This season of Avatar fell so far short of the bar set on the previous two series it's almost insulting.
The Aang series was amazing. There was depth and character development everywhere. Every character was memorable, had unique characteristics which set them apart from the others, and the overall struggle, while simple, was given depth by the characters themselves. They exploredThis season of Avatar fell so far short of the bar set on the previous two series it's almost insulting.
The Aang series was amazing. There was depth and character development everywhere. Every character was memorable, had unique characteristics which set them apart from the others, and the overall struggle, while simple, was given depth by the characters themselves. They explored multiple themes which had repercussions within the wider world.
The first Season of Korra, while limited in scope, introduced a theme of equality that raised genuine questions within the Avatar world. They managed to create a primary villain who raised valid issues and yet went about bringing his ideas to reality in a way that was unacceptable and required intervention by the rest of the world, even if you agreed with his premise on equality. It was thought provoking, even if unintentionally.
Reviewing this season requires mentioning what came before because of how abysmally short of those standards it fell.
There is little explanation of the main premise of the villain. Why does he want what he wants? They give you hits without explaining anything about exactly how he turned to believing what he believed. What were his motivations? Why did he do what he did? We do not know, I don't even remember his name after watching, because he was that generic.
The entire struggle makes little sense, his goals and methods are obscure to the point that we can see that rather than being intentionally mysterious, the writers simply expected love of the series to bouy suspension of disbelief far enough to ride through the credits on the last episode.
There are two great episodes, where they return to the Avatar tradition of creating a rich world with a history which matters. They bring it back to the first Avatar, and those episodes are worth watching even without the context of the rest of the season as to why we're talking about Avatar Prime.
The rest is crap. Pure, unmitigated crap. The main character does not at any point undergo any personal growth that we can see or understand. Like at the end of Season 1 when she can suddenly airbend for no reason, when she finally connects to her spiritual side not because she has learned introspection but simply because she got depressed, she makes a thoughtless decision at the end of the second season with worldwide repercussions based on nothing more than "maybe this decision wasn't the best one that could have been made generations ago" and then the world swallows it with cheers.
In fact, in the last Episode one of the few decent characters (Ang's son Tenzen) actually goes so far as to say that he has nothing left to teach the Avatar. Uhh, at not a single point since we met her has she grown as a person in the ways you were trying to teach her to grow from the start, she has not learned a damn thing from you that you were there to teach her, and you're saying you're done teaching her?
Lazy writing. Korra acts like a stupid, uninformed teenager. If you want that to be her character, that's fine. But having the world cheer in response to that like a teenager's whims are what should decide the fate of a planet is stupid and lazy.
I have no hopes for Season 3. Season 2 was a showcase of all of the bad attributes of Season 1 with none of it's high points save 2 episodes which were expositional background, not current story development. There is nowhere good for the third season to go unless they retcon a ton of stuff and go in completely different directions. Something that season 2 proves the writers are either unwilling or unable to do.… Expand
Avatar: The Legend of KorraYour Score0 out of 10User Score
