Introducing my girlfriend Mica to Avatar: The Last Airbender was an easy win. I knew that she adored fantasy, animation, spiritual philosophy, and good storytelling, all of which are the hallmarks of Avatar. And I also knew that she’d grown up without much TV, so I was certain to be the one to introduce her to this magical confluence of so many of her interests. And, better yet, it would be a way to show her something special from my childhood, since Avatar was my central obsession in elementary school, second only to Bionicle*.
So, as I expected, we watched it and loved it. The only problem was, bingeing without commercial breaks filling out the episodes and an airing schedule stretching the story, it was over a lot quicker than I expected, and we both felt the need for more. My options were to recommend the terrible live action remake** or the sequel series, The Legend of Korra, which I remembered being competently made, but nowhere near as satisfying as the original, and leaving an odd feeling of melancholy after each episode. I watched it more out of obligation than excitement when it first aired, to prove that I was a real fan of the original.
Watching if again with Mica, I felt the same disappointment as before, and after a few episodes apologized to her, offering to watch something different if she wanted. But she said something like, “What are you talking about? This is great!” So, as we watched the rest of the series together, I paid close attention to what she liked in it, and what failed to connect for me.
Part of it, I’m sure, is the gender politics of it. Avatar starts out with a very male-dominant cast, though it evens out quite a bit by introducing of a bunch of women in season two. Korra, meanwhile, features a diverse cast of women, especially middle age and old women rarely seen in animation. Watching it in middle and high school, I wasn’t mature enough to realize how revolutionary this was, and some subconscious sexism probably biased me against it from the beginning. Even watching it again recently, I didn’t really grasp the importance of the representation until Mica explained it to me.
But the deeper reason I didn’t get Korra at first has more to do with nostalgia, I think. In this world’s mythology, a new avatar can only be born once the old one dies, so the entire premise of a show following a new avatar meant that a character that I’d beloved in my childhood had passed away. The fact that he’d died after a long and meaningful life didn’t make it any better, because it brought with it the truth that, no matter how much you accomplish in your lifetime, eventually the world moves on without you. It didn’t help that the show invokes that sense of loss and nostalgia constantly: in season one you miss the original show, in season two you miss season one when Team Avatar was still together, in season three you miss season two before the world had become so distorted by Harmonic Convergence, and in season four you miss season three before Korra’s trauma. It’s hard to ever get your bearings on where you are when the show keeps reminding you where you were, and how much you’ve lost since then.
Not only does Korra change the familiar world of its past series and seasons, but it challenges the ideas that made those stories so comforting in the first place. Avatar shows a world where growth and struggle can atone for sins and heal harm. Characters are either like Zuko and Iroh, who come to terms with their flaws and undo the pain they have caused (Iroh does this before the story even begins), or Ozai and Azula, who are too far gone and need to be taken down to restore balance. Korra complicates this. When the world changes, it changes permanently. The solution isn’t to return to the past, but make the most of what is now, sometimes even by destroying what came before. Not everyone can be redeemed, even well-meaning people whose ideologies seek to address real harms. And for every villain there is a character diametrically opposed who is immoral, mistaken, or stupid enough to prove that opposing evil isn’t enough***.
What I’m trying to say in all this is that the melancholy I felt wasn’t a mistake or the effect of bad writing, but the point of the show itself. This isn’t to say that Avatar was morally simple (it tackled genocide on episode three) or that Korra is in every way better and more complex (Korra’s wider cast means more dud characters, while the seven main heroes of Avatar are all excellent). I just mean that Korra grows up from Avatar, showing a more complex and modern world, and the new problems that come with that. You can see this even in the art: where the original Avatar had bright shapes surrounded by bold, black outlines, Korra has duller colors that fade into each other more, and the low lighting makes every scene feel like it’s shot at the end of the day, as light has just begun to leak from the world.
The difference between Mica and I is that she saw both series shortly after each other, so she could understand Korra for what it was: a natural and necessary extension on the ideas of the original. I, meanwhile, had rewatched and obsessed over the original since childhood. I treated it like a sacred text, and the newcomer like a false prophet. I needed a new perspective from fresh eyes to see genuine growth where it really was.
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* And, while Avatar is famously accessible to people of all ages and interests, the entire convoluted mythos of Bionicle is sort of an inside joke, in that it only makes sense if you were in the six-to-twelve year-old age demographic between 2001 and 2009. Anyone coming later is inevitably hopelessly lost.
** Which I planned to shave my head for so I could dress up as Aang at the premier. My Mom didn’t let me go through with it, though, which was lucky both because the movie wasn’t worth bodily modification and, given my unnatural skinniness, with a bald head I’d look a lot like a chemo patient.
*** Best as I can figure, the secondary villain opposing the main villain for each season is Tarrlok for season one, Varrick for season two, the Earth Queen for season three, and Prince Wu for season four.
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