SNCommand said:
NinjaDeathSlap said:
It presented lots of complex dilemmas, but when it came to resolving them, it all became a little too neat and simplistic again
Except for you know the dethroning of the tyrannical Earth Queen leading to a power vacuum that propelled the book 4 villain into power, anarchy lead to tyranny
But you can be pretty sure that if it had been the Avatar toppling the Earth Queen, rather than another villain, things would've turned out alright. In any case, One Zaheer is defeated, his ideology is all gone, and the Red Lotus are never brought up again, despite being shown to be a bigger movement than just him and his inner circle. The show did a good job in presenting a character who really believes in his cause, and is inspirational in that, but in terms of showing people what anarchy actually
is and how it effects people versus the various alternatives? Very little. About 10 minutes of looting in Ba Sing Se, and then nothing until Kuvira unites the nation again 3 years later, where we're just told that she's a tryant now, with no in depth exploration of how she rose to power and how that process might have changed her.
It was the same in Book 1. The word 'Equality' was tossed around
a lot, and it was generally understood that 'Equality' was supposed to be a 'Good Thing', even if Amon was a 'Bad Guy', but it kinda falls flat when the Equalist cause was largely reduced to a dude in the street shouting about bending being evil. Oh, and there was that one scene with the Triads who were using bending to bully a shopkeeper. One scene. Wow. I'm totally on board with the idea that the entire city hates benders and is now rising up behind Amon now... or that as soon as Amon was revealed to be a fraud, everyone just kinda went home.
I don't want to get into a long protracted argument about it, because I
did really enjoy Korra, and I
liked that it's writing had loftier ambitions for storytelling, I just wish it had gone just that extra step further much of the time, to be more thoughtful and less derivative.