Michael and Bryan (“Brike”) are huge libs themselves. We should always credit Aaron Ehasz, the lead writer for ATLA, with the actual success of the show. Brike were responsible for the art and set direction while Ehasz led the writing team through its 3 seasons.
Ehasz left the writing staff which left Brike to handle the narrative for Korra. This led to both ATLA and Korra being so different that Nickelodeon actually removed the “avatar” branding from Korra (which used to be called “Avatar: The Legend of Korra”).
Korra is not just “libbed up” it was a liberal betrayal. Everything that was set up in ATLA was cannibalized, retconned, or spat on by Korra. The worst thing about it is that the show did so poorly that it is mostly likely the reason why we don’t have more high-budget Avatar media beside the Netflix live action even though Avatar still has a sustained fanbase.
Fuck Korra, it should have never happened, even the queerbait at the end. Brike are hacks and the live action is likely going to be another flop unless production staff has rigorous quality control.
It was bad enough that I think my friends and I walked right out of the theater and agreed to forget what we had watched. I couldn’t tell you much of anything about it.
It was a shame. As a general fan of Avatar and Shyamalan, I’m glad I never saw it in theaters. The trailers were dope but the movie was such a let-down.
korra has a fun depiction of anarchists tho, korra tries to get help killing kuvira and all the libs said no it was wrong, and imprisoned anarchist volcel airbender zaheer said hell yeah lets kill some fash
Ehhhh, gonna be the odd one out and say I kind of liked Korra because it was ambitious and broke new ground, and was willing to tackle issues like fascism which the original ATLA never really wanted to touch.
Okay raise the eyebrows back into the neutral position I was joking, but jokes aside, I did like Korra because politics aside, I liked how they made major changes/alterations to the setting (as plot) which I felt like many shows in general are usually too scared to do. It’s been years since I watched it but among the things I liked about it was how they brought the spirit world into the real world and kept it like that rather than make it go back to the way it was like many shows do because they’re cowardly. It’s been a while, but I think it was during Korra as well that they erased the link between the avatar and the previous avatars, a major alteration to the setting which again, many shows are too scared to do. It’s been years since I watched it, but its willingness to alter the setting permanently in a way that would affect any stories going forward was a breath of fresh air honestly.
Obviously the show’s politics are very liberal and they repeat the ‘romanticized’ view of fascist nations (for example the villain at the end actually having a powerful mechanized military when real life Nazis actually had very few tanks, or that the threats she dealt with were actually real instead of a fabrication, etc.), but at the time I wasn’t able to view it in a critical lens and just focused on the story, and for myself the show’s willingness to make major permanent changes was quite welcome.
it was ambitious and broke new ground, and was willing to tackle issues like fascism which the original ATLA never really wanted to touch.
I mean in ATLA there was a genocide on aangs people
In this one theres people pointing at someone saying “she’s doing an authoritatrianism and jailing dissenters!” and has ‘anarchists’ in it. Its all pretty baby brained
I thought Korra was entertaining, but it lacked a lot of the internal consistency that ATLA had, in favor of superficial explorations of something vaguely resembling political ideology. ATLA dealt with issues of poverty, non-violence and resistance in the face of oppression, while still being a show for children with magic martial arts and beautiful music. I think Korra did a few things very well, but everything else felt like squandered potential.
As for the portrayal of fascism on LOK, i recommend this video to see better why it doesn’t really work because of the very clear limitations the show runners have.
It’s so sad because Nickelodeon actually let Brike get away with a lot of stuff in Korra (on-screen torture of protagonist, on-screen execution of political leader, fascist dogwhistling, contradictions of industrial capitalism, woman protagonist, adult main cast) all for it to be squandered on an orientalist neoliberal imagination that has nothing to say.
If I didn’t know any better I would think that Brike were charged to write Korra so that they could ruin any sort of leftist thought in children’s television after ATLA’s mindblowing success. But it was most likely because Brike are extremely egotistical white who drive success off of controversy and clicks.
Also it’s really funny that the straw that broke the indigenous female protagonist’s back was the queerbait kiss at the end. The nick execs really could not tolerate that.
So do people view it as queerbaiting? I’ve seen some libs argue the opposite (i.e. that it was a good portrayal).
To me, it felt like trying to win brownie points from people. Like I haven’t seen much of Korra after S1. I stopped watching when the Blood guy (cus ngl he kind of had a point), but from what I’ve seen from clips and from people who watched it, they previously only had briefly talked and just sent letters or something?
It’s the textbook definition of queerbaiting. The showrunners shoved multiple toxic (straight) romantic subplots into the story that led to no development (cheating, etc), made jokes about one of the male secondary protagonists being sexually harassed by a woman of higher socioeconomic class, and Asami (the person Korra is supposed to like) gets little to no actual character development (shes also neolib fascist) and has a out of touch, disgusting torture scene of the main protagonist that is 99% someones barely disguised fetish.
The gay kiss at the end must be contextualized with the fact that the show was doing so poorly at this point that any sort of way to get the pot stirred would be beneficial. It angered the already frustrated Nick execs who saw the show as a huge financial black hole (and now a brand liability) and let Brike disguise themselves as progressive and hide the reason why the show was canceled (which was because the writing team as a whole were irresponsible, immature losers who had shown us that they have nothing useful to say).
OP’s post shows that Brike are still both con-men who have nothing useful to say besides their half-baked lib opinions that they stole from others.
On the other hand, The Owl House, which was authored by an actual queer creator, is a textbook example of how not to queer bait audiences. They got the “brand liability” axe as well, but The Owl House itself is a intensely queer narrative. Don’t even try to say that Korra walked so that the Owl House could run, that’s just insulting to the Owl House.
That was an interesting write-up. Small caveat though and just wanna point it out cus I once didn’t know what hard-drive was, but the post is done by a satire site.
LOK is a travesty but the original series was fairly lib too. The Tibetan monks being the nation of peace and the Da Li secret police was anti-China
On the cultural-philosophical side it was somewhat chauvinist too: the concept of an avatar in Indian religions is a divine being taking on a responsibility which often involves justified violence against evil. Rejecting this with some “both sides” nonsense felt like a slap in the face to me as an Indian and socialist. Ofc we need to put some people to the wall, fuck those ideals of self purity
Aang choosing not to kill the fire-lord needlessly endangered the entire world. He had the opportunity to kill Ozai when redirecting lightning, but he didn’t, and if he didn’t get some insanely lucky miraculous acupuncture rock shit the entire world would’ve been lost to the fascist fire nation because of Aang choosing not to kill the firelord.
I don’t know if the show really fully endorses Aang’s “killing is never justified” worldview. A lot of important characters disagree with Aang, but since the show ended immediately after Ozai was defeated there was never a scene where Aang talked about the needless risk he took. Wondering if a planned season 4 would’ve addressed that.
it’s genuinely a shame that korra is so libbed up
Michael and Bryan (“Brike”) are huge libs themselves. We should always credit Aaron Ehasz, the lead writer for ATLA, with the actual success of the show. Brike were responsible for the art and set direction while Ehasz led the writing team through its 3 seasons.
Ehasz left the writing staff which left Brike to handle the narrative for Korra. This led to both ATLA and Korra being so different that Nickelodeon actually removed the “avatar” branding from Korra (which used to be called “Avatar: The Legend of Korra”).
Korra is not just “libbed up” it was a liberal betrayal. Everything that was set up in ATLA was cannibalized, retconned, or spat on by Korra. The worst thing about it is that the show did so poorly that it is mostly likely the reason why we don’t have more high-budget Avatar media beside the Netflix live action even though Avatar still has a sustained fanbase.
Fuck Korra, it should have never happened, even the queerbait at the end. Brike are hacks and the live action is likely going to be another flop unless production staff has rigorous quality control.
What, Shyamalan’s 2010 adaptation not good enough for you?
There is no movie in Ba Sing Se.
It was bad enough that I think my friends and I walked right out of the theater and agreed to forget what we had watched. I couldn’t tell you much of anything about it.
It was a shame. As a general fan of Avatar and Shyamalan, I’m glad I never saw it in theaters. The trailers were dope but the movie was such a let-down.
korra has a fun depiction of anarchists tho, korra tries to get help killing kuvira and all the libs said no it was wrong, and imprisoned anarchist volcel airbender zaheer said hell yeah lets kill some fash
I would pay to see zaheer and his queer coded posse kill murder neoliberals and monarchs for an entire season.
Korra has a bad habit of making all the villains cooler than the protagonists.
Ehhhh, gonna be the odd one out and say I kind of liked Korra because it was ambitious and broke new ground, and was willing to tackle issues like fascism which the original ATLA never really wanted to touch.
Okay raise the eyebrows back into the neutral position I was joking, but jokes aside, I did like Korra because politics aside, I liked how they made major changes/alterations to the setting (as plot) which I felt like many shows in general are usually too scared to do. It’s been years since I watched it but among the things I liked about it was how they brought the spirit world into the real world and kept it like that rather than make it go back to the way it was like many shows do because they’re cowardly. It’s been a while, but I think it was during Korra as well that they erased the link between the avatar and the previous avatars, a major alteration to the setting which again, many shows are too scared to do. It’s been years since I watched it, but its willingness to alter the setting permanently in a way that would affect any stories going forward was a breath of fresh air honestly.
Obviously the show’s politics are very liberal and they repeat the ‘romanticized’ view of fascist nations (for example the villain at the end actually having a powerful mechanized military when real life Nazis actually had very few tanks, or that the threats she dealt with were actually real instead of a fabrication, etc.), but at the time I wasn’t able to view it in a critical lens and just focused on the story, and for myself the show’s willingness to make major permanent changes was quite welcome.
I mean in ATLA there was a genocide on aangs people
In this one theres people pointing at someone saying “she’s doing an authoritatrianism and jailing dissenters!” and has ‘anarchists’ in it. Its all pretty baby brained
I thought Korra was entertaining, but it lacked a lot of the internal consistency that ATLA had, in favor of superficial explorations of something vaguely resembling political ideology. ATLA dealt with issues of poverty, non-violence and resistance in the face of oppression, while still being a show for children with magic martial arts and beautiful music. I think Korra did a few things very well, but everything else felt like squandered potential.
As for the portrayal of fascism on LOK, i recommend this video to see better why it doesn’t really work because of the very clear limitations the show runners have.
It’s so sad because Nickelodeon actually let Brike get away with a lot of stuff in Korra (on-screen torture of protagonist, on-screen execution of political leader, fascist dogwhistling, contradictions of industrial capitalism, woman protagonist, adult main cast) all for it to be squandered on an orientalist neoliberal imagination that has nothing to say.
If I didn’t know any better I would think that Brike were charged to write Korra so that they could ruin any sort of leftist thought in children’s television after ATLA’s mindblowing success. But it was most likely because Brike are extremely egotistical white
who drive success off of controversy and clicks.
Also it’s really funny that the straw that broke the indigenous female protagonist’s back was the queerbait kiss at the end. The nick execs really could not tolerate that.
So do people view it as queerbaiting? I’ve seen some libs argue the opposite (i.e. that it was a good portrayal).
To me, it felt like trying to win brownie points from people. Like I haven’t seen much of Korra after S1. I stopped watching when the Blood guy (cus ngl he kind of had a point), but from what I’ve seen from clips and from people who watched it, they previously only had briefly talked and just sent letters or something?
It’s the textbook definition of queerbaiting. The showrunners shoved multiple toxic (straight) romantic subplots into the story that led to no development (cheating, etc), made jokes about one of the male secondary protagonists being sexually harassed by a woman of higher socioeconomic class, and Asami (the person Korra is supposed to like) gets little to no actual character development (shes also neolib fascist) and has a out of touch, disgusting torture scene of the main protagonist that is 99% someones barely disguised fetish.
The gay kiss at the end must be contextualized with the fact that the show was doing so poorly at this point that any sort of way to get the pot stirred would be beneficial. It angered the already frustrated Nick execs who saw the show as a huge financial black hole (and now a brand liability) and let Brike disguise themselves as progressive and hide the reason why the show was canceled (which was because the writing team as a whole were irresponsible, immature losers who had shown us that they have nothing useful to say).
OP’s post shows that Brike are still both con-men who have nothing useful to say besides their half-baked lib opinions that they stole from others.
On the other hand, The Owl House, which was authored by an actual queer creator, is a textbook example of how not to queer bait audiences. They got the “brand liability” axe as well, but The Owl House itself is a intensely queer narrative. Don’t even try to say that Korra walked so that the Owl House could run, that’s just insulting to the Owl House.
That was an interesting write-up. Small caveat though and just wanna point it out cus I once didn’t know what hard-drive was, but the post is done by a satire site.
It was good bait to trash on Brike though, it awakened something in me.
Aang, hero of the revolution. Korra, the status quo must be preserved.
LOK is a travesty but the original series was fairly lib too. The Tibetan monks being the nation of peace and the Da Li secret police was anti-China
On the cultural-philosophical side it was somewhat chauvinist too: the concept of an avatar in Indian religions is a divine being taking on a responsibility which often involves justified violence against evil. Rejecting this with some “both sides” nonsense felt like a slap in the face to me as an Indian and socialist. Ofc we need to put some people to the wall, fuck those ideals of self purity
yeah, I love TLA but the fact that we just end the show with a ‘good firelord’ is so absurd
oh yeah absolutely, the original series is only better insofar as liberalism had a better criticism of what it replaced than of itself.
one thing i like about the final fight in ATLA is
spoiler
Aang choosing not to kill the fire-lord needlessly endangered the entire world. He had the opportunity to kill Ozai when redirecting lightning, but he didn’t, and if he didn’t get some insanely lucky miraculous acupuncture rock shit the entire world would’ve been lost to the fascist fire nation because of Aang choosing not to kill the firelord.
I don’t know if the show really fully endorses Aang’s “killing is never justified” worldview. A lot of important characters disagree with Aang, but since the show ended immediately after Ozai was defeated there was never a scene where Aang talked about the needless risk he took. Wondering if a planned season 4 would’ve addressed that.