Thoughts on Korra: No escape from American-ism
I happen to be one of those people that watched Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra as an adult. My lack of childlike whimsy was no deterrent to the enjoyment of The Last Airbender; I wholeheartedly immersed myself into the show and for weeks I was consumed by the logic of bending, the martial-art style action sequences, the power-struggles, Iroh’s snippets of wisdom and so on. TLA had a massive task at hand when it decided to become the prequel to Korra, it had to balance the child-viewer’s indifference with the utter gravity of a world ravished by a hundred-year war. Although I’ve never been one to buy into the concept of a messiah, I put my faith in Aang as the show demands. Sadly Korra for me for a sobering slap on the face. TLA can be held close by even a politically charged adult- a feat that is close to impossible I’d say- but Korra is a litmus test for what you believe justice, freedom and fairness must look like. I have way too many thoughts on the show that cannot be condensed into a long rant or a twitter thread. There are several themes I want to get into, so let’s do this.
Apples and Oranges?
Nostalgia is no one’s friend. Nostalgia is a curse.
Prior to watching Korra, my partner warned me that the fandom thoroughly dislikes the sequel, but he believed that this was unwarranted, that Korra can be redeemed, that she is a flawed Avatar and moreover, a woman, which creates a bubble of biased criticism that cannot be taken seriously. He himself was a fan of Korra, but I had to disappoint him. There are plenty of likeable things about Korra but largely, it remains tucked unceremoniously beneath the shadow of TLA.
This is quite unfortunate because the Aang is a perfect Avatar; he embodies the power of goodness that Wan symbolizes. I suspect this is a result of his monk-hood. He was frozen in ice for a hundred years and woke up to the harrowing truth that he is the only remaining airbender, and yet, he refused to take Ozai’s life. There are tons of instances in the show where Aang’s resilience and principles are way beyond his age. Korra was consciously stripped of this key facet; her impulsiveness and arrogance perhaps were meant to signify strength and nuance but unfortunately it translates to nothing but annoyance. This is not to say I don’t like Korra’s troubled relationship with her sense of duty and responsibility. It is rather intriguing to watch her face every problem head-on, without a plan, and fail over and over again. If Aang never existed, Korra’s failures would be more than endearing. More than anything, her lack of worldly knowledge is frustrating when she does not deliver results. She fails in eighty percent of her fights, is uninterested in solutions and somehow makes every existential threat even more potently destructive than it already was.
Granted, modernity and governance present strange and complicated issues in front of Korra and her gang. It is not easy to defeat the enemy because the enemy is an ideal, a notion that is always so powerful that it possesses the potential to topple the Republic whereas TLA had a single A-line goal- to defeat the fire lord. More on that later.
Yet, Korra is deeply incompetent for someone with limitless power and potential.
Book 2 is instrumental in our understanding of Korra’s incompetence. She disowns Tenzin as her teacher and follows her uncle Unalaq who appears more skilled in the ways of the spirits. Although the audience picks up on his ominousness, Korra remains unaware. This is not because the writers are utilizing dramatic irony; we know this because both Tenzin and Korra’s father Tonraq are wary of her attachment to Unalaq and attempt to dissuade her multiple times. At no point does Korra question why the spirit portals need to be opened. How exactly is this supposed to help mitigate dark spirit attacks? How did Unalaq learn so much about spirituality to begin with?
Korra is consistently too trusting. We hear her yell “you tricked me” to a bad guy every season. At some point it is no fun to watch. Especially since we are somehow more perceptive than Korra herself. She consequently makes Unalaq an unstoppable force, consistently failing to get ahead of him. Is it any surprise? Korra is uneducated about her own past lives and the spirit world. Unalaq is the opposite. He identifies a grave error in what Wan did to begin the Avatar cycle; he despises the decision to have separated Raava and Vaatu. His aggrandized worldview may be far-fetched but as the finale episode itself indicates, it is not without weight. Wan did commit a grave error. In fact, errors after errors consume the Avatars that follow him, and each one is responsible for correcting their predecessor. While Unalaq may have intended to correct the original error in vain, as a viewer, I find his cause to be deeply fascinating.
Korra on the other hand, retorts to him with “this is madness” which is something she will say a lot in the coming seasons. Well, it is madness. It is the maddening passion of Unalaq that allowed him to trick Korra, open the spirit portals, develop a relationship with Vaatu and later fuse with him. He was blindsided by the dialectical notion that he cannot be rid of Raava but he was a capable villain that dreamt of a strange, new world. A world that pales in comparison to what Korra can draw up.
The original team avatar was cooperative and had interesting interpersonal relationships. Somehow, they could take down all sorts of threats while not being solely concerned with the Avatar’s protection. Korra’s team Avatar is…boring. Other than Korra herself and Bo Lin, none of the other characters can sustain a single scene within themselves. Every close member of the team including Lin Beifong and Tenzin are consumed by the thoughts of keeping the Avatar safe whereas Aang always put himself in front of the team ready to protect others even at the risk of his own life. Korra is incapable of keeping herself safe, which is rather antithetical to her status as the Avatar.
Asami is not somebody I will complain about, but as a non-bender, she was under-utilized and rather boring. Don’t even get me started on Mako, who for the record, I actually dislike. The creators of this show are not equipped to write romances, evidently. Books 1 and 2 could’ve done without the messy love triangle that somehow turned Asami and Korra gay. In fact, the implication that they might like each other is the sole redeeming feature of the whole romance arc, but truthfully, it is unconvincing regardless.
The problem with Korra is that it is a sequel. It follows a nearly perfect show and unless the creators were willing to forsake their own ideals of a rebuilt world, they were bound to be twisted up in the countless comparisons that fans are inclined to make with TLA. Perhaps as a standalone series, Korra might’ve excelled but it is still lackluster in terms of pushing forward the wonder and excitement of a pre-technobureaucratic universe.
Neo-liberalism everywhere
The well-balanced format of TLA that interspersed elevated political commentary with comedic adventures is one of the main reasons I enjoyed it thoroughly.
Katara’s reluctance to take the life of a cog in the machine who was responsible for her mother’s death and Aang’s own conundrum were resolved with utmost attention. It is worth noting that Iroh’s change of heart from a ruthless, indoctrinated military general to the tea-loving, wise and restrained spirit-master is one that was triggered by the death of his own son. Zuko’s moment of clarity falls over him only after attaining the badge of honor, a seat adjacent to his uncaring father, who deformed his countenance. Both Mai and Ty Lee are shown to have always been aware of the “right path” but choose to become Azula’s lackeys simply due to blind allegiance or a lack of revolutionary potential. Comfort is a great hindrance to change, after all. I pondered a lot about many side-characters’ motivations and the creators’ choices after watching the TLA but it was easy to chalk up some of them to the necessity of nuance.
In Korra though, one comes face to face with a regressive mode of thinking which ahem, Americans suffer from. DiMartino and Konietzko seem to think that political problems are largely ethical problems, and often times they are quick to moralize these ethical problems to present solutions. The question of who is right and who is wrong are often judged and decided based on the capacity of the “problem” to disrupt the established order of governance in the post-war Avatar world, which just so happens to be a rigid and tiresome democracy.
We see semblances of this tendency in TLA as well when Jet and Hama are presented as antagonistic characters. Of course, we cannot argue that the show’s treatment of them were incorrect considering they both acted in a reckless manner that ‘endangered innocent people’. In fact, this is the metric presented by DiMartino and Konietzko in evaluating just how good or bad a character could be; are they so careless as to pursue a mode of revenge that is harmful towards those that never truly harmed them? Will many innocent lives be at stake? If so, the Avatar team is correct in their actions. I won’t argue with this logic because it is more or less accurate to maintain such a standard.
My issue is with the reasoning that led the creators to employ specific characterizations for those who are the antagonists in Korra. While TLA focused on largely personalized revenge which one can argue is almost always self-serving and problematic, Korra’s villains are microcosms of larger social issues.
Amon aka Noatak may have been deceitful as the leader of the Equalists but the Equalists highlighted an essential conflict in a world where bending equates to power and knowledge. One can easily identify the parallels between the Equalists and Marxists owing to their emphasis on those who have and those who don’t. At the same time, one can argue that since bending is a “natural gift” it is nothing like the class struggle with which Marxists are concerned. This is accurate only insofar as we ignore that one can give and take bending, a power that Aang, Amon and Korra possess. Bending has hereditary and rather arbitrary motions; you cannot quite tell why someone is a bender, and so it holds no real value to your personhood as long as it conceptualized as such.
Yet, the power imbalance between benders and non-benders was something that escalated purely due to the diplomatic ignorance of those in power at Republic city. Weren’t the distress of non-benders a valid political concern to be addressed? Wasn’t it an issue that requires deep pondering and perhaps a policy shift in the the key city built by Aang? Instead, the Equalists-arc end abruptly and unsatisfactorily with little to no mention of the conflict after Book 1. Are we supposed to believe that nobody in republic city or any of the other kingdoms were disillusioned with the imbalance any further, simply because Amon turned out to a liar?
Book 3 features the Red Lotus, the most magnificent set of villains in the Avatar universe. They are creepy and spine-chilling and for once, the plot contained a bit of mystery.
I think about Zaheer frequently; his obsession with Guru Lahima, his composed and learned approach to the world’s most debated political problem and his unmuddied resolve to ignite an anarchist revolution, all of this impacted me more than it should’ve. I must say, Zaheer is the most compelling protagonist in the show; I refuse to antagonize him, I refuse to cast him aside or find him faulty. This brings me to my primary issue with Korra, she is an anti-revolutionary. Korra and her team find and kill revolutionary potential anywhere it grows. Instead of investigating the root of dissatisfaction, poverty and inequality, Korra fuses with the elite. She is seen pleading with the government and president at numerous occasions even though they are nothing but impersonal representations of liberal democracy. Nobody in republic city has ever shown any interest in the goodwill of the other nations, they are as pale and useless as they appear and yet, the audience must root for them and their sustenance. Why?
Simply put, Zaheer is the most truthful character in Korra. Despite his imprisonment he is most enlightened regarding world affairs. His disdain for governments and world leaders is a disdain for power and control at the expense of many, for the benefit of the few- is that something to be squashed? As a Leninist, I do not propose that the power must simply be given to the masses, but a thinking individual will easily be able to recognize the almost-transparent goodwill in Zaheer.
Despite this, the creators have smartly done what they did in TLA. They give all the villains short-sightedness and a penchant for needless violence. They threaten the “peace and order” in such an obvious and disruptive way. It becomes impossible to hold them close and stand by their causes.
If that weren’t enough, the creators of Korra are staunch supporters of a police state as is evidenced by their decision to turn every other character into a cop. I would argue that the character with the most reactionary potential in both shows is Toph. She is solely concerned with her independence and freedom, has never explicitly picked a morale to fall back to, and has the most potential to “turn bad” so to speak. Making it clear that she is such a wild card, the creators impose that Toph is the chief of police! Laughable! Lin and Mako follow suit. The creators see a valuable mode of control being perpetrated through a police state and it is safe to say that this is rather regressive and worrisome to me. As a child, I wouldn’t a batted an eyelid.
If ALL of this weren’t enough, book 4 ties my whole theory up by introducing Kuvira. Miss Kuvira is a military mastermind, a visionary who wishes to unite the earth kingdom and won’t stop at anything to achieve this. DiMartino and Konietzko go mask off anti-communist and showcase their true American sentimentality towards hyper-individuality and freedom through this perfectly-Mao-aligned dictatorial character. I drew the China-Hong Kong parallel with what Kuvira wished to do in the Earth Kingdom-Zaofu/Republic City and perhaps I wasn’t so off-base. Kuvira’s methods and her ruthlessness can only be an indictment towards the juvenile political understanding of authoritarianism which is in-bred in the American psyche. Even within kids shows, this is reproduced and thus it appears more sinister. By invoking “loyalty”, threatening “reeducation camps”, and fighting allegations of “brainwashing” it is obvious that the blueprint for Kuvira were “authoritarian” (lol) and militant leaders from socialist states across history.
The final season of Korra left me bitter and confused.
So, what is the lesson I must take from the show? Although it is a kids show, unlike TLA, Korra was aimed at an older audience. DiMartino and Konietzko were well-aware of the scrutiny Korra would be subject to since the original audience is older now. It is rather odd that the entire show appears as an attack on any political system that deviates from liberal democracy which questions and reinterprets power and justice. To the brain-dead, the villains from Korra are just exciting and well-written but truly, they are one-dimensional caricatures of what a typical American sees as ‘evil’ or ‘bad’- it is telling that they view subversive and revolutionary rhetoric as the enemy.
