bobbityhobbity:
ikkinthekitsune:
[snip]
Korra certainly takes certain parts of her job as the Avatar seriously. But her arc in Book 1 is about learning airbending and connecting to spirituality, two specific and very important parts of the Avatar role that Korra demonstrably undervalues to the point that she tells Tenzin, to his horror, that maybe she “doesn’t even need” airbending.
Korra’s frustration is that of a prodigy confronting something that doesn’t come naturally for the first time, and her attitude for the first few episodes is certainly something like, “this is boring and it sucks and I hate it.” She embraces her airbending training after “A Leaf in the Wind,” but spirituality - particularly the kind of deep meditation that allows her to connect with her past lives - is something she not only struggles with but repeatedly fails to recognize the importance of. She hallucinates Aang, and it never occurs to her that that might be significant or, at the very least, something to tell Tenzin about.
And honestly, this is, I think, what made people so mad. Not only is she the complete opposite of Aang, but she doesn’t even really recognize the value of being like Aang (beyond her vague understanding that Aang was a pretty good dude and Avatar). Re-engineering all of this as a manifestation of “insecurity” and “false bravado” is a way of sanitizing, I think, what made Korra so threatening for some. Certainly, there’s an element of “I’m not automatically good at this and that doesn’t feel good” when it comes to Korra’s airbending and spiritual training, but there’s also, “I’m so good at all this other shit, so why is it such a big deal?” That is a character flaw, one that the entire season is dedicated to dealing with, but I think it’s more palatable for a lot of people to write off as “insecurity.”
In other words, it’s not that Korra doesn’t take her title seriously or certain parts of her role seriously (specifically the law-keeping aspects). It’s that she leans very heavily on her mastery of three bending disciplines at the expense of these other things that don’t come naturally but are, in many ways, far more important.
As far as airbending is concerned, I think Korra’s claim that she doesn’t even need it comes almost entirely from her frustration, even if her difficulty in getting the steps down was influenced by her lack of recognition of their value. Korra desperately wanted airbending, in principle, even if she didn’t understand its core values in practice.
Korra made her breakthrough about airbending footwork the moment she was put in a position in which the value of negative jing was made clear. However, as soon as she made that breakthrough, she started working it into her fighting style immediately – she valued that part of airbending as soon as it started giving her results.
On the other hand, I basically agree as far as spirituality is concerned, though I’d suggest that her feeling like she doesn’t need it is based less in her confidence in what she already has and more in her physical pragmatism. She couldn’t quite see how negative jing was useful without being given a push, but when she got it, she got it. But spirituality was kind of nebulous and not necessarily inclined to offer her immediate solutions, and so she never really understood how it could be useful, even after it actually gave her results in Out of the Past.
But, yeah, Korra’s pragmatism has nothing to do with her insecurity, and it’s definitely part of what made her so threatening. And, in the end*, she still has it – she grows spiritually by learning to recognize spirituality as useful, but she’s still inclined to choose the most useful solution instead of looking for a spiritual solution where easier physical ones exist. It just isn’t really obvious, because her physicality isn’t given quite as much of a chance to shine as it ought to have been.
When I say “the end,” assume I’m talking about the Korra that existed prior to the last two scenes. =P
And when Baelor says 1x08 was a high point, he’s clearly talking about the scene in Dragon Flats, not in Tarlokk’s office, and I think he means that Korra begins to see that her responsibility in keeping balance goes beyond just hunting bad guys but defending the weak. That’s a subtle but non-trivial distinction that really matters in that moment. Korra in 1X01 wrecks a city block and causes a lot of collateral damage.
Well, yeah, I wasn’t assuming that he was talking about that scene. But it feels like a mistake to treat that episode as a high point in Korra’s character arc when it was designed to act as a moral low in such a major way.
Also, I don’t think Korra failed to realize that defending the weak was part of her responsibility before – the reason she got involved in Welcome to Republic City was that the triad thugs were threatening a defenseless shopkeeper. What she failed to realize was that her actions could actually do more damage than the bad guys themselves would have done.
I love this discussion of the last scene. But I think that while “proving herself” is an issue, I think Baelor’s reading of it also makes sense. Korra doesn’t just push spiritual connections away because she wants to prove she can win a fight on her own terms, she just on a fundamental level doesn’t recognize that any of it is all that important beyond the fact that OTHER people are telling her that it is.
The finale pushes Korra to the point where she has no other resources that she can possibly rely on. In fact, it does this twice: first with airbending and second with her past lives (which represents her spiritual breakthrough). Both can only be achieved when the tools Korra has relied on her entire life are stripped from her. When Mako is in danger and Korra has no other way to save him, she unlocks her airbending. When Katara has no solutions, Korra subconsciously summons Aang (“but you called me here” - that line gives me chills btw).
I can see what you mean; Korra being put in a position to recognize the usefulness of her spirituality is definitely part of it, now that you mention it.
However, I think Korra pushing other people away was really important, too, and she was doing that immediately before she sat down and let Aang in. And, of course, there are a number of other scenes where it’s essentially impossible to offer a satisfying explanation that doesn’t involve Korra feeling the need to prove herself… and, as such, it makes sense that that part of her character would rear its ugly head here, too.
(I mean, honestly – if Korra knew about what the Avatar State could do, which she should have known, it’s hard to imagine her seeing that as useless in terms of allowing her to succeed at her external goals. Korra might have had reason to believe that sitting around and talking to dead people was boring and kind of useless, but supreme invincible power is right up her alley. That she wasn’t interested in seeking that out strongly suggests that there was some reason why she thought it was undesirable.)
I want to call back to ikkin’s (controversial!) statement about Korra not needing to be vulnerable. Because as a culture, there is a lot of discussion happening about female action heroes like Black Widow and Furiosa (one being considered a feminist triumph and one decidedly not).
But one of the things that was refreshing about Korra is that, unlike most female action heroes, including the aforementioned, Korra’s backstory is devoid of real trauma. Sure, she was isolated and didn’t have a normal childhood (something she explicitly says she never wanted in Book 2 - she just wanted to be the Avatar), but her badassery is not a product of brokenness. It’s just who she is. So many action films featuring female heroes are revenge fantasies (Beatrix Kiddo being a kind of archetype) enacted by women who, you get the sense, would much rather be doing just about anything other than what they are in the film to do.
It’s not that that kind of storytelling is inherently bad or anti-woman. And it’s not that there is something contemptible about people who experience trauma or vulnerability, just that 1) in some cases it achieves absolutely pornographic dimensions and 2) female badassery that is always portrayed as a curse and a product of brokenness is kind of exhausting when men are showered in power fantasies that aren’t rooted in this sort of shit. Korra being the sort of hero who is just powerful just because she is and uses her power because she wants to do good and enjoys it was really refreshing, and I kind of hate how people are now trying to go back and woobify her by projecting insecurities that she really didn’t have or magnifying the ones that existed.
Exactly.
Under my interpretation, Korra’s unstable self-image explains the excessiveness of her violence rather than her willingness to use it in the first place – Korra’s always been pragmatic, and a balanced Korra would have loved her power just as much and been just as comfortable using it as the Korra we first met.
Yeah, but I don’t think baelor was portraying her as a Kuruk redux. At least that’s not how I see her. Korra had difficulty recognizing the appropriate limits on her power, which is a Kuvira-like quality, but she also leaned too heavily on her physical power and her mastery of three elements to the neglect of spirituality. In fact, that was the really big point on Korra’s arc in the first half of the series, which has fuck all to do with Kuvira. As in my previous post, my issue isn’t that there aren’t some parallels present between the two of them but that they are kind of surface-level and split of wildly once you get to the core of who these people are.
That Korra can find those similarities is clearly enough for many, but as a justification for what she went through, I needed more (I know and understand ikkin’s stance on this).
Korra’s spiritual growth in Book 2 was heavily tied to her recognition that her actions had consequences and she couldn’t allow her feelings to have major negative effects on the people around her, though… and both of those things were highly relevant to Kuvira’s arc. All of the (numerous!) negative traits that Korra and Kuvira shared were mitigated by Korra’s spiritual growth; I don’t think the fact that Kuvira’s arc wasn’t explicitly about spirituality changes that.
I kind of agree with ikkin, but what’s disturbing about the “worst Avatar ever” thing is not just that Toph says it but that Korra internalizes it, to the point that she is still dwelling on it several episodes later. It’s not just that other people are saying she sucks, it’s that Korra, for the first time, really really feels that she does. That’s hard to watch if you don’t think she exited the season with a radically different view.
Ah, that’s a good point. I agree. Korra agreeing with that assessment – and agreeing in more than just a moment of weakness – is definitely different, and it’s not a good thing. =(
This is a good point. It’s actually something I have been thinking about. And I wonder if those who tend to prize those aspects of Korra have tended to ignore it because the context (that entire episode plus some) was just kind of dumb and dissatisfying. Korra threatening Bataar by saying that she will dedicate her entire life to keeping him miserable is…kind of awesome.
But the problem is that not only am I in no suspense whatsoever about this actually coming to pass but I don’t give a shit about Bataar Jr or his relationship with Kuvira. Bataar Jr. is annoying at best and utterly insufferable at worst. That he is scared about losing Kuvira is something I absolutely couldn’t care less about. And what’s more, Bataar Jr. has really no relationship to Korra that could possibly make me think that she has any investment in what she’s saying beyond this one specific goal.
In other words, the ruthless pragmatism is cool, but it doesn’t get far beyond “cool.” The whole problem with that episode is that it tried to replicate the tension and cliffhangers of pre-finale episodes in seasons past. But those cliffhangers were as follows: 1) Lin’s sacrifice, 2) Tonraq’s defeat at the hands of Unalaw, 3) Tenzin almost dying. Sure, Book 4 tries to make you think that maybe everyone is dead for half a second (but in the end, the destruction of that factory is barely even a setback for Team Avatar given how wildly ineffective the hummingbird suits are until Hiroshi shows up and proves that you only need one), but the emotions surrounding it hinge entirely on Bataar Jr. and Kuvira’s relationship. Everything is so flat-footed and inconsequential that Korra threatening Bataar doesn’t feel like it tells us anything all that significant either about Korra as a character, how she views herself, or where she is in her recovery.
I guess the thing is, I’m not sure those same circumstances don’t apply to Korra threatening Judge Hotah.
Hotah was a jerk of a minor character whose main emotional touchpoint with the audience was that he tried to have Tonraq executed. The audience had no reason to care if he got his head bitten off, and no one really thought that that might actually happen, either. Just as with Baatar Jr., the tension came from whether he’d crack, not whether he’d end up having his day ruined by an angry Avatar.
I agree that Book 4’s attempt at a cliffhanger was nowhere near as effective as Book 3’s, and that Baavira could have been handled in a much more effective way, but I’m not sure why changing either of those things would have been necessary for the audience to care about Korra making threats, especially when they weren’t really necessary in Hotah’s case.
(I guess some audience members could have just had an immediate negative reaction to threats of death regardless of how unsympathetic the victim was, but, other than that, the circumstances were pretty similar in my book.)
I tend to agree with this. Taking on PTSD was a big challenge the writers set for themselves and a worthy subject for the skill they have typically demonstrated, but it’s the sort of challenge that requires care and precision, and there were a lot of unforced errors here that made the message really muddy.
Exactly. =/