Tumblr crosspost (5 September 2020)
Feb. 5th, 2024 01:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineI chose “I always get what I want” as one of Kuvira’s badass quotes for the handwriting meme, but the more I think about it, the more it seems … just manifestly untrue.
Kuvira’s most formative experience is getting abandoned by her parents as a child—something that very obviously screwed her up into adulthood. She certainly didn’t get what she wanted then.
Su picked her up at some point and says she thought of Kuvira as a daughter, but it seems more of a turn of phrase than literal reality. Kuvira isn’t at the family dinner or in any of the family photographs or anything like that. It’s not like Su was obligated to fully adopt Kuvira, but it does seem like Kuvira wanted more from her than she got.
Kuvira also wanted Su/Zaofu to act to pick up the pieces of the Earth Kingdom, which of course didn’t happen. Kuvira wanted the Beifongs to accept her engagement to Baatar. Nope. She wanted to make herself and her people invulnerable and ultimately fails.
It’s not that Kuvira doesn’t get a lot of things she wants, many of them reprehensible (she’s thrilled to seize Zaofu, lol). But ultimately, those are kind of surface-level? They’re not what she really wants. So there’s this mix of confidence in going after anything she wants, and inability to acknowledge that she doesn’t have what she actually wants and never has, because—as Korra notes—she’s so afraid at that point.
I’m not sure where this is going and she still does many awful things etc etc etc. But … welcome to angsting over sad villains: the life, the blog.
Kuvira’s most formative experience is getting abandoned by her parents as a child—something that very obviously screwed her up into adulthood. She certainly didn’t get what she wanted then.
Su picked her up at some point and says she thought of Kuvira as a daughter, but it seems more of a turn of phrase than literal reality. Kuvira isn’t at the family dinner or in any of the family photographs or anything like that. It’s not like Su was obligated to fully adopt Kuvira, but it does seem like Kuvira wanted more from her than she got.
Kuvira also wanted Su/Zaofu to act to pick up the pieces of the Earth Kingdom, which of course didn’t happen. Kuvira wanted the Beifongs to accept her engagement to Baatar. Nope. She wanted to make herself and her people invulnerable and ultimately fails.
It’s not that Kuvira doesn’t get a lot of things she wants, many of them reprehensible (she’s thrilled to seize Zaofu, lol). But ultimately, those are kind of surface-level? They’re not what she really wants. So there’s this mix of confidence in going after anything she wants, and inability to acknowledge that she doesn’t have what she actually wants and never has, because—as Korra notes—she’s so afraid at that point.
I’m not sure where this is going and she still does many awful things etc etc etc. But … welcome to angsting over sad villains: the life, the blog.