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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An anon asked:

Do you think the fourth season of lok might have flowed better if kuvira were introduced way earlier, like in season 1 or 2?

I replied:

Yes. I mean, Nickelodeon’s shenanigans and the development of the arcs and such makes it pretty impossible for that to happen, but if it were possible, I think it would work better, because Kuvira serves two different functions that are fairly difficult to reconcile.

Her primary function is as a villainous version of Korra through whom Korra’s issues can be processed—hence Korra hallucinating Kuvira as herself, for instance. This IMO is the main reason why taking compassion on Kuvira is so important as the culmination of Korra’s character arc; Kuvira represents Korra at both her worst and her most vulnerable, so Korra taking compassion on her is intrinsically tied to taking compassion on herself. This is why Kuvira is Final Boss, much more than because of the threat that Kuvira poses.

At the same time … well, someone on FFA said Kuvira got beaten by the villain stick to make the story work, and I do kind of agree. Sometimes what we get in Kuvira is “how would a dark Korra become more extreme?” and sometimes it’s “how would a military dictator become more extreme?” So you get really weird things like the camps and the giant mecha laser thing that don’t fit with the dark!Korra theme, or seem to follow from the basic characterization, but rather from the function Kuvira is fulfilling as an ideological representative who goes Too Far.

Like—if you’re going to try and weld “dark Korra” and “military dictator” together, IMO it would help to build up to it! There’s a lot we just don’t know about Kuvira or only get the merest scraps of (contrast Amon, who gets a highlight reel of his entire childhood that explains a lot). If there was more time and space given to her descent into villainy that actually tied in her parallels with Korra, I think the different elements would feel less abrupt and disconnected.

Of course, it would require a lot more continuity between the seasons than really exists. But I do think it’s a good idea, yes.

I was reading some older Mass Effect threads on f_fa and while some were fun, and some were just "huh, guess it takes all kinds," they are (or were) so OTT hostile towards Liara while very generously reading into bland dude characters like Kaidan that I'm just "...ugh." Allegedly it's about Liara ninjamancing Shepard, but Kaidan is an entitled asshole if you're moderately friendly and don't romance him, so the double standard is really glaring. Bleh.

I was browsing f_fa again for pretty silly purposes, evading spoilers, etc, but I kind of love this nonny's take on Gale/Mystra:

I read f_fa's SW threads sometimes, because they can be interesting, but tbh they're so allergic to bad "Jedi Critical" takes that most of them have come around the other side to "the Jedi cannot be criticized for anything, ever, and if you think any of them made any poor decisions at any point with regard to Anakin ARGLEBARGLE GENOCIDE." There's one valiant soul in a recent thread (not me, I almost never actually post there) trying to argue that Obi-Wan chopping off three of Anakin's limbs and leaving him to burn alive under the assumption that he'll eventually die is morally questionable, actually, and the responses are all defensive nonsense.

I honestly find it weird for anyone to come away from the OT with the conviction that Obi-Wan never fucked up with regard to Anakin, but add in the prequels and ... whew.

(I'm kind of curious if there's any association between "well Anakin deserved it tho" and "Obi-Wan only said Luke's refusal to assassinate his father was condemning the galaxy to Palpatine's rule as a tactic, he wasn't actually wrong" and "but telling the truth about Anakin at any point before Luke left for Cloud City would have been super awkward, so it's okay that Luke had no idea he was attempting patricide." Obi-Wan's failures are what make him so interesting!)

(...relatedly, my best friend and I had a long phone call about SW today, as we frequently do, and I stand by our shared opinion that, while there's a lot of interesting material in the prequels-as-they-are, a potentially very interesting alternate approach would have been a narrative that took Obi-Wan as the clear protagonist from the beginning to the end and focused on him as the flawed tragic hero of the piece in a more subtle way than Anakin is.)

I was trawling f_fa for Jyn/Cassian threads while I wait for my D&D group to gather on Discord, and ran across a post I hadn't seen before reccing both my meta and fic. Felt pretty nice tbh!

(I know better than to vanity-search myself on f_fa, since there are very definitely some nonnies who dislike me and I don't need or want to go looking for their opinions, so I only ever run across references to myself there by stumbling over them. You never really know how that's going to go, so ... yeah, it's cool when it's just random nice people.)

Someone at ffa (I know, I know) was saying that Shadow Weaver's final moments count as redemption if Vader's do, and I'm still ... processing the entire concept. And the total indifference to narrative framing it requires.

I don't want to feel validated by f_fa, but ran over an anon saying "she's a great writer" about my SW fics and ... <3

(SW fandom: not always terrible?)

FFA is frequently a trash fire, but sometimes it's so cathartic.

(There's a current dissection of a fic I viscerally hated, and ... I wouldn't put it that way myself, but IT'S NOT JUST ME, THANK YOU.)