double entendre:

^
There's no way Iroh isn't doing it on purpose!

Because multiverse this is technically canon somewhere in space and time:

canon yuri, canon yuri everywhere.

Rosenakahara wrote:canon yuri, canon yuri everywhere.

Ny God...they should have sent a poet....

I dub 2014 the year of yuri!
seriously the rest of that year was shit but we DID get 3 canon lesbian and/or (because im not entirely sure about what christa likes, ymir is just christasexual) bisexual couples.
so that's always good.

/r/korrasami had a survey:
[url]https://www.reddit.com/r/korrasami/comments/2rhf3k/korrasami_postfinale_survey_preliminary_results/[/url]
well for reddit that is a pretty large amount of females.

So, I finally got out of my procrastination and watched the last two seasons, so here's my general reactions and thoughts:
WARNING, HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!



- these two seasons were really when the show "grew the beard", the creators knew about how many episodes they could make and it shows, the pacing is much more mastered and can have several subplots taking two seasons, instead of having to be imperatively resolved in one like seasons 1 and 2. (especially 1)

- now that it's over, I realize that each of the season's villain had a parallel and thus represented one of the main "threats" from the early 20th Century:

• Amon and the Equalists are workers revolutions gone bad (think of the communist revolutions in Eastern Europe, but here stopped before they could seize power)
  
• Unalaq and Vatuu were religious extremism(?), although it's the kind of threats that have more media attention nowaday
  
• Zaheer and the Red Lotus are anarchism
  
• Kuvira and her Earth Empire are fascism (blended with Maoism)

- I was really surprised with the darkest themes and imagery shown and what the creators could get away with in a kid show, most notably the very graphic death by suffocation of the Earth Queen (they even put the characteristic bloodshot eyes from asphyxiation!) and how "mundane" and realist the poison used on Korra and its consequences were: they could had gotten away with some sort of secret mystical poison made of dark energy and 10 bear asses, but instead used a liquid metal that's all but stated to be mercury, with a very realistic representation of how mercury poisoning works (well, except the fact that with a good half-liter of injected in her veins Korra should had dropped dead in a few seconds! ), and yes: intense pain, muscular paralysis, depression, hallucinations are all symptoms of mercury poisoning, and its a real bitch to purge from the body, and even then it very often leaves many physical sequels. And the show didn't shied away from showing it: two weeks later she was still horribly pale and weak and bound to a wheelchair, and it took her years of physical therapy to finally get back in shape (and that's with all this magical healing!)
And of course, there's the fact it showed that people that got very near death usually don't shrug it off as it was nothing, her fight with Zaheer leaving Korra with one hell of a PTSD that pursued her for years and left her with permanent emotional scars, as it's with real victims of PTSD. (on a side-note, I noticed that since around 10 years, the subject of PTSD is much more treated upon in television, a consequence of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan I suppose, a stark contrast with the emotionally invincible heroes from the 80's and 90's)

- I really appreciated how they toned down all the romantic subplots drama BS, sure there are love interests and all, but they are kept on the background instead of taking the plot, which is good. And of course the KorrAsami ending, with the two of them getting closer as the series progress was done very organically. Well, since the creators stated that it wasn't explicitly planned but that it grew on them as they developed the plot, it was to expect, but they didn't shied away from it.

- Overall, except Unalaq which was a rather bland and generic bad guy greedy for power (which was even lampshaded in-universe), all the villains were memorable in their own style, both legitimately threatening and complex, with their own motivations that explains how they ended where they are. In my personal opinion the more well rounded up villain was Zaheer, with Kuvira in second and Amon third. Kuvira could had gained the first place had the show lingered a little more on what she had gone through. (more on it later)

- Varrick's abridged version of the series is the best recap episode scene since Kill la Kill one! That "Evil Square" phone conference just killed me!



Overall, the last two seasons really upped the series from "good" to "excellent", still, I have several critics, which I realized boils down to one fact: for me each season should had been longer to explore the setting and characters, 12 episodes per season is way too little, it should had been at least 20 episodes like in ATLA. As a consequence, each story has to be streamlined as much as possible, leaving several things poorly explained (or not at all) or potential in character development and exploration wasted:

- the biggest offender is lavabending: it just came out of nowhere, and unlike metalbending it's never explained how it works, if you can learn it or are born with it (like psychic bloodbending or combustion bending), as if you just had to thing "Lava!" while earthbending and boom, you pulled a mini-volcano out of nowhere.

- the Red Lotus gang could had benefited from more screen time outside of battle. It's clear that they are more than teammates, but are fire forged true companions like the Gaang and Krew are, and I would had wanted to see more of them, their backstories that drove them to join the Red Lotus, what exactly made the Red Lotus split from the White Lotus, since we know almost nothing from the White Lotus aside that they wanted to bring down the Firelord in ATLA...

- Kuvira could had really benefited from having some screentime more devoted to her backstory and what's happening in the Earth Empire: it's implied that she started with genuine good intentions but saw some really bad shit in the past three years that made her change into the dictatorial control freak we see in the story, as even with her dictatorial manners everyone says that it's better than the chaos in which the Earth Kingdom was thrown in, but it's never addressed, so she looks like someone who got an instant power trip. I really think that an episode depicting her departure from Zaofu with good intention then facing the chaos of Ba Sing Se and the rest of the EK, with their local warlords backstabbing everyone for power, even their allies from yesterday, which made her sink little by little into a dictatorial mindset would had been great in making her a more complex character and show more why everyone said that she had some points in her methods of pacifying the EK.
I mean, you just don't gather a huge army and tens of thousands of followers in three little years if you don't have a good basis for it!
Oh yeah and also to explain why she decided to put every non-earthbender into re-education camps, seriously, what the hell was with that? It appeared only in one episode and was never mentioned again, it really feels as if it was thrown here just to make Kuvira screams "evil" and make a parallel with the Fire Nation from ATLA, but it looked unnecessary, we already know that she had gone too far and had to be stopped.


But it's not just a question of time constraints, there are other critics:

- the end of Season 3 said that Zaheer and his goons were only the tip of the iceberg, a small team of (okay, elites) Red Lotus operators, and that there are many others still hidden that will probably try to capitalize on the chaos thrown by the Earth Queen's death to try to kill more leader and spread anarchy, then comes Season 4 and nothing, they don't seem to had acted, there's no indications if they were hunt down and neutralized or if they are still hiding, hell the guys aren't even mentioned aside Zaheer's role in Korra's PTSD!
Although that could be another consequence of the little screentime the creators had at their disposal.

- we are talked at length about the Earth Empire's labor and re-education camps, to the point that it was clear that we will get to see them up-close to really understand how far Kuvira has slipped, and then nothing. This is a clear case of "Show, don't tell", and that can't be because of restrictions of being a kid's show, since they already shown labor camps in ATLA.
But here again, that could had been a consequence of the tight screentime restrictions.

- I really wanted to see the United Republic and Earth Empire armies to get to fight, again it can't be because of restriction of being a kid show since there already were several in ATLA (for example the siege of the North Pole or the Invasion of the Fire Nation), instead of just having Kuvira going Godzilla on the city and few platoons of mecha-suits that did nothing.

- speaking of which, I'm really divided with those: the mecha-suits as well as the flying humming-bird things were really borderline (especially seeing how mecha tanks and planes were invented only three years prior and treated as a huge technological leap), but the Colossus was just too much. How much platinum do they have in this fucking planet anyway? I could buy a small African country with just an arm of the damned thing! The feeling is mitigated by the fact that the fight to bring it down was really epic and that its armor looking like an Eva and the airbenders flying around it made me think of some crazy crossover between Eva and Attack on Titan, which is awesome.

- the excuse of Toph and Katara for not implicating themselves in the affairs of the world because of their age looked really flimsy, okay they are nearly 90, but it's clear that benders, especially powerful ones, lived very long, hell Bumi in ATLA was 112 and still curb stomped all of Omashu's garrison by himself, and Zuko is definitely still involved! Sure, Toph also said that it was because those are not really their time anymore, but the physical state one sounds just like an excuse.
And dammit, I wanted to see what Katara learned in those past 70 years!

- In the end, we didn't got to see the Fire Nation, which is a shame, I really wanted to see how evolved the country that was the leader in technology 70 years ago!

You can blame nick for the twelve episodes thing, i heard somewhere the scrapped episode they had would have had more development for kuvira and a few scenes to build up to that korrasami ending just a bit more (though i think the buildup was fine as it is) but again nick sucks donkey balls.

red lotus ARE a missed opportunity, personally i think they should have done more with them but meh.

the camps were a dumb idea that literally only exist to make the fact that kuvira is literally hitler more obvious.

the earth empire and united republic not fighting might have been a decent idea if literally seconds later kuvira didnt open fire on the city.
you would think that the soldiers would actually attack after that, plus you have hundreds of earthbenders there you can just topple the damn think like korra and the airbenders tried later.

i have just come to accept the avatar world is built upon hundreds of miles of platinum, then again its a fantasy world they can have all the damn platinum they want.

i think the no fire nation thing was due to korra being more based in one place than TLA, most of korra was in republic city so they didn't have any need to show off the fire nation.

also obligatory korra pic:
Teen titans go!:

Rosenakahara wrote:You can blame nick for the twelve episodes thing, i heard somewhere the scrapped episode they had would have had more development for kuvira and a few scenes to build up to that korrasami ending just a bit more (though i think the buildup was fine as it is) but again nick sucks donkey balls.

A shame really, the creators did a fantastic job with what little they had (and even beyond fantastic really), but I can't help but think that if they had more liberty in budget and time, like Anno have now that he had founded Khara, instead of having the douchebags at Nick, it would had been a masterpiece.
But alas.

Rosenakahara wrote:red lotus ARE a missed opportunity, personally i think they should have done more with them but meh.

Agreed.

Rosenakahara wrote:the camps were a dumb idea that literally only exist to make the fact that kuvira is literally hitler more obvious.

I don't really have a problem with the labor and "re-education" camps, after all imagery aside Kuvira seems essentially base on Mao, who did used them, it's the detail that every non-earthbender get sent to the latter that I find idiotic, since it came out of nowhere and is never explained.

Rosenakahara wrote:the earth empire and united republic not fighting might have been a decent idea if literally seconds later kuvira didnt open fire on the city.
you would think that the soldiers would actually attack after that, plus you have hundreds of earthbenders there you can just topple the damn think like korra and the airbenders tried later.

That's not exactly what happened: Kuvira shot a few times to destroy the United Forces Navy to make Raiko surrender, which he did, and after that she sent Bataar to take the capitulation documents and see the terms of surrendering, implying that it was around a few hours later the time for his airship to come and go to Republic City, meanwhile Kuvira's troops had all the time to restrain all the United Forces soldiers (which might explain why the infantry wasn't present in the city and there was only the mecha-suits platoons), it's only when Bataar explained that he had been abducted that she moved to attack, and it's probable that all the United Forces soldiers were already restrained at that moment.
Still, I would had liked to see it, and maybe even to have Iroh at least try something to liberate himself and his men.

You know the craziest in all this? In terms of what could be international law, Kuvira was probably still more or less justified in what she did: the United Republic officially surrendered, and Korra and her friends abducted the Earth Empire official sent to put on paper the capitulation, making Korra and Co. rebels. In the end, it's similar to what happened in Zaofu: everyone know that what she was doing was wrong, but she arranged things so the way she did was legal, sometimes I wonder if the creators didn't channeled Putin when creating her!

Rosenakahara#779227"]i have just come to accept the avatar world is built upon hundreds of miles of platinum, then again its a fantasy world they can have all the damn platinum they want.
The good old MST3K Mantra, let's keep it at that!


[quote="Rosenakahara wrote:i think the no fire nation thing was due to korra being more based in one place than TLA, most of korra was in republic city so they didn't have any need to show off the fire nation.

Well, Season 1 was locked in Republic City, but in Season 2 we got a lot of episodes in the Northern and Southern Water Tribes, and Season 3 and 4 had a lot of time in the Earth Kingdom/Empire (with a few visits to the Northern Air Temple in Season 3 too), so having some time spent in the Fire Nation wouldn't had been out of place, if the plot allowed it of course.
In the end, the only glimpse we got was when Korra ended on that FN temple island with amnesia, and since it's a temple, it's basically the same than in the ATLA era.



Anyway, a couple of other points I wanted to talk about:

- First is how I was pleasantly surprised by how genuine Zaheer and P'Li's love was, the most powerful scene for me was in the episode in which she died, when P'li talked about her past, it was just after Zaheer recalled to himself the words of that ancient guru that said to shed all his earthly attaches to "enter the void" and learn to fly, everything was pointing toward Zaheer doing the typical big bad thing and killing her loyal subordinate and supposed lover to gain more power, cementing him as a pure bastard so the good guys could get rid of him without any moral dilemma, and we even see him having long silences as if he was seriously pondering the situation, and then he reciprocate P'Li's affection, which could be interpreted as him finally deciding that even this mythical power wasn't worth to lose her, and that he preferred to retain some of his "earthly attachments", which if you think about it is exactly what Aang chose in ATLA, and that humanized a lot Zaheer.
Kuvira on the other hand... well at least she showed that she really didn't enjoyed trying to blow up her fiancée, that's something I guess.


- At first I wasn't really fan of Korra's new haircut, but it progressively grew on me and now I like it, gives her a more mature and "veteran that got through some shit" look.


- Something that also really bothered me was how the power levels of each character was purely defined by the plot. I know that it's something that was already present in ATLA (Sokka besting trained FN soldiers with his club even though he almost never trained before being an example), but here it was at times really ridiculous.
The biggest offenders being the White Lotus guards who get completely curb stomp in absolutely every fights they were in, be it against the Equalists or the Red Lotus, while the Zaofu guards held their own against Zaheer and his gang very well, even forcing them to fall back without Korra, hell even Republic City's metalbending cops looked more competent than these guys!
Same thing for the Dai Li: first time they manage to hold their ground against Korra and the airbenders, and against the Red Lotus it's as if they weren't here! Damn even fucking Kai beat the Dai Li instructor even thought he got not even a couple of days of training!
That was already present as far back as the first season, where the Equalist troops utterly dominated Korra and Mako the first them, then became complete red shirts even for Mako (Korra I can understand since she was intensely trained since she was four), same thing for Mako and Bolin against the magma guys and armless lady from the Red Lotus: first time they got completely massacred, and second time it's them who ditched the pain, even though their training amount to some street brawling and pro-bending!
Now for Season 4 I can understand them holding their ground against the Earth Empire troops, since Mako fought many triads during his three years as a cop and Bolin more than probably got military training and some fighting against local warlords troops during his time serving in the Earth Empire army.


- Strangely for me, I'm actually okay with the vision of Avatar State Korra in Season 4 never being explained if it was a hallucination, some avatar mojo at work, or a combination of both, it adds to the mysteries and unexplainable of the spirit shenanigans.

And to finish, since we are into fanarts and screenshots, I can't believe you didn't noted this one Rosenakahara:

They're not even trying to hide it!

^ oh believe me i noted that scene earlier just not on this site.

to quote dragonball z abridged: power levels are bullshit!
the main reason that there was a lot of inconsistencies in regards to power in the show is mostly due to an old trope where if you show the mooks beating up the heroes it makes them more menacing, similarly show the villain easily best a "elite" and it makes them look a lot more powerful, its a basic drama thing.

I think the zaofu guards actually being competent was to drive home that this really was one of the safest places in the world but that ended up creating story problems later on as we can see.

The FN would have been nice honestly but it didn't really have any story purpose so i can see why it wasn't used.

what im saying is i hoped that after they found out kuvira was shooting up the city anyway iroh and his men decided to have a change of plans and attack kuviras army, some of them would have been disarmed but it wouldn't have taken too long seriously.

Rosenakahara wrote:the main reason that there was a lot of inconsistencies in regards to power in the show is mostly due to an old trope where if you show the mooks beating up the heroes it makes them more menacing, similarly show the villain easily best a "elite" and it makes them look a lot more powerful, its a basic drama thing.

I know that, what I meant is that it was used so much (notably for the White Lotus guards) that at times it became ridiculous.

Rosenakahara wrote:what im saying is i hoped that after they found out kuvira was shooting up the city anyway iroh and his men decided to have a change of plans and attack kuviras army, some of them would have been disarmed but it wouldn't have taken too long seriously.

As I said, some time passed between the UR surrendering and Bataar being abducted, so Kuvira's army probably took that time to disarm and restrain the UR troops. After all Kuvira was shown to be very cautious and genre savvy.
In fact, sometimes she looked like an adult version of Azula minus the sadistic streak, to the point that I'm sure that if Azula died during the 70 years between ATLA and LOK, she reincarnated into Kuvira!

Speaking of azula:

that was one of the last times we see her before she runs off forever, i really want some closure here.
its like they closed the "where is my mother" thing but then opened up another loose end to piss everyone off.

also i have a mini-analysis somewhere showing the sokka is most likely suyins father especially considering sukki seems to be moving towards the zuko camp:
[url]http://lokgifsandmusings.tumblr.com/post/102534369528/suyin-is-sokkas-daughter-the-evidence[/url]
this also means bataar jr. is not just tophs grandson but also sokkas.........how the fuck do you mess up that bad with those amazing genes?

and small facts you may not know:
Korra's clothes are made out of animals she caught and skinned herself since hunting is kinda big in water tribe culture.

Rosenakahara wrote:Speaking of azula:

SPOILER: Show

that was one of the last times we see her before she runs off forever, i really want some closure here.
its like they closed the "where is my mother" thing but then opened up another loose end to piss everyone off.

Well, there's a new comics trilogy called "Smoke and Shadow" about an anti-Zuko rebellion int he FN, and in an interview the author hinted that Azula might be involved in the story, so rest assured, I'm sure that they didn't forgot about her, her ultimate fate being pretty much the last mystery from the ATLA era, aside from Toph's two partners, speaking of which:

Rosenakahara wrote:also i have a mini-analysis somewhere showing the sokka is most likely suyins father especially considering sukki seems to be moving towards the zuko camp:
[url]http://lokgifsandmusings.tumblr.com/post/102534369528/suyin-is-sokkas-daughter-the-evidence[/url]
this also means bataar jr. is not just tophs grandson but also sokkas.........how the fuck do you mess up that bad with those amazing genes?

Well, Suyin has a noticeably darker skin than Lin, so her father being of Water Tribe is possible (also there are also Earth Kingdom people with olive skin), but if that was really the case it would had been mentioned, or at least one of Suyin's children would had blue eyes or something, yet apart the dark skin all have green or brown eyes, so I doubt that it was Sokka, so either we will never know, or we'll get trolled and again and it's just another random dude we never saw before that will just get his name dropped on passing. Or it was Azula.

Rosenakahara wrote:and small facts you may not know:
Korra's clothes are made out of animals she caught and skinned herself since hunting is kinda big in water tribe culture.

Even the blue shirt and track pants?


More seriously, from where did you got that fact?

^ currently at college so going through my tumblr post likes would be a bad idea (a few NSFW posts in there) but its from bryans tumblr that she skinned the animals herself and caught them too, i'll get the link when i get home.

also it is very easy to change the colour of animal skin if you know what you are doing

^
It was more the fact that the body fitting shirt she's always seen wearing could be made of seal guts or something like that, is Asami even aware of the fact?

Now I have the mental image of Korra dragging Asami in a hunt in the middle of the South Pole and trying to teach her how to skin an animal to make beautiful fur!

gah it was from one of the ask panels they had, which means its going to be hard to find on the internet, when i find it i'll get back to you on that.

also even if it was made of seal guts it would still be like any normal piece of clothing :P

^Never mind who Suyin's father was, I want to know if Mai x Zuko reformed itself or not (and if not who the hell is Izumi's mother?)

izumi is a water based name.
maybe zuko just fell for some random water tribeswoman.

Rosenakahara wrote:izumi is a water based name.

The Japanese name in question means "spring" and you're right about that, but the "zu" sound makes it a fire nation name.

Shinoyami65 wrote:^Never mind who Suyin's father was, I want to know if Mai x Zuko reformed itself or not (and if not who the hell is Izumi's mother?)

Well the oncoming new comics trilogy will also have Zuko and Mai meeting again, since the latter's father is the leader of the anti-Zuko resistance group, so we'll probably have an answer then.

^HAHAHAHAHA YESSSS!