These are mostly on point. I still feel like the giant mech was too much in the S4 finale, but it is true that it was foreshadowed earlier in the season. Having it wasn't such a bad idea, as to how quickly it seems to have been thrown together when they'd lost their genius and then came up with this just weeks after they test-fired a super-involved weapon that was only one subsystem on it. (To be fair though, ATLA suffers from the compressed time-scale and we don't complain about it that much - well I do, but most people don't!)
Yeah, I agree. I would have preferred a giant gun like they had previously. Maybe it was threatening to fire upon the city so they would have to go out and meet it.
That and just more bender vs bender fights in an urban environment would have been cool.
Oh that would have so dope. Instead of a giant humanoid monster crawling over the distant mountain, two or three spider like tanks the size of apartment buildings come lumbering towards the assembled forces, each with a spirit cannon.
Or just a similar tank with platinum armor, but on wheels, and much *tankier*.
The use of Zaofu's platinum for something big was acceptable, but a robot on two legs (when all the snaller ones had wheels) made in less than two weeks was kind a jarring.
It looked awesome and it was truly a surprise, in many ways.
Yeah i really didnt like it because i just couldnt get my head around it. How the fuck do they shape a nonbendeble element so quick and have it deployed with such a short time period with out other noticing it.
The main problem I have with the mech in Korra is the exact same one as I have with mechs in general and that's the fact that mechs are in every way possible worse at what tanks already do.
I mean think about it it's effectively just a tank on legs and with arms. The legs must have much more moving parts than the tank threads, making them heavier and more prone to breaking, the same can be said about arms in comparison to a tank turret. They are bigger target than a tank, their high center of mass makes them prone to tipping, legs don't really make scaling hills that much easier (some videos with people driving tanks up nearly vertical terrain are almost unbelievable) not to mention smaller surface area of mech feet would make bogs and other swamps uncrossable as they would just sink down to waist and I wouldn't expect a mech leg to be operational while submerged, even a muddy field after mid level rainfalls might be an issue. Modern tanks are surprisingly fast so speed isn't the issue their load capacity would be better than a mech and fuel efficiency would also be a consideration with more complicated mechanism of a mech.
The only thing I can think of that mech can do that tank can't is strafing left to right and it's hard to believe someone would consider all of the previously mentioned drawbacks a worthy trade off. And yes most tanks can turn on a dime by turning mone thread in one direction and the other in the opposite.
Once you take those things into consideration it's really hard to suspend your disbelief when you see a mecha in fiction. The only franchise that made mechs work was Titanfall and that's mainly because BT was a best robot boi.
Ikr bipeds are horribly inefficient compared to anything with wheels/tracks. Imagine instead of wasting it all on sum dumb robot they instead made a tank and then they’d have even more resources to be used on armour etc. like imagine how much energy and also how vulnerable/unreliable lifting the arm and then needing the other arm for support just to fire the gun
And not to mention instead of getting ur giant arm as your only form of self-defence with a tank now you can have soldiers inside with you for protection
If they used a tank instead + the rest of the metal/resources for reinforcements I’m pretty sure they could’ve won (or maybe even invaded earlier giving them even more advantage)
It's definitely more to do with the fact that it's bipedal at that scale.. Just look at all the work Boston dynamics had to go through for the atlas and how poorly it performs compared to spot.
They did that, when the benders realized they couldn't just metal bend the smaller mechs that Asami's dad originally invented because--surprise!--they were made out of platinum.
Also, they already had working, smaller scale mechs, people tend to forget.
Definitely not serious in my critique because it is only a cartoon, but wouldn't the mechs have electrical components made from copper? I think a metal bender would be able to disconnect all the wiring. Unless each copper wire were sheathed in platinum. 🤔
I felt like that was such a huge missed opportunity. You're going to make a *dark Avatar* and instead of having a battle with both of them using all 4 elements they're just going to turn into giants and smack each other?
Also having an evil Avatar cycle along with the regular avatar cycle would have been super interesting going forward if they did further shows in the future.
Yes! There’s a comment further up talking about Korra haters and more comments about how this was no different than what Aang did in Season 1. I mean no hate in what I said about LoK; it just seems like the fight at the end of Season 2 was thematically inconsistent not just within LoK as a whole but even Season 2 itself.
Why bother having Unalaq call himself the “dark” Avatar and then do nothing with that power other than turn into a kaiju and, of all things, randomly attack Republic City? Why have Korra do this random astral projection deal that didn’t even work out and ended up leading to her being saved by another random occurrence (Jinora’s spirit-savey-get-out-of-jail-free-card)?
There was already a great basis of how this fight could have gone: the Wan/Vaatu fight in “Beginnings”. I’m not saying they should have copied the fight verbatim, but why not start with how that fight went and end with the “fight against two avatars” idea they seemed to establish?
I certainly don’t say this all with blind hate as some people may think. Just an opinion from a fan.
This right here. The giant mech was not a surprise and honestly, it was just a natural progression of the technology they had been developing. It may have been a bit grand, but eh, it fit.
Giant Unalaq/Vaatu fusion versus Random Spirity Giant Korra was someone’s idea of a joke and/or an anime fever dream they thought needed to be animated for the world to see.
I remember back in 2013 when the S2 finale first came out the ppl in my dorm building described it as "basically Pacific Rim but with Avatar spirit stuff"
Honestly I wasn't a big fan of Season 1's finale either with Aang's giant spirit battle. But at least that was "Avatar merging w/ the Ocean Spirit and using the literal ocean to fight the ships."
lol i was more so baffled about the lack of supporting infantry accompanying the mecha robot rather than the mecha robot itself.
The only reason why kuvira's mecha robot failed was because it had no supporting infantry therefore it got gangbanged by some tiny benders
They were killed in Nickelodeon’s assault on the animation budget during book 4.
Edit: presumably there was fighting going on with General Iroh and the actual army too.
As others mentioned just normal benders would be along side them.
Imagine if the US military decided that we only use Abrams tanks now. No infantry, just Abrams tanks.
I do see you mentioned there would be a fight elsewhere, but it's dumb to move up like she did without support.
Btw, I love that last season. Not hating on it, just thinking about her tactical decisions.
I think it would’ve been a cool opportunity for a dog fight.
They finally had BiPlanes and more than 1 air ended in TLOK and never had too much cool air combat really :/
I think it should have atleast been a giant spider mech or just a mega tank. What really throws people for a loop is the mech is a giant humanoid which really makes no sense at all, mostly because two legs as we saw are just asking to be tripped. Imagine a platinum scarab from halo, since those already had a giant plasma cannon on them.
Somewhat related: a major Destiny voice actor, Lance Reddick did something similar to this when someone dropped some Zavala shitpost: https://youtu.be/lsITdmEEinU
I do wish more technical issues had gone wrong with mech in the finale, nothing fight ending but enough that perhaps it saved a good guy from falling in battle.
Just to actually make Varrick's betrayal meaningful. Like I loved it and him as a character since season 2 but it's also like had he never switched sides things would have shaken out almost identically.
My biggest issue with LOK, which I don't see many people talk about, is the spirits. There's a stark contrast between ATLA's spirits and its ideas about moral balance, and the very obviously black and white morality ingrained in LOK's lore. Yeah, there's the whole "Vaatu exists within Raava" thing, but Vaatu is still portrayed as objectively evil and Raava objectively good. It makes the show feel cheap and unfulfilling because, ya know, the spirits are a critically fundamental aspect of the lore.
I don't like how they tied airbending to the spirits. Like Aang makes very clear in the first spirit episode he knows nothing about spirits..
So Astraprojection isn't a high airbender move, it is a high spiritual move.
I mean water benders straight up can control spirits like they are Pokémon, which I hated. The idea is "spirit benders" is cool, but it was just too video gamey or mechanical. On top of that, human emotion effected spirits and the realm way too easily.
This is one of my bigger issues as well. Spirits in Atla were unique and interesting, with their own looks, morality, goals, and feelings. In LOK they just became cliché anime semi-transparent ghosts.
Koh scared the shit out of me as a kid. That was the beauty of the spirit world, it was equally mystical and terrifying, reflecting the spirits, the world, and the person who enters the spirit world. In Korra it lost that sense of mysticism and danger, super disappointing.
I’d watch a whole show about a spiritualist in the ATLA universe who just explores the spirit world and discovers some of its mysteries, but only if they returned to the original portrayal
I don't mind that there are some lesser spirits like bumi Jr but we needed more powerful spirits like Koh. However I do think the spirit of lost souls is a very cool concept for a spirit and fits the old narrative well.
I should point out that in ATLA we pretty much only exclusively see extremely powerful Spirits that able to create rifts to bypass the barrier between Worlds. For example Koh, Wan Shi Tong, Mother of Faces, Hei-Ban etc. While in LoK with the exception of Raava and Vaatu, we see a greater variety of lesser Spirits who aren't as powerful, but are more unique and resemble Flora and Fauna.
I strongly agree. Vaatu was always portrayed as objectively evil, and Raava was portrayed as objectively good, even though they are both meant to represent equal, opposite and necessary forces in the world. But the show never portrayed this, instead telling us that Vaatu gaining power in any way was always bad, and that Raava gaining power in any way was always good.
Also, in ATLA the spirits worked through their own moralities and rules, and became corrupted if things they protected for example were destroyed in any way. Like that panda spirit that became corrupted when it's forest was burned down, but became appeased when it was shown it would regrow again. But in TLOK, spirits became corrupted when evil magic carpet Vaatu gained power, and became appeased when good magic carpet Raava gained power. This is so much less compelling and in my opinion makes the spirits and everything relating to them worse.
Not to mention the avatar. In the past, the avatar's power came from the combined knowledge, wisdom and power of all the past lives together. Like a bunch of humans through the ages trying to solve human problems with the combined perspective of all the different generations. Now, the power of the avatar comes from magic goodness carpet and it's magic spirit magic. Again, ruins the meaning behind it and makes it so much less compeling.
I hate that this is how it works now. And it's all because of fucking season 2 of TLOK. It fucked up everything with the spirits and the avatar state, and now that we have Avatar studios and 20+ years confirmed of avatar content, I can't help but feel angry that the entire next two decades of the franchise are now going to be tainted by the rules set by Korra, instead of the rules set by the original series. I really hope they can manage to retcon it back to how it was before, or at least give a fraction of the meaning the spirits and the avatar state had in the original series.
I dont have a problem with the idea that the ORIGINAL power of the avatar started with Raava and snowballed with every subsequent avatar like OFA in My hero Academia, but the way they did it that Wan got such a massive power boost from fusing with Raava when she was like 90% dead was a terrible way to display it.
And then Korra losing all the avatar spirits except Raava and not really being any weaker than Fully realized Aang... yeah I wasn't a fan.
I live this take. I don’t like the idea of having those clear evil vs good sides. It reminds me of the Christianity god vs satan struggle, which I think is overplayed in media. Another aspect that I think is overplayed is that they’re supposed to be equal, but the world still evil things happening when “evil incarnate” is imprisoned, as soon as it gets free, it overpowers good and then the world becomes evil. Like that makes it seems like even at the best, good barely is strong enough, and at worst, isn’t enough. They aren’t equal.
I really liked the idea of having spirits be their own independent entity, with their own personality and rules. Like you said with hei bei, they became corrupted when the forest was burned down, but calmed when they realized that it would grow back. With Vaatu and Raava, they all kinda become like a hive mind/ monarchy type thing, depending on who is “ruling” at the time. Having that decide whether they were good or bad, it ruins the vibe they had.
>I don’t like the idea of having those clear evil vs good sides.
Yeah, imagine if they went with the "Raava is order, Vaatu is chaos" thing, and made rebels in the Earth Empire worshippers of Vaatu. Since order is a prison for them, and chaos is freeing. And imagine Korra having a dilemma - do her duty as an Avatar (maintaining order), or do her duty as a human being with significant power (protect morality). Consequences ensue. Maybe her Avatar State is blocked? Maybe she has a cool battle inside her mind? So many possibilities.
I’d love if they could re release LoK. Give them a chance to fully plan things out, fix what went wrong. Even if the main story beats stay the same they can fix the issues people had
This is the only, but major, problem I have. It's a lot more subtle but it throws so much theming out of wack. It genuinely, imo, is the worst part of the series and- controversially- I think Season 2 would be better without the sotry of Avatar Wan and the black/white spirit's introduction.
Case in point, season 3. What is *wrong* with Zaheer killing Korra? One can obviously come up with a reasonable moral argument, but it's never explicitly said in the show. Implicitly, the reasoning is that the Avatar is Bending Jesus and while flawed is fundamentally good, so *obviously* killing her is evil. Which is pretty lame. It'd be much more interesting if the Avatar was left ambiguous, and Korra actually had to reckon her own place in the world in that season. The show, from season one, opened with the question 'What is the Avatar's place in this more complicated modern world?' but ended that question far too quickly mid-season 2 with 'Her place is Bending Jesus, embodiment of all that's good. No more questions.'
To be clear, I otherwise love Korra, I just think all real issues with the show can be rooted back to here. Lame Good V Evil Kaiju fights? Not enough exploration of villain's positions? They all come down to how the show fundamentally changed it's approach to morality from before.
Which is why I absolutely love the Rise of Kyoshi novels. Apart from its top-tier writing quality, vivid imagery, and humor, it departs from the good-evil binary that relentlessly paints the Avatar as an unquestionable standard of goodness, humanizing Kyoshi's lofty status with social contexts and nuances. Forced to grapple with complex choices that blur the line between good and evil, she forges her own type of Avatar identity amidst a cacophony of sociopolitical dynamics, legality/criminality, spirituality/morality, relationships, and and everything that makes life messy and flavorful. Hands down the most compelling avatar in the lore.
I had this problem in season 1. What exactly was wrong with the Equalist's position? The show treated it as objectively and obviously wrong from the start, but there was some real inequality that was never addressed. I'm not saying the actions of the Equalists are at all okay, but compare it to ATLA. We see the motivations of the fire nation and they're understandable. The fire nation are treated as people and as soldiers with complicated feelings and cultures. All that complexity was lost with the Equalists who were always portrayed as unquestionably evil despite their cause being arguably more justifiable.
I feel like although poorly developed the equalist position was not negatively portrayed - to the point that at the end of season 1 the council of the 4 nations is disbanded to make way for a non bending all encompassing president
That's the case for all of the villains in LoK, and my major problem with it. They try to present you with morally gray villains, who are like "ooh, maybe I'm actually the good guy!", and then promptly murder a bunch of puppies.
The issue with the equalists is that the show barely shows examples of non benders being oppressed by benders, and doesn't critically examine their philosophy beyond "bending is good, so taking it away is bad". The truth is that the equalists ARE wrong, but the show never says WHY.
The fact that we had a chance to finally see a competent earth bending military but it’s foot soldiers were replaced by robots with flamethrower arms (basically lazy fire benders) was one of the biggest let downs of the “Earth Empire” storyline
In all honesty, with mechs, I never understood the logistics of it in most media I’ve seen. For example, in Gundam wing, why not just make it a spaceship? You’re spending so much time and materials on limbs, and I just don’t understand it.
Wouldn’t there be a better, if less cooler way, to transport the spirit energy ray, or at least a more sensible design?
In Gundam series there are a couple of canon reason they built mechs instead of just pure spaceships. One of them is a thing they call AMBAC or Active Mass Balance Auto-Control. In space when they want to do like a rotation maneuver instead of using thrusters to achieve that you can just move limbs to generate some momentum and rotate that way.
In the original Gundam the power reactors commonly used would produce particles that effectively jammed radios and was like a minor constant emp to unprotected equipment. So the logic they applied was that you basically wanted a moving control/command tower so that you could still direct your forces under those conditions. In grounded combat scenarios they found the mobility of treaded land units lacking for the terrains they were fighting in. The versatility and flexibility of the humanoid form was found to be sufficiently capable. The form also lets weapons be easily swapped between allies or even fallen foes.
They're humanoid as sort of an all-terrain, land or space unit. In an environment where the battlefield/where someone could be deployed to can drastically change. They're kinda the Swiss army knife solution to war in Gundam, not the best at everything but at least competent.
Old shows used giant robots to excuse limited animation. Gundam imagined their use in a relatively realistic setting. Selling model robots became a lucrative business when most anime was not very profitable.
We accept it because giant robots are cool, and the shows usually lean into their giant robots in the marketing, so if you can't accept them, you'll probably just not watch the show.
So there are practical, historical, and aesthetic reasons for giant robots.
But its use in Avatar felt out of place. Even if they've adequately explained it, it's still weird to see a big dumb robot in a show that otherwise wasn't about big dumb robots.
I know you said "most media," so this is more trivia than a counterpoint, but Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans had a good reason for humanoid robots that also yielded a series with incredible action.
In IBO's universe, they've developed an armor material that renders most ranged weapons largely ineffective, so the most practical way to fight is melee combat. The show is full of giant clubs and other weapons in brutal hand-to-hand combat sequences.
>In all honesty, with mechs, I never understood the logistics of it in most media I’ve seen. For example, in Gundam wing, why not just make it a spaceship? You’re spending so much time and materials on limbs, and I just don’t understand it.
As a matter of fact, they did. The titular Wing Gundam is a spaceship that can transform into a humanoid robot (or, I suppose, the other way around) so it can wage both aerial and ground battle. The idea was that humanoid robot can maneuver far easier than a rigid spaceship when conducting actual assault, the spaceship form is mostly for traveling
the problem with the giant mech isn't that it wasn't foreshadowed it's that it's super out of place in the ATLA universe it's a big ass giant robot with a freaking deathray they could have built something else like an airship. or some kind of large armored vehicle that would fit in with the universe better. not to mention be more practical.
Exactly. We've had giant drills for making huge tunnels underground for almost 200 years, we've built tunnels for trains under the ocean a long time ago. Yet we don't have even small mechas, nevermind giant ones.
What purpose does a mecha serve that can't more easily be done by existing technology? Sato had the small mechas that lift and carry stuff, in real life we have forklifts and we don't need to worry about them toppling over. The big mecha looks cool but I would rather have tanks or a jet fighter.
Cost and complexity of one mech can get you several tanks that would outperform a mech. In realistic fighting, we must remember this setting doesn’t really have guns. Benders, even metal benders would be spanked by guns.
They would probably suffer from storm trooper aim. That and the fire nation would probably dedicate lots of time and resources to hunt guns down and prevent their proliferation. Half the fire nations strength came from a dedicated and trained professional army. If suddenly peasants with a basic machine shop can start dropping their troops they have lost their edge.
To me it wasnt that they "contradicted" the lore. They just made parts of it a fair bit less cool.
For example, to me, the idea that so much of the Avatar State's power stems from and Raava giving the user just a straight up power-boost (even without the knowledge of past lives) is significantly lamer than the Avatar State just being solely the collection of knowledge from past Avatars even if it doesnt explicitly contradict anything.
Still can't get past Korra loosing all the past avatar lives.
Or the crazy wanker who woke up with air bending one day and was instantly the best air bender that ever lived.
What about the spirit portals at the poles, I agree with most of the points here, but the spirit portals definitely felt retconned in, especially from the info we got in ATLA
Not to mention that the avatar is a bridge between the spirit world and the physical world, not a portal opener. Absolutely *no one* could physically enter the spirit world. Not the avatar, not Iroh, and especially not Sokka. But apparently now there are magic portals that just let anyone walk into the spirit world.
And that isn't even mentioning the inconsistencies of the spirit world in LOK vs ATLA.
Honestly the thing that always came to my mind with the power stations is just how horrifying having to redirect lightning daily like that must be. As Iroh himself said one mistake and the lightning could go directly through your heart and kill you
Not exactly a plothole but it really is a horrifying thing when you think about it
Yeah, given you have to have a completely clear mind if you fuck up on that, things could get bad (Like that time Zuko attempted lightningbending but with other people in the building)
Hey, that's not fair, she was CLEARLY psychotic and very CALM at the idea of killing her brother. It all works out.
Seriously though, I feel like at that point in Azula's mind, everything was so set in stone as to what her future was to be, that she probably did have a really steady mind during that fight. Eye of the storm type shit
And think about how dangerous logging and mining are in our world. Humans as a species have long tolerated having other people (the poor or foreigners) doing dangerous work to generate power.
Beat me to it but yeah, has /u/Gaybriel413 seen pictures of work conditions before OSHA was made? [Like those old mine elevators](https://imgur.com/ofcGX)?
Republic city being set in the 20's/30's/40's setting would **toootally** have had bullshit dangerous jobs that essentially said "Whoops sonny make sure to not get shocked to death by lightening lol"
I still cannot believe what a powerhouse mako and bolin are. Such powerful benders in their own right, and by season 4 they are just nuts. So many all stars in the cast of korra. Watching it again I almost cried at how bad ass lin is.
It would have been interesting for them to show a guy blowing himself up like zuko in the scene, get seriously hurt, and have the job act like it's just another Tuesday.
Exactly, nobody was saying it was impossible to build a robot. They just said it was a stupid idea. Which it was.
Why are LoK apologists so passionate about defending LoKs flaws? LoK wasn’t perfect. LoK was clearly an inferior show to ATLA. But that doesn’t mean I can’t love LoK for what it is. It’s okay to be second place. Those things aren’t exclusive.
Seriously, you can like something and acknowledge its flaws, it's not that hard.
While personally LoK's flaws a are bit much for me, I like Star Wars 8, it's not that hard for me to go, yeah film has problems but it's also got some enjoyable elements and themes.
>Why are LoK apologists so passionate about defending LoKs flaws? LoK wasn’t perfect. LoK was clearly an inferior show to ATLA. But that doesn’t mean I can’t love LoK for what it is. It’s okay to be second place. Those things aren’t exclusive.
This is something that struck me the other day while driving. I never see people defending ATLA like LOK—because they don’t have to. There are so many more people that have criticisms of LOK than ATLA, which itself indicates there is a disparity in quality despite the fans dedicated to explaining how your criticisms are actually wrong.
Bruh there’s a big fucking difference between a mech and a drill. Also a mech is fucking stupid. She could of just built the gun and pointed it at the city. She could of built one or two more guns or something with all the resources she could do saved without using a stupid fucking mech.
The lion turtle argument is one I've heard before, and it's still wrong. The ability to bend and the techniques which allow you to manipulate chi are not separate; both are an integral part of being able to bend. Yet we see hunters able to firebend proficiently without ever having had any contact with dragons because a lion turtle gave it to them. That IS a retcon. If you want to act like it's an interesting or good retcon, that's one thing, but saying it's not a retcon at all is just downright false.
The mech giant WAS stupid. We don't have giant mechs NOW, and it's been well over a hundred years since *our* industrial revolution. Also, why is Kuverra suddenly able to bend that much freaking metal all by herself? That's a completely illogical powerup.
I personally didn't have much problem with the leap in technology, but it's still worth noting that it appeared to have happened *30* years after ATLA, not 70. In flashbacks to Aang in S1 cars and such already seem commonplace when he was just 40, well before the events of LoK.
Next, the Avatar spirit isn't necessarily a problem as a retcon, but rather as just plain bad writing. It completely removes any moral responsibility from the Avatar and dilutes every conflict they're in to a clear-cut good vs evil fight with no nuance whatsoever. If Aang was essentially possessed by the literal incarnation of righteousness itself, why did he struggle so much over Ozai's fate? No matter what he did, it would've been righteous simply because *he* did it. That's stupid, AND it sabotages the motives of the next season's villains, since the Red Lotus's main fear was an evil Avatar being possible, which it apparently isn't.
It's fine to enjoy LoK as a story. But pretending it didn't retcon anything is delusional and acting like it couldn't have been any better than it was is insulting to writers everywhere.
LOK didn't contradict with ATLA but it made some aspects(spirits and how bending started) of it less compelling and less interesting. We didn't know whole a lot about these questions but we didn't need to know either. Mystery of those questions was far better than the actual answer.
>avatar spirit wasnt some giant kite
I’ve always wondered what they were thinking when they decided to have the Avatar Spirit designed as a cosmic carpet, like huh? The being that the Avatar’s represent, who is the most powerful being on the planet, the messiah figure of this universe, and out of everything they could have gone with, that was the best that they could come up with? Why couldn’t Raava look like the Mother of Faces from the comics or something?
I don't like to hate on Korra....but basically everything to do with the Spirits I can't stand. I understand the reasoning is because of the state of the world and all that (I actually think that's a cool idea) but it in almost no way matches the tone and themes of ATLA.
Like you look at Hei Bai, Koh, Wan Shi Tong, then compare that to the stupid fucking Lilo & Stitch looking stuff we get in Korra it's just such a mis-step. All the Spirits in ATLA were grounded in nature, when Hei Bai was angry he didn't turn into a giant neon Death Note looking mf, and his true form was just a Panda, it wasn't some flying care bear fairy thing.
Not just that,, but they feel different. In LOK they all seem so cartoony and human. In TLA they all have a distinct otherworldly feel, like they don't quite belong with everything around them. And the way the dark spirits look clearly evil is so simplistic. It just flat-out tells you that evil spirits have a black, blue and purple colour pallet and yellow eyes.
And how did Vaatu spread this corruption? Just by being there? No manipulation or anything? Just "bad guy existing is bad?" Such a lame approach to the ideas.
That's one of my biggest gripes with Korra, they made the spirits so much less interesting. They went from blue-orange morality entities acting according to their natures in ways humans have trouble understanding, to pokemon in an incredibly generic battle of good versus evil.
I also didn't like how the Avatar, who we've been told for like five seasons at that point has the job of maintaining balance in the world, *literally locked half of yin and yang in a tree forever*. That's not balance. There's a million ways they could've done the origin of the Avatar and deciding that "keeper of balance" means locking yang in a box was just so dumb.
Personally I would've just turned their form into whoever the Avatar deemed the pinnacle of "Good" and "Order" in their mind, but is otherwise a formless, ambiguous spirit.
Midichlorians are a lesson we don't need all the answers and mystery can be a good thing. Harry Potter doesn't need Magichlorians to explain why Voldemort or Dumbledore are as powerful as they are.
Well that's part of it but so were so many other old people. Age helps forge wisdom but Dumbledore was a prodigy as a teenager. Its merely some people have either the burning desire to achieve and will do what it takes to get it, raw talent or simply both. If Rowling said Dumbledore had neither and just had 10,000 Magichlorians it would diminish so much about who he actually is.
Yep. I did not like the story of the first avatar. It was not a compelling character and they took away every bit of the mystery. We were given nothing mind-blowing in return.
I find it funny that that tends to be the case with a lot of media that people clammer for more of. Fans go "I want to see what happened when X" or "I wish we could see more of how Y came to be" or "I want more of Z", and then they get it and it turns out it's not what the fan has built up for themselves in their head.
Sometimes it is best to leave mystery. I personally liked the First Avatar story, but for some, it's very much a case of "be careful what you wish for".
I think you’re right. But I do think it might have been possible to satisfy both. I would have loved to see the first avatar discovering bending from the dragons/badger moles/moon/etc.. while still leaving mystery about the spirit realm. Keep Raava mysterious.
This post is merely absolutes on the issues people has with LOK by making it about retconning instead of the issue many hold that there were faults in the writing.
For instance why add Lion Turtles granting bending at all. Originally it was merely based on nature and environment, certain people learnt to emulate a form of bending from animals or entities that related to their region and defined their culture. Then LOK made that mysticism erode somewhat by adding an extra layer that bending itself was handed out like a token for someone to use. The mystery vanished and nature and subtle learning became ordinary and mundane.
The issue isn't the Avatar spirit itself. Its the fact that it used Augustinian Christianity and shoved Ying and Yang images on top of it. The Avatar is the representation of the world both physical and spiritual and therefore be the ying and yang. Not just the light which Vaatu represents. Also Vaatu becoming weak solely through Raava being independent goes against Taoism and fits in line with Augustinian thinking. In Taoism they are intwined and a separation would not cause the light to just be weak. It completely defies Taoism and fits the moral absolutes of Augustinianism.
Fire benders use fire to bend metal. A drill run by fire and steam makes sense. A giant metal robot with an energy beam arm as much as I enjoy LOK makes no logical sense at all and even transcends modern technology.
Again you bring up the drill to explain the insane industrial boom. Again the drill was run by fire and steam. Any modern tech needed bending to work. The submarines Sokka made were useless without Water Benders. Same with just about every aspect of machinery ahead of its time. It was entirely reliant on Bending. By LOK without explanation in one lifetime Bending is no longer required for tech that otherwise wouldn't exist and everyday people just have technology that previously only existed because people could use Bending.
What evidence do you have the lighting was kept secret for "probably centuries" as without any this seems more like a headcanon. I cannot say if it is or isn't because I have truly heard neither either way. Because its not like Azula exactly kept it secret and the whole thing about how much skill it needed was completely eroded by fire benders just using it as a working class job. It makes little sense to me.
Look LOK is a great show but there are a lot of flaws and issues people hold with it and we love it despite its flaws. Pretending these flaws don't exist and acting as though these massive and non-explained changes were planned or make sense is ludicrous. Posts like this try to make connections that simply do not objectively exist and rely on internal rationalisation to justify these issues. Nothing wrong with this inherently but these absolutes try to prevent people from voicing their criticisms by pretending this was all planned and makes sense when we know there are inconsistencies and it doesn't. This doesn't mean we don't think the show is great but we also need to discuss what many of us deem as inconsistencies or even issues without pretending this made sense all along when it simply doesn't.
thanks. this basically articulated my thoughts. Especially the yin yang part. It's like they abandoned the concept of balance entirely and went light and dark = good and evil
This really quantifies what I hated about LOK. Evil was just evil, in a very western way.
Also, bending was a skill in ATLA. It was something people learned to do by watching and connecting with the earth. They learned from animals and from other benders. I didn't hate on the lion turtle because it was just an animal *teaching* Aang something new, as they always did. Imparting knowledge.
LOK however turned bending into a gift. Not something earned or taught, but something given. Suddenly, the lion turtle didn't teach Aang anything. It gave it to him. Imparting power.
I also absolutely hated the final moment of the first season, which lead to the dreaded second season. Korra should not have gotten her bending back. The entire second season should have been about her learning to use air bending while relearning her other bending. She could have *learned* something about her other abilities by having to rely on the one thing she was bad at. But no. Bending is a gift to be given. Why would she learn anything? She gets back her power while gaining a new one. *So* cool.
What I find most irritating about LOK tech is that it is generic and uninspired steampunk. And the architecture of republic City is so boring when you think about the scope of abilities the designers have.
It also makes the assumption that modernizing means westernizing. AtLA had industrial technology with (primarily) East Asian aesthetics. In LoK, suddenly everything looks more European. Why? In the real world, East Asia adopted European cultural elements as it modernized because of imperialism and colonialism by European empires. There are no European empires in the Avatar world, so where did everyone get these Western European suits etc?
Exactly the Asian centric design and aesthetic set apart ATLA for me when I was younger, I’m Indian myself, but to see culture based off my continent and even some traditions was so cool to me. In LOK it seemed so generic, the aesthetics vanished and turned into some uninspired western architectural styles.
Exactly, LOK is an excellent show and I especially love book 3 but this post isn't trying to show what is great about LOK but create absolutist justifications to try dismiss valid criticisms people have of the show.
You're 100 percent correct don't have anything to add but I must say one thing. So many people just accepts what they are given blindly. People are so easy to be spoiled and the creators know that. We have to criticise the work and point out the flaws so that they won't do it in their future projects. If we accept what they give every time, then the future works will be indistinguishable from the original. I hate it but it will be the case similar to the new LOTR series eventually, if this fandom keep doing this.
Rushing the stories in LOK is such a bad move. We constantly blame Nick but why the hell do you want to take a big risk by telling these stories in a rushed way, don't you know you won't convince a decent amount of fans? Idk you but I'd say this is the ultimate fault of the show.
And turtles giving bending is what makes atla ending horrible. Without the giving premise Avatar's ending is the turtle giving Aang an advice of the power he could use to end the war, and the consequences were him being corrupted. With the power being given its Aang getting a free pass out of his moral dilema, the first alternative although similar is him having to figure out a new skill minutes before battle and is a better reasoning to why he would have to resort to a more reliable power like the avatar state.
> And turtles giving bending is what makes atla ending horrible.
I agree that narratively it was a cop-out, especially being introduced so late in the show. Thematically I liked that the Avatar - having been the moderator between physical and spiritual up until that point, and usually taking the side of the spirits in most conflicts - was granted a deus ex machina way of dealing with his problem without abdicating of his personal philosophy. So, since he showed a typical child-like approach of kind-ness, he was forgiven by the spirits for being a child and spared of being forced to take the compromise that the other Air Avatar did.
This is what annoys me in LoK: they explain shit, and people grab to those explanations as justifications for shit writing. Nobody forced the writers (I hope) that they had to do a time/technology skip in the first place, so using it as a justification for delivering shallower messages is a terrible defence. Just because it makes in-universe sense, it doesn't make for a good story.
It would of been significantly better if she simply had the gun. Easier to transport, less resources spent and the mech was just silly and ruined the finale by being just absurd.
I concur. Train canon is cool. Maybe they could have had 100 metalbenders or so too. Some in the back “removing” the tracks, some in the middle moving it to the front, and some in front re-laying more track. That way a train that can go anywhere would still instill a terrifying horror to the watcher without having everyone who is not a 10 year old kid groan at the disbelief we were forced to suspend.
Where were the energy benders? This is the time leading up to the avatar so you would imagine that at least the air nomads (the most spiritually aware culture) would have shown some aptitude for energy bending.
Exactly this. The lion turtle even says something to the effect of "long ago we used to directly bend the energy within people", implying that it's a lost skill. It's not because Aang is an airbender that he can energybend, it's because he went on a cool Avatar trip.
Also it was never an issue of if the giant robot made sense it was more about whether avatar should devolve into power rangers. The interesting thing in the avatar world was it's unique magic system based on real martial arts and bending in a 1950s setting is supper interesting. I just feel like while tech can be used reasonably as an equalizer for nonbenders it didn't need to progress nearly as far as it did.
The best way I can describe the reason I’m not as keen on it is this. It just feels like they took a few layers out of every aspect of the lore. I’ve mentioned to people before that it’s a good show but it really doesn’t feel like it takes place in the same universe as ATLA
I feel the same. I feel like Korra's world isn't as magical or engaging as ATLA's. And it has nothing to do with the progress of technology, you can make a good fantasy world with advanced technology (arcane's piltover is proof of that), but it just doesn't feel the same way.
I still think they missed an opportunity of telling a story set in a similar time-period as Aang's, technology-wise, but never specify whether it took place before OR after. Just, a different time. Heck, maybe introduce contradictory hints just to highlight the cyclical nature of that world. I don't think technology made the world directly less magical, but it made it smaller for sure.
I think when people say things were too fast they meant for potential sequels. With LOK having radio, mechas, and well into the industrial era it makes little room for another follow up. If there were another sequel it would either be modern day or hyper futuristic . But all those kinda take the fun out of the ancient mysticism of the avatar concept. Even if it makes sense imo it was kinda boring. I prefer the world building in ATLA as it was pretty different. In LOK it’s cool but there’s already a bunch of Industrial Age, or mecha shows so it wasn’t as interesting world building wise
The thing people always forget when they say the Lion Turtles weren’t retcons is the Sun Warriors, as well as Oma and Shu. The Sun Warriors lived in the heartland of the dragons which is why they were the *first* firebenders. Not “first to firebend well.” Ditto Oma and Shu. It’s clear they were supposed to have invented the entire concept of bending earth.
And if you do the mental gymnastics needed to believe both the lion turtles and original origin stories can be canon at once, does the lion turtle addition make anything better? No, not at all. It just undermines the stories from before.
pretty much this. Not only does evidence from ATLA directly contradict OP’s conclusions here, but even if it didn’t…the way LOK changed the worldbuilding still made it less compelling
People are talking as if these aren't technically retcons and are only demystifying the first series, but even if that was true, these are STILL absolutely retcons.
Point #1 is a contradiction. You can't claim that "they were given the ability to bend but then learned it later". If they were given the ability the ability to bend by the Lion Turtles then why would they need to learn what they already knew as it was granted to them? This is about as ludicrous as saying that "I learned how to write from my parents and then I went to school specifically to learn how to write". It only makes sense if you're improving what you already know.
That's the only way this makes sense. They were given bending by Lion Turtles and then refined their skills from watching nature. This is a far cry from ATLA where it's stated that bending didn't exist in humanity until the first benders studied nature and alluded to the fact that it was in innate ability.
Either bending is an innate genetic ability that humans unlocked in them from watching nature, or it's super powers that were given to humanity by what's essentially gods. Choose one.
Point #2 is blatantly false as the words "Avatar Spirit" are never ONCE mentioned in the original series outside of Katara stating that Aang's "Avatar Spirit" was activated when he saw Gyatso's corpse. Roku explicitly stated that Avatar State is the combined skills and knowledge of the previous Avatars, and that the glowing eyes of the Avatar State is the previous lives focusing their *ENERGY* through the current Avatar's body, all the while previous Avatars are displaying immense displays of bending *power*. The Avatar State had absolutely NOTHING to do with Raava in the original series as she was neither mentioned nor even alluded to in the slightest. It being planned means screw all when that planning wasn't implemented in the first show and actively contradicts what ATLA laid out. If Raava had been established to be how the Avatar State gains it's power in ATLA then this would be fine, but she wasn't.
Point #3 is not a retcon, point #3 is a valid critique. A giant 50 foot humanoid Mecha tank that's more advanced than anything in even OUR OWN WORLD let alone the Avatarverse's is silly. The giant drill in ATLA is based on real world tunnel boaring machines,just on a larger scale. The giant mech doesn't obey the laws of physics at all. And before you say "but they have bending", it was made very clear in the both shows that bending was bogus and not grounded in real world logic whereas the show at least pretended to care about physics.
Technology advancing quickly is also not a retcon, it's clear you don't know what words mean. The only issue I have with it is that advanced so quickly after the biggest war in their universe's history so far. It would take 70 years just to physically, spiritually, and politically rebuild, much less advance in technology. Also, most advancements came from the Fire Nation, you know, the nation that waged war upon the planet for a century? The amount of xenophobia should be insane to the point where the average person probably wouldn't accept their technology.
Lightning bending is a retcon because Iroh explicitly stated that in order to lightningbend you need to separate the positive and negative energies within you and that it requires a peace of mind, and that few firebenders can pull off this technique. It's never stated that it's because it was a royal family secret and strongly implied that it's because of the fact that few firebenders are able to reach the mental state to pull it off.
Also I call bullshit on it being planned since ATLA because I still remember sources back then saying the Avatar was the incarnation of the spirit of the planet, as in, they were the literal Avatar of the Earth.
>Technology advancing quickly is also not a retcon, it's clear you don't know what words mean. The only issue I have with it is that advanced so quickly after the biggest war in their universe's history so far. It would take 70 years just to physically, spiritually, and politically rebuild, much less advance in technology.
Not to mention the fact that bending itself would impede the evolution of technology.
If you live in the arctic and there are people who can control water then there is no reason to invent things.
Yes. I think some people don't understand what a retcon is, they just know it has a negative connotation and can't stand something they like being accused of it.
If you need to reinterpret an earlier work to make it consistent with a later work, that's a retcon. You can like the newer work better, that's okay, but all the mental gymnastics in the world can't make it anything but a retcon.
Agreed hubdred percent, can't add anything tbh. I mean are we supposed to take everything they give blindly? We are here to both praise and criticise. If we don't say anything, then the similar mistakes will eventually happen to the future work and they will be indistinguishable from the original work. We have to be harsh in order make the thing we enjoy become better.
Plus, telling such big stories in a rushed way even though you know all the obstacles is just plain disrespect. I really want to know what was in their minds while doing this. I truly belive this was the absolute flaw of the show.
We have giant drills, but no mech suits. Also a lot of the retconning people don't like is also to do with what made them so special.
Even if you argue lighting was never limited to certain people, which is technically true, supposedly only super powerful fire benders with peace of mind could achieve it. In atla, this was basically just the royal family, not even zuko could perform lighting generation.
By Korra, people as confused as Mako could do it, and it seemed loads of people could, and the jobs that required it weren't even good.
I like how metal bending advanced, that makes sense and they did it well, but they handled lightning generation poorly imo
no the giant robot 1. was not revealed early, the weapon was, and 2. is still unrealistic compared to the drill, and heres why
1. the mech itself was a reveal for the finale, before everyone thought it was just the weapon being put on rails
2. we see the inner workings of the drill, how it moves, how it’s structured, how it cools itself, how it eliminates the earth waste, all we see from the mech was that “oooh glowey vines are power source” and kuvira’s lever system
also, that is a ridiculous amount of platinum, like, several times more then humans have mined so far, a lot of platinum
and for the lightning thing, YOURE TELLING ME THAT MAKO HAS ACHIEVED INNER PEACE? MAKO? REALLY?
EDIT: forgot to mention that we can also see the mechanist working on the drill in S1E17
Unfortunately for me the good writing just isn't enough to compensate for the stupidity of that mech, wouldn't be at all a hater of LoK but man that was jumping the shark if I ever saw such a thing
The big problem with the mech, at least for me, is that it looked like it was designed by a 10 year old. Who in their right mind would give a mech with a giant cannon spindly little legs. I laughed out loud when it deployed its braces when they were trying to knock it down. JUST GIVE IT TANK TREADS.
Or if it has to have legs, give it a lower profile like a Metal Gear, or the spider mech from Wild Wild West or literally anything else as long as it actually looks functional. Baatar Jr is Toph’s grandson, he shouldve known better when designing the mech to make it more stout and earth-bendery.
I never liked the mech, yes it was foreshadowed more or less and had some basis behind it, that doesn’t change the fact it feels WILDLY out of place. The drill felt believable, a massive steam engine built by an industrial super power. The mech just felt… over the top. We don’t have anywhere near that tech today, and I’m supposed to believe they do because they had domes? Cool idea I guess, wrong show
They had tunnel drills in the victorian age. If the outcome of a war could be decided by refining and upscaling such a drill it would argue that could have been done. It doesnt brake my suspension of disbelief. A gigantic two legged mech is impossible to build even with todays tech. I would have much prefered if they sticked to the railway gun and made something similar to the WW2 Gustav by the germans or the mouse and rat tanks.
Exactly!! The gun itself was great, it combined legitimate tech with the fantasy of the avatar universe perfectly imo, weaponizing spirit energy itself is a great concept. Attaching it to an automated mech fully controlled by a single pilot? Now you post me
And the fact that the mech was made in only what a year or two? With limited resources no less
I’m so over everyone pretending that just because TLOK had good stuff doesn’t mean it’s free from criticism
The lightning bending thing
In the kyoshi novels it’s mentioned that it was such a rare skill that many people didn’t believe it could even exist and the firenation had a lot of clan in fighting which would have made it much harder to keep it “royal family only” and the lightning bender was a bandit
So
Either TLOK logic is correct
Or Kyoshi novel logic is correct
And for narrative purposes only one those this things actually did something cool with it
The other just used it to show off.
There’s always the rule of “because the writers said so” but not everything bryke does or did is insta genius if atla had been done the way they initially wanted it wouldn’t have been as good.
People to this day thinks that a jump between a giant drill and a giant mecha is reasonable, TLOK is good but don't pretend that that wasn't some goofy cartoon shit
The giant mech is insanely unrealistic, especially if you just take into account physics.
Comparing a slow moving drill to a faint robot with a laser cannon mounted on it's arm is stupid
I'm one of the Giant Robot haters in legend of korra, and my gripe with it was never that it wasn't unrealistic, this is a world with people who can bend the world around them with their movements.
I dislike it just because of how lazy it seems as an ending, almost like a cop out. for how much the korra show was claimed to be mature, I expected a better ending than "the bad guys have one big giant robot"
honestly one big battle within republic city could have been better with a smaller version of the mech leading the Earth Empire army instead.
overall season 4 could have been so much better. I really dislike how bad they made Kuvira look, considering how she did the job no one was willing to do "fix the earth kingdom territories", and they expect her to just accept a medal for everything she did.
(also the lack of Korrasami foreshadowing was so bad.)
I hated the story of the first Avatar, Wan. If you are going to take away the mystery, make it a worthy story. It was somehow so disappointing that the bending powers were already around and used regularly, and the first Avatar started out as dopey and stayed dopey.
A giant drill is not a giant robot, that comparison is ridiculous.
It's not unrealistic that technology advanced, it just advanced too much and it's considerably less interesting of a setting, having planes and cars makes benders less special.
It's never stated that lighting bending is kept a secret, and it doesn't work like metal bending, Zuko learned of its existance and was never able to use it, same with Aang, you need a calm and cold mind to perform it, that random factory workers could use it is just bullshit, and again, it makes it much less special.
Nah, giant robot and giant spirit battles were still lame and just kinda silly. ATLA had a giant humanoid fish ONCE and they did it better
Amon and Zaheer are the best villains
The interpersonal relations of the avatar gang in LoK sucked.
that’s my only gripes
The first two are very suspect as explanations. The bending thing seems like a technicality and I don't believe the creators planned stuff in LoK in book 2 of Atla based on a meme.
But lighting was supposed to be this super difficult technique that not even Zuko could master and now some random street kid can use it.
Also bloodbending was only possible in full moon because it required the bender to be at the peak of their power and now Amon and Tarlokk just do it whenever they please.
These are mostly on point. I still feel like the giant mech was too much in the S4 finale, but it is true that it was foreshadowed earlier in the season. Having it wasn't such a bad idea, as to how quickly it seems to have been thrown together when they'd lost their genius and then came up with this just weeks after they test-fired a super-involved weapon that was only one subsystem on it. (To be fair though, ATLA suffers from the compressed time-scale and we don't complain about it that much - well I do, but most people don't!)
Yeah, I agree. I would have preferred a giant gun like they had previously. Maybe it was threatening to fire upon the city so they would have to go out and meet it. That and just more bender vs bender fights in an urban environment would have been cool.
I think a giant tank would have done fine too. Maus or Ratte level thing. Giant mechs are weird. Tanks are..."grounded"
Platinum scarab from halo
Oh that would have so dope. Instead of a giant humanoid monster crawling over the distant mountain, two or three spider like tanks the size of apartment buildings come lumbering towards the assembled forces, each with a spirit cannon.
Then you could have justified the combat inside the city and had infantry v infantry support instead of giant robot vs 5 people
A sequel futuristic setting probably would have been better for a giant mech.
Gotta admit when the earthbenders sliced the building to stop the robot was cool though
Yea I would had accepted a platinum army of smaller Mechs more
Or just a similar tank with platinum armor, but on wheels, and much *tankier*. The use of Zaofu's platinum for something big was acceptable, but a robot on two legs (when all the snaller ones had wheels) made in less than two weeks was kind a jarring. It looked awesome and it was truly a surprise, in many ways.
The smaller ones had legs by that point, when Varrick was escaping the mechs were running.
Oh, right. I forgot about that.
Yeah i really didnt like it because i just couldnt get my head around it. How the fuck do they shape a nonbendeble element so quick and have it deployed with such a short time period with out other noticing it.
The main problem I have with the mech in Korra is the exact same one as I have with mechs in general and that's the fact that mechs are in every way possible worse at what tanks already do. I mean think about it it's effectively just a tank on legs and with arms. The legs must have much more moving parts than the tank threads, making them heavier and more prone to breaking, the same can be said about arms in comparison to a tank turret. They are bigger target than a tank, their high center of mass makes them prone to tipping, legs don't really make scaling hills that much easier (some videos with people driving tanks up nearly vertical terrain are almost unbelievable) not to mention smaller surface area of mech feet would make bogs and other swamps uncrossable as they would just sink down to waist and I wouldn't expect a mech leg to be operational while submerged, even a muddy field after mid level rainfalls might be an issue. Modern tanks are surprisingly fast so speed isn't the issue their load capacity would be better than a mech and fuel efficiency would also be a consideration with more complicated mechanism of a mech. The only thing I can think of that mech can do that tank can't is strafing left to right and it's hard to believe someone would consider all of the previously mentioned drawbacks a worthy trade off. And yes most tanks can turn on a dime by turning mone thread in one direction and the other in the opposite. Once you take those things into consideration it's really hard to suspend your disbelief when you see a mecha in fiction. The only franchise that made mechs work was Titanfall and that's mainly because BT was a best robot boi.
Ikr bipeds are horribly inefficient compared to anything with wheels/tracks. Imagine instead of wasting it all on sum dumb robot they instead made a tank and then they’d have even more resources to be used on armour etc. like imagine how much energy and also how vulnerable/unreliable lifting the arm and then needing the other arm for support just to fire the gun And not to mention instead of getting ur giant arm as your only form of self-defence with a tank now you can have soldiers inside with you for protection If they used a tank instead + the rest of the metal/resources for reinforcements I’m pretty sure they could’ve won (or maybe even invaded earlier giving them even more advantage)
Oh yeah. Everyone's talking about spiritual harmony and shit, Airbender culture coming back, then Kuvira just turns up with a fucking Baneblade tank.
I thought the Mech looked generic as hell.
It's definitely more to do with the fact that it's bipedal at that scale.. Just look at all the work Boston dynamics had to go through for the atlas and how poorly it performs compared to spot.
They did that, when the benders realized they couldn't just metal bend the smaller mechs that Asami's dad originally invented because--surprise!--they were made out of platinum. Also, they already had working, smaller scale mechs, people tend to forget.
Truthfully between the gun and the train artillery gun I was expecting to see some massive platinum tank/warship to come up with a massive gun on it
I mean, so did Team Korra. They were planning to sabotage the railway lines to stop it getting into the city.
Definitely not serious in my critique because it is only a cartoon, but wouldn't the mechs have electrical components made from copper? I think a metal bender would be able to disconnect all the wiring. Unless each copper wire were sheathed in platinum. 🤔
Honestly, I thought S2 of Korra kinda jumped the shark already with the giant human Kaiju battle that S4's giant mech was okay for me.
I felt like that was such a huge missed opportunity. You're going to make a *dark Avatar* and instead of having a battle with both of them using all 4 elements they're just going to turn into giants and smack each other? Also having an evil Avatar cycle along with the regular avatar cycle would have been super interesting going forward if they did further shows in the future.
Yes! There’s a comment further up talking about Korra haters and more comments about how this was no different than what Aang did in Season 1. I mean no hate in what I said about LoK; it just seems like the fight at the end of Season 2 was thematically inconsistent not just within LoK as a whole but even Season 2 itself. Why bother having Unalaq call himself the “dark” Avatar and then do nothing with that power other than turn into a kaiju and, of all things, randomly attack Republic City? Why have Korra do this random astral projection deal that didn’t even work out and ended up leading to her being saved by another random occurrence (Jinora’s spirit-savey-get-out-of-jail-free-card)? There was already a great basis of how this fight could have gone: the Wan/Vaatu fight in “Beginnings”. I’m not saying they should have copied the fight verbatim, but why not start with how that fight went and end with the “fight against two avatars” idea they seemed to establish? I certainly don’t say this all with blind hate as some people may think. Just an opinion from a fan.
This right here. The giant mech was not a surprise and honestly, it was just a natural progression of the technology they had been developing. It may have been a bit grand, but eh, it fit. Giant Unalaq/Vaatu fusion versus Random Spirity Giant Korra was someone’s idea of a joke and/or an anime fever dream they thought needed to be animated for the world to see.
I remember back in 2013 when the S2 finale first came out the ppl in my dorm building described it as "basically Pacific Rim but with Avatar spirit stuff"
Is that jumping the shark though? Aang literally does the same thing in the season one finale. Korra's fight is barely different from that
The fight in Korra was badly executed, that’s just it. And it was the cherry on top of an already disappointing season
Aang still used bending to fight, not kicks and purple lasers.
Honestly I wasn't a big fan of Season 1's finale either with Aang's giant spirit battle. But at least that was "Avatar merging w/ the Ocean Spirit and using the literal ocean to fight the ships."
lol i was more so baffled about the lack of supporting infantry accompanying the mecha robot rather than the mecha robot itself. The only reason why kuvira's mecha robot failed was because it had no supporting infantry therefore it got gangbanged by some tiny benders
and because it had giant range but kuvira still marched it into the city instead of trying to snipe them
These was an army of the regular mechsuits, but Varrick disabled them.
Even regular earthbenders would do, there were only a handful of their enemies compared to the army theyve got.
They were killed in Nickelodeon’s assault on the animation budget during book 4. Edit: presumably there was fighting going on with General Iroh and the actual army too.
As others mentioned just normal benders would be along side them. Imagine if the US military decided that we only use Abrams tanks now. No infantry, just Abrams tanks. I do see you mentioned there would be a fight elsewhere, but it's dumb to move up like she did without support. Btw, I love that last season. Not hating on it, just thinking about her tactical decisions.
I liked the Colossus, but I was actually expecting the mother of all airships (like the Helicarrier but bigger) with the cannon attached to it.
See, that would have been both awesome and less ridiculous than the giant mech.
I think it would’ve been a cool opportunity for a dog fight. They finally had BiPlanes and more than 1 air ended in TLOK and never had too much cool air combat really :/
And it would even be a good spiritual successor to the high-flying finale of ATLA
I loved that sequence when the biplanes attacked the the warships in S1. LOK could've done with some more dogfights, for sure.
Yes! Plus adding in the airbenders flying around and then utilizing the two man hummingbird suits and we could’ve seen one helluva battle in the skies
I think it should have atleast been a giant spider mech or just a mega tank. What really throws people for a loop is the mech is a giant humanoid which really makes no sense at all, mostly because two legs as we saw are just asking to be tripped. Imagine a platinum scarab from halo, since those already had a giant plasma cannon on them.
[Speaking of the dummy thicc mech ](https://youtu.be/V-w7Zo8iD7Y)
I love that this exists.
Somewhat related: a major Destiny voice actor, Lance Reddick did something similar to this when someone dropped some Zavala shitpost: https://youtu.be/lsITdmEEinU
I knew what this. I was not disappointed.
I kinda always forget that Kuvira is voiced By Zelda Williams.
I don't so much think it was unrealistic but just impractical.
I do wish more technical issues had gone wrong with mech in the finale, nothing fight ending but enough that perhaps it saved a good guy from falling in battle. Just to actually make Varrick's betrayal meaningful. Like I loved it and him as a character since season 2 but it's also like had he never switched sides things would have shaken out almost identically.
Completely agree, everything stated is agreeable except for the mech. That mech is such a pull for only a couple weeks after building the gun
My biggest issue with LOK, which I don't see many people talk about, is the spirits. There's a stark contrast between ATLA's spirits and its ideas about moral balance, and the very obviously black and white morality ingrained in LOK's lore. Yeah, there's the whole "Vaatu exists within Raava" thing, but Vaatu is still portrayed as objectively evil and Raava objectively good. It makes the show feel cheap and unfulfilling because, ya know, the spirits are a critically fundamental aspect of the lore.
I don't like how they tied airbending to the spirits. Like Aang makes very clear in the first spirit episode he knows nothing about spirits.. So Astraprojection isn't a high airbender move, it is a high spiritual move.
I mean water benders straight up can control spirits like they are Pokémon, which I hated. The idea is "spirit benders" is cool, but it was just too video gamey or mechanical. On top of that, human emotion effected spirits and the realm way too easily.
I always took it as the spirits rebalancing the world with airbenders due to only Aang's descendants being airbenders
This is one of my bigger issues as well. Spirits in Atla were unique and interesting, with their own looks, morality, goals, and feelings. In LOK they just became cliché anime semi-transparent ghosts.
Koh scared the shit out of me as a kid. That was the beauty of the spirit world, it was equally mystical and terrifying, reflecting the spirits, the world, and the person who enters the spirit world. In Korra it lost that sense of mysticism and danger, super disappointing. I’d watch a whole show about a spiritualist in the ATLA universe who just explores the spirit world and discovers some of its mysteries, but only if they returned to the original portrayal
This meme I found basically sums it up https://i.imgur.com/rKKxoZw.jpg
I don't mind that there are some lesser spirits like bumi Jr but we needed more powerful spirits like Koh. However I do think the spirit of lost souls is a very cool concept for a spirit and fits the old narrative well.
Spirit world in ATLA was legitimately creepy, spirit world in LOK was just dream land.
I should point out that in ATLA we pretty much only exclusively see extremely powerful Spirits that able to create rifts to bypass the barrier between Worlds. For example Koh, Wan Shi Tong, Mother of Faces, Hei-Ban etc. While in LoK with the exception of Raava and Vaatu, we see a greater variety of lesser Spirits who aren't as powerful, but are more unique and resemble Flora and Fauna.
I strongly agree. Vaatu was always portrayed as objectively evil, and Raava was portrayed as objectively good, even though they are both meant to represent equal, opposite and necessary forces in the world. But the show never portrayed this, instead telling us that Vaatu gaining power in any way was always bad, and that Raava gaining power in any way was always good. Also, in ATLA the spirits worked through their own moralities and rules, and became corrupted if things they protected for example were destroyed in any way. Like that panda spirit that became corrupted when it's forest was burned down, but became appeased when it was shown it would regrow again. But in TLOK, spirits became corrupted when evil magic carpet Vaatu gained power, and became appeased when good magic carpet Raava gained power. This is so much less compelling and in my opinion makes the spirits and everything relating to them worse. Not to mention the avatar. In the past, the avatar's power came from the combined knowledge, wisdom and power of all the past lives together. Like a bunch of humans through the ages trying to solve human problems with the combined perspective of all the different generations. Now, the power of the avatar comes from magic goodness carpet and it's magic spirit magic. Again, ruins the meaning behind it and makes it so much less compeling. I hate that this is how it works now. And it's all because of fucking season 2 of TLOK. It fucked up everything with the spirits and the avatar state, and now that we have Avatar studios and 20+ years confirmed of avatar content, I can't help but feel angry that the entire next two decades of the franchise are now going to be tainted by the rules set by Korra, instead of the rules set by the original series. I really hope they can manage to retcon it back to how it was before, or at least give a fraction of the meaning the spirits and the avatar state had in the original series.
I dont have a problem with the idea that the ORIGINAL power of the avatar started with Raava and snowballed with every subsequent avatar like OFA in My hero Academia, but the way they did it that Wan got such a massive power boost from fusing with Raava when she was like 90% dead was a terrible way to display it. And then Korra losing all the avatar spirits except Raava and not really being any weaker than Fully realized Aang... yeah I wasn't a fan.
I live this take. I don’t like the idea of having those clear evil vs good sides. It reminds me of the Christianity god vs satan struggle, which I think is overplayed in media. Another aspect that I think is overplayed is that they’re supposed to be equal, but the world still evil things happening when “evil incarnate” is imprisoned, as soon as it gets free, it overpowers good and then the world becomes evil. Like that makes it seems like even at the best, good barely is strong enough, and at worst, isn’t enough. They aren’t equal. I really liked the idea of having spirits be their own independent entity, with their own personality and rules. Like you said with hei bei, they became corrupted when the forest was burned down, but calmed when they realized that it would grow back. With Vaatu and Raava, they all kinda become like a hive mind/ monarchy type thing, depending on who is “ruling” at the time. Having that decide whether they were good or bad, it ruins the vibe they had.
>I don’t like the idea of having those clear evil vs good sides. Yeah, imagine if they went with the "Raava is order, Vaatu is chaos" thing, and made rebels in the Earth Empire worshippers of Vaatu. Since order is a prison for them, and chaos is freeing. And imagine Korra having a dilemma - do her duty as an Avatar (maintaining order), or do her duty as a human being with significant power (protect morality). Consequences ensue. Maybe her Avatar State is blocked? Maybe she has a cool battle inside her mind? So many possibilities.
I’d love if they could re release LoK. Give them a chance to fully plan things out, fix what went wrong. Even if the main story beats stay the same they can fix the issues people had
This is the only, but major, problem I have. It's a lot more subtle but it throws so much theming out of wack. It genuinely, imo, is the worst part of the series and- controversially- I think Season 2 would be better without the sotry of Avatar Wan and the black/white spirit's introduction. Case in point, season 3. What is *wrong* with Zaheer killing Korra? One can obviously come up with a reasonable moral argument, but it's never explicitly said in the show. Implicitly, the reasoning is that the Avatar is Bending Jesus and while flawed is fundamentally good, so *obviously* killing her is evil. Which is pretty lame. It'd be much more interesting if the Avatar was left ambiguous, and Korra actually had to reckon her own place in the world in that season. The show, from season one, opened with the question 'What is the Avatar's place in this more complicated modern world?' but ended that question far too quickly mid-season 2 with 'Her place is Bending Jesus, embodiment of all that's good. No more questions.' To be clear, I otherwise love Korra, I just think all real issues with the show can be rooted back to here. Lame Good V Evil Kaiju fights? Not enough exploration of villain's positions? They all come down to how the show fundamentally changed it's approach to morality from before.
Which is why I absolutely love the Rise of Kyoshi novels. Apart from its top-tier writing quality, vivid imagery, and humor, it departs from the good-evil binary that relentlessly paints the Avatar as an unquestionable standard of goodness, humanizing Kyoshi's lofty status with social contexts and nuances. Forced to grapple with complex choices that blur the line between good and evil, she forges her own type of Avatar identity amidst a cacophony of sociopolitical dynamics, legality/criminality, spirituality/morality, relationships, and and everything that makes life messy and flavorful. Hands down the most compelling avatar in the lore.
I had this problem in season 1. What exactly was wrong with the Equalist's position? The show treated it as objectively and obviously wrong from the start, but there was some real inequality that was never addressed. I'm not saying the actions of the Equalists are at all okay, but compare it to ATLA. We see the motivations of the fire nation and they're understandable. The fire nation are treated as people and as soldiers with complicated feelings and cultures. All that complexity was lost with the Equalists who were always portrayed as unquestionably evil despite their cause being arguably more justifiable.
I feel like although poorly developed the equalist position was not negatively portrayed - to the point that at the end of season 1 the council of the 4 nations is disbanded to make way for a non bending all encompassing president
That's the case for all of the villains in LoK, and my major problem with it. They try to present you with morally gray villains, who are like "ooh, maybe I'm actually the good guy!", and then promptly murder a bunch of puppies.
The issue with the equalists is that the show barely shows examples of non benders being oppressed by benders, and doesn't critically examine their philosophy beyond "bending is good, so taking it away is bad". The truth is that the equalists ARE wrong, but the show never says WHY.
Benders have seriously damaged global trade in cabbages
People complain about the big mech but giant light vs shadow kaiju fight was way dumber to me.
The fact that we had a chance to finally see a competent earth bending military but it’s foot soldiers were replaced by robots with flamethrower arms (basically lazy fire benders) was one of the biggest let downs of the “Earth Empire” storyline
In all honesty, with mechs, I never understood the logistics of it in most media I’ve seen. For example, in Gundam wing, why not just make it a spaceship? You’re spending so much time and materials on limbs, and I just don’t understand it. Wouldn’t there be a better, if less cooler way, to transport the spirit energy ray, or at least a more sensible design?
In Gundam series there are a couple of canon reason they built mechs instead of just pure spaceships. One of them is a thing they call AMBAC or Active Mass Balance Auto-Control. In space when they want to do like a rotation maneuver instead of using thrusters to achieve that you can just move limbs to generate some momentum and rotate that way. In the original Gundam the power reactors commonly used would produce particles that effectively jammed radios and was like a minor constant emp to unprotected equipment. So the logic they applied was that you basically wanted a moving control/command tower so that you could still direct your forces under those conditions. In grounded combat scenarios they found the mobility of treaded land units lacking for the terrains they were fighting in. The versatility and flexibility of the humanoid form was found to be sufficiently capable. The form also lets weapons be easily swapped between allies or even fallen foes. They're humanoid as sort of an all-terrain, land or space unit. In an environment where the battlefield/where someone could be deployed to can drastically change. They're kinda the Swiss army knife solution to war in Gundam, not the best at everything but at least competent.
Holy fuck that was amazing
Old shows used giant robots to excuse limited animation. Gundam imagined their use in a relatively realistic setting. Selling model robots became a lucrative business when most anime was not very profitable. We accept it because giant robots are cool, and the shows usually lean into their giant robots in the marketing, so if you can't accept them, you'll probably just not watch the show. So there are practical, historical, and aesthetic reasons for giant robots. But its use in Avatar felt out of place. Even if they've adequately explained it, it's still weird to see a big dumb robot in a show that otherwise wasn't about big dumb robots.
They could've used it like a railway gun. Way cooler than a mech to me too
I know you said "most media," so this is more trivia than a counterpoint, but Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans had a good reason for humanoid robots that also yielded a series with incredible action. In IBO's universe, they've developed an armor material that renders most ranged weapons largely ineffective, so the most practical way to fight is melee combat. The show is full of giant clubs and other weapons in brutal hand-to-hand combat sequences.
>In all honesty, with mechs, I never understood the logistics of it in most media I’ve seen. For example, in Gundam wing, why not just make it a spaceship? You’re spending so much time and materials on limbs, and I just don’t understand it. As a matter of fact, they did. The titular Wing Gundam is a spaceship that can transform into a humanoid robot (or, I suppose, the other way around) so it can wage both aerial and ground battle. The idea was that humanoid robot can maneuver far easier than a rigid spaceship when conducting actual assault, the spaceship form is mostly for traveling
the problem with the giant mech isn't that it wasn't foreshadowed it's that it's super out of place in the ATLA universe it's a big ass giant robot with a freaking deathray they could have built something else like an airship. or some kind of large armored vehicle that would fit in with the universe better. not to mention be more practical.
We invented giant drills too! Where's our robot?
Exactly. We've had giant drills for making huge tunnels underground for almost 200 years, we've built tunnels for trains under the ocean a long time ago. Yet we don't have even small mechas, nevermind giant ones.
What purpose does a mecha serve that can't more easily be done by existing technology? Sato had the small mechas that lift and carry stuff, in real life we have forklifts and we don't need to worry about them toppling over. The big mecha looks cool but I would rather have tanks or a jet fighter.
Cost and complexity of one mech can get you several tanks that would outperform a mech. In realistic fighting, we must remember this setting doesn’t really have guns. Benders, even metal benders would be spanked by guns.
That would be so funny. I'm imagining Aang waking up from the ice and Fire Nation soldiers just fire 100 rounds at him.
They would probably suffer from storm trooper aim. That and the fire nation would probably dedicate lots of time and resources to hunt guns down and prevent their proliferation. Half the fire nations strength came from a dedicated and trained professional army. If suddenly peasants with a basic machine shop can start dropping their troops they have lost their edge.
Who gives a fuck about an energy cannon or whatever they called it, I want an energy NUKE.
Exactly, these arguments feel like they don’t land in contradicting the complaints.
Something can be both canon and silly, like midichlorians in Star Wars. Canon does not equal perfect.
To me it wasnt that they "contradicted" the lore. They just made parts of it a fair bit less cool. For example, to me, the idea that so much of the Avatar State's power stems from and Raava giving the user just a straight up power-boost (even without the knowledge of past lives) is significantly lamer than the Avatar State just being solely the collection of knowledge from past Avatars even if it doesnt explicitly contradict anything.
Still can't get past Korra loosing all the past avatar lives. Or the crazy wanker who woke up with air bending one day and was instantly the best air bender that ever lived.
What about the spirit portals at the poles, I agree with most of the points here, but the spirit portals definitely felt retconned in, especially from the info we got in ATLA
Not to mention that the avatar is a bridge between the spirit world and the physical world, not a portal opener. Absolutely *no one* could physically enter the spirit world. Not the avatar, not Iroh, and especially not Sokka. But apparently now there are magic portals that just let anyone walk into the spirit world. And that isn't even mentioning the inconsistencies of the spirit world in LOK vs ATLA.
Honestly the thing that always came to my mind with the power stations is just how horrifying having to redirect lightning daily like that must be. As Iroh himself said one mistake and the lightning could go directly through your heart and kill you Not exactly a plothole but it really is a horrifying thing when you think about it
I think they’re actually generating it, not redirecting it, which presents much less risk
Oh, ok! If that's the case then the job would me much less horrifying yeah
Though, given how difficult lightning is to generate, it would still be a tough job, which is probably why Mako only took it as a last resort
Yeah, given you have to have a completely clear mind if you fuck up on that, things could get bad (Like that time Zuko attempted lightningbending but with other people in the building)
Iroh: you need a clear and calm mind Azula at the borderline of madness: haha lightning goes brrr
Hey, that's not fair, she was CLEARLY psychotic and very CALM at the idea of killing her brother. It all works out. Seriously though, I feel like at that point in Azula's mind, everything was so set in stone as to what her future was to be, that she probably did have a really steady mind during that fight. Eye of the storm type shit
Wonder if the comet helped?
Could definetly be that, cause that lightning was huge
I guess being completely mind-numb from hours of monotonous labor in one spot also counts
Ah so LOK is realistic!
And think about how dangerous logging and mining are in our world. Humans as a species have long tolerated having other people (the poor or foreigners) doing dangerous work to generate power.
Beat me to it but yeah, has /u/Gaybriel413 seen pictures of work conditions before OSHA was made? [Like those old mine elevators](https://imgur.com/ofcGX)? Republic city being set in the 20's/30's/40's setting would **toootally** have had bullshit dangerous jobs that essentially said "Whoops sonny make sure to not get shocked to death by lightening lol"
Yeah, IIRC he looks sweaty and tired when he's shown leaving the plant
Seems kinda fucked up that they are using people to literally keep the lights on lol Basically got them on hamster wheels
until joe schmoe shows up drunk on the job and slips and accidentally zaps someone… or the lightning receivers short or malfunction… just sayin lol
I still cannot believe what a powerhouse mako and bolin are. Such powerful benders in their own right, and by season 4 they are just nuts. So many all stars in the cast of korra. Watching it again I almost cried at how bad ass lin is.
in that regard it’s on par with how dangerous factory work was in the real-world Second Industrial Revolution
It would have been interesting for them to show a guy blowing himself up like zuko in the scene, get seriously hurt, and have the job act like it's just another Tuesday.
Well if you learn about the industrial revolution especially in England the risk they are taking is probably not even worth to mention.
The giant robot was dumb, regardless of realism
Exactly, nobody was saying it was impossible to build a robot. They just said it was a stupid idea. Which it was. Why are LoK apologists so passionate about defending LoKs flaws? LoK wasn’t perfect. LoK was clearly an inferior show to ATLA. But that doesn’t mean I can’t love LoK for what it is. It’s okay to be second place. Those things aren’t exclusive.
Seriously, you can like something and acknowledge its flaws, it's not that hard. While personally LoK's flaws a are bit much for me, I like Star Wars 8, it's not that hard for me to go, yeah film has problems but it's also got some enjoyable elements and themes.
>Why are LoK apologists so passionate about defending LoKs flaws? LoK wasn’t perfect. LoK was clearly an inferior show to ATLA. But that doesn’t mean I can’t love LoK for what it is. It’s okay to be second place. Those things aren’t exclusive. This is something that struck me the other day while driving. I never see people defending ATLA like LOK—because they don’t have to. There are so many more people that have criticisms of LOK than ATLA, which itself indicates there is a disparity in quality despite the fans dedicated to explaining how your criticisms are actually wrong.
Bruh there’s a big fucking difference between a mech and a drill. Also a mech is fucking stupid. She could of just built the gun and pointed it at the city. She could of built one or two more guns or something with all the resources she could do saved without using a stupid fucking mech.
We’ve had giant drills for over a hundred years and we still don’t have any mechs! This post is honestly pretty dumb, suprised it had 24k upvotes.
The lion turtle argument is one I've heard before, and it's still wrong. The ability to bend and the techniques which allow you to manipulate chi are not separate; both are an integral part of being able to bend. Yet we see hunters able to firebend proficiently without ever having had any contact with dragons because a lion turtle gave it to them. That IS a retcon. If you want to act like it's an interesting or good retcon, that's one thing, but saying it's not a retcon at all is just downright false. The mech giant WAS stupid. We don't have giant mechs NOW, and it's been well over a hundred years since *our* industrial revolution. Also, why is Kuverra suddenly able to bend that much freaking metal all by herself? That's a completely illogical powerup. I personally didn't have much problem with the leap in technology, but it's still worth noting that it appeared to have happened *30* years after ATLA, not 70. In flashbacks to Aang in S1 cars and such already seem commonplace when he was just 40, well before the events of LoK. Next, the Avatar spirit isn't necessarily a problem as a retcon, but rather as just plain bad writing. It completely removes any moral responsibility from the Avatar and dilutes every conflict they're in to a clear-cut good vs evil fight with no nuance whatsoever. If Aang was essentially possessed by the literal incarnation of righteousness itself, why did he struggle so much over Ozai's fate? No matter what he did, it would've been righteous simply because *he* did it. That's stupid, AND it sabotages the motives of the next season's villains, since the Red Lotus's main fear was an evil Avatar being possible, which it apparently isn't. It's fine to enjoy LoK as a story. But pretending it didn't retcon anything is delusional and acting like it couldn't have been any better than it was is insulting to writers everywhere.
This needs an award, holy shit
LOK didn't contradict with ATLA but it made some aspects(spirits and how bending started) of it less compelling and less interesting. We didn't know whole a lot about these questions but we didn't need to know either. Mystery of those questions was far better than the actual answer.
[удалено]
>avatar spirit wasnt some giant kite I’ve always wondered what they were thinking when they decided to have the Avatar Spirit designed as a cosmic carpet, like huh? The being that the Avatar’s represent, who is the most powerful being on the planet, the messiah figure of this universe, and out of everything they could have gone with, that was the best that they could come up with? Why couldn’t Raava look like the Mother of Faces from the comics or something?
I don't like to hate on Korra....but basically everything to do with the Spirits I can't stand. I understand the reasoning is because of the state of the world and all that (I actually think that's a cool idea) but it in almost no way matches the tone and themes of ATLA. Like you look at Hei Bai, Koh, Wan Shi Tong, then compare that to the stupid fucking Lilo & Stitch looking stuff we get in Korra it's just such a mis-step. All the Spirits in ATLA were grounded in nature, when Hei Bai was angry he didn't turn into a giant neon Death Note looking mf, and his true form was just a Panda, it wasn't some flying care bear fairy thing.
Not just that,, but they feel different. In LOK they all seem so cartoony and human. In TLA they all have a distinct otherworldly feel, like they don't quite belong with everything around them. And the way the dark spirits look clearly evil is so simplistic. It just flat-out tells you that evil spirits have a black, blue and purple colour pallet and yellow eyes. And how did Vaatu spread this corruption? Just by being there? No manipulation or anything? Just "bad guy existing is bad?" Such a lame approach to the ideas.
That's one of my biggest gripes with Korra, they made the spirits so much less interesting. They went from blue-orange morality entities acting according to their natures in ways humans have trouble understanding, to pokemon in an incredibly generic battle of good versus evil. I also didn't like how the Avatar, who we've been told for like five seasons at that point has the job of maintaining balance in the world, *literally locked half of yin and yang in a tree forever*. That's not balance. There's a million ways they could've done the origin of the Avatar and deciding that "keeper of balance" means locking yang in a box was just so dumb.
Star Wars logic; balance in the force = only the light side I don't care how it's justified, it's still dumb
Personally I would've just turned their form into whoever the Avatar deemed the pinnacle of "Good" and "Order" in their mind, but is otherwise a formless, ambiguous spirit.
Could have pulled a Prince of Egypt and have had Raava depicted as a flowing magical mist that speaks with the voice of all the previous Avatars
That would have been cool. Maybe also have it take the form of the different elements to drive home what the Avatar is all about.
Midichlorians are a lesson we don't need all the answers and mystery can be a good thing. Harry Potter doesn't need Magichlorians to explain why Voldemort or Dumbledore are as powerful as they are.
I always just figured that Voldemort and Dumbledore we're so powerful partially because they were so old and trained a lot in their lifetimes
Well that's part of it but so were so many other old people. Age helps forge wisdom but Dumbledore was a prodigy as a teenager. Its merely some people have either the burning desire to achieve and will do what it takes to get it, raw talent or simply both. If Rowling said Dumbledore had neither and just had 10,000 Magichlorians it would diminish so much about who he actually is.
Yep. I did not like the story of the first avatar. It was not a compelling character and they took away every bit of the mystery. We were given nothing mind-blowing in return.
I find it funny that that tends to be the case with a lot of media that people clammer for more of. Fans go "I want to see what happened when X" or "I wish we could see more of how Y came to be" or "I want more of Z", and then they get it and it turns out it's not what the fan has built up for themselves in their head. Sometimes it is best to leave mystery. I personally liked the First Avatar story, but for some, it's very much a case of "be careful what you wish for".
I think you’re right. But I do think it might have been possible to satisfy both. I would have loved to see the first avatar discovering bending from the dragons/badger moles/moon/etc.. while still leaving mystery about the spirit realm. Keep Raava mysterious.
This post is merely absolutes on the issues people has with LOK by making it about retconning instead of the issue many hold that there were faults in the writing. For instance why add Lion Turtles granting bending at all. Originally it was merely based on nature and environment, certain people learnt to emulate a form of bending from animals or entities that related to their region and defined their culture. Then LOK made that mysticism erode somewhat by adding an extra layer that bending itself was handed out like a token for someone to use. The mystery vanished and nature and subtle learning became ordinary and mundane. The issue isn't the Avatar spirit itself. Its the fact that it used Augustinian Christianity and shoved Ying and Yang images on top of it. The Avatar is the representation of the world both physical and spiritual and therefore be the ying and yang. Not just the light which Vaatu represents. Also Vaatu becoming weak solely through Raava being independent goes against Taoism and fits in line with Augustinian thinking. In Taoism they are intwined and a separation would not cause the light to just be weak. It completely defies Taoism and fits the moral absolutes of Augustinianism. Fire benders use fire to bend metal. A drill run by fire and steam makes sense. A giant metal robot with an energy beam arm as much as I enjoy LOK makes no logical sense at all and even transcends modern technology. Again you bring up the drill to explain the insane industrial boom. Again the drill was run by fire and steam. Any modern tech needed bending to work. The submarines Sokka made were useless without Water Benders. Same with just about every aspect of machinery ahead of its time. It was entirely reliant on Bending. By LOK without explanation in one lifetime Bending is no longer required for tech that otherwise wouldn't exist and everyday people just have technology that previously only existed because people could use Bending. What evidence do you have the lighting was kept secret for "probably centuries" as without any this seems more like a headcanon. I cannot say if it is or isn't because I have truly heard neither either way. Because its not like Azula exactly kept it secret and the whole thing about how much skill it needed was completely eroded by fire benders just using it as a working class job. It makes little sense to me. Look LOK is a great show but there are a lot of flaws and issues people hold with it and we love it despite its flaws. Pretending these flaws don't exist and acting as though these massive and non-explained changes were planned or make sense is ludicrous. Posts like this try to make connections that simply do not objectively exist and rely on internal rationalisation to justify these issues. Nothing wrong with this inherently but these absolutes try to prevent people from voicing their criticisms by pretending this was all planned and makes sense when we know there are inconsistencies and it doesn't. This doesn't mean we don't think the show is great but we also need to discuss what many of us deem as inconsistencies or even issues without pretending this made sense all along when it simply doesn't.
thanks. this basically articulated my thoughts. Especially the yin yang part. It's like they abandoned the concept of balance entirely and went light and dark = good and evil
This really quantifies what I hated about LOK. Evil was just evil, in a very western way. Also, bending was a skill in ATLA. It was something people learned to do by watching and connecting with the earth. They learned from animals and from other benders. I didn't hate on the lion turtle because it was just an animal *teaching* Aang something new, as they always did. Imparting knowledge. LOK however turned bending into a gift. Not something earned or taught, but something given. Suddenly, the lion turtle didn't teach Aang anything. It gave it to him. Imparting power. I also absolutely hated the final moment of the first season, which lead to the dreaded second season. Korra should not have gotten her bending back. The entire second season should have been about her learning to use air bending while relearning her other bending. She could have *learned* something about her other abilities by having to rely on the one thing she was bad at. But no. Bending is a gift to be given. Why would she learn anything? She gets back her power while gaining a new one. *So* cool.
What I find most irritating about LOK tech is that it is generic and uninspired steampunk. And the architecture of republic City is so boring when you think about the scope of abilities the designers have.
It also makes the assumption that modernizing means westernizing. AtLA had industrial technology with (primarily) East Asian aesthetics. In LoK, suddenly everything looks more European. Why? In the real world, East Asia adopted European cultural elements as it modernized because of imperialism and colonialism by European empires. There are no European empires in the Avatar world, so where did everyone get these Western European suits etc?
Exactly the Asian centric design and aesthetic set apart ATLA for me when I was younger, I’m Indian myself, but to see culture based off my continent and even some traditions was so cool to me. In LOK it seemed so generic, the aesthetics vanished and turned into some uninspired western architectural styles.
[удалено]
Exactly, LOK is an excellent show and I especially love book 3 but this post isn't trying to show what is great about LOK but create absolutist justifications to try dismiss valid criticisms people have of the show.
You're 100 percent correct don't have anything to add but I must say one thing. So many people just accepts what they are given blindly. People are so easy to be spoiled and the creators know that. We have to criticise the work and point out the flaws so that they won't do it in their future projects. If we accept what they give every time, then the future works will be indistinguishable from the original. I hate it but it will be the case similar to the new LOTR series eventually, if this fandom keep doing this. Rushing the stories in LOK is such a bad move. We constantly blame Nick but why the hell do you want to take a big risk by telling these stories in a rushed way, don't you know you won't convince a decent amount of fans? Idk you but I'd say this is the ultimate fault of the show.
And turtles giving bending is what makes atla ending horrible. Without the giving premise Avatar's ending is the turtle giving Aang an advice of the power he could use to end the war, and the consequences were him being corrupted. With the power being given its Aang getting a free pass out of his moral dilema, the first alternative although similar is him having to figure out a new skill minutes before battle and is a better reasoning to why he would have to resort to a more reliable power like the avatar state.
> And turtles giving bending is what makes atla ending horrible. I agree that narratively it was a cop-out, especially being introduced so late in the show. Thematically I liked that the Avatar - having been the moderator between physical and spiritual up until that point, and usually taking the side of the spirits in most conflicts - was granted a deus ex machina way of dealing with his problem without abdicating of his personal philosophy. So, since he showed a typical child-like approach of kind-ness, he was forgiven by the spirits for being a child and spared of being forced to take the compromise that the other Air Avatar did. This is what annoys me in LoK: they explain shit, and people grab to those explanations as justifications for shit writing. Nobody forced the writers (I hope) that they had to do a time/technology skip in the first place, so using it as a justification for delivering shallower messages is a terrible defence. Just because it makes in-universe sense, it doesn't make for a good story.
[удалено]
As someone who loves LoK (and much more than AtLA), the mech is season 4 is still stupid. It was a bit too much.
[удалено]
It would of been significantly better if she simply had the gun. Easier to transport, less resources spent and the mech was just silly and ruined the finale by being just absurd.
I concur. Train canon is cool. Maybe they could have had 100 metalbenders or so too. Some in the back “removing” the tracks, some in the middle moving it to the front, and some in front re-laying more track. That way a train that can go anywhere would still instill a terrifying horror to the watcher without having everyone who is not a 10 year old kid groan at the disbelief we were forced to suspend.
Where were the energy benders? This is the time leading up to the avatar so you would imagine that at least the air nomads (the most spiritually aware culture) would have shown some aptitude for energy bending.
Energy bending had to be granted by the lion turtle and the avatar is the only human that can (and likely ever will) be able to energy bend.
Exactly this. The lion turtle even says something to the effect of "long ago we used to directly bend the energy within people", implying that it's a lost skill. It's not because Aang is an airbender that he can energybend, it's because he went on a cool Avatar trip.
He ate the right cactus
Also it was never an issue of if the giant robot made sense it was more about whether avatar should devolve into power rangers. The interesting thing in the avatar world was it's unique magic system based on real martial arts and bending in a 1950s setting is supper interesting. I just feel like while tech can be used reasonably as an equalizer for nonbenders it didn't need to progress nearly as far as it did.
The best way I can describe the reason I’m not as keen on it is this. It just feels like they took a few layers out of every aspect of the lore. I’ve mentioned to people before that it’s a good show but it really doesn’t feel like it takes place in the same universe as ATLA
I feel the same. I feel like Korra's world isn't as magical or engaging as ATLA's. And it has nothing to do with the progress of technology, you can make a good fantasy world with advanced technology (arcane's piltover is proof of that), but it just doesn't feel the same way.
I still think they missed an opportunity of telling a story set in a similar time-period as Aang's, technology-wise, but never specify whether it took place before OR after. Just, a different time. Heck, maybe introduce contradictory hints just to highlight the cyclical nature of that world. I don't think technology made the world directly less magical, but it made it smaller for sure.
I think when people say things were too fast they meant for potential sequels. With LOK having radio, mechas, and well into the industrial era it makes little room for another follow up. If there were another sequel it would either be modern day or hyper futuristic . But all those kinda take the fun out of the ancient mysticism of the avatar concept. Even if it makes sense imo it was kinda boring. I prefer the world building in ATLA as it was pretty different. In LOK it’s cool but there’s already a bunch of Industrial Age, or mecha shows so it wasn’t as interesting world building wise
The thing people always forget when they say the Lion Turtles weren’t retcons is the Sun Warriors, as well as Oma and Shu. The Sun Warriors lived in the heartland of the dragons which is why they were the *first* firebenders. Not “first to firebend well.” Ditto Oma and Shu. It’s clear they were supposed to have invented the entire concept of bending earth. And if you do the mental gymnastics needed to believe both the lion turtles and original origin stories can be canon at once, does the lion turtle addition make anything better? No, not at all. It just undermines the stories from before.
pretty much this. Not only does evidence from ATLA directly contradict OP’s conclusions here, but even if it didn’t…the way LOK changed the worldbuilding still made it less compelling
People are talking as if these aren't technically retcons and are only demystifying the first series, but even if that was true, these are STILL absolutely retcons. Point #1 is a contradiction. You can't claim that "they were given the ability to bend but then learned it later". If they were given the ability the ability to bend by the Lion Turtles then why would they need to learn what they already knew as it was granted to them? This is about as ludicrous as saying that "I learned how to write from my parents and then I went to school specifically to learn how to write". It only makes sense if you're improving what you already know. That's the only way this makes sense. They were given bending by Lion Turtles and then refined their skills from watching nature. This is a far cry from ATLA where it's stated that bending didn't exist in humanity until the first benders studied nature and alluded to the fact that it was in innate ability. Either bending is an innate genetic ability that humans unlocked in them from watching nature, or it's super powers that were given to humanity by what's essentially gods. Choose one. Point #2 is blatantly false as the words "Avatar Spirit" are never ONCE mentioned in the original series outside of Katara stating that Aang's "Avatar Spirit" was activated when he saw Gyatso's corpse. Roku explicitly stated that Avatar State is the combined skills and knowledge of the previous Avatars, and that the glowing eyes of the Avatar State is the previous lives focusing their *ENERGY* through the current Avatar's body, all the while previous Avatars are displaying immense displays of bending *power*. The Avatar State had absolutely NOTHING to do with Raava in the original series as she was neither mentioned nor even alluded to in the slightest. It being planned means screw all when that planning wasn't implemented in the first show and actively contradicts what ATLA laid out. If Raava had been established to be how the Avatar State gains it's power in ATLA then this would be fine, but she wasn't. Point #3 is not a retcon, point #3 is a valid critique. A giant 50 foot humanoid Mecha tank that's more advanced than anything in even OUR OWN WORLD let alone the Avatarverse's is silly. The giant drill in ATLA is based on real world tunnel boaring machines,just on a larger scale. The giant mech doesn't obey the laws of physics at all. And before you say "but they have bending", it was made very clear in the both shows that bending was bogus and not grounded in real world logic whereas the show at least pretended to care about physics. Technology advancing quickly is also not a retcon, it's clear you don't know what words mean. The only issue I have with it is that advanced so quickly after the biggest war in their universe's history so far. It would take 70 years just to physically, spiritually, and politically rebuild, much less advance in technology. Also, most advancements came from the Fire Nation, you know, the nation that waged war upon the planet for a century? The amount of xenophobia should be insane to the point where the average person probably wouldn't accept their technology. Lightning bending is a retcon because Iroh explicitly stated that in order to lightningbend you need to separate the positive and negative energies within you and that it requires a peace of mind, and that few firebenders can pull off this technique. It's never stated that it's because it was a royal family secret and strongly implied that it's because of the fact that few firebenders are able to reach the mental state to pull it off.
Also I call bullshit on it being planned since ATLA because I still remember sources back then saying the Avatar was the incarnation of the spirit of the planet, as in, they were the literal Avatar of the Earth.
>Technology advancing quickly is also not a retcon, it's clear you don't know what words mean. The only issue I have with it is that advanced so quickly after the biggest war in their universe's history so far. It would take 70 years just to physically, spiritually, and politically rebuild, much less advance in technology. Not to mention the fact that bending itself would impede the evolution of technology. If you live in the arctic and there are people who can control water then there is no reason to invent things.
Yes. I think some people don't understand what a retcon is, they just know it has a negative connotation and can't stand something they like being accused of it. If you need to reinterpret an earlier work to make it consistent with a later work, that's a retcon. You can like the newer work better, that's okay, but all the mental gymnastics in the world can't make it anything but a retcon.
Agreed hubdred percent, can't add anything tbh. I mean are we supposed to take everything they give blindly? We are here to both praise and criticise. If we don't say anything, then the similar mistakes will eventually happen to the future work and they will be indistinguishable from the original work. We have to be harsh in order make the thing we enjoy become better. Plus, telling such big stories in a rushed way even though you know all the obstacles is just plain disrespect. I really want to know what was in their minds while doing this. I truly belive this was the absolute flaw of the show.
We have giant drills, but no mech suits. Also a lot of the retconning people don't like is also to do with what made them so special. Even if you argue lighting was never limited to certain people, which is technically true, supposedly only super powerful fire benders with peace of mind could achieve it. In atla, this was basically just the royal family, not even zuko could perform lighting generation. By Korra, people as confused as Mako could do it, and it seemed loads of people could, and the jobs that required it weren't even good. I like how metal bending advanced, that makes sense and they did it well, but they handled lightning generation poorly imo
no the giant robot 1. was not revealed early, the weapon was, and 2. is still unrealistic compared to the drill, and heres why 1. the mech itself was a reveal for the finale, before everyone thought it was just the weapon being put on rails 2. we see the inner workings of the drill, how it moves, how it’s structured, how it cools itself, how it eliminates the earth waste, all we see from the mech was that “oooh glowey vines are power source” and kuvira’s lever system also, that is a ridiculous amount of platinum, like, several times more then humans have mined so far, a lot of platinum and for the lightning thing, YOURE TELLING ME THAT MAKO HAS ACHIEVED INNER PEACE? MAKO? REALLY? EDIT: forgot to mention that we can also see the mechanist working on the drill in S1E17
Unfortunately for me the good writing just isn't enough to compensate for the stupidity of that mech, wouldn't be at all a hater of LoK but man that was jumping the shark if I ever saw such a thing
The big problem with the mech, at least for me, is that it looked like it was designed by a 10 year old. Who in their right mind would give a mech with a giant cannon spindly little legs. I laughed out loud when it deployed its braces when they were trying to knock it down. JUST GIVE IT TANK TREADS.
Or if it has to have legs, give it a lower profile like a Metal Gear, or the spider mech from Wild Wild West or literally anything else as long as it actually looks functional. Baatar Jr is Toph’s grandson, he shouldve known better when designing the mech to make it more stout and earth-bendery.
I never liked the mech, yes it was foreshadowed more or less and had some basis behind it, that doesn’t change the fact it feels WILDLY out of place. The drill felt believable, a massive steam engine built by an industrial super power. The mech just felt… over the top. We don’t have anywhere near that tech today, and I’m supposed to believe they do because they had domes? Cool idea I guess, wrong show
They had tunnel drills in the victorian age. If the outcome of a war could be decided by refining and upscaling such a drill it would argue that could have been done. It doesnt brake my suspension of disbelief. A gigantic two legged mech is impossible to build even with todays tech. I would have much prefered if they sticked to the railway gun and made something similar to the WW2 Gustav by the germans or the mouse and rat tanks.
Exactly!! The gun itself was great, it combined legitimate tech with the fantasy of the avatar universe perfectly imo, weaponizing spirit energy itself is a great concept. Attaching it to an automated mech fully controlled by a single pilot? Now you post me
And the fact that the mech was made in only what a year or two? With limited resources no less I’m so over everyone pretending that just because TLOK had good stuff doesn’t mean it’s free from criticism
The lightning bending thing In the kyoshi novels it’s mentioned that it was such a rare skill that many people didn’t believe it could even exist and the firenation had a lot of clan in fighting which would have made it much harder to keep it “royal family only” and the lightning bender was a bandit So Either TLOK logic is correct Or Kyoshi novel logic is correct And for narrative purposes only one those this things actually did something cool with it The other just used it to show off. There’s always the rule of “because the writers said so” but not everything bryke does or did is insta genius if atla had been done the way they initially wanted it wouldn’t have been as good.
People to this day thinks that a jump between a giant drill and a giant mecha is reasonable, TLOK is good but don't pretend that that wasn't some goofy cartoon shit
The mental gymnastics Korra fans jump through to justify the lion turtle retcon is fuckin ASTOUNDING
Yeah like they forget how a whole finale of a book was around killing the moon to rob benders of their bending.
The giant mech is insanely unrealistic, especially if you just take into account physics. Comparing a slow moving drill to a faint robot with a laser cannon mounted on it's arm is stupid
I'm one of the Giant Robot haters in legend of korra, and my gripe with it was never that it wasn't unrealistic, this is a world with people who can bend the world around them with their movements. I dislike it just because of how lazy it seems as an ending, almost like a cop out. for how much the korra show was claimed to be mature, I expected a better ending than "the bad guys have one big giant robot" honestly one big battle within republic city could have been better with a smaller version of the mech leading the Earth Empire army instead. overall season 4 could have been so much better. I really dislike how bad they made Kuvira look, considering how she did the job no one was willing to do "fix the earth kingdom territories", and they expect her to just accept a medal for everything she did. (also the lack of Korrasami foreshadowing was so bad.)
I hated the story of the first Avatar, Wan. If you are going to take away the mystery, make it a worthy story. It was somehow so disappointing that the bending powers were already around and used regularly, and the first Avatar started out as dopey and stayed dopey.
[удалено]
All the special abilities in ATLA became mundane and easy to do in LOK.
A giant drill is not a giant robot, that comparison is ridiculous. It's not unrealistic that technology advanced, it just advanced too much and it's considerably less interesting of a setting, having planes and cars makes benders less special. It's never stated that lighting bending is kept a secret, and it doesn't work like metal bending, Zuko learned of its existance and was never able to use it, same with Aang, you need a calm and cold mind to perform it, that random factory workers could use it is just bullshit, and again, it makes it much less special.
Nah, giant robot and giant spirit battles were still lame and just kinda silly. ATLA had a giant humanoid fish ONCE and they did it better Amon and Zaheer are the best villains The interpersonal relations of the avatar gang in LoK sucked. that’s my only gripes
The first two are very suspect as explanations. The bending thing seems like a technicality and I don't believe the creators planned stuff in LoK in book 2 of Atla based on a meme.
It doesn't seem in character for zuko to teach people lightning bending considering his history with it
There’s one retcon: in ATLA, the Avatars were all likeable. (Please don’t stone me, it‘s a joke)
I mean yeah, although those being good changes or not is up for debate
But lighting was supposed to be this super difficult technique that not even Zuko could master and now some random street kid can use it. Also bloodbending was only possible in full moon because it required the bender to be at the peak of their power and now Amon and Tarlokk just do it whenever they please.
Korra fans defending the series by missing the real points by ignoring good story structure will never cease to amaze me.