f13.net

The premiere episodes of the sequel series to the animated Avatar: The Last Airbender can be legally viewed now at http://www.korranation.com/

I really like the world-building on display here--it's a very nice way to establish a completely new narrative situation while keeping faith with the baseline set-up from the last series. It's a good model for how to move a story ahead and establish some new conflicts and characters. Animation is also very high quality.

Definitely wondering what the eventual reveal of the Big Bad's identity will be. Fun to speculate.

korranation.com redirects to korranation.tumblr.com, which says that you can watch the episodes at korranation.com.  What sort of sick joke is this?

^^^^
What he said.  I wanted to watch the first two episodes and can't.  I is sad.

Wow. That's annoying. I don't know when they did that. It was up live when I posted. I don't think they said anything about it being a limited run.

There's always the method that dare not speak its name, of course. Or wait until April 14.

I'll probably just wait.  I plan to set the DVR to record episodes anyways, so I'll just plow through shows in chunks, which is kind of how I like to watch.  Just wish the DVR could be set more than 2 weeks out.

I watched them on Sunday on this site. (http://collider.com/legend-of-korra-premiere/154765/)  So far I'm feeling very good about the series.

They are pretty much begging me to do that, aren't they.

The first two eps are up on iTunes. I liked them. The progression to 20s-ish aesthetic is pretty cool.

Just got done watching the first two episodes, and I'm liking it a lot.

I really like the 20's era technology vs. Eastern philosophy/bending direction they look to be heading to.

So, as someone that made it a few episodes into the first show before Sokka (and Aang to a lesser extent) grated on me badly enough to stop watching, should I even bother with this one?

You clearly hate fun, so no.  :why_so_serious:


Seriously though, if you didn't enjoy the first series, you won't enjoy this one.

Works for me.

The first two episodes are available on the Nick site itself.

http://www.nick.com/videos/clip/legend-of-korra-101-full-episode.html

http://www.nick.com/videos/clip/legend-of-korra-102-a-leaf-in-the-wind-full-episode.html

The personalities of the main characters are different though. Aang is a light-hearted kid. Korra is a rebellious headstrong impetuous teenager who has taken her status as avatar for granted. If that sort of character is more appealing to you :awesome_for_real: you might like the new show.

I am really liking this show so far. In some ways, better than the first series.

It seems much faster paced, almost rushed at times.

Well, the overall series is planned to be shorter than the original was - 12 episodes this season and 14 next.

I still need to watch yesterday's episode but yeah, this is a great show.  Another site I'm on has gotten into a debate about whether bending is a genetic trait or a learned one.  Right now the general consensus is leaning more towards genetic.

I don't think there is any question that it is genetic, but with some kind of spiritual connection.  If it was purely learned then there would be more air benders; the only living examples are direct relatives of Aang.  It's also the only way to explain the cycle of the Avatar always being: earth > fire > air > water because it implies that people are either born benders or not born benders.

The show is awesome.  The sixth episode was phenomenal.  I've got a pretty good idea of who Amon is, but it's a fun mystery, and I'm looking forward to finding out more about Aang and the crew's fate between the two series.

Yes. The flashbacks in the last two episodes are so tempting--they really suggest that something terrible happened to the Aang Gang when they were adults that split them apart.

Didn't know it is going to be that short, makes more sense then.

And I can't watch the episodes from the web anymore because I'm Canadian.


How do I trick the website into thinking I'm not Canadian, surely there's a plugin or something that does that by now?

Speak the pledge of allegiance clearly into your microphone before attempting to watch.

They'll clearly hear through my HI-larious Canadian accent.

You can route your traffic through a free proxy in the US.  Or just torrent the show.

I'm loving the crap out of this, btw.  Definite DVD buy once it's available.  The writers are doing a lot of the things that made the first series great while doing something entirely different with this one.  I think it's great how the heroes are caught between two "bad guys" and it's not obvious which is worse.

I think it's actually one of the best re-imaginings of the rise of fascism in 1920s Europe that I've seen. In many ways, more convincing and interesting and complex as a confrontation with evil than the first series.

I'm about 100% certain who Amon is at this point...

Better than the original series, I think.  These last three episodes have been stellar.

The saddest part is that Amon's going to be done as a villain after this season, so after the one hour season finale this coming week.  No more Steve Blum to listen to.  :cry2:

No real vote on who Amon could be, though I have a few possibilities in mind. 

The momentum of the last few episodes has been great.  I can't wait to see the finale. 

(despoilering because I don't think there's anything spoilery in that particular comment, or the one I'm about to make)

There's no way Amon is a completely "normal" human, being as he can do that whole "energybending" thing.

What I find most interesting about Amon and the various theories on who he is (we're sort of assuming he's wearing the mask because he's somebody we the audience would recognize -- wouldn't it be funny if that turns out to be a complete red herring?) is that no theory explains both how he can do what he does and what his motivation would be.

Re: energybending, here's what the lion turtle told Aang when he taught him how to do it.  I'm sure this will end up being relevant somehow:

Well, if it were supernatural, this would be a very weird way of going about things. I fully expect that there is another layer to the "conspiracy" (specifically on his identity), I just hope he doesn't end up being the being pitched in the spoiler I replied to. It just rubs me a little too Deus Ex Machina for my tastes.

(I also love the fuck out of this show.)

"Legend of Korra" creators preview the season finale (http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/06/19/the-legend-of-korra-creators-preview-the-finale/).

Nothing very spoilery, but a nice little interview, all the same.

I was surprised that things were wrapped up as much as they were.

I was surprised as well, but pleasantly so.  I'm looking forward to where they take the next season. 

About the arc - I've heard offhand that the first season was initially it so that's why the storyline is so compact and complete.  Then the second season was given the green-light and hence, separate storylines.  I'm actually kind of fine with that because it gives a sense of stages completed for Korra rather than the overarching storylines that Aang needed.


Best moment of the series?

Overall, I really enjoyed the first season and hope it's not too long before the second season comes out.  I'm re-watching ATLA right now and plan to segue right into LOK when I'm done.

Boo - can't nest spoilers

I thought the finale was too rushed.  Feels like the writers wanted to do a big epic story like with Last Airbender, but they couldn't quite fit all the plot threads into twelve episodes so they had to do some really hasty tying-up at the end.

Things I would have liked to have had more time for:

I'm realizing now that one of the things that made Last Airbender a great show was the huge amount of time they devoted to character development over the course of three seasons.

It did feel a bit pat, but generally still very good. I'm keen to see what they do with the world-building they've done so far in a second season.

Something else I was thinking about that bothered me in the finale (I feel like Plinkett explaining how the prequels ruined Yoda's wise sayings):


 :geezer:

It's probably unfair to compare LoK to AtLA given the vastly different lengths, but I really feel a little robbed by how much potential awesomeness they set up and then copped out of delivering on.

The other thing I remember being eager to see explored (not gonna spoiler this because it's been pretty clear for a while that it wasn't going to happen) was the basic ideological conflict between "bending is awesome, we can do anything with it" and "kinda sucks for people who can't bend".  As Tarlok got increasingly douchey it looked like maybe we might see Amon become a more sympathetic character, and maybe even cause Korra to question her own role in this evolving world.  Deep stuff, like when Aang had to wrestle with the moral implications of executing Ozai (and go against what every past Avatar was telling him to do).  Ah well.

I think the length of the seasons was a real detriment to how things were allowed to play out.  Someone on another forum posted some bits from the creators that was in a 2011 WSJ blog:
From here -> http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/03/08/the-last-airbender-legend-of-korra-the-creators-speak/

So timing played a lot into how the storylines came out.  When you have an entire 12 episode season written and off to the animators and halfway through get the green light for a 14 episode season 2, it's kind of hard to add in an overarching storyline.  So to that degree, I can accept things being rushed feeling.  But then again, if season 1 was all we were going to get, it still feels very rushed and some storylines weren't finished out well or done in any depth - like the bender vs. non-bender conflicts.  Amon wouldn't have been very successful if there wasn't resentment there in the first place.

Which also makes me wonder - was any of that conflict presented in ATLA?  I can't imagine it's a recent issue.  Now I think I'm going to keep an eye out since I'm about halfway through rewatching the first season of ATLA again.

I don't think so.  In ATLA it seemed like all of the benders either formed communities with other benders of the same type (e.g. the monks in the air temples, the waterbenders in the swamp, the nomadic sandbenders) or devoted themselves to serving the non-bender community in some way (e.g. the earthbenders who spent all their time moving cargo or whatever, or all the firebenders who were conscripted into the military).  You didn't really see any benders operating as "private citizens", like professional athletes, gangsters, etc.  Presumably the societies of the various nations were set up with fairly rigid rules to ensure that (any child that demonstrates bending ability gets whisked away to be trained in a structured environment), and things got more complicated within the more cosmopolitan society of Republic City where you've got different kinds of benders all left free to pursue their own lives.

Right. My sense is that this has been a world rather like pre-Perry Japan: relatively homogenous, internal conflicts within each 'nation' but a strong sense in each one that you belonged with  your nation more than anyone else. Aang and Zukko set out to make a cosmopolitan city in a very nationalized world as an antidote to nationalism. Rather as in the real world, that turns out to have it own problems.

THIS!

Best summary of what happened (and is still happening) in Republic City I have read.  :drill:  :drillf:

My problem with the series is that the supposed protagonist, Korra just seems to be reacting to what everyone is doing. It was pretty easy for Lin BAMF Fong to steal the show from her. Sad to say, Korra is pretty privileged and overly entitled compared to her predecessor Aang. Personality wise - rather bland.  

I'm not too impressed with her being the Avatar.   :why_so_serious:

Exactly.  And Korra isn't a rather scared 12 year old boy who didn't want to be the avatar.  She's a provincial 17 year old girl who's known she was the avatar since she was about 5-6 years old and has grown up surrounded by people who treated her like the avatar, not a young woman.  Coupled with her personality, heading to Republic City and finding out how backwoods she is, it's not a good mix.  She's confident in being the avatar as if that's the greatest thing EVAR! and Republic City is more or less like "Oh, that's nice, dear."

It's kind of an argument against training the Avatar as a privileged, isolated princeling. It's interesting that there have been so many Avatars and yet the White Lotus and others don't really get the point even now--especially odd given that the Avatar himself/herself can consult all his previous selves. Presumably they've all found that their real effectiveness comes from learning about life and people through experience, not from being Superman.

It breaks out similarly to way the jedi fell in the last days of the Republic. Cloistered monks who just knew they were the shit and then they had the rug pulled out from under them.

If you remember in A:TLA's episodes where Aang was remembering growing-up as a young airbender, this very argument happened even among the airbenders.  Aang's mentor wanted him to behave as a normal child and not be treated any differently, but a few other council members disagreed and felt that he should be treated as the Avatar and molded to that role - whatever they felt that role was.

I imagine that given the importance of the Avatar in sort of preserving the general state of the world, and the fact that you don't practically speaking have any Avatar in between the old one dying and the new one completing his/her training, you want to get them up to speed as quickly as possible.  Not that that's necessarily productive, but I can understand that the people who see themselves as responsible for that feel like they're under a lot of pressure to make it happen.

http://insidetv.ew.com/2012/07/11/legend-of-korra-second-season/

yay.

http://www.redbubble.com/people/dfragrance/works/8692805-korra-2012

Actually, a bunch of them there: http://www.redbubble.com/explore/korra

He, some of those are pretty cool looking.  Now I think I want a fire ferrets shirt.

Avatar: The Next Generation.   :awesome_for_real:

So I finally got to watch the last four episodes (god damn Canadian TV) and my only real complaint was the pacing.

Shit went way to fast, especially that end. I thought there would be a lot more "so now we don't have bending, how will I go on with my life" soul searching from everyone who got the bending off switch from Amon.


That got wrapped up really damn fast instead though. They could've easily done twice as many episodes with this story arc overall.





Ready for more though!

Old topic, but I want to talk Korra and it might as well be here rather than a new topic.

Korra is meant to be a contrast to Aang, who is a selfless and spiritual person. Korra is more selfish and physical. As the creators even said, that was what was keeping her from tapping into her airbending and spiritual side. Saving Mako from having his bending taken away was the first time Korra did something completely selfless. So it's not really a deus ex machina, but more or less her just finally getting a clue.

As for Aang popping up and energybending her. Well if you recall ATLA, Roku was often popping up to mentor Aang. And the energybending thing kinda was a Deus ex Machina in TLA, because Aang picked it up last minute from an almost godlike ageless being as a way to not have to kill Ozai. And they didn't just make it disappear which is nice. Energybending can be used to alter the energies within a person, and using it to take away bending was Aang's idea, not the Lion turtles, so it's not surprising that he could do the opposite with it and give a person the ability to bend.

As for Amon, though it's kinda neat how he mixes bloodbending with chi blocking to take away people's bending(he seems to be using bloodbending to reach a pressure point on the brain to permanently disrupt their chi,) but I think there was potential for a much darker story with him than making him a hypocrite waterbender. Yeah it's the easiest way to turn people against him, but with the story he told, they could have went with something more interesting. Like maybe Amon lost his face to Koh the face stealer, in exchange for the power of energybending. As for him being Taarlok's brother and Yakone's son, they definitely hinted at it enough with Korra's visions of Aang fighting Yakone. But Korra misunderstood, believing Aang was trying to warn her about Taarlok, when he was trying to warn her about Amon.

As for Asami, I think she didn't have much emotion over losing Mako because she's already realized she lost him when Korra got kidnapped. She'd already been coming to terms with it. And Iroh, Dante Basco needs to deepen his voice or Iroh needs to lose the dimples, cause the look/sound are too conflicting, ones too young, other is too old. As for him being stuck, considering he does that firebending rocket technique like Ozai, I don't think he'll have any problems getting down.

Also more relevant news: Korra DVD/Blu-ray has been announced, but no release date yet. And season 2 is apparently in the planning stages. Book 2: Spirits

 Season 2 starts Friday. Ep 1 and 2 can be viewed here I believe. (http://www.nick.com/shows/legend-of-korra/)

woot.

I like how they're not having Korra automagically turn into a mature, serious person this season. I kind of wish the Bad Guy weren't so obviously the Bad Guy right at the start, but there's probably more to the story than it seems. Maybe he's possessed by the Face Stealer or something along those lines.

To double down on my previous comment, I really love that they're not telling us that Adult Aang was a perfect guy, quite the contrary.

I feel like this is a sign that on some weird level, we really are getting better as a culture. There really were not cartoons with this kind of narrative (anime or otherwise) available to us in the 70s and 80s.

I had a similar thought when watching one particular scene, I think it was Korra and Mako at the fair. Was thinking, this is a fairly mature conversation for what is supposed to be a kid's cartoon.

While some of the plot is massively telegraphed I'm intrigued by where they are taking the plot this season.

Two-part origin story was well done visually and narratively. Big tonal shift for the rest of the season, though.

Finale was...well I'm not 100% sure. I liked it but didn't love it?

I'm not overly fond of them wrapping up a storyline each season, feels a little rushed to me. What's going to be the big challenge now, would seem hard to top that.

I still love the show, it's almost like they get the small things so right but are hit and miss on the big things.

One other note while watching the final battle, I LOVE the music in this show (and Avatar) , it's fucking kick arse.

I think one of the big issues they have with Korra's story versus Aang's (besides the number of episodes allotted to each season) is the lack of clear goal for Korra.  Aang's "purpose" besides being the Avatar was to stop the Fire Nation and bring balance back to the world.  Korra's goal is to... grow up and fight paper-thin villains apparently.  There wasn't anything distinctly wrong with the world that needed fixing.  I guess you could say her goal is to figure out how the Avatar fits into an increasingly modern world that doesn't seem to need an Avatar in it, but that's really kind of nebulous.

Season 1 had Amon who was a two-bit villain, but he had a point to what he was outwardly trying to do - non-benders were being treated as second class citizens by benders, and Amon was supposedly trying to fix that.  He was a hypocrite and doing things the wrong way, but he had a point.

Season 2 had Unalaq, who had absolutely no build-up and no reason to be the bad guy except for mustache-twirling and MWAHAHAHA!  I SHALL RULE THE WORLD IN DARKNESS!!  Yeah.  We knew nothing about him, had no reason to care about him other than the story telling us (in a patently obvious manner) that he was the bad guy. 

Compare Unalaq to Ozai from A:TLA and it becomes even more obvious how bad the villains have been and how A:TLK lacks a good, clean villain.  In A:TLA, we knew Ozai was the bad guy from the beginning, he was driving the Fire Nation to take over the world and everything Zuko did was to try to appease his father.  So we get big world bad guy and small personal issues bad guy wrapped up into one.  It gave an over-arching storyline to work towards.  We don't have that in Korra, or if there is someone like that, it's certainly been well hidden so far.

All that said, I enjoy the show.  The animation and art are terrific.  The music is just fantastic!

This season definitely felt choppy, but I'm glad it didn't get drawn out into a 2-season series of FedEx quests to gather the stuff needed to Kill Foozle. It's next season that I really wonder about. Basically Korra just did a Miyazaki on her world and I hope it will be a messy, complicated thing to have done. Presumably even with Foozle/Vaatu defeated (or was he: I don't remember seeing a body, and he's not back in his prison: if Unalaq was a Dark Avatar, maybe there's a new person out there with the Dark Avatar spirit now...) not all the spirits in the world are flying bunnies and all that.

Well, the next season is supposedly called "Changes" so I'm going out on a limb to guess it's about the whole spirit world and physical worlds are interacting.  Likeyou said, it's not all fun and games and if the spirits can be affected by emotions, then that's going to be a driving issue right there.

I hadn't thought about the Dark Avatar being reborn like the Light Avatar was.  That really would make things interesting, wouldn't it?  We know Vaatu is still around somewhere, or at least his essence should be, since you need darkness to see the light and vice versa.

Can we get more Varrick?  He was rather awesome..:D

Varrick was an entertaining character, and I like Tenzin more and more.  Having him break free of the Fog of Lost Souls was cool in that it (ironically) hammered home how much he does resemble his father -- one of my favorite things about Aang was that his goofy persona hid this core of discipline and determination that slowly became more visible over the course of the story.  Tenzin gets used as a comic foil a lot, so it's cool to see him shine as a badass now and then.

Otherwise, eh.  This season felt just as rushed as the last one in that everything got wrapped up very quickly at the end through a series of nonsensical deus ex machinas.  The whole "learn to bend your own energy" thing could have been an interesting arc for an entire season, but instead it was just, I'll go sit down here for five minutes, okay cool now I'm all charged up into a giant glowy thing and I can punch the bad guy and win.

The old show did sort of the same thing though with the turtle and Ozai. It's mostly that the pacing seems off--Korra learns to powerup in such a rush, and without any real sense of spiritual depth. She got broken down some in this season in a good way, but not really built back up in a satisfying emotional sense. I get that the show needs to have a youthful protagonist, but it really feels as if she didn't have the time to become the person she needed to be for the giant glowy kaiju fighting spirit woman to feel right.

Next season really needs to be a humbled Korra who gets into trouble because she doubts too much rather than petulant teen Korra.

The difference korra and last airbender is rather more summed up in three points

1. The main villain of last airbender was an overarching villain, he had three seasons to drop clues and hints at who he really is. Ultimately we didn't get "a lot" more than a "batshit crazy mustache twirler" but he was at the very least what we knew about him and the threat he posed made him a great villain. Even though he technically only confronts the hero twice.

2. Split story telling. Last airbender gave us two stories for the price of one. Managing to not only tell Aangs story but Zuko. So instead of one midly interesting stories, we had two really concise and tightly written ones. Which also leads to point 3...

3. Airbender had minibosses the hero directly interacted with during the course of the season. Whether be General Zhao of season 1 or Princess Azula of season 2. What I find hilarious is that none of the villains, main or secondary, were personal threats to Aang. They were indeed from beginning to end, Zuko's villains, Zuko's problem. With the exception of Ozai who he confronted during the day of the Eclipse, Zuko personally fought and was there to end the arc of Azula and Zhao. Again this is the benfiet of grander story telling, something I kinda hoped Korra will get back to but neither has the cast or the desire to do so...

To harp even more on Villains, what made Amon work was that he was very personal to Korra. He mind raped her, made her doubt herself, beat her, brought her to her lowest point twice, and ultimately put fear in her. In a lot of ways the affects of fighting and beating Amon "should" have shown up in Korra's character wel into season 2...and it kinda didn't. Unalaq was again suppose to be a personal villain to Korra and ultimately felt less personal even though he is responsible for making her lose faith in tenzin and her father, threatening her family, tricking her into creating a war between the north and southern tribes, and is responsible for the destruction of her home, the failure to save tenzin daughter....and yet I feel he'll be shrugged under a rug by season 3. Arg. It's like there should be more here, though I honestly had no problem liking what I saw.

 I love how korra beats the world ending villain because SHE WANTS TO (which is basically how spirit bending works. You want to win more than the other guy so you win) and that harmonic convergence happens to be mere days away (oh noez). Last avatar introduced two planetary events and both paid off an entire seasons away after being introduced....which i think counts toward the rushed feeling. They have a whole other season guaranteed and yet the world has to end now. But on the other hand we DO get an entire season to see the aftermath, so trade off?

I think the idea that Ozai is a great villain that we built up to is in the end kind of wrong. We only see him as a great villain because he did harm to the world as a whole (but we find out that it's not just him, it's at least two generations) and to his family (Zuko and Azula and their mom.) But in a way, the only really interesting villain in all those seasons of the old show is Azula.

But I do completely agree that there's no one as interesting as Zuko in Korra's world. I think Tenzin is at least as interesting as Iroh, in part because he's a very different kind of person than Iroh but an equally loveable/admirable figure with his own depth. The show is mostly weaker in the bench--Mako, Bolin, Asami are just really not very interesting people. Varrick has some potential but he's too often played for laughs.

The idea of a dark Avatar was great but Unalaq wasn't anything more than a quick sketch of a character--he really needed some of the depth of Azula to make sense.

Than want to focus on Korra being this strong female character with all these personal issues and by extension personal villains. And...well.... With Amon you had the threat of losing your bending and his equalist movement. With Unalaq you don't really get his motivations. Like sure power but what world does he envision? Also yeah what made Ozai "great" for the series, was that he was built up as being this generally bad guy. But better Ozai had Zhao and Azulu to fill in for him. Unalaq not so much since he was being set up as a one arc villain and ultimately it doesn't work combined with the sheer scale of what he was doing and the lack of gravity to his character.

But despite this I think that they are trying to tell a story that won't be entirely complete until the third season and it's not like I didn't like was happening, just wish we had more character behind it on all fronts.

Season 3 starts tomorrow!

Despite some of the flaws in pacing and characterization in this series, I still really love it on the whole. In some ways I actually appreciate the rough edges and messiness of the character relationships and narrative structure as a contrast to the relatively tight and ultimately conventional structure of the original Avatar series. I'd like to see Korra develop a slightly more calculating, self-aware streak this season though--having her bull her way through more subtle political subplots is going to get old eventually.

I also am curious about the status quo as far as being the Avatar goes. Does she have access to her past selves any more after the conclusion of last season? I hope so: it would seem a shame to lose that. I also think they need an antagonist who has more interesting and thought-out motivations than Unalaq. They're still playing with a steampunk/industrial revolution setting, so I could see a sort of Edison/Tesla (or Teller/Oppenheimer) struggle over whether science and technology should be morally compatible with the world of the spirits or antagonistic/exploitative of it.

Arise for not much of a good reason!

All four seasons of this are on Canadian Netflix now, so I binge watched it over the last month. And now I'm done. And kinda sad because I really enjoyed that. To the point that I might even read the graphic novels due this fall.

Now what to watch?

In some ways, despite the inconsistencies and false leads, I think this was a better show than the first Avatar. Korra is definitely by the end a more interesting character than Aang--she may be one of the more complex YA/anime-ish protagonists I can think of, with a very interesting hero's journey.

I would love the series creators to do something new--whether in this universe or some other. Very talented people.

Just got done with Avatar for the first time. GF had the dvds and loved the series so we watched them over the course of 2 months. Now we are onto this on Amazon...or Hulu... can't recall which. First three seasons are free with Prime so we just started in on this. Looking forward to it as I really got some enjoyment out of Avatar, though the first 5 episodes of it really didn't turn me on at all. Once the show got going though... I enjoyed it. Hoping for the same.

I love you, Azula. I do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HH1vXDP9C-0

A quit touching Azula supercut. Such nuanced characters for a kids show.

Korra frustrates some people because the protagonist is a contradictory, changing person who makes a lot of mistakes. I think that makes her one of the most amazingly human protagonists in this kind of show. It's also a show with less of single major plotline--essentially she faces a series of adversaries who are badly misguided but who each have kind of a legitimate point they're making if you step back from it a bit.