Why the villains of Legend of Korra matter

[anghraine]

My best friend and I were talking about the ways that Legend of Korra does and doesn't work for us, and particularly about the way it feels very erratic on a craft level where ATLA is pretty consistently good to great, yet ultimately LOK engages us both more. Inevitably, we wound around to a point of firm agreement: excepting Unalaq and Vaatu in B2, we consider the main villains of LOK a lot more personally and thematically interesting than Ozai and this has a weird effect on LOK's politics.

I drafted a far longer post about this [ETA: lmao], but anyway: there are many obviously progressive elements to ATLA. Ozai as a villain is fundamentally aligned with things antithetical to progressive ideals. He is a hereditary autocrat carrying on a multi-generational campaign of imperialism that historically (in the show) has been justified by familiar bigoted, reactionary rationales about civilizing and bringing prosperity to other cultures. He's overwhelmingly authoritarian in every aspect of life—as a ruler, as a conqueror, as a father, as a husband. He's less a person than an embodiment of domination, imperialism, autocracy. And the ultimate solution that ATLA provides for the problem of Ozai is 1) a greater power defeating him in combat and 2) replacing him with a good autocrat.

That's not a charitable characterization of a beautifully executed and emotionally satisfying conclusion. And I think the underlying rationale for that resolution owes more to ATLA's mythic and fantastic structure than to any serious commitment to the "what we really need is a good dictator" form of political discourse that has unfortunately become increasingly common. But solving the problem of imperialism with a Chosen One and a kinder and softer absolute ruler over the imperialists is not ... exactly a radical solution, let's say. It's not that different from, say, Lord of the Rings.

It works for ATLA's story! I just don't feel that this resolution is particularly daring or transgressive in the way that it is sometimes represented as being. Other aspects of ATLA are much more daring and revolutionary than this, but the core politics just don't feel that way to me.

LOK, by contrast, has a lot of centrist-at-best baggage. It would take awhile to detail all of this (the fantasy copaganda is probably the most obvious), but it's especially apparent with the villains. LOK essentially has a revolving door of major villains who are each very different in personality, goals, motives, politics, and symbolic alignments, but thematically unified by one very familiar concept that is obvious even before it's explicitly spelled out in B4.

I've talked about this before in relation to LOK and had plenty of criticism of it (here and here), but the basic idea is this: What if the villain actually has the right idea, but just goes too far?

This trope lends itself to compelling, daring villains and frustrating narratives around them. These narratives usually suggest that the villain's basic point is correct within the world of the story, and perhaps even in our world as well. Either way, the villain has identified a genuine problem, and the existing institutions are mishandling that problem or shoving it under the rug in the service of the status quo.

These villains disrupt the status quo and cause various forms of upheaval in order to address the problem. But this kind of villain is fundamentally an extremist and is typically written to seem sympathetic or at least interesting at first, only to be revealed as ruthless, indiscriminate, cruel, increasingly fanatical, and so forth, or they develop in those directions over time. Ultimately, the upheaval they cause is worse than the flawed status quo. Narratively, the extremism of the villain allows for their defeat to become the priority rather than the problems motivating their actions. Thus, the restoration of the status quo comes as a relief by the end, or at least is framed that way.

This allows for more complex, interesting, relatively nuanced villains for audiences to engage with, but avoids "too much" risk in terms of how the story is told and received. It's very easy to associate this technique with stuff like Marvel (which has used it multiple times to varying effects). But the use of villains to give voice to real social problems and injustices these characters have often genuinely suffered from while their villainy gives the author some cover is ... a very old tactic. That said, the dangers writers evade with this approach range from "I could be killed" to "the megacorp might make less money than they usually do," so it can register very differently depending on the context.

When that context is the US entertainment industry of the twenty-first century (as it was for ATLA and LOK), the extremist villain with a good cause narrative feels pretty fundamentally meh despite its basic appeal. A more conservative narrative wouldn't accept that this "woke villain" did have the right idea. A more progressive narrative wouldn't prop up the status quo and use this narrative structure to vilify attempts at social change. LOK does feel very deliberately centrist in how this is one of the few consistent core themes of the show throughout all four seasons, and one of the few aspects of it other than Korra's arc holding the show together as a whole.

Individually, most of the LOK villains are really compelling characters with very understandable concerns (I would only exclude Unalaq/Vaatu from this, although they can all be a bit underwritten in some ways). But the persistent, inescapable link between failed disruption and villainy can certainly wear on me after a bit, or at least feel like it should.

However, the question that came up in my conversation with my bff was a bit of a twist on this. We ended up talking about whether the LOK villains' attempted disruptions of the status quo do fail in the long term.

Going back to Book 1, I used to joke that Book 1: Air would be more properly called Book 1: Air, Otherwise Known As Water because water, waterbending, and change were so much more thematically and structurally important. Water is the element of change, after all.

I do understand why some people really disliked Amon turning out to be a waterbender all along. But before the reveal, there was already quite a bit of speculation that he was a waterbender, given his highly fluid fighting style, his association with spirituality, and his alignment with drastic change. On this emotional/spiritual/symbolic level, Noatak is not only a waterbender but arguably the most waterbender.

Noatak and his brother/enemy Tarrlok are politically opposed, but they are both ultimately figures of disruption, and Noatak most of all. He sees the world as unjust and unequal, and sets out to change it. Yes, his means are ruthless, callous, unstable, and increasingly counter-productive. He seems to lose his previously tight control in an interesting way after he takes Tarrlok's waterbending and becomes even more extreme and irrational. But we have actually seen the problems that he is trying to address. His means and egocentric approach are the problem, not his cause.

This is not always handled smoothly, for sure, but we see Korra's initially tone-deaf responses to non-bending protestors. We see that Republic City is controlled by benders representing the other nations, although RC seems to be a sovereign state. The principal entertainment in Republic City is based on bending. Their police force is based on bending. In B1, non-benders are lumped in with Equalists and end up getting punished for guilt by association, even non-benders who don't seem to actually be associating with Equalists at all. There's an emergency non-bender curfew that Tarrlok imposes when he's going off the rails, and there's an awkwardly written but clearly significant moment when the non-benders being oppressed insist that Korra as the Avatar should be defending them as well.

Now, the Equalist movement disappears after B1. I think the only Equalist we ever again encounter is Hiroshi Sato in a very different context; his extremely late redemption strains suspension of disbelief for me given his perspective in B1, and seems only introduced in order to kill him off. Meanwhile, Amon himself is killed near the end of B1 and the show rarely even alludes to his existence again (Tarrlok isn’t referenced ever again iirc). But, interestingly, two of Amon’s main objections actually are quietly addressed by the show.

Amon condemns the rule of Republic City by benders, as described above. By B2, somewhere between a few months to a year after Amon's death, Republic City’s council of bending representatives has been replaced by a democratically elected non-bender president. Amon also criticized the dominance of pro-bending as entertainment, given that it's necessarily restricted to benders and (in his view) contributed to the cultural glorification of them. In B2, this is largely supplanted by an early film industry pioneered by eccentric genius non-benders Varrick and Zhu Li (Varrick is technically also a villain in B2, but his various crimes never catch up with him and he's ultimately recuperated as a friendly ally).

The various forms of discrimination against non-benders in B1 are never really addressed by the show again, which is disappointing, but those forms of discrimination also don't seem to be in effect after B1, either. It seems like society has genuinely improved.

Would these changes have happened without Amon and the Equalist revolution? Maybe. I personally doubt it. Amon and the Equalists did terrible things, but they also made it impossible to ignore their criticisms. They didn't get everything they were after, obviously, but did the upheaval and disruption they caused ultimately lead to major political and cultural changes of the kind they wanted? Apparently, yes.

I wish we saw this in a more organic way, rather than being presented with it as a fait accompli in B2 and the subject never coming up again. But I do appreciate that the ultimate result of this failed, terrifying revolution is significant social change.

This is even more front and center with Unalaq. I’m not going to get into all the details, but his main deal is freeing the spirit world and making the spirits accessible to everyone rather than relying on the Avatar to be a bridge between the spirits and humanity. Korra kills Unalaq for other reasons, concludes he was right about the spirits, and decides against maintaining the barrier between the spirit and physical worlds, a decision which has drastic consequences throughout the rest of the series and changes their world forever.

Unalaq is the least interesting villain by a mile and it’s, hm, interesting that the villain whose main concern is most directly and explicitly addressed in the show, and whose actions produce the most transformative consequences to the world, is the one whose “right idea taken too far” is fundamentally an in-world matter. Amon wants change and equality, Zaheer wants freedom from power structures, and Kuvira wants to impose order and stability while also protecting her people from being exploited and hung out to dry by other powers. Although the specific inflection points of these concerns are based on in-world particulars, the fundamental problems these other villains articulate are grounded in reality in a way that Unalaq’s concerns aren’t, really.

So this is not a full-throated defense of how LOK handles these things. It’s more of an observation of how, for all of LOK’s studied centrism, it is decidedly wary of mixing social justice villains with a reset button. All these villains’ actions produce long-term consequences that affect later events and the world around them, even when they’re killed off, and these broad changes trend towards the ideals of the villain who precipitated them.

Books 3 & 4 are even more closely tied together. Zaheer and the Red Lotus don’t manage to overthrow all figures of authority, but he absolutely does manage to murder the most despotic monarch around, the Earth Queen, and to disrupt the entire social order of the Earth Kingdom. B3 provides the least amount of resolution of any of the seasons; Zaheer survives as a captive, the Earth Kingdom is in chaos, Korra is alive but too traumatized to step in at this critical juncture, and Kuvira is a minor hero. It’s already clear that the actions of Zaheer and the Red Lotus in pursuit of anarchy have had a major impact on the world in ways that can be altered but never undone.

Is this worse than the clearly oppressive rule of the Earth Queen? It’s hard to say. She was so evidently a terrible ruler and deeply unpleasant person that neither chaos nor even Kuvira’s later rule seems so unambiguously dreadful as the traditionalist, hereditary reign of the queen. In any case, the most direct result of the situation created by the Red Lotus is a power vacuum filled by Kuvira between B3 and B4. Kuvira offers order, stability, and protection to her adherents, but over the several years between seasons, is moving towards authoritarianism and empire. Initially, this might make it look like Zaheer is consequently the least effective of the villains in the long term; his achievement was temporary and contributed heavily to the rise of the kind of person he is most ideologically opposed to. Moreover, Zaheer appears to himself be aware of this when he returns in B4 and helps Korra after thoroughly traumatizing her in B3.

Kuvira, meanwhile, is one of the more unevenly written villains and one of the most compelling. On the one hand, B4 is a bit weirdly paced and Kuvira kind of gets new personality traits as the plot requires. An anon at f_fa once described her development in the later season as “getting hit with the villain stick” and it really does feel that way.

For example, there’s one baffling episode where everyone who isn’t native to the Earth Kingdom is thrown into prison camps by order of Kuvira, the same person who spent previous episodes actively recruiting talented people from all over the world without regard to their origins (the latter makes a lot of sense for her own background and hang-ups as well). As far as I could tell, this appears to happen solely to give Bolin—a character who rarely covers himself in glory and really doesn’t wrt Kuvira—something heroic to do. It’s not really explained or referenced again and is pretty hard to square with Kuvira’s role as the villainous mirror to Korra, Kuvira's previous policies, or with the narrative sympathy she’s ultimately given.

However, Kuvira also gets some of the most spectacular villain moments in the whole show. She certainly gets some of the most intriguing ones. Mako is rightly wary of Kuvira from the beginning, but he’s also the one who points out to Prince Wu (the Earth Queen’s mediocre heir propped up by powers outside the Earth Kingdom) that Kuvira has actually helped their people while Wu has done nothing. Kuvira is also elevated by her interconnectedness and UST with Korra, her A+ character design, and an excellent performance from Zelda Williams.

Anyway, the interesting thing about both Zaheer and Kuvira is that despite their profound ideological differences, they’re the ones addressing problems in the Earth Kingdom that have clearly existed for a long time and which nobody else really seems to be doing much about. Both of them distrust the hereditary monarchy for entirely valid reasons, and Wu seems all the more pathetic by contrast with Kuvira’s intensity and extreme competence.

The fact that everyone was perfectly happy to just let Kuvira do her thing in the Earth Kingdom until she made it clear that she was not laying groundwork for a restoration of the monarchy but establishing an empire of her own seems this strange quasi-indictment of the sort of established power structures of the world. They just do not care about the welfare of the Earth Kingdom in the ways that the differently villainous Zaheer and Kuvira do. That's kind of wild.

The stuff with the spirit vine laser mecha and invading Republic City for not much of a reason and so on definitely does feels like Kuvira’s getting hit with that villain stick to justify her overthrow by people who have no real solution to the problems she was originally addressing. In fact, I think there’s even a conversation or scene or something early in the season where some of the characters are struggling with whether they can justify trying to overthrow her when she hasn’t unambiguously brought it on herself and they don’t really have alternative solutions. This is only resolved by Kuvira’s convenient swerve into outright OTT villainy.

At the same time as Kuvira is escalating into full evil overlord territory, Wu is starting to mature and come into his own, and at first it wasn’t clear if the point of this was building him into someone who could be a good king and not just an obnoxious puppet who doesn’t care about his own people. Maybe all these problems Zaheer and Kuvira brought attention to could then at least theoretically be addressed without Zaheer’s and Kuvira’s … issues. But it honestly didn’t feel right for the way the story was going, or for the general tendency of the show. By and large, the central LOK villains are tightly linked to Korra herself, in a way that none of her own allies ever seem to be. Though this is stated outright as early as Korra's late-night confrontation with Tarrlok in B1, it’s never more pronounced than with Kuvira. Replacing her with even an improved Wu would feel very strange. And the broader Zaheer->Kuvira arc culminating in a denial of the social problems they had identified and linked to the monarchy would not feel like LOK.

This had always been a show that, for all the centrist trappings, was willing to transform its own setting. It might tapdance around this in awkward ways, like with the offscreen transition to an elected non-bender president, there might be unpleasant side effects like the spirit vines in Republic City, the more drastic changes might be unpredictable or frightening for the characters, and people don’t always know what the political changes they advocate will lead to, as with Zaheer inadvertently setting up the conditions for Kuvira's rise. But I think the overall arc of the show is one of broad and sometimes drastic social change towards a better world. Solving the problems articulated by Zaheer and Kuvira with a good King Wu would not have worked for LOK.

But it didn’t happen. As usual, it’s handled breezily and a bit awkwardly, but the culmination of Zaheer's and Kuvira’s downfall and Wu’s maturation is a transition to a republic. The basic political structure of the Earth Kingdom is going to be radically transformed from anything it’s ever been before. And for all that this is underwritten and weird in the context of the finale, the ultimate result of Zaheer’s and Kuvira’s activities in the Earth Kingdom is drastic change for the better. There’s a level on which every one of these villains does succeed despite their defeats. They force people to pay attention to actual problems of their world. They influence Korra and others towards their own ideals. Major aspects of how the world works are continually transformed via the impact of these villains.

And this has ended up being way longer than the “short” version was meant to be, but this is a significant part of why LOK fundamentally works for me despite the calculated centrism, despite this annoying af trope, despite the uneven writing, despite everything. It can feel silly and trivial to say “LOK has better villains tho.” But for me, the villains are essential to what LOK is doing. There is something ambitious about what the show does with them and the consequences of their calls for change. It does not always work on a character level and it’s certainly not always well-developed in terms of overall plot. But I think this is part of what makes the LOK villains really stick with me in a way that, even as a villain fan in general, a lot of others don’t. They’re allowed to change the world.

Comments

[alias_sqbr]

I can't quite get my thoughts in order, but I feel like there's a deep seated discomfort with activists that a lot of writers have which manifests a few ways.

I'm not wedded to this analysis but off the top of my head:

Zeroth approach: There are no activists everything is fine shh.

First approach: An internally consistent but unpleasant all activists are bad, and social change is also bad. No matter how bad it is the status quo is better than the alternative, at most we feel a little sad for the Tragically Villainous Activist but since nothing can actually ever change for the better their whole approach was always doomed. This is really common in cop shows and murder mysteries.

Second approach a la Korra: All activists are bad, if often in a tragically sympathetic way. On the other hand, social change is good, so it just... happens, somehow. Or it's the result of the activists, and the result is overall good, but the activists are still overall bad. Like a larger scale version of anti-hero villain who Makes Hard Choices and murders the Even Worse Villain the Good protagonist won't kill, before dying themselves. Oh look the problem went away but our heroes didn't have to do Bad things, hooray!

Third approach a la X-men/Black Panther: social change is good, and there are Good activists and Bad Activists. The Bad ones are the radicals, and still sympathetic but doomed, and the Good ones are often very ineffective and connected to the status quo. There's still often a "nothing really changes, then Activist Villain causes problems and is rightfully defeated, and oh look everything is better now yay" arc.

I personally tend to prefer the third, for all it's flaws, because I find the implication that there's no reasonable way to push for social change really frustrating, versus a story where the 'reasonable' approach is pretty toothless but at least exists and gets to have some positive effect. But yeah the second approach still beats the first by far, and I generally prefer it to the zeroth.

Dragon Age has a frustrating combination where there ARE moderate Good activists the story likes and approves of... but they all either die tragically or turn into Bad Activists. Though because of the Edgy Choice Based Narrative you can sometimes just ignore the framing and side with the Bad Activists anyway haha. What's that, the epilogue acts like it's a tragedy? Hmm, no, unreliable narrator, they lived happily ever after and saved the world, the end.

[anghraine]

Ooh, this is interesting. I do 100% agree with this point:

I feel like there's a deep seated discomfort with activists that a lot of writers have which manifests a few ways

My experience of the transformative villain trope is that Type 0 and Type 1 are pretty overwhelmingly common, so I didn't think about separating Types 2 and 3 in that way. But I do see why you would split them apart. LOK has this sort of framework of ... activists are always bad people, however tragically or sympathetically so, and apparently those kinds of bad people are necessary to bring about substantive social improvement. The improvement is good, and it can be drastic, but the agents of change themselves seem definitionally bad.

(This is a bit complicated by the mirroring of the transformative villains with Korra herself as a flawed and sometimes troubled protagonist but fundamentally heroic figure. The transformative villains all mirror some aspect of Korra's own character or identity, and the change brought by the villains is often, though not always, mediated through Korra. I feel like her links with other heroic characters are thematically kind of underwhelming by contrast to her more profound interconnectedness with the villains and their influence on her. But despite the changes Korra brings, this is framed as a matter of exercising unilateral power rather than her taking up the villains' activist mantle.)

Still, my own very subjective preference among these types of activism stories is for Type 2 over Type 3, because the change you get in Type 3 with the "good" (usually incrementalist/otherwise centrist-approved) activist feels more minimal to me. Like, IME these narratives' social changes kind of feel like crumbs, and the absolute minimum quantity of crumbs at that. LOK is this weird narrative where it seems to suggest it takes kind of awful people to seriously advocate for drastic social change, but that level of social change can ultimately be a good thing that should happen. Type 3 often feels like, oh, what the world needs is nicer, less demanding and disruptive activists who will be content with relatively small and convenient changes.

I think both variations are closely related in terms of coming from a place of more or less well-intentioned belief that social change can be preferable to the status quo, alongside a deep discomfort with the actual people who make it happen. Something like LOK is never going to explicitly credit the overhaul of Republic City's political structure to the "evil revolutionaries" even though it's very obviously a direct result of the revolution, say.

What's that, the epilogue acts like it's a tragedy? Hmm, no, unreliable narrator, they lived happily ever after and saved the world, the end.

Haha, nice!

[alias_sqbr]

Entirely fair, you are completely right about all the ways type 3 can be infuriating.