fionwe1987

Yep. I admire the ambition, in Korra, and salute their decision to not settle on a formula. In fact, for all that "same soul born again and again to save the world" sounds like the basis for a highly repetitive set of stories, the creators have managed, by rotating the cultures the Avatar is born into, as well as their gender identity and sexuality, to make this an exciting way to explore very different identities, in conversation with each other. Korra herself is a huge personal favorite. Flawed, complicated, but with a very nicely done arc that, at its heights, genuinely matches what they did with Zuko in ATLA. The secondary characters is where LoK falls a bit, though I'd argue there's plenty of good ones there, and Mako is the chief failure and the writers never really made anything of him.

I don't understand this. What movie? It was choppy especially with the show runners having no clue how many seasons they'd get, but they still pulled off a pretty good series that has a lot of what made ATLA good, in my opinion. I'm glad they changed the vibe of the show, though.

I doubt they will be frame-to-frame faithful to the animated series. There's a lot that won't translate well from a animation to the screen. And I'm sure they'll try to explore some stories in greater depth. I can't see them not expanding time at the Southern Air Temple, especially the flashback, for instance. It's going to be one costly location to build for the little screen time it gets in the animated show. Same with Zuko's flashback in the Fire Nation palace. Clearly we'll get a lot more of the Ozai-Zuko-Azula dynamic a lot earlier, given the casting reveals. What I'm not sure of is if expanding the story like that won't end up hurting it. Does it make sense to make Zuko sympathetic too early? You risk that the moment you introduce Azula and Ozai.

Very solid casting. Still not sure what Netflix will end up producing, but the cast list is good.

I think the issue is not that the story is condensed. It is how it has been condensed. They did so in a way that fundamentally changes so many major characters that its hard to see how the themes and story arcs remaining will play out with any kind of fidelity to the original at all. They can probably keep the show going and even improve over S1 just if they work more on the sets, don’t have Covid restrictions hampering them, etc. But if there’s a way for the plot to recover, I’m not sure this crew of writers is going to find it, or care to execute it. Their vision just seems fundamentally geared towards the big spectacle scenes in WoT (and the ability to add their own, I guess), and less concerned with the character arcs that made those scenes seem more earned than what we got in S1.

A perhaps inevitable choice.

And I'm pretty sure Hollywood took notice of the amount and the popularity/publicity of this Kickstarter. Given that cinematic Universe are in vogue right now, the Cosmere seems not too far from seeing actual adaptations. I'm betting we see a Mistborn series/movie by 2025/26.

Astronomy is definitely full of Tolkien geeks, but the PR department (in line with The Martian, amusingly ) seems to have nixed the Tolkien reference, because I've seen multiple articles refer the Old English meaning, but not Tolkien.

I thought that too, but the article says not quite: I'm guessing this Old English word might have inspired Tolkien, though?

Do we know the eagles were not somewhere near Aragon's hosts, awaiting a signal from Gandalf to swoop in? Because if so, Frodo and Sam getting to Mount Doom early wouldn't have been an issue. Gandalf would have known the moment Frodo claimed the Ring, summoned Gwaihir and his chums, and had a slightly longer flight to Orodruin. He might have spent his extra flight time sulking about not being able to stare the Mouth of Sauron into silence...

I had to go to the Literature forum and confirm you were the same person, but how do you square this position, and your mentioning "way too high benchmarks" with your take on the WoT thread there? If you'd posted both anonymously, I'd believe they were from different people given the starkly contrasting perspectives.

Hmm, I guess the show had something to say about class and inequality, but I'm not sure whatever it said landed coherently on me. It was fine, nothing bad, just nothing revelatory either.

I agree that the animation is getting good enough that I hope wider audience starts realizing that animation is a genuinely excellent form of television, and we start seeing studios pitch major stories (SFF or otherwise) as animated shows.

Yeah, the sheer smoothness of the animation evoked hand drawn animation at it's best, while the CGI allowed for incredible cityscapes which looked wonderfully alive and complex. That would have been enough for me to watch the show, but it had a decent story, interesting characters, and a plot that surprised me quite a bit. I'd agree it's the best SFF of 2021, though maybe the last season of the Expanse will overtake it. Nothing that's new, though.

I wouldn't say LoK conclusively demonstrates anything though. Part of the issues with it, at least, were with not being given a full series order at first. And them being unable to explore a Korra-Asami romance early on. Take those away, and I think Korra would be a much more cohesive show. Even with those constraints, it's managed to be a damn good show. Hopefully, given that they were lured back to Nick, they have those kinds of issues sorted, and will have the money and the creative freedom to do more original storytelling in the Avatar world. I quite liked how they blended technology and bending, and I wouldn't mind more of that in future seasons.

Yeah the casting is great! I read they're going to be shooting in Mandalorian style "green" screen, though, which is disappointing. The landscapes of Avatar are obviously hard to recreate in real life, but I'm not sure the fully digital background will do the live action show any service.

Not exactly sure what else you think it could be mined for. If she forgets too much, her being able to fight Unalaq wouldn't add up. We do, but they keep getting different. In season 1, such a scene is used to show how brash and thoughtless Korra is with her power. You feel her thrill at using it, but then reality comes crashing down. In Season 2, it's in her helping her parents, again showing her continuing brashness, but she learns and apologizes a lot faster. I'm 3, she's already thinking more before acting, not just using her power but her experience and authority to diffuse situations. And of course, her deciding to sacrifice herself for the Air nation is the peak of this. In season 4, Korra trying to help various people and failing shows how far she's fallen, and how much of a struggle it is for her to get back up. I think you want a lot of scenes with the same emotional beats, but the show instead varies things up while the overall structure is "Korra helps the little guy". Uhh...no. It was an immensely gutsy call, and it totally boosted seasons 3 and 4 massively. The stakes felt more real, and Korra's struggles way more relatable, now that she had no way to contact her past lives for wisdom. Her guilt at the lost connections also makes for excellent character growth. You can tell there's a perceptible try to think before acting, from this point, because Korra now knows an immense magnitude of loss, and the wright of it pushes her to have more care with herself and her powers. Yeah, but that's just more of the same. It would have been formulaic Avatar plot to keep having that. Instead the writers chose to chop off their access to many many "learn lesson x from past Avatar y" plot arcs to do something that was a truly wrenching moment of TV. Losing those connections had real weight. The music and animation were phenomenal, and they didn't cheapen the horror of the moment by building the connections back, so on a rewatch, you know full well what the cost of her defeat is. Its one of the best decisions in the show, and coming in it's weakest season, to boot. I could use less love triangling, too, but a lot of that, I feel, is because Mako is such an undynamic character. Because he's not funny or allowed any kind of real pathos or growth, it's really hard to believe Korra and Asami would both continue to find him attractive, and that makes all the emotional drama feel valueless and boring. A more dynamic third there would have actually made the same plot much more bearable, and also interesting. I'd have gone for replacing Mako with General Iroh, to be honest. A link to the old gang wouldn't have been totally remiss.

While I think Mako, and Asami, get very little growth, and Bolin gets some but not enough, I definitely feel Korra herself drew me in at least as much as Zuko did, and in some ways more. She's a fascinating character with an excellent arc, and that they did this for a teenaged woman character makes her stand out all the more. Tenzin is no Iroh, and for that I'm actually glad. He isn't all knowing and wise. He's still getting there. And that made him a perfect mentor for Korra. I feel their personalities matched just right for this to be an engaging mentor mentee relationship.

Interesting. I've heard the opposite, before. Where were they on storyboarding season 2 when they learned season 3 and 4 were green lit? That would be an interesting question for someone to ask. I like both. They're different enough that they're difficult to fully compare, and I've met people who feel one is better than the other, but to me, they're both excellent shows that speak to some core competencies in the writing team. They picked thematic through lines that make these the same world, but explored them differently enough, in tone and story and design, to make for two distinct yet linked shows of high quality. That doesn't happen very often, in TV. Most cinematic universe descend into chaos of the second story totally reinterpreting or downplaying the first, or giving power and value to the first story to an extent that doesn't feel earned. There's very little of that here. The first story manages to remain legendary and epic, it's heroes age in ways that make sense to me, and the next batch of protagonists, while not delved into with the same depth, except for Korra and Tenzin, are fairly engaging and are fine as supporting characters. Whatever comes next, I hope it has the dynamism and innovation in Korra, but also manages to give everyone in Team Avatar sufficient screen time so they develop the distinct personalities and arcs that the OG Team Avatar had.

Not quite what I meant. I think Korra's patchiness is way more related to Nick just never being sure it would be a hit, and giving it incremental one season orders. I don't think the issue is with writing, especially when it's a rewrite of an existing show anyway. I'm thinking more that there are live series related things that Bryke wouldn't have been familiar with, and I'm wondering if that caused Netflix to interfere.

It's possible, of course, that they also don't have enough life show experience, and so Netflix was interfering more. Also, would Paramount really throw more money at them for an animated movie than Netflix did for the live action show?

Does that pass the sniff test? Wouldn't Netflix be wise to such tactics?

Yup. We even have it in the first episode that Republic City was built as a center for balance between the four Nations. That's what Aang envisioned, and I'm pretty sure the Gaang themselves never saw non-Benders as a lower class. And yeah, Sokka was someone who overcame his feelings of inadequacy. And it's worth nothing that he had plenty of political power and influence as a non-bender. It's entirely possible he never again felt the staggering imbalance in power between benders and non-benders.

Even the show makes that point. I always felt that episode with Tarrlock trying to arrest normal people for protesting a powercut was under developed and underutilized. They really should have had Korra examine those events more, but we were 5 episodes from the end, so they had to rush. Again, I'd think a longer, deeper season 1 would have Korra grappling with her loss of bending, and understanding how not having bending can be such a crippling disadvantage to non-Benders, and pushes for a more equal set of laws and the decision to move to a different form of governance. In fact, I'd think a transition to that would have made for a far better start to season 2.

As a non-Westerner who prizes these shows for being one of the few without a Weatern-centeic viewpoint, you've lost me here. Maybe you only know Westerners who see the show, and have thus concluded "everyone" watching the show saw Christian parallels. Nothing about Raava is like the Christian God. She seems to have contempt for humans, at best, and thinks they wreck everything. She has to learn they are good for more than that. She's clearly, therefore, neither the creator of the world, and most especially not the creator of humanity. Their design, especially as they are fighting each other, practically screams Yin and Yang, not a famous Christian symbol, last I checked. And, of course, there is nothing Christian about God having to fuse with a human to defeat the Devil, let alone reincarnating repeatedly, or worse, being reborn out of the heart of the devil. All this may well be my lack of deeper knowledge of Christian theology showing, but as a Hindu (by upbringing) watching the show, powerful forces of light and dark in constant conflict that comes to a head at regular time periods, where the Spirit of light is regularly reborn as a human to keep darkness at bay doesn't code as Christian. It reminds me of Krishna (Vishnu's Avatar) telling Arjuna that he takes birth age after age to keep destroy evil and establish good. If you never watched Avatar the Last Airbender and wondered "who was the first Avatar, why is this spirit alone capable of using all 4 elements? What allows it to access past memories, while other spirits aren't able to?", I don't know what to say. Those were very obvious world building questions, and the answers make perfect sense in world, and continue the deep borrowing from Hinduism, with the design borrowing from other dualistic concepts in Eastern cultures. Maybe you're overfitting to Christianity because that's what you're familiar with? If you're right this is a show for Western audiences, would people even know who Shiva is let alone that he has a third eye? But 3rd eyes and destruction aren't linked to Shiva alone. Kali is also often depicted with the 3rd eye, and she's even more associated with vengeance and destruction than Shiva. Literally every Hindu I know who has seen this (and that's a lot, because my extended family has a lot of fans) has only commented that it is cool to see a Western show depict something like this. All that said, I wouldn't mind them delving deeper into this. Why are combustion benders so rare? Why are they ostracized? They danced around it with P'li, but this is really an aspect of the world building that is ripe for deeper delving. These are separate issues. I like that they grappled with Aang's need to be nonviolent, before kind of ruining it by having an escape hatch for him. But that he didn't kill Ozai in head-to-head combat is obviously a result of it being a kids show. But while they may have designed Energy ending to come up with this escape hatch, I see no reason to let it go into the nonsensical direction of the Avatar being able to grant bending to everyone. That would literally make them God's, and I don't see how it would not create nonsensical plot issues to have them have that ability. If they can give just anyone bending, how do they decide who to give it to? Why not give everyone bending? So keeping it to taking away and restoring bending for someone born with the ability sounds perfectly right to me. Like Sokka had perfect control over how Republic City was set up, and intentions can never be tainted by reality and political machinations. Gotcha. How is this remotely anything like Ozai? I think if they'd claimed Aang didn't favor his only Airbender child, I'd have called bullshit. I felt this storyline was entirely realistic and believable. We have no idea how Katara dealt with Aang neglecting his other kids. But I suspect she got it, and even if she called him out on it often, sympathized with what was driving him. As for the Civil War, I agree. The retcon of Toph saying Katara was too old to interfere never sat well with me. Toph, after all, interfered when her kids were in trouble. I don't buy Katara sitting in the sidelines. I'd imagine this is a product of S2 being a 14 episode story, too. If not, then yeah, this is definitely a weakness in the way they aged her character. You do. Being a cop in the Avatar world has a totally different valence than in ours. Just because she's a kid who is leery of rules due to her upbringing doesn't mean she'd have to live her life in that same headspace. I could totally see Aang or Katara not thinking of the need for cops in their new city, but Toph being the person to rise to the occasion as crime inevitably crops up. Especially after seeing Toph in Season 4, I'd argue they did a great job keeping the character a believably older version of the kid we knew, and as a believable retired cop. It's not like Aang abused his kids. I don't see what universe would have Zuko interfering in his parenting. All these seem very childish and definitely based on extreme reads of what are very believable flaws in the adult versions of the characters.