Tumblr crosspost (13 September 2020)

[anghraine]

I love LOK, but one of the things that bothers me is that it relies very heavily on a trope I dislike a lot, though in a way that usually makes the characters involved more interesting.

It’s basically: the villain has the right idea, but goes Too Far.

Part of the reason that I dislike the trope is that in general, while there are vague gestures in the direction of acknowledging the villain’s point, the emphasis is overwhelmingly on the Too Far—and in fact, usually follows it up with even more (often baffling and counterproductive) villainy to move the focus to taking them down rather than addressing the fundamental problems driving them.

LOK eventually makes the “your villains have had good ideas, but went Too Far” theme explicit, but it was apparent long before that that it was the unifying concept behind the villains of the show. And the thing that makes the trope doubly aggravating for me personally is that … I mean, I’m a villain stan. It doesn’t take a lot for villains to win me over, and the villain being both tragic (this is usually why they care so much about whatever their deal is) and having some fair points makes them super appealing in themselves—just all tangled up in this really frustrating trope.

It’s different (at least somewhat) when the narrative actually makes serious efforts to address the good ideas buried in the villainy (which, in fairness, LOK sometimes does). But I think the thing that most bothers me is that common element of not doing that, but instead following up genuine moral dubiousness with these detours into OTT villainy that smooth over complicated questions by reducing the antagonists to the bad guys who must be defeated. Problem solved!

But it’s not solved and it’s clear that it’s not solved and aghghghhhhh—

Okay, and I really feel this with my faves among the main LOK villains, Noatak and Kuvira.

The point about Republic City being governed by benders is implicitly addressed by replacing the council with an elected president, but this happens offscreen, the president is himself is portrayed with very little sympathy, and this doesn’t really deal with the systemic problems. We hear virtually nothing about the non-bender conflict ever again, and don’t know for sure if the oppression was even real. It’s explicit that Noatak himself genuinely cared about inequality from childhood and that his motivations were sincere, despite being driven by his childhood abuse as much as anything else, but the questions he asks go pretty solidly unanswered.
And in-story, it’s fair that people are concerned with defeating a villain who is going around stripping people’s bending away and tyrannizing the city. My problem is that the story itself is constructed so that the focus shifts to driving him off (for the heroes) and putting him in a situation where he passively acquiesces in murder-suicide, and the movement just vanishes.

And then there’s Kuvira, where it’s clear that she’s responding to very real problems in the Earth Kingdom—both the ones exposed by Zaheer and the ones caused by Zaheer. Her temperamental similarities to our heroine are underscored, and it’s explicitly pointed out that she is at least trying to do something for her people and is popular because of it, whereas the alternative to her is completely incompetent and self-absorbed for most of the season.

Honestly, it’s arguable that the plan is to replace her with a puppet king that foreign governments can control rather than solving the problems that exist in the Earth Kingdom, which have personally influenced Kuvira herself as well as many others. And the story deals with the conflict between “Kuvira must be stopped!” and “is it legitimate to attack her? Do we have better solutions?” by tacking on all this extraneous villainy with invasions and mechas and lasers and shit that makes her a valid target.

The last minute “we’ll just be a republic now!” is, like the switch in government that followed Amon, barely touched on, and it’s not at all clear that it’ll do much for the poverty, neglect, and factionalism that besets the Earth Kingdom. But Kuvira’s surrender seems like it’s supposed to do that in some way, even though she only rose to power because she was trying to address those very things.
>_<