Korra Finale: What.
Jun. 27th, 2012 10:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ljwritesHere is my two parts review/eight parts rant of the last episode of Korra Season 1, and all the episodes I never got around to reviewing because of Real Life and growing frustration with the show:
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overlithewas right, this is a story about nothing. NOTHING was at stake in the first place, and even those few things that were actually at stake were just fleeting, meaningless. If Korra is about anything it's mocking social movements and social grievances. It's about ignoring EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS in favor of things that AREN'T FUCKING REAL. It's about special sparkly people and how horrible it is to be just mundane, and just human. And they don't have to suffer even that for more than a few days, because Avatar forbid the special people suffer actual permanent hardship!
Oh yeah, it is about one real thing: The paranoia of the privileged that the rabble are out to get them and that social movements aren't about anything real anyway. Unlike, you know, their own specialness which is all that's important in the world. Real-life stuff like less-special people getting murdered, that's something to Just Get Over Already. Or lying bitches who lie and all that.
The worst part was, Korra started out pretending to a story about something. Even when it started focusing on the bending to an annoying extent, I still held out hope that the bending, energybending was at least about SOMETHING, spirituality, balance, the works. But no, I expected too much. This whole thing was a power wank, no more and no less. It had some of the trappings of being deeper, which is where my and others' expectations went astray, but in the end it all went nowhere in favor of being all about the gimmicky fantasy stuff that amounts to precisely NOTHING when it has no connection to anything deeper. It lives up to all the stereotypes of animation being puerile children's entertainment with no meaning or substance, and having war an' shit in it ain't going to make it any more serious.
I keep trying to tell myself this doesn't affect ATLA or my love for it, but at the moment it does. I feel silly and juvenile for writing reams and reams about how much I loved the show, analyzing its politics, culture, symbolism. I know I didn't hallucinate the meaning and depth in the original show, but its supposed continuation is an empty, silly story that goes in all directions and ends up precisely nowhere.
Perhaps symbolic of this, I lost the mega-post I'd written about the social situation in Republic City and why the Equalists could rise to power and so on. I deleted it out of stupidity, not some principled anger, but I'm glad it's gone. It was the essay equivalent of an alternate universe, the one where Korra is a story about society and people's place in it and justice and other stuff that actually matters, and thus don't matter in the inverted logic of the story.
I love ATLA, and I love the community that's sprung up around it. No modern work of fantasy spoke to me quite like ATLA did about my own heritage and history, and through those rich cultural trappings it spoke about universal things, power and war and greed and loss, responsibility, growing up. It was everything a good fantasy should be, a fantastic story about realistic things.
With Korra, I feel like someone peeled back that facade to reveal that hey, it's just moving pictures on a screen after all. And that in turn shows me who I am, a thirtysomething woman who spends time watching cartoons and writing about cartoons. It's almost like Bryan and Mike are engaging in an epic work of meta-art, showing the emptiness behind it all. What does it matter, in the end? Airtime gets filled, whether with gold or crap. Fans buy shit. The fanblogs light up. It goes on and on and on.
Maybe I should thank the creators for showing me it was all for nothing and stories, in the end, are just pretty lies. It's pretty eye-opening, that's for sure.
overlithewas right, this is a story about nothing. NOTHING was at stake in the first place, and even those few things that were actually at stake were just fleeting, meaningless. If Korra is about anything it's mocking social movements and social grievances. It's about ignoring EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS in favor of things that AREN'T FUCKING REAL. It's about special sparkly people and how horrible it is to be just mundane, and just human. And they don't have to suffer even that for more than a few days, because Avatar forbid the special people suffer actual permanent hardship!Oh yeah, it is about one real thing: The paranoia of the privileged that the rabble are out to get them and that social movements aren't about anything real anyway. Unlike, you know, their own specialness which is all that's important in the world. Real-life stuff like less-special people getting murdered, that's something to Just Get Over Already. Or lying bitches who lie and all that.
The worst part was, Korra started out pretending to a story about something. Even when it started focusing on the bending to an annoying extent, I still held out hope that the bending, energybending was at least about SOMETHING, spirituality, balance, the works. But no, I expected too much. This whole thing was a power wank, no more and no less. It had some of the trappings of being deeper, which is where my and others' expectations went astray, but in the end it all went nowhere in favor of being all about the gimmicky fantasy stuff that amounts to precisely NOTHING when it has no connection to anything deeper. It lives up to all the stereotypes of animation being puerile children's entertainment with no meaning or substance, and having war an' shit in it ain't going to make it any more serious.
I keep trying to tell myself this doesn't affect ATLA or my love for it, but at the moment it does. I feel silly and juvenile for writing reams and reams about how much I loved the show, analyzing its politics, culture, symbolism. I know I didn't hallucinate the meaning and depth in the original show, but its supposed continuation is an empty, silly story that goes in all directions and ends up precisely nowhere.
Perhaps symbolic of this, I lost the mega-post I'd written about the social situation in Republic City and why the Equalists could rise to power and so on. I deleted it out of stupidity, not some principled anger, but I'm glad it's gone. It was the essay equivalent of an alternate universe, the one where Korra is a story about society and people's place in it and justice and other stuff that actually matters, and thus don't matter in the inverted logic of the story.
I love ATLA, and I love the community that's sprung up around it. No modern work of fantasy spoke to me quite like ATLA did about my own heritage and history, and through those rich cultural trappings it spoke about universal things, power and war and greed and loss, responsibility, growing up. It was everything a good fantasy should be, a fantastic story about realistic things.
With Korra, I feel like someone peeled back that facade to reveal that hey, it's just moving pictures on a screen after all. And that in turn shows me who I am, a thirtysomething woman who spends time watching cartoons and writing about cartoons. It's almost like Bryan and Mike are engaging in an epic work of meta-art, showing the emptiness behind it all. What does it matter, in the end? Airtime gets filled, whether with gold or crap. Fans buy shit. The fanblogs light up. It goes on and on and on.
Maybe I should thank the creators for showing me it was all for nothing and stories, in the end, are just pretty lies. It's pretty eye-opening, that's for sure.
