So, The Last Airbender is good. Korra is also good, in a lot of ways. Animation? Brilliant. Choreography? Yes. Anything beyond a surface deep reading of its representation as politics? Well…
Its so weird, how did they go from AtLA, to this show where every good guy is either a cop or a CEO or literal royalty and every single villain is some caricature of a leftist? In the last season, theres a king whos demonstrably dumb, vain, and in no way should be in charge but hes just still played as the good guy and anyone who doesn’t want him to be king is evil???
The Avatar, protector of the people, seeker of balance, coming in just to restore the status quo leaders every single time. Its the definition of liberal politics. Just made this thread to bitch, but lets all complain about how many times the heroes in these stories blindly return everything to how it was because “any change = bad”
They lowkey ruined Toph. She literally had a speech where she said Amon and Zaheer took “equality and freedom too far” and that’s why they were bad. Also she went from blind bandit “let’s break some rules” to queen of the cops.
Oh yeah, I was annoyed. Toph invents the police?? The blind bandit who hates the rules invented metal bending super cops???
I think LoK is a great example of lib brain, and in that sense is a really interesting think to examine. For liberals you can take freedom and equality too far
I mean, people grow up and sell out. Not everyone sticks to the ideas they held when they were ten.
Doesn’t mean they didn’t ruin her.
LoK also took a massive dump on the sense of adventure ATLA had, I was never a fan of 90% of the show taking place in the same modernized city
Yeah, I think the Avatar world is unfortunately tiny. The whole thing is 3 countries, because the Air nation just has a few temples. The whole consists of the population of New York.
It is tiny, but at least with ATLA they visit different villages/cultures and like learn from them and expand their worldview; LoK doesn’t bother with this. One of the things I love about ATLA is watching its characters expand their worldview, learning and growing from others, and adding new bending techniques into their own, etc
Rise of Kyoshi novels have excellent worldbuilding, check them up
The writers are libs, and you can tell how sympathetic they are to fascism in season 4
Wait, which part was fascism? I don’t remember the show all that well…
she wanted to create living space for the earth kingdom for one
Also her rhetoric was scapegoating the problem, except the scapegoats were actually creating the problem. Bad look writers
LOK is the most liberal show ever I mean apparently the main setting is a westernized industrial country with a cosmopolitan populace like apparently new york just sprung up from a state full of refugees and unconvicted war criminals/colonizers
then they learn nationalism is alright actually and all the villians are people who dislike the status quo
another thing is that LoK has to make its villians do 100% evil things so people know they are evil, The equalists have to be bending racists and nothing else, Unalaq its like an avatar fanfic villian when he becomes the dark avatar and he was always evil, Zaheer is the best and they have to make him a 14 year old edgy anarchist so people dont sympathize when he kills a literal tyrant, and finaly Kuvira has to be the avatar version of literal hitler so people dont like her and in the books they end up redeeming her!.
i agree with this video and the other 3 in the series that goes in depth about Legend of Korra not knowing what political ideologies are
The thing with Kuvira have several parts:
- They protrayed an obvious Hitler like “oh just some good intended person that got power crazy”
- The reasons why Kuvira got to power were a good critique, but she went full Hitler.
- They give a redemption arc to fucking Hitler.
- THE FUCKING GIANT ROBOT
.
[ Nice thing Korra had to talk to Zaheer to learn how to beat Kuvira, almost like liberals don’t know how to fight fascist but only enable them].
Zaheer is cool actually
Zaheer is the coolest, and i like Amon even if the equalist were trash
Zaheer was cool, but they gave him one line that invalidated his whole ideology. His anarchism is worse than ancap, it’s “everyone look out for themselves.”
If I remember correctly it’s because the heroes from TLA took over the world, so now the current order must be characterized as good lest you take away from what was accomplished by them.
The Avatar, protector of the people, seeker of balance, coming in just to restore the status quo leaders every single time. Its the definition of liberal politics.
Why do you think it’s so popular with the American audience? This is the exact reason it has been so incredibly successful in the US while less so in other territories.
Not really arguing with you, but its not that popular. I’m pretty sure both avatar shows were pretty shafted when they aired, I remember having to go to Nick’s website to watch Korra back in the day.
from what i understand is that nick invested a ton of money into Korra so that it would be like 2-3 times as big (like what AAA video-game companies do) but it didnt, so nick claim that korra was a financial failure so that it got a tax discount with the IRS
LoK season 1 was the first time I cheered for the bad guy ever watching a cartoon.
check r/leftistATLA or something like that
For real though, I’d have preferred if they just ditched the childish political lib-shit and just made it into 4 seasons of Pro-Bending tournaments. Or try to understand how the ideologies they’re portraying actually work.
But honestly pro-bending was so good, I think I finally understood the appeal of sports animes.
This video series on the politics of LOK was good.
Long story short, this video is Amon = communism from a bougeoise perspective, and every other video is whatever hamfisted political reference in the show from the perspective of the bougeoise.
