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?

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chidorinnnnn sent this ask:

In an AU where Aang was NOT the last airbender (because there were people who got away, assimilated within other cities/cultures, etc.), I wonder if it would’ve made sense for Zaheer to be an airbender from day 1 (without any spirit world shenanigans from canon book 2), descended from a population that had rejected the teachings of the air temples. Add to that an explicit acknowledgement from the very beginning that Korra was nearly kidnapped as a child by the Red Lotus, and you’ve got maybe a consistent storyline?

I replied:

Hmm. I’m not sure it quite fits with my vague ideas for grey!Zaheer, but it does actually work really well for a different AU where Zaheer is the B1 villain instead of Amon, because I’d been juggling ideas for how it would work without Harmonic Convergence. Thanks!