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anghraineThis tangentially touches on my current bloodbender feelings, but it's really about, well, the title. It's probably the meta that I thought about the most and put the most effort into, even though it's not (all) that long, so I figured I'd crosspost while I'm in a LOK frame of mind!
Every now and then, someone points out that Korra doesn’t seem to use her native element much, or act like a “proper” waterbender, or whatever. As a criticism of Korra, I agree that it’s particularly inane, but it seems people are in such a hurry to defend her that we don’t stop to think about why.
So, I’ve been thinking about why ;)
To begin with, a quick summary of the Avatarverse elements:
Earth is the element of substance, tied to endurance, patience/obstinacy, and decisiveness. It’s the least spiritual element. The people associated with earth are strong, diverse, tough, and straightforward, able to endure indefinitely. Its opposite is air.
Fire is the element of power, tied to life, the sun, and chi (which firebenders use directly). It can be boosted by anger. The people associated with fire have energy and strong wills driving them to accomplish their desires. Its opposite is water.
Air is the element of freedom, tied to flexibility, detachment, and spirituality. It is the most versatile and defensive of the elements. The people associated with air are peaceful, meditative, and seek to transcend earthly tethers. Naturally, its opposite is earth.
Water is the element of change, tied to fluidity, the moon, and chi (which waterbenders can directly manipulate). Like air, it’s highly versatile; like fire, it can be strengthened by emotion. The people associated with water are adaptable, with a strong sense of community and love. Its opposite is fire.
When that opening clip of LOK’s pilot first aired, I was puzzled. I knew that Korra would be going to struggle with her opposite element, which should be fire–but it isn’t. Compare her last two predecessors. Aang, who heavily favoured his native air, had a natural flair for water and fire, and struggled with earth. Roku struggled with water during his own training, and didn’t bend it even while surrounded with water and fighting a volcano. But Korra plainly has no block whatsoever with fire. She’s readily picked it up with water and earth by the age of four (!) and is having a blast with it at seventeen.
And really, it makes sense. She doesn’t need to painfully acquire the mindset of firebending. Will? Ferocity? Drive? Vitality? She has all that naturally. If anything, she seems to prefer to fight with fire and earth, though she’s skilled with water and readily uses it when circumstances make it convenient. It’s hard to see fire as her opposite on any level. At the same time, she doesn't struggle with water. She has it with earth and fire at four, she’s picked up healing from Katara; she just doesn’t lean on it, and it doesn’t tend to work well for her when she’s bringing out the big guns (at first), and she doesn’t demonstrate many of its attributes.
I’ve seen a lot of ingenious explanations for how the Korra we met in Book 1 makes sense as a primary waterbender. But mine is a little simpler.
She isn’t.
Oh, she’s a native waterbender, certainly. She’s an excellent waterbender, definitely. But water isn’t her primary element.
Not at first, anyway.
Think back. Outside of the opening crawl, the first time we saw Korra bend was when she blasted through her parents’ wall–earthbending. Though Korra is a much more diverse bender than Aang or Roku, throughout Book 1 she falls back on earth when she feels vulnerable or wants to demonstrate her power (most memorably when she uses earthbending to demonstrate her power to the apparently-disarmed Tarrlok and flings his insult back in his face). And not only is it stated outright that air is her opposite element, it’s explicitly compared with Aang’s difficulty with earth.
(This is focused on Book 1, but it’s worth considering that the only subart Korra learns onscreen is metalbending, which she almost instantly picks up, and uses much more often than we ever see her use healing. Meanwhile, when she goes into disguise, it’s in Earth Kingdom clothes. The character who most closely resembles and parallels her is Kuvira, an elite earthbender.)
Okay. Accepting that Korra’s primary element is earth, with accompanying affinities for fire and water and opposition to air, the obvious question is—why? All the other Avatars are closely associated with their native elements. Why not Korra?
Well, the Doylist answer is easy. Bryke wanted Korra to be the opposite of Aang. She’s stubborn where he was flighty, straightforward where he was tricky, aggressive where he was peaceful, dutiful where he was fun-loving. She ends up completely distinct from him, and as air is the only elemental training we haven’t yet seen, it makes narrative sense to highlight that one.
And in-story? Honestly, that’s not too difficult, either. Korra is isolated from both the community of her birth and any possibility of forging another–the defining feature of the Water Tribes. She has no friends beyond her animal companion. She’s brought up by largely inflexible, unsupportive masters. Only achievement and strength appear to be validated, and that with qualification; it’s no surprise that she ends up favouring fire and earth so much.
(Personally, I think the criticism of her ~only getting the physical side~ in the firebending test is bullshit. Korra is completely in tune with what fire is about. She is completely in tune with what earth is about. The only one where she seems disconnected from the underlying principles is water, the test for which she must have passed years ago. STFU, asshole.)
((It is a wonder Korra turned out as well as she did. >_>))
Okay, so Korra’s forcible alienation from idk everything water is about cut her off from most of the typical characteristics of waterbenders and the Water Tribes generally. She could easily carry a waterskin like Katara if she favoured water and wanted it available to her. Aang, for instance, relied on air even when it wasn’t optimal. (Think of when he insistently used air against the Fire Nation tanks in the attack on the Northern Air Temple, even though Katara’s ice had been shown to be much more effective and he was a perfectly capable waterbender at that point.) Yet in Book 1, she rarely uses it outside of when it’s the only real choice: pro-bending and when she’s surrounded by it or travelling on it. She doesn’t even use it when Tarrlok is waterbending at her; she punches the ice and then ineffectively firebends at him before falling back on reliable earth.
But why does it matter?
Well, setting aside the basic wrongness of her upbringing and how deeply troubled she is at that point (which many of her defenders prefer to ignore, but w/e), and how wrong it is to cut her off from a culture she still deeply identifies with—
At the end of Book 1, I joked that it was “Book 1: Air, Otherwise Known As Water.” Korra is the Water Tribe Avatar. She is forced to function purely as a waterbender as a pro-bender. She joins fellow waterbender Tarrlok’s task force as a waterbender (though she ends up throwing in earthbending because of course she does <3). Where she’s alienated from the principles of water, her opponent exemplifies the extremes of those principles even before he’s revealed as a waterbender.
Actually … let’s get into Korra vs Noatak a bit more. Blast from the past ;)
Amon, as he presents himself, is Korra’s polar opposite. He was scarred by the firebending she loves. He’s a non-bender touched by spirits. Korra is the ultimate bender with no spirituality; she can’t contact her own past lives, much less the spirits or the Spirit World. Amon seeks to free people of inequality. Korra inevitably opposes him and in doing so defends the stability of the status quo (and initially is bewildered that anyone would have a problem with it).
Basically, Amon-the-persona seems to exemplify the principles of air that Korra is failing at: freedom, detachment, spirituality. Even his agile, adaptable fighting style contrasts with Korra’s painfully direct approach to the airbending forms. Amon is everything Korra isn’t. He’s the anti-Avatar to Korra’s Avatar, and it’s because of her spiritual failure that he exists at all.
except lol no
At the end of the day, Amon is raising an organized army and setting up a severe, highly discriminatory dictatorship, which is approximately the least airbender-ish thing ever. For all his maneuverability, he doesn’t remotely avoid direct confrontation in fighting; he manipulates situations to his advantage and uses his enemies’ moves to take control of them. He promotes violent change, as a revolutionary and in his ability to take bending. We all knew perfectly well he was lying about where it came from.
Also, when Korra does try to use waterbending against him (i.e., when she’s surrounded by water), it inexplicably fails. Her ice spikes fall short. Her waterspout collapses. Fire and earth, by contrast, work, they just don’t succeed.
It’s not much of a surprise that he’s a waterbender. While–with his brother–paralleling Korra in many ways, when it comes to water, he also differs in a significant way. Noatak, whatever he might tell others and himself, is a waterbender to his core. He is all about change and control, by whatever means necessary. Remember Iroh talking about how waterbenders control their enemies by turning their own strength against them? Noatak’s bloodbending/chibending is that at its most terrifying extreme. And since Korra completely identifies herself with her strength as a bender, she is uniquely vulnerable to him.
That makes it all too appropriate that it’s his quintessential, instinctive waterbender identity that destroys him. And even more appropriate that Korra actively uses it to destroy him.
Let’s jump back for a moment. I’ve focused on the change and fluidity of water, but there’s another side: love for community and family that holds them together. Korra didn't have a community to bond to. She loves her family, but was kept away from them (at their own request, it turns out—more shades of Kuvira there). But through Book 1, she’s able to build a community around herself in her friends and her previous life’s descendants. Of all these, she’s most attached to Tenzin and Mako.
Noatak’s situation is both similar and dissimilar. Like her, he appears to have no friends; unlike her, he doesn’t ever make them. Like her, he’s isolated in one of the poles; unlike her, he’s not only stuck with his family, but in a horrifically abusive family situation. And he does have a human to bond to in that family: his brother. Noatak’s entire sense of family and community is concentrated on Tarrlok, and he reacts to a small and entirely reasonable hesitation on Tarrlok’s part as total betrayal.
He effectively replaces Tarrlok with the Equalists, addressing them as “brother” and “sister,” but there’s an artificiality to it. They’re his followers, not his family. His actual brother obliviously gives him more than ample cause to move against him, but Noatak doesn’t, not until Tarrlok spirals out of control completely. He only takes his bending after Tarrlok bloodbends; Noatak later admits that he felt he had to do it, but (in a moment of shining hypocrisy) regrets it. Given the chance of capturing Korra, he leaves her to his underlings and takes care of moving his brother’s unconscious body. Though imprisoned, Tarrlok is kept safely away from everyone, and appears clean and well-treated. Even when Noatak flees his angry enemies and ex-followers (and must know Tarrlok is complicit in his defeat), he stops to release Tarrlok from prison and ask him to escape with him.
Despite everything, Tarrlok is Noatak’s family, and in his role as a superhuman menace, that makes him a weakness. And by that point, Korra gets it. She has a family and community. And she’s learned to adapt to changing circumstances. She went to the Air Temple to ambush him, but she quickly switches to using Noatak’s waterbender identity against him: literally (he’s a bender!) and figuratively (his community, the NWT, and family, Yakone and Tarrlok). Noatak, shaken but still hyper-adaptive, responds by threatening her created family-community, first the airbenders, and then Mako.
Fire is the opposite of water. But it’s appropriate that Noatak’s abuse of waterbending’s control of movement and chi, his use of it to exert control over others, over Korra, is broken by air, the element of freedom. He then reveals himself as the innate waterbender he is, and falling back on the ties of family, passively acquiesces in dying with his brother.
Meanwhile, Korra is free of him, but she’s lost her sense of stability and power. Freedom isn’t enough. She turns away from her family-community and retreats back to isolation on the cliff, strikingly reminiscent of both her early self and the young traumatized Noatak. She leans far enough over the edge that her tears fall into the air instead of on the ground. And then, in a moment of rare gentleness on herself, she lets herself grieve for what she’s lost: the cherished image of herself as the Avatar, the aspect of herself that she truly recognized and valued.
It’s then that Korra, primary earthbender turned solely airbender, has her spiritual breakthrough. And it’s not through power, endurance, or even freedom. She is now open, Aang tells her, to change.
Physically, she’s always been a waterbender. Now she’s one in spirit, too. Just in time to face the real waterbending anti-Avatar.
Every now and then, someone points out that Korra doesn’t seem to use her native element much, or act like a “proper” waterbender, or whatever. As a criticism of Korra, I agree that it’s particularly inane, but it seems people are in such a hurry to defend her that we don’t stop to think about why.
So, I’ve been thinking about why ;)
To begin with, a quick summary of the Avatarverse elements:
Earth is the element of substance, tied to endurance, patience/obstinacy, and decisiveness. It’s the least spiritual element. The people associated with earth are strong, diverse, tough, and straightforward, able to endure indefinitely. Its opposite is air.
Fire is the element of power, tied to life, the sun, and chi (which firebenders use directly). It can be boosted by anger. The people associated with fire have energy and strong wills driving them to accomplish their desires. Its opposite is water.
Air is the element of freedom, tied to flexibility, detachment, and spirituality. It is the most versatile and defensive of the elements. The people associated with air are peaceful, meditative, and seek to transcend earthly tethers. Naturally, its opposite is earth.
Water is the element of change, tied to fluidity, the moon, and chi (which waterbenders can directly manipulate). Like air, it’s highly versatile; like fire, it can be strengthened by emotion. The people associated with water are adaptable, with a strong sense of community and love. Its opposite is fire.
When that opening clip of LOK’s pilot first aired, I was puzzled. I knew that Korra would be going to struggle with her opposite element, which should be fire–but it isn’t. Compare her last two predecessors. Aang, who heavily favoured his native air, had a natural flair for water and fire, and struggled with earth. Roku struggled with water during his own training, and didn’t bend it even while surrounded with water and fighting a volcano. But Korra plainly has no block whatsoever with fire. She’s readily picked it up with water and earth by the age of four (!) and is having a blast with it at seventeen.
And really, it makes sense. She doesn’t need to painfully acquire the mindset of firebending. Will? Ferocity? Drive? Vitality? She has all that naturally. If anything, she seems to prefer to fight with fire and earth, though she’s skilled with water and readily uses it when circumstances make it convenient. It’s hard to see fire as her opposite on any level. At the same time, she doesn't struggle with water. She has it with earth and fire at four, she’s picked up healing from Katara; she just doesn’t lean on it, and it doesn’t tend to work well for her when she’s bringing out the big guns (at first), and she doesn’t demonstrate many of its attributes.
I’ve seen a lot of ingenious explanations for how the Korra we met in Book 1 makes sense as a primary waterbender. But mine is a little simpler.
She isn’t.
Oh, she’s a native waterbender, certainly. She’s an excellent waterbender, definitely. But water isn’t her primary element.
Not at first, anyway.
Think back. Outside of the opening crawl, the first time we saw Korra bend was when she blasted through her parents’ wall–earthbending. Though Korra is a much more diverse bender than Aang or Roku, throughout Book 1 she falls back on earth when she feels vulnerable or wants to demonstrate her power (most memorably when she uses earthbending to demonstrate her power to the apparently-disarmed Tarrlok and flings his insult back in his face). And not only is it stated outright that air is her opposite element, it’s explicitly compared with Aang’s difficulty with earth.
(This is focused on Book 1, but it’s worth considering that the only subart Korra learns onscreen is metalbending, which she almost instantly picks up, and uses much more often than we ever see her use healing. Meanwhile, when she goes into disguise, it’s in Earth Kingdom clothes. The character who most closely resembles and parallels her is Kuvira, an elite earthbender.)
Okay. Accepting that Korra’s primary element is earth, with accompanying affinities for fire and water and opposition to air, the obvious question is—why? All the other Avatars are closely associated with their native elements. Why not Korra?
Well, the Doylist answer is easy. Bryke wanted Korra to be the opposite of Aang. She’s stubborn where he was flighty, straightforward where he was tricky, aggressive where he was peaceful, dutiful where he was fun-loving. She ends up completely distinct from him, and as air is the only elemental training we haven’t yet seen, it makes narrative sense to highlight that one.
And in-story? Honestly, that’s not too difficult, either. Korra is isolated from both the community of her birth and any possibility of forging another–the defining feature of the Water Tribes. She has no friends beyond her animal companion. She’s brought up by largely inflexible, unsupportive masters. Only achievement and strength appear to be validated, and that with qualification; it’s no surprise that she ends up favouring fire and earth so much.
(Personally, I think the criticism of her ~only getting the physical side~ in the firebending test is bullshit. Korra is completely in tune with what fire is about. She is completely in tune with what earth is about. The only one where she seems disconnected from the underlying principles is water, the test for which she must have passed years ago. STFU, asshole.)
((It is a wonder Korra turned out as well as she did. >_>))
Okay, so Korra’s forcible alienation from idk everything water is about cut her off from most of the typical characteristics of waterbenders and the Water Tribes generally. She could easily carry a waterskin like Katara if she favoured water and wanted it available to her. Aang, for instance, relied on air even when it wasn’t optimal. (Think of when he insistently used air against the Fire Nation tanks in the attack on the Northern Air Temple, even though Katara’s ice had been shown to be much more effective and he was a perfectly capable waterbender at that point.) Yet in Book 1, she rarely uses it outside of when it’s the only real choice: pro-bending and when she’s surrounded by it or travelling on it. She doesn’t even use it when Tarrlok is waterbending at her; she punches the ice and then ineffectively firebends at him before falling back on reliable earth.
But why does it matter?
Well, setting aside the basic wrongness of her upbringing and how deeply troubled she is at that point (which many of her defenders prefer to ignore, but w/e), and how wrong it is to cut her off from a culture she still deeply identifies with—
At the end of Book 1, I joked that it was “Book 1: Air, Otherwise Known As Water.” Korra is the Water Tribe Avatar. She is forced to function purely as a waterbender as a pro-bender. She joins fellow waterbender Tarrlok’s task force as a waterbender (though she ends up throwing in earthbending because of course she does <3). Where she’s alienated from the principles of water, her opponent exemplifies the extremes of those principles even before he’s revealed as a waterbender.
Actually … let’s get into Korra vs Noatak a bit more. Blast from the past ;)
Amon, as he presents himself, is Korra’s polar opposite. He was scarred by the firebending she loves. He’s a non-bender touched by spirits. Korra is the ultimate bender with no spirituality; she can’t contact her own past lives, much less the spirits or the Spirit World. Amon seeks to free people of inequality. Korra inevitably opposes him and in doing so defends the stability of the status quo (and initially is bewildered that anyone would have a problem with it).
Basically, Amon-the-persona seems to exemplify the principles of air that Korra is failing at: freedom, detachment, spirituality. Even his agile, adaptable fighting style contrasts with Korra’s painfully direct approach to the airbending forms. Amon is everything Korra isn’t. He’s the anti-Avatar to Korra’s Avatar, and it’s because of her spiritual failure that he exists at all.
except lol no
At the end of the day, Amon is raising an organized army and setting up a severe, highly discriminatory dictatorship, which is approximately the least airbender-ish thing ever. For all his maneuverability, he doesn’t remotely avoid direct confrontation in fighting; he manipulates situations to his advantage and uses his enemies’ moves to take control of them. He promotes violent change, as a revolutionary and in his ability to take bending. We all knew perfectly well he was lying about where it came from.
Also, when Korra does try to use waterbending against him (i.e., when she’s surrounded by water), it inexplicably fails. Her ice spikes fall short. Her waterspout collapses. Fire and earth, by contrast, work, they just don’t succeed.
It’s not much of a surprise that he’s a waterbender. While–with his brother–paralleling Korra in many ways, when it comes to water, he also differs in a significant way. Noatak, whatever he might tell others and himself, is a waterbender to his core. He is all about change and control, by whatever means necessary. Remember Iroh talking about how waterbenders control their enemies by turning their own strength against them? Noatak’s bloodbending/chibending is that at its most terrifying extreme. And since Korra completely identifies herself with her strength as a bender, she is uniquely vulnerable to him.
That makes it all too appropriate that it’s his quintessential, instinctive waterbender identity that destroys him. And even more appropriate that Korra actively uses it to destroy him.
Let’s jump back for a moment. I’ve focused on the change and fluidity of water, but there’s another side: love for community and family that holds them together. Korra didn't have a community to bond to. She loves her family, but was kept away from them (at their own request, it turns out—more shades of Kuvira there). But through Book 1, she’s able to build a community around herself in her friends and her previous life’s descendants. Of all these, she’s most attached to Tenzin and Mako.
Noatak’s situation is both similar and dissimilar. Like her, he appears to have no friends; unlike her, he doesn’t ever make them. Like her, he’s isolated in one of the poles; unlike her, he’s not only stuck with his family, but in a horrifically abusive family situation. And he does have a human to bond to in that family: his brother. Noatak’s entire sense of family and community is concentrated on Tarrlok, and he reacts to a small and entirely reasonable hesitation on Tarrlok’s part as total betrayal.
He effectively replaces Tarrlok with the Equalists, addressing them as “brother” and “sister,” but there’s an artificiality to it. They’re his followers, not his family. His actual brother obliviously gives him more than ample cause to move against him, but Noatak doesn’t, not until Tarrlok spirals out of control completely. He only takes his bending after Tarrlok bloodbends; Noatak later admits that he felt he had to do it, but (in a moment of shining hypocrisy) regrets it. Given the chance of capturing Korra, he leaves her to his underlings and takes care of moving his brother’s unconscious body. Though imprisoned, Tarrlok is kept safely away from everyone, and appears clean and well-treated. Even when Noatak flees his angry enemies and ex-followers (and must know Tarrlok is complicit in his defeat), he stops to release Tarrlok from prison and ask him to escape with him.
Despite everything, Tarrlok is Noatak’s family, and in his role as a superhuman menace, that makes him a weakness. And by that point, Korra gets it. She has a family and community. And she’s learned to adapt to changing circumstances. She went to the Air Temple to ambush him, but she quickly switches to using Noatak’s waterbender identity against him: literally (he’s a bender!) and figuratively (his community, the NWT, and family, Yakone and Tarrlok). Noatak, shaken but still hyper-adaptive, responds by threatening her created family-community, first the airbenders, and then Mako.
Fire is the opposite of water. But it’s appropriate that Noatak’s abuse of waterbending’s control of movement and chi, his use of it to exert control over others, over Korra, is broken by air, the element of freedom. He then reveals himself as the innate waterbender he is, and falling back on the ties of family, passively acquiesces in dying with his brother.
Meanwhile, Korra is free of him, but she’s lost her sense of stability and power. Freedom isn’t enough. She turns away from her family-community and retreats back to isolation on the cliff, strikingly reminiscent of both her early self and the young traumatized Noatak. She leans far enough over the edge that her tears fall into the air instead of on the ground. And then, in a moment of rare gentleness on herself, she lets herself grieve for what she’s lost: the cherished image of herself as the Avatar, the aspect of herself that she truly recognized and valued.
It’s then that Korra, primary earthbender turned solely airbender, has her spiritual breakthrough. And it’s not through power, endurance, or even freedom. She is now open, Aang tells her, to change.
Physically, she’s always been a waterbender. Now she’s one in spirit, too. Just in time to face the real waterbending anti-Avatar.