On My Shelves: The Legend of Korra

Earth. Fire. Air. Water. Only the Avatar can master all four elements and bring balance to the world.

 

I hadn't ever watched much of Avatar: The Last Airbender, but I knew it had been a successful series which spawned a well-thought-of sequel series. As I've been deliberately looking for things to show my daughters that star women heroes, and they like animated shows, The Legend of Korra looked like a good bet.

It was.

As stated in the quote above, while there are four elements that have their own "benders" – earthbenders, waterbenders, firebenders, and airbenders – only one person in every generation can control, or "bend", all four elements. "Benders" can be extremely powerful – controlling and moving large masses of earth, directing fire and wind, and so on – but the Avatar, at full power, is at least an order of magnitude more powerful, in all forms of bending. They also have a symbolic and perhaps truly mystical significance to the spiritual survival and order of the world.

The Legend of Korra focuses on the newest Avatar, a young woman named Korra. A dark-skinned, dark-haired girl with blue eyes, Korra is at first quite impulsive and not a little arrogant – she's been raised as "The Avatar" for years and is used to being regarded with no little deference. She's also not been raised in anything like an organized civilization, so when she's sent for her education in airbending to join Tenzen and his family (the only remaining airbenders on the planet) in the newly-built Republic City, Korra finds herself to be a fish entirely out of water.

This isn't helped by the fact that she at first finds airbending to be entirely opaque; it has entirely different mental and physical disciplines than the elements she's mastered before, and she's frustrated and embarrassed by her inability to just do airbending the way she was able to do the other three.

But things are about to get much worse; under the shiny surface of the magical-steampunk Republic City lurks an undercurrent of wariness and resentment of benders, and someone is whipping this dull ember into a flame… a someone who, it is rumored, can take away someone's bending powers…

 

Korra's development as a character is very well done. She has four seasons of character development that take her from an inexperienced, hot-headed and sometimes dangerously overconfident Avatar-in-Training to a mature, experienced leader who has accepted the power and the responsibility that only the Avatar can know.

Such development, naturally, can only take place with the help of other characters, and we have a lot of wonderful characters in this series – all of whom grow and change in their own ways: Tenzen, son of Avatar Aang, a sometimes overly-dignified and meticulously serious practitioner of airbending who begins by finding Korra frustratingly flippant about his teaching, and ends by seeing her as another of his own daughters; Mako and Bolin, two brothers who are part of a professional bending team that Korra joins for a while, and who subsequently join her on her adventures; Asami Sato, who finds herself having to choose between justice and family; Lin Beifong, chief of police of Republic City; Varrick, industrialist, clown, inventor, and a deeper plotter than people suspect; and more.

The relationships of the various characters are also well-done and not simply one-to-one; there are dates turning to longer-term relationships that then lead to breakups; there are misunderstandings; there are people coming to understand each other better than they thought. It's very realistic, sometimes wince-generating, sometimes heartbreaking or heartwarming, and occasionally very, very funny.

The villains are equally well-painted, and often tragic in one way or another. Only one of them, Unalaq, turns out to be effectively irredeemable, and that is quite possibly due to his interaction with the being that is the closest to pure evil that exists in the Avatar world, a monstrously powerful spirit named Vatu. Even Unalaq isn't a two-dimensional cutout; he has very human motivations and plans, they just eventually snowball into something that more controls him than the other way around. The other villains – Amon, the four members of the Red Lotus, and Kuvira – all have much more human, often quite noble, motivations which they just tend to follow to their extreme conclusions.

This is a really, really well-done series, well worth watching. About my only complaint was that in a couple of seasons, especially the first, the ending seemed rushed and a bit oversimplified for what they had set up. It made sense, and didn't jar with the prior material, just seemed to resolve to quickly and, in at least one case, too easily.

But that's a minor flaw in what is otherwise four seasons of awesome! Top marks!