Legend of Korra – Living for the city

I always say that you can never judge a TV series until the episode after the pilot. Pilots are workshopped and fussed over for ages, and there’s a lot of establishing work that won’t have to be done in later episodes that pilots usually have to cover. If you really want to know what a show’s going to be like, I always advise watching through at least the second or third episode. And so it always makes me nervous when there’s a pilot is as good as Legend of Korra’s was, because what if the rest of the show doesn’t live up to that?

Luckily for all of us, Korra shows no sign of slumping soon. In fact, if anything, it’s gotten better and grown on all the things I loved about the pilot. I am so, so enamored with the new world of Republic City that Korra lives in.  Not just because it hits all of my history nerd buttons, but because it’s so rich and clearly well-researched. It feels weird to think of Republic City as “period accurate”, since it’s a fantasy world, but let’s put it this way — obviously, Korra has a crack research team that spent a lot of time learning about the culture of major cities in the early 20th century, because they’ve got everything down to a T, from the factories (and shoutout to that shot of Mako working in the powerplant — as my brother said, “I’m a straight dude, and even I got that he was hot in that”) to street culture, it’s like watching a fantasy version of Newsies.

Even the main series plot of benders v. non-benders, which we really delved into for the first time this week, is both utterly logical. The struggle between the haves and the have-nots was, at a roughly analogous time in real-world history, a huge geopolitical theme, and tying that so deftly into the bender v. non-bender struggle down to the aesthetic of the propaganda posters, the methods of secret meetings, and the rhetoric used by the non-bender parties was (and again, I say this as a giant history nerd) amazing. And, as a friend pointed out to me while I was complaining to her that I had no idea what to write besides “THIS WAS SO AWESOME” copy-pasted over and over, it’s deliciously morally gray.

Amon’s justification for his vendetta — a firebender destroying his family — is the same backstory that’s shared by both Sokka and Katara in the original series, as well as Bolin and Mako in the current series, with a side-order of Zuko-esque angst because a firebender also destroyed his face. It’s also hard, even going into the series as biased as we are towards benders, to really fault him. The people he targets are people like gang leaders, who objectively have used their powers to oppress non-benders. They’re not sympathetic innocents.

The other thing that’s interesting about this presented struggle is how much more faith it displays in the maturity of the Avatar audience. The first series started as a pretty black and white struggle: firebenders are bad, they must be stopped. Any nuance that was added to this struggle was something the audience was methodically lead through. But the bender v. non-bender struggle is, off the bat, a much more mature conflict for the audience to grapple with. In fact, the whole tone of the series is much more mature, which is a pretty smart move. Clearly no one expected that Avatar would be as popular with older audiences as it was, and on top of that, fans of the original who perhaps started in the target demographic have grown up since the show began.

So, if anything, instead of closing doors opened by the pilot, Korra has somehow improved on an initially fantastic premise, which I had no idea was even possible.

Clacked by Julia Hass
on Apr 23, 2012 @ 15:32 EST5EDT