The Legend of Korra - Book One: Air

Amon was drowning in the ocean and suddenly woke up deep underwater, so it makes sense he would desperate use his powers to save himself, not rationally thinking about the fact that there might be witnesses.

I just started playing the finale again, and I agree elements feel very rushed. We should have been introduced to Iroh and the Navy in a standalone episode before this. They just show up out of nowhere in the previous episode, we had no mention of them before this.

Also, at the open of the episode they're hiding with this crazy guy with wild hair. Who is this guy? Again, someone they should have introduced in a previous episode.

 

Fair enough! Still, it would have been nice to have seen where this underground sprang up from.

So, who should the Season Two Big Bad be?

I say make it an evil earth bender. I've always felt that earth bending is the most powerful set to have. I think my favorite battle from the old series is in "The Earth King" when Team Avatar has to fight their way through hundreds of earth bending guards to get to the king. That was epic stuff. As long you're on the dirt ground, I would think a good earth bender would be nigh unstoppable.

Not to mention we always had evil fire benders in the old show and we just had an evil water bender. And only Tenzin or his little kids aren't going evil

 

That's a reasonable conjecture, but that's all it is. Nobody could know that for a fact, because this has never happened before in the history of the world. So the characters, and plenty of the viewers, wouldn't share your certainty on that point. Thus, it would leave things unresolved and would not work as a series finale.

What Mr Light said. He was acting on pure survival reflex at that point.

Part of the core philosophy of martial arts, and Asian spirituality overall, is that the physical and the spiritual are not opposite "sides" as they are in Western belief, but facets of the same continuum. Channeling the spirit is something you do by moving the body (martial arts, t'ai chi). You heal the body by redirecting its spiritual energy (acupuncture). You rearrange your physical space in order to purify it spiritually (feng shui). There is no divide between the two. And in-universe, we've seen Iroh (the original one) explain how fire- and lightning-bending involved directing energy/chi through the body. So it's entirely in keeping with the metaphysical underpinnings of the show's universe that a bender's spiritual connection with one's element could be severed by a physical change in the body. (I gather there's also precedent in Asian martial-arts fiction and legend for strikes that can permanently incapacitate a fighter's abilities.)

In the context of the show's metaphysics, what he's doing is probably some kind of anti-acupressure -- instead of using touch and pressure to redirect the flow of chi through the body in a positive way, he's blocking it somehow -- to borrow Guru Pathik's analogy, he's damming the stream, or redirecting the flow in a way that severs one's connection with one's element.

I'll never understand why anyone thought Koh would have anything to do with this in the first place. I think it started with some attempt to guess why Amon was wearing a mask, but the idea that he'd had his face stolen would never have worked, because Koh's victims had no eyes or mouths, and Amon clearly had both. It was a non-starter of an idea.

And if his abilities genuinely were spiritual, then having him be a bender as well would be overcomplicating things. It would be a revelation that wouldn't go to the core of what he was, and that's poorly structured.

I think just the opposite. If it's just a physical alteration, then it makes sense that it's a lesser form of power than the one the Avatar can apply. If it actually were a power on the same level, that would make it harder for her to overcome, not easier.

But she did unlock it by herself. She is Aang, and Roku, and Kyoshi, and all the others. They're the same soul born into different bodies. Aang isn't a separate person, but a part of herself that she'd never fully connected with before.

No, it's not bad writing, because it's the payoff they've been building toward the whole series. From very early in the first episode, it was established that Korra had trouble connecting with the spiritual side of being the Avatar. That's a theme that was returned to in the second episode and later, and we saw her spiritual side trying to break through when she got visions from Aang. Then in "Out of the Past" we saw her finally begin to apply Tenzin's lessons about spiritual connection and access that side of herself -- but she was only able to do it when she was close to her lowest ebb. So what happened here didn't come out of the blue -- it's been set up and built toward from the start of the series.

It was also a payoff of her character arc. All along, we've been shown that Korra is arrogant, impulsive, lacking in introspection, and that those qualities got in the way of her connection with her spiritual side. As in many heroes' journeys, she needed to learn humility, to go through an ordeal that forced her to look past the one big flaw that held her back. It was only when she felt powerless that she was finally able to let go and be open to change. It fits with Buddhist and Hindu philosophy too -- you have to let go of all attachments and certainties to find enlightenment.

His name is Gommu. And I thought he made quite a memorable impression in episode 1. Although I did watch episode 1 three or four times.

 

I agree that the ending seemed rushed and a little too much of a "happy ending".

I would have liked to have seen Korra spend the second season on a quest to regain her lost elements.

It would have also been interesting to see what effect that many benders losing their bending would have on the world. It might have disrupted the balance of the elements and maybe send them into elemental chaos.

 

Everybody's saying that. But didn't we already have a series like that? The idea behind TLoK is to tell new kinds of stories in the Avatar world. I'm more interested in seeing what new ideas they come up with now. There's still plenty of stuff worth exploring in Republic City, plenty of problems that still need to be dealt with. I bet that once people have seen the second season, they'll be glad it wasn't just a rehash of what Aang already went through.

 

You seem to think that Korra getting her bending back would be treated the same as Aang learning how to bend for the first time. They're completely different situations and could have very unique stories. In Aang's case, he was a bender who just didn't know how to bend all the elements yet. In Korra's case, it would be a quest to regain her powers, not by traveling to different nations and being taught by masters, but by reversing whatever Amon did to her.

Now, I'm not even saying that I would have preferred that over what we got; it's just another way things could have gone. Hell, it didn't even need to last the whole second season. It could have been dealt with in the first couple episodes with Korra accessing her spiritual side.

 

I just saw this again, and nothing Iroh did really constituted "flying." He used the fire jets twice -- once to boost himself onto a plane that was a few dozen meters ahead of him, not long enough to constitute flight, and once when he was falling from a plane, to aim his descent so that he'd land on another plane.

But I have to wonder -- if he's commanding a fleet of ships, why is he General Iroh instead of Admiral Iroh?

 

Anybody know how long we have to wait for Book Two?

 

FOREVER!

 

It will feel like forever!

 

At the very earliest, next year. In one of the interviews I saw with the pair of writers, they said that on average, it takes them two years to put together each year/book, and they had barely begun plotting out book 2.

 

I'm late to the game, but I have a comment on the discussion about non-bending Air Nomads from pages 25 and 26...

While I'm loath to bring up the movie, which I thought was pretty bad overall, I thought how Shymalan portrayed the Air Nomads was interesting. While the other nations consisted of people that were racially similar, he purposely portrayed the monks at the air temple as a mixture of races. This, combined with airbenders being taken from their families to live at the air temples from a young age, would imply that the Air Nomads were not at all a nation, just a spiritual order consisting of those who could airbend, and airbenders could therefore come from any nation.

This would explain why the air temples are scattered and in other nation's territories. It may not be entirely consistent with the show, though, since if airbenders could pop up from anywhere they couldn't have been nearly so certain they were ending the Avatar cycle by killing all the monks.

 

^That's a good point, although it's worth mentioning that there was some ethnic diversity in the film's version of the Earth Kingdom as well. I think some of the EK inhabitants we saw were played by African-American actors as well as Asian actors. And the Fire Nation characters included an Iranian actor (Shaun Toub) alongside the South Asian actors, so there's some degree of diversity there too.

 

That kills the theory, if airbenders could come from any nation during Sozin's times (which couldn't be a secret) there would have been no point in attacking them in the first place unless the goal was to kill the avatar specifically and that would have only led to a watertribe avatar who was a few years younger.

I took some time to rewatch the Korra finale and think about it and the things people wrote in this thread in its defence. My opinion hasn't changed much, I still think the final scene was awul and nothing but crappy writing.
I can deal with Amon waterbending to save his life, but I still think the way he did it was out of character for him. Using waterbending to get to the surface? Sure, that makes sense, but emerging from the water and floating in midair on top of a giant water column for such a long time? That was too much.

 

As suggested above, it was probably reflex. He had been unconscious, he woke up in the water, and he reflexively retreated from that situation as forcefully as he could. And he seemed to be up there longer than he was because of the slow motion.

 

Okay, I've been watching the "Making of a Legend" thing on NickToons -- running through the episodes every evening at 9 Eastern with extra introductory bits by Konietzko and DiMartino -- and they're now halfway through Book 1, so I was expecting they'd finish out the second half next Monday through Friday. Yet there are no further episodes showing up on either my cable's schedule guide or Zap2It. What gives? Why would they only show half the series? I saw a post on Korra Nation confirming that the creators recorded 36 act intros, which works out to 12 episodes, the whole Book 1. So when are they going to show the other half, and why stop now?

I'm also annoyed because I set the DVR to record the first few episodes (since I had other things to watch on those nights) and didn't set it to record a few extra minutes just in case. I expected the added material would increase the running time, but I assumed that would be taken into account in the data sent to the cable box. Yet it turned out it wasn't, so I missed the endings of episodes 2 & 3. Of course I've seen them several times already, but it was still annoying not to get to see them again.

 

Was there any interesting additional information in those commentaries?

 

There are a few possibilities for why they would have chosen a ground forces office:

A) Iroh is a member of the Fire nation's royal family, and the forces may have been made up largely of Fire nation soldiers/ships.

B) They may have mistakenly believed most of the fighting would actually take place on land and gave Iroh command early out of a desire to maintain steady leadership throughout the battle.

C) Iroh may be acting in a manner similar to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs or perhaps a Commander-in-Chief and needs to be on-site due to technological limitations in their long-distance communications methods.

D) The original intent may have been that he act as a figurehead. An admiral could be giving most of the orders while they're at sea.

 

I started a Book Two thread here.