tenzin learns to come out from under the shadow of his Avatar father and strike out on his own path to pursue his goals more authentically, thereby becoming more successful in his goal of being an Air master and rebuilding the Air nation. This is one storyline aside from Korra’s where I think a larger role for the memory or spirit of Ang could have been enriching. In some ways, Tenzin was included as a narrative stand-in for Ang anyway.

Interestingly, while Korra does not interact with her “ancestor” avatars much, most of the other characters are children or grandchildren of the cast from Avatar and the theme of intergenerational exchange and inheritance are critical to them all. We are able to explore multiple facets of this kind of relationship in each example. Asami must deal with the complexity of her father’s willingness to use evil means for noble ends - seeking justice against those who killed his wife; the Beifong family explore what it means to mend broken relationships and to navigate the presence and absence of family; Mako and Bo-Lin experience both orphanhood and then acquire large families; and I previously mentioned Tenzin’s case. Perhaps the lesson in all of this is that Korra (and therefore the viewer) cannot always rely on “parents” to help her and teach her. Instead, she must rely on herself and her friends to determine what to do and to learn righteousness. But, we must be mature and understanding in our relationships with others when we are lucky enough to have them. 

In summary, Korra was highly entertaining, laudable for its presentation of really important morals and lessons for the audience, and just a bit disappointing in its narrative structure.