Avatar: The Legend of Korra (Book 1: Air)
Feb. 8th, 2014 08:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckro60-ish years after the events of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Avatar Aang has passed on and Avatar Korra has taken his place. Born a waterbender, she quickly mastered earth and firebending, but never quite took to airbending and has basically no spiritual connections.
First off: The animation is gorgeous. Really spectacular stuff.
Second off: ARR likes this less because the ending credit music is much harder to dance to.
Third off: It took me half the season to notice that the images in the opening are Kyoshi, Roku, Aang, and Korra. That's cute.
I think a lot of the hate this show gets is not just because it isn’t AtLA, but because it’s aggressive trying NOT to be AtLA. The setting has changed from world-trotting in a medieval magitek world to staying in a single city in a 1930s-tech-level DecoPunk world. Korra is very not-Aang, in both her powers and attitude. The supporting cast are teenagers and 40-something adults, whereas AtLA was all about kids and the elderly. The tone is darker, things get worse and worse until they pull up at the very end; which means the goofy humor has to be much more limited.
(Some of this, especially the pacing of the first Book, is because it was apparently planned as a 12-episode miniseries and then later greenlighted for 52 episodes in four seasons. I suspect that they would have played out the ending to Book 1 differently had they known they had an entire series to explore certain repercussions. As it stood, the last two minutes of 1x12 seem a little too pat.)
SPOILERS!
Bending apparently has grown in power in general over the decades: Not only can every firebender throw lightning, and there’s an entire police force of metalbenders (admittedly trained by the inventor of the discipline herself), but blood-bending (which was only known to two people in all of AtLA) became widespread enough to be made illegal.
How, exactly, does one use blood-bending to take away someone’s bending abilities? Aang could do it because he was the Avatar, master of all elements, and could spiritbend/energybend. By the mythos of the show as I understand it, Amon shouldn’t be able to do that (or, if he was a rare fifth tribe of “energybenders”, he shouldn’t be able to waterbend!). Alternately, if he was mucking with people’s chi via blood-bending to make a pseudo-permanent version of the chi-blocking effect, Katara should be able to undo it on the next full moon. Basically, if it’s a physical effect, it should be correctable, and if it’s a spiritual one, he shouldn’t be able to do it.
And in the next three seasons, we better see Sokka’s space sword get recovered.
Overall: It’s not AtLA, but it’s certainly not the travesty I’d been warned about. When I can watch the second (and third and fourth) seasons for free, I will.
First off: The animation is gorgeous. Really spectacular stuff.
Second off: ARR likes this less because the ending credit music is much harder to dance to.
Third off: It took me half the season to notice that the images in the opening are Kyoshi, Roku, Aang, and Korra. That's cute.
I think a lot of the hate this show gets is not just because it isn’t AtLA, but because it’s aggressive trying NOT to be AtLA. The setting has changed from world-trotting in a medieval magitek world to staying in a single city in a 1930s-tech-level DecoPunk world. Korra is very not-Aang, in both her powers and attitude. The supporting cast are teenagers and 40-something adults, whereas AtLA was all about kids and the elderly. The tone is darker, things get worse and worse until they pull up at the very end; which means the goofy humor has to be much more limited.
(Some of this, especially the pacing of the first Book, is because it was apparently planned as a 12-episode miniseries and then later greenlighted for 52 episodes in four seasons. I suspect that they would have played out the ending to Book 1 differently had they known they had an entire series to explore certain repercussions. As it stood, the last two minutes of 1x12 seem a little too pat.)
SPOILERS!
Bending apparently has grown in power in general over the decades: Not only can every firebender throw lightning, and there’s an entire police force of metalbenders (admittedly trained by the inventor of the discipline herself), but blood-bending (which was only known to two people in all of AtLA) became widespread enough to be made illegal.
How, exactly, does one use blood-bending to take away someone’s bending abilities? Aang could do it because he was the Avatar, master of all elements, and could spiritbend/energybend. By the mythos of the show as I understand it, Amon shouldn’t be able to do that (or, if he was a rare fifth tribe of “energybenders”, he shouldn’t be able to waterbend!). Alternately, if he was mucking with people’s chi via blood-bending to make a pseudo-permanent version of the chi-blocking effect, Katara should be able to undo it on the next full moon. Basically, if it’s a physical effect, it should be correctable, and if it’s a spiritual one, he shouldn’t be able to do it.
And in the next three seasons, we better see Sokka’s space sword get recovered.
Overall: It’s not AtLA, but it’s certainly not the travesty I’d been warned about. When I can watch the second (and third and fourth) seasons for free, I will.
