Korra

[farla]

Just caught up on Korra.

Kind of meh, unfortunately. The animation continues to be gorgeous and I love the characters, but I'm not really pleased with the plot.

I really liked the bender/antibender thing. You see Korra show up in the city, and look, there's benders using their power to menace others. She gets in trouble and look, she's using her bending to try to get out of it. But at the same time benders are incredibly useful - their powers help society as a whole as well.

But the whole pro-bending matches...so what? We've spent episodes on them and I just can't care. It doesn't matter if Korra wins or loses, and it's happening instead of her exploring the city and everyone else in it. So much is going on in the first episode - there's homeless people in the park at odds with the police, but who don't mind a firebender camping out next to their bush. I'd like to see her running around dealing with the triads, who seem to be the dark mirror of bender cooperation, and trying to balance stopping the bad guys against causing even more harm to those she's supposed to be helping. Or dealing with opponents who she completely outclasses, and getting an idea of why they hate her so much. And dealing with ordinary people who don't hate her, and why, and how they feel about benders being able to run rampant everywhere - there must be so many people on the fence, not yet recruited into the equalists but not cheerleading bending. And just look at the all-bender council discussing how to put down the people with "equal" in their name! When you're in a republic and looking at a popular revolution, maybe you should reconsider some things.

Unfortunately, the way the conflict is actually playing out is getting more and more ridiculous. If they can get technology to make benders obsolete, the conflict is as well. And it switches the focus to the poor oppressed benders being attacked by the scary mean prejudiced people who are so much more powerful than they are.

It's like, the first episode has Korra threatening a guy for saying benders are thugs. The show treated this as bad on her part. But then the third episode has her attacking the same guy because some unrelated members of his group attacked a bunch of criminals and happened to get her friend by accident, and the show doesn't seem to see anything wrong with it, and since then it's presented the nonbenders as frightening and oppressing the benders. It's like the only problem with how she acted in the first episode was wasting time trying to talk to him in the first place.

There's something very interesting about how Amon has spiritbending when it's apparently it can only be used on people you should have used it on, and Aang would have lost his powers if he'd done it for the wrong reasons, and Amon so far has only targeted people who've shown themselves to be obviously bad or abusive of their power, but that could be a coincidence, since picking the biggest bullies is the best option either way. Is he bluffing about being able to remove Korra's powers and just choosing not to yet? (...It's the only option that doesn't make him look stupid.) But all the focus is on how scared Korra is of losing her powers, not whether or not Amon has spiritbending because he's right or if he's somehow tricking whatever forces govern this into letting him do what he wants or if he's using a version that has no connection to whatever force judges things.

Of course, there's lots of episodes to go, and maybe this kind of thing will be dealt with, but... The way they're putting both a plot about nonbenders rebelling over bender superiority with a plot about technology making benders no longer a superior group is really worrying. Either one of them would work but I can't see any way to have both at once.

Comments

[farla.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was surprised to see it feature so much when my initial impression of the game was that it was just an announcer saying things at random. I think I've finally picked up the gist of it, but it's hard to be invested in what's happening when you can barely tell what that is.

He's certainly trying to win the public over, but he uses small teams of highly trained fighters. The public in general isn't trained in chi blocking and have no access to their hi tech weaponry.

True, but that seemed to be more a matter of the fact only highly trained fighters stand a chance against benders. It's like how rebellions will have a core of trained fighters who melt back into the general supportive population - and we see a lot more people around Amon than just his core fighters. And from the looks of it, chi blocking is illegal to learn, since they have to train in secret. (I mean, if there hadn't been big Amon posters on the walls...they'd still have gone in and frozen people solid on the basis they were practicing chi blocking, wouldn't they? I can't imagine people would be so dumb as to put up illegal posters in their perfectly legal hideout. So it's less an issue of Amon being an elitist and more like, say, ninja vs samurai. It's the existing elite who ban these things from the public in general.)

As to the tech - I'm not sure what the production requirements for those are, but the gauntlets at least don't look too hard. Amon managed to field enough people to take out every guard at the same time with what seems like brand new technology. And even if they can't be manufactured widely, it's still more democratic and equal to have something anyone can use (and that can be taken away from them if they abuse it) than inborn and unremovable abilities like bending.

What if it's not a plot about non benders rebelling over bender superiority mixed with a plot about tech making bending obsolete, but a plot about a manipulative revolutionary using the public's (justified) anger at the conduct of some benders to create a new elite based on technology?

But we'd need to start from the standpoint their anger's justified for that. If Korra was looking around going holy shit we are reaping what we've sown, I need to repair bender/nonbender relations STAT, omg you guys HOW CAN YOU NOT HAVE A SINGLE BENDER ON YOUR COUNCIL THEY'RE ONLY MOST OF THE POPULATION, then it'd work. But the show doesn't seem to be presenting it as justified...the first episode had an antibender guy, and bender criminals, and Korra causing more damage taking those guys out followed by resisting arrest and causing more trouble using her bending. But ever since then, it's just been that the antibenders are jerkfaces and benders being afraid of getting crippled - and without even a moment's consideration that what they consider crippled and powerless is how nonbenders live. I've been hoping that's all setting stuff up for a reversal, but it's weird to see it presented for so many episodes with apparent narrative support.

I mean, absolutely no one in fandom thinks Amon's sincere. He oozes lying weasel. And the antibender flyer guy is treated with little more respect than the cabbage guy. And that really makes it hard to believe the antibender sentiment is anything legitimate instead of something drummed up for Amon's own purposes. If we'd seen it exist beforehand and that Amon was just capitalizing on it, it'd have worked better, but so far, antibender sentiment is presented at starting from Amon (and, because he's oozing lying weasel, all his speeches about what's bad about bending are assumed to be made up so people will support him when they're the only place we're hearing about it.)

Hm, you might be right that spiritbending's just a will contest. I'm not sure I even understood it at the time, but I'm pretty sure there was the idea that you can't misuse it.

[ember-reignited.livejournal.com]

benders being afraid of getting crippled - and without even a moment's consideration that what they consider crippled and powerless is how nonbenders live

And this is why Amon really isn't that scary to me; what he's doing just doesn't tap into any real fears or anxieties I have. Even when I put effort into thinking of something I or anyone I know has that could be roughly equivalent to super powers and what it would be like to lose it, I come up with nothing. And you can't exactly sympathize with his victims since all of them so far have been terrible people who really didn't deserve to have that kind of advantage in the first place. I mean, the episode with his formal introduction only avoided the focus on rescuing Bolin being skeevy protagonist-centered morality because the other people there genuinely weren't worth rescuing, and what was happening to him wasn't so horrible as to make you say, "No one deserves that."

I'm obviously not rooting for him, because yeah, slimy weasel, but... I'm kind of having trouble actively rooting against him. If anything, I guess I'm rooting for him to make at least enough waves to get a lot of people seriously talking about what he represents and whether he might have some points.

[farla.livejournal.com]

I think the best analogy to bending is like...being able to draw, say. I can't draw, but people who can really like drawing, so it'd be crippling to them in a way it wouldn't be to me. Or being injured in a way that makes it impossible to play a professional sport without impacting daily life. I can sympathize with Korra's fearing it because bending is her whole life. But it's a very personal sort of threat and it's awkward when it's connected to societal-level stuff. No one seems to really care about the broader implications of it - Amon's going on about a revolution while all the benders are just worried about if it'll happen to them.

[learntwocook.livejournal.com]

Um, wow. You should look at the de-bending section here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Headscratchers/TheLegendOfKorra

It's a long, long thread of people making increasingly ridiculous analogies to describe it, finally culminating in "[Energybending is] essentially rape." Yes, seriously, that's an actual quote.

why you do this people

[farla.livejournal.com]

Yeah they've been a pile of failure for some time now. Energybending is rape will go well with their bit about how Lolita was such a seductive little twelve year old.