Avatar: The Legend of Korra (Season 2)
Feb. 15th, 2015 05:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroSix months after Avatar Korra defeats the Equalists, dark spirits start attacking ships in the south seas. Korra returns home to the southern Water Tribe, and bristling at her current mentors, she opts to follow her uncle Unalaq to learn the ways of the spirits.
The first thing that caught my eye was that they do a very good job of foreshadowing Korra and Mako’s breakup—their relationship is clearly rocky from the first time we see them together this season.
The prevalence of cars, snowmobiles and other non-magitek mechanical devices continues to set this significantly apart from A:TLA. Granted, the technological level of an entire society changing radically in 80 years is not the slightest bit unrealistic, but it still feels almost like it’s a different world.
This show is having a bit of what Conan the Barbarian fans know as “the wizard conversation”—that is, whenever Conan meets a friendly and helpful wizard, he is always, always evil.* This show is setting up a recurrent precedent that any friendly and helpful authority figure not directly descended from an A:TLA character is always, always evil.
Similarly, they seem to have a love affair with the “Korra is going to lose her Avatar powers FOREVER! Oh noes!” cliffhanger.
I honestly feel like they didn’t have enough character material for Korra and her team, so they took the focus off of her constantly—we got two episodes of flashback to the First Avatar, an episode with Korra missing and amnesiac, a whole episode with Korra as a spirit-regressed child; and probably half of the remaining useful plot time dedicated to Tenzin and his siblings.
They also spend much more time on the worldbuilding and on cosmic-scale events that A:TLA really ever did; apparently so they could shake everything up and change it all for drama use later.
Really, I suspect a lot of the problem was that, at least from what I’ve read, they didn’t know there was going to be a season 2 until season 1 was pretty much wrapped up, and the same with season 3. So they ended this on what could be a plot hook or could be a feasible ending, depending on the network. Jethrien came in partway through and was convinced I was watching the series finale.
Overall: This series is weaker overall than A:TLA, and I think season 2 was weaker than S1 because it tried so hard to be cosmic and neglected the strong character moments that really made the original series. When I can watch the last two seasons for free on Amazon Streaming, I’ll see if they fixed that later.
*Every time! By Crom!
The first thing that caught my eye was that they do a very good job of foreshadowing Korra and Mako’s breakup—their relationship is clearly rocky from the first time we see them together this season.
The prevalence of cars, snowmobiles and other non-magitek mechanical devices continues to set this significantly apart from A:TLA. Granted, the technological level of an entire society changing radically in 80 years is not the slightest bit unrealistic, but it still feels almost like it’s a different world.
This show is having a bit of what Conan the Barbarian fans know as “the wizard conversation”—that is, whenever Conan meets a friendly and helpful wizard, he is always, always evil.* This show is setting up a recurrent precedent that any friendly and helpful authority figure not directly descended from an A:TLA character is always, always evil.
Similarly, they seem to have a love affair with the “Korra is going to lose her Avatar powers FOREVER! Oh noes!” cliffhanger.
I honestly feel like they didn’t have enough character material for Korra and her team, so they took the focus off of her constantly—we got two episodes of flashback to the First Avatar, an episode with Korra missing and amnesiac, a whole episode with Korra as a spirit-regressed child; and probably half of the remaining useful plot time dedicated to Tenzin and his siblings.
They also spend much more time on the worldbuilding and on cosmic-scale events that A:TLA really ever did; apparently so they could shake everything up and change it all for drama use later.
Really, I suspect a lot of the problem was that, at least from what I’ve read, they didn’t know there was going to be a season 2 until season 1 was pretty much wrapped up, and the same with season 3. So they ended this on what could be a plot hook or could be a feasible ending, depending on the network. Jethrien came in partway through and was convinced I was watching the series finale.
Overall: This series is weaker overall than A:TLA, and I think season 2 was weaker than S1 because it tried so hard to be cosmic and neglected the strong character moments that really made the original series. When I can watch the last two seasons for free on Amazon Streaming, I’ll see if they fixed that later.
*Every time! By Crom!
