Tensions between the northern and southern water tribes have reached a breaking point. After Chief Unaloq’s troops took over the south, Varrick incited an uprising, but Korra stopped the rebels from abducting her uncle. Enraged by the insurrection, Unaloq arrested the rebels and Korra’s parents, accusing them of conspiring to assassinate him.
Wow let’s break that down.
Tensions between the northern and southern water tribes have reached a breaking point.
So, two different groups.
After Chief Unaloq’s troops took over the south
Still two different groups or else he couldn’t have taken it over with his own distinct troops.
Varrick incited an uprising, but Korra stopped the rebels
“Uprising” and “rebels” could be either people invaded or those objecting to their existing government.
from abducting her uncle. Enraged by the insurrection
And now we’ve transitioned all the way to it being an internal dispute, just in time for the narrator to finish up by saying Korra’s problem is preventing the civil war.
Also, no one appears to be batting an eye at the idea someone who was kidnapped and not visibly harmed can say that it was in fact an assassination attempt.
“I can’t believe you’re doing this to your own family!” says Korra, because saying stupid shit in the opening of episodes is apparently her thing now. Why would you bother raising the avatar to believe in justice and fairness for everyone when you could just tell her only family matters? What a great idea.
And Varrick, who objectively was part of the rebellion, tells the rest of the gang to bribe the judge to keep the people who objectively were rebels out of prison. Weirdly, the show has him justify this by saying he’s sure the trial’s been rigged already, which is why it’s necessary to counter-bribe, despite the fact they objectively did in fact do this.
Meanwhile in Tenzin’s side of the story, he finds his missing daughter playing with baby air bison who she’s decided are her new siblings. Tenzin, sick of his own siblings asks if he can stay too. MEANWHILE HIS WIFE DOESN’T EVEN KNOW IF HER DAUGHTER IS ALIVE OR DEAD WHAT THE FUCK.
Which made me realize what the underlying problem is.
This would be a perfectly good plotline in the first series, because the characters in the first season were in their early teens. Aang, Katara or Sokka deciding to stay with the baby bison and not report back makes sense, because remembering that someone else would be worried and realizing you should tell them is a lot to expect from a stressed kid.
The same goes for his sibling’s atrocious behavior last episode – twelve year olds not getting that a slightly younger kid being missing is a lot more important than your stupid feelings is just them being twelve, and their childish arguments (don’t walk away when I’m yelling unreasonably at you just because there’s something super important you’re trying to do!!!!!!!!) would be fine coming out of the mouths of children.
And that keeps making sense. Korra’s trust in authority and general terrible decisionmaking isn’t any worse than Aang’s, but she’s not twelve. And unlike the first series, the cast here is a couple older teens and adults, rather than younger teens, other kids, and a couple adults off in the distance.
Ultimately, they simply can’t write older characters, and this just wasn’t obvious because they were writing kids back then and the silly behavior of what adults there were people dismissed as being because it had to be a kids show, and was all the fault of the evil executives who hated the show and viewers.
Anyway, the trial goes exactly as you’d expect, beat for beat. The only slightly interesting bit is that Korra’s mom is considered not guilty, presumably because lol like a woman could’ve done anything.
But Korra’s part of it is great, in its way.
“You take their lives, and I’ll take yours!” Korra snarls, and you see the judge’s face go OH SHIT.
That’s right, Korra is now threatening to MURDER A JUDGE FOR HIS RULING. She’s not even saying it’s the wrong ruling. There’s no claim that treason = murder isn’t the standard punishment. Not even Korra saying that this being the standard punishment is actually wrong. Just that she will kill someone for daring to follow the law when it’s something she doesn’t like.
But she does get less stupid, in that she pretends to accept the new life in prison ruling, but as soon as she gets back to her dad she explains that actually her plan is to smash their way free. Her idiot dad says that no that would be bad because there’d be civil war, and also apparently the north has the bigger army despite Varrick saying the south is far, far wealthier.
Of course, then her mommy cries back at the house, so she decided doing something rash must be okay.
And by “rash” I mean “horrible”.
“It’s not about what I want,” says Korra to the judge. “It’s about what Naga wants. And she wants you to let my father out of prison.”
But don’t worry! It turns out the judge was evil and his ruling had nothing to do with the legal system, so torturing him is a-okay! Also there’s the SHOCKING REVELATION that yeah Unaloq’s behind her dad’s banishment because that means Korra will get to be water tribe princess! YAY!
Korra is a good person!
What’s most annoying here is that the terrible dialogue the guy gets (let me blurt out unrelated incriminating evidence! then say I shouldn’t have said that in case you missed it!) actually holds a seed of how this could have gone. What if instead of being Generic Evil Henchman, Unaloq had been the one to threaten him? What if he actually was a judge well known for his fair and evenhanded rulings and he didn’t want to be part of this? When Korra seeks him out to do anything other than threaten to murder him if he won’t subvert justice for her, he “accidentally” mentions the evil conspiracy than makes it clear he definitely won’t ever tell her about anything like her uncle’s involvement in her dad’s banishment, oh you’re looking scary I guess I have no choice but to explain, you’ve beaten it out of me oh terrifying Avatar of Justice.
Which I guess gets into the second problem about the kids/adults thing. The first series could have had that happen! But here there’s designated comedy characters and everything else is grim politicking, so instead it’s just predictable as hell, especially because let’s face it, clever plots were not exactly the first series’ talent, madcap additions to prevent you from guessing how it’d work out were.
At least Korra finally explains that yes, she gets that he’s evil. Then they try to jailbreak him. And her uncle is a waterbender, continuing our everyone in power is a bender thing, and he kicks their ass until she airbending punches him.
Then they get to a boat but have to escape on a plane from there, but the guy forgot to build a runway long enough.
Is the solution:
a) airbend the plane into the air?
b) create an ice ramp in front of the boat?
c) use the water to push it into the air?
d) firebending jets without even being braced?
Hint: the stupidest option.
“My own brother betrayed me,” says her dad, after she explains the secret backstory, because the part where he’d been thrown in prison wasn’t a clue. So the reason Korra’s an idiot is because she inherited the stupid gene from her dad.
…
The waterbender twins: still hilarious. We’re at least sort of getting some actual justification from them, in that she tells him to bow when she leaves and Bolin falls to his knees, but my reading of it as Bolin completely failing to assert any boundaries and probably overacting sill makes more sense – she said bow, not grovel on the floor, she just thinks it’s funny that’s what he actually did! And indeed, we see that when he attempts to tell her he wants to break up, she responds to it withou threats, just without getting it – she says marriage is the solution, Bolin just freaks out.
I mean, yeah, it’s all shit, but there’s still glimmers of something that could not be shit, which is more than the rest of the show has going for it.
Oh, and also she sticks a betrothal necklace on him and Korra’s all LOLZ THE GUY SHOULD GIVE THE GIRL THAT and fuck you show last series that was called out as some sexist shit and now you’re 110% on board with it. And we resolve with Varrick explaining that bitches be crazy, yo, just run off before they realize you’re gone! And then he’s objectively right because the crazy bitch chases them!
So, good things:
Waterbending twins are still comedy gold, though this is probably the last episode I can say that about. Air bison are adorable. Watch those clips on youtube. Also, there’s a pretty good scene of Bumi talking to Aang’s statue.
Did the last show say the betrothal necklace was sexist? It seemed to me that they found the arranged marriage concept idea sexist, not the necklace itself. They seemed to support the necklace in both northern and southern tribes, but where the northern tribes used it to mark property, the southern tribe used it to show a woman accepting a man’s proposal.
The best part about all the errors and plotholes you’re picking up? Everyone over on the TLA sub is CONVINCED that this is all part of the writer’s secret genius. The latest issue is police chief Lin being an idiot, and everyone is desperately scrambling to come up with reasons, their favorite being that she’s waiting for the right time to strike. Korra isn’t bad because she’s written badly. Honestly, people react to her like she’s a real human being, and half the forum hates her. Tenzin is still getting all the cuddles and pity because of the latest show having slightly bruised the man’s ego.
I think you’re right. The authors have no idea how to write teens and adults. They tried to brush off a child being missing by offhandedly saying she could take care of herself, but it still cmpletely misses the point that three adults shouldn’t be squabbling over daddy issues, they should be doing everything in their power to find the kid. Hell, the fact that all three of them are just strolling in the same direction is the worst search and rescue I’ve ever see.
Meanwhile, they have Korra as an emotional hothead (because, lol, teen girls are like that, right), Mako as the king of logic and reason with the emotional range of a dead hippo (because that’s what teen boys are like), and Bolin, who at this point has turned into a cardboard cut out for background jokes (because I guess having a second teenage boy was too hard).
I just don’t understand how they write Korra as such a horrible, male dependent female character when they did so fantastically with women in the last show.
In the first show, Katara’s grandmother runs off without returning the necklace even though she’s breaking off the betrothal, then passes it down to her daughter and then young granddaughter. She completely separates the necklace from its meaning by turning it into a maternal line heirloom – and it can’t be a southern tribe thing at all because to Katara, it’s her mom’s necklace, not a betrothal necklace.
In light of this it probably wasn’t intentional in the least and they just needed a way for the waterbending teacher to have a sudden revelation that he should stop beating up Katara and being sexist.
For it to just be a matter of accepting a proposal, there should be nothing wrong with a boy getting one from a girl – she is the one that did the proposing, after all.
Hell, the fact that all three of them are just strolling in the same direction is the worst search and rescue I’ve ever see.
What made it worse for me is they started off split up, so Tenzin must have said that, then Bumi decides to fool around by hiding along the way and pretending to be his daughter, then whatever the third sibling’s name is shows up to continue harassing Tenzin. Really, I’m totally for him getting new air bison siblings, he just should’ve told his wife they were okay.
> I just don’t understand how they write Korra as such a horrible, male
dependent female character when they did so fantastically with women in
the last show.
Last show’s writers aren’t here. ATLA had a team, a committee of writers all working on it, and Mike/Bryan were just the idea guys. In fact, they shot down a lot of Mike/Bryan’s bad ideas and were responsible for the stuff that catapulted ATLA from “pretty good” to “HOLY SHIT YES” like /Toph’s entire character/.
LOK just has Mike/Bryan and now some yes-men helpers for the second season, so it’s some kernels of decent ideas in a shit matrix.
Ah. I was thinking it was the whole Avatar group and this was just them with puffed heads. If this is an Avatar series “by the guys who thought up element bending!” and not “by the guys who wrote those stories you liked!” that’d explain basically everything.
Visual representation: http://korrafeels.tumblr.com/post/64961444457/kernels-a-visual-representation-of-legend-of
Apparently if you watch the original ATLA pilot, which was written by Mike/Bryan, it has a lot of the telling-not-showing/poor pacing/wooden dialogue problems of LOK. Mike/Bryan are basically just indulging their desire to have wild teenage drama and hijinks and Mako!Stu without the mediating force of the other writers to do the boring (cough) parts like believable dialog, character development, and letting female characters stand on their own.
That chart is only for season 1 though. Did you look at the credits for season 2? Tim Hedrick and Joshua Hamilton have been responsible for nearly 2/3s of season two’s writing credits. Both of whom were writers for ATLA. It’d be nice if they got more back but a fair amount have moved on and have different projects. They even have different people directing the episodes in season two for better or worse.
Also, I’ve seen the pilot, most of the faults feel like season one ATLA problems and not at all like Korra. You want ATLA episodes written by Mike and Bryan and directed by Joaquim dos Santos just look at Sozin’s Comet part 3 and 4.
Tim and Joshua = still no women
Sozin’s Comet part 3 and 4 –> makes sense, this was the exciting finale, no? All the hard work had been done and it was time to punch people.
That graphic is as hilarious as it is tragic.
Also, I guess it shows that really, diversity alone is worth a lot.
It’s true, I mean, I’m not sure that hiring a single woman writer would 100% fix LOK’s problems– plenty of women on my friendslist thought Lin and Korra’s tantrums were cool/funny, sigh– but I think if there were a few cooler heads on the team, some of the badness could have been mediated.
I think you hit the nail on the head. It keeps on frustrating me how childish this show is, and it’s probably less that the original wasn’t and more that then it made sense with the plot and characters, whereas here it’s trying to do political intrigue about adults and it just turns out as an unholy, simplistic mess where everyone is a terrible idiot.
I wanted Korra to be awesome so badly. I kept on waiting for the nuance to the Equalist plot in the first season and it never happened. Then I desperately wanted this season to make up for it. But it’s just a terrible trainwreck and ugh. Please stop.
I am kind of surprised things are actually getting worse this season since last series, the second season was the best one. Failing that, I thought they’d be so happy to get to the Korra punches bad guys!!!! finale they’d just keep doing Korra punches people and be decent in that respect, since really, the equalist plot was decent if you just cut out all the talking and pared it down to Evil Big Bad Can Depower People Oh No.
Hate to bring this up again, but if Bolin gave Eska something that’s basically a collar and said, “hey, we’re married now, so wear this,” that would be totally un-okay, waterbending tradition be damned. But since it’s the other way around, haha, it’s funny because she doesn’t understand what’s socially acceptable and he’s too terrified to protest!
But that actually ties into the main issue I have with this season (which you’re starting to touch on now): this show deals with very adult topics (missing children, objective treason, daddy issues) while still being marketed to kids. All of the characters are written for and as kids, and it generally comes across pretty terribly.
So as sad as it is, I saw Korra’s reaction to the court case as something that was definitely coming, at least in terms of her character. I hate how she’s enough of a rash idiot that she thinks it’s okay to go and threaten a judge with her polar-bear dog and avatar powers, and I hate even more her current character development or direction. My one hope, however, is that the writers also share my feelings and are setting up for her to, I don’t know, actually realize that she’s doing a horrible job of regaining balance by being blinded by her own goals and maybe she’ll actually grow as a person by the end of this.
…I mean, last season I was hoping that Republic City would see that the Equalists were kind of right or Korra would understand that Mako’s an ass, but no cigar.
I really think you’re coming at the relationship thing the wrong way around. If he was a girl, there’d easily be an additional unpleasant layer because in our society male -> female relationships start off unbalanced. But that doesn’t mean the default state of this is to assume marital rape.
It’s a necklace. It really doesn’t matter what she gives him, and it’s only the show that’s saying it specifically a joke because it’s supposed to be for a girl and he’s a boy. What’s funny to me is just the continued pattern of her not understanding anything but an explicit statement and Bolin being able to say everything but that. Also his outfit. She even got one for the ferret! There’s still no sign that if he said he didn’t want to marry her, she’d club him over the head and drag him back by his hair. And there’s no real worry of her dragging him off just because he can’t manage to say no in time, because all of his friends agree that the relationship is a disaster and are willing to step in.
And Bolin’s reactions are also important – they’re still in the realm of not wanting to deal with the awkwardness of a breakup and not actual fear for his life to me – I accept that may be the direction the show’s going, but it’s just not coming across well. He just really really really really really does not want to have that conversation, because emotions are hard.
(Granted, with the progression of the relationship I’m braced for the next episode to be her dragging him off to be married at gunpoint. But so far, it’s just been her not understanding any human interaction beyond language itself, and it led to the ferret having silly hair.)
My one hope, however, is that the writers also share my feelings and are setting up for her to, I don’t know, actually realize that she’s doing a horrible job of regaining balance by being blinded by her own goals and maybe she’ll actually grow as a person by the end of this.
Well, I gather they haven’t done it by whatever episode we’re actually at, which is like most of the way through the season, isn’t it? So we’re pretty much fucked there. Spending most of the season on why the girl avatar is an idiot who’s worse than Aang in every way is still pretty awful even if they handled the reveal and growth a thousand times better than anything we’ve seen from them.
I don’t know, the last water avatar was a total screwup so maybe if they explained water avatars tend to be wildcards with the potential for extreme success and failure, since then the depth of her incompetence could be used to suggest equally impressive things from her once she realized she was wrong and improved. But that’d require Korra to be allowed to accomplish great things without the plot kicking her in the face for it, so I doubt it.
This. All this. Especially the Eska thing. Eska seems to suffer (alongside some other mental issues) Non Verbal Learning Disorder, and part of the reason I love her so much is that I have it, too, and can identify with it. Basically, among other things, if you don’t tell me straight to my face in very blunt language, I will not know what you’re trying to tell me. Beating around the bush does not work. And it drives my girlfriend and my family crazy.
and now I’m worried my girlfriend wants to break up with me but I’ve accidentally engaged us instead.
That’s what makes the most sense to me, especially when we see that she and her brother can’t even read each other. She makes a joke. He asks for clarification about her statement that seems opposite to her usual statements. She explains she did not mean that. They make the laughing noise they’re seen people do to indicate it’s funny.
Add in that even sheltered Korra thinks they’re weird and creepy and we can add that they’ve got virtually no socialization either, which is the only thing that’d mitigate it.
“Well, I gather they haven’t done it by whatever episode we’re actually
at, which is like most of the way through the season, isn’t it?” Really? I thought Korra was really reasonable in episode 9 – having a clear goal now, acting towards it in a reasonable manner, not resorting to violence, and even getting acknowledgement that siding with Unalaq over Tenzin made sense for Korra at the time and she’s learned from it. I guess I look forward to your interpretation of it.
I should clarify that I only watched up to The Beginnings episodes when I made this comment (and those episodes were fantastic, by the way, so looking forward to seeing your reaction there). I’ll sort of agree now that I’ve seen nine, although I’m still holding out. The writers are going to have to do some crazy stuff to make up for the first six episodes of Korra-fail.
But I think we just have different perceptions of Eska, honestly. I don’t see her as a tragic, sheltered girl who doesn’t relate to people or can’t understand how good relationships are supposed to work; I see her as a cop-out attempt at comedy or maybe just a poor re-hash of Mai (who, when she actually got character development, was pretty awesome). I understand how other people might see the waterbending twins, but I’m personally too uncomfortable with (what I perceive as) abusive relationship-esque setups to laugh it off, I guess?
That being said, there are a couple of developments later on that are helping the twins grow on me. I’m going to stop referencing all of this vague stuff happening later on because I don’t want to keep spoiling, but there is a light at the end of the metaphorical tunnel for a bunch of the problems you pointed out.
I’m also interested to see what Farla thinks of the Beginnings episodes. Personally I thought they kind of ruined spirits.
For the record, I feel similarly uncomfortable about Eska as you do. I see where Farla’s interpretation is coming from, but since the narrative doesn’t actually portray her as sympathetically socially inept, her possessiveness just comes off as really creepy to me and an inappropriate source for cheap laughs. It’s much better if we pretend she’s sympathetically socially inept (Twilight is way better interpreting Edward as just being too dorky and out of touch with society to understand that watching girls sleep is creepy, too), but that does involve pretending.
Fuuck I just got as far as spirits becoming a factor again and I was hoping that’d be an improvement.
Well honestly, I’m pretty sure that’s what the show’s actually trying to do. I just don’t much care because I think the show fumbled the execution and I’m not convinced Bolin fears for his life and not having a conversation about feelings.