Legend of Korra Book 4.44: This is (Not) Anime

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > Legend of Korra Book 4.44: This is (Not) Anime

Lt. Danger: Dec 22, 2006; jolly good chaps we sure showed the hun

this allusion meant posted:

LoK's moral system is outright evil. It's about establishing a clear hierarchy of concepts of the good, with virtue over values, and values over vision, and establishing the inherence of each to roles of different actors within the political order.

Every season (except for 3, which is a mess where the writers are weepily licking their wounds and making jabs at their critics) goes like this: there are people in society who value such and such thing--equality between benders and non-benders, spiritualism, freedom, destroyed and backward nations recovering from tragedy and progressing past monarchy--and they are initially visually represented by supporters within Republic City. These people are just sort of milling around the streets all day looking for bad ideas to follow apparently; none of them has a backstory. This is the show's image of the masses--nameless crowds without real lives or needs who are driven by their convictions and easily led astray by anyone claiming to support their values.

Next, a figure for them to rally around is shown. This figure never attempts to achieve goals through diplomatic or peaceful means, and always quickly goes to force and intrigue. No explanation for this is ever given directly, though the charitable implication is that they are incredibly powerful and therefore believe the best way to get what they want is to use that power unilaterally (unlikely, though, since it conflicts with the idea that Amon's grievances aren't correct in the long run). The less charitable but more viable explanation is that it is the very purity of the values they claim to champion that necessarily draws the ambition of unscrupulous men and clouds their judgment with their intoxicating righteousness--a popular trope among the more reactionary branches of liberalism. Anyway these are the show's representations of leaders who challenge the (obviously good, and just) power system that controls the world. Such leaders are driven by their visions of what could be, which causes them to ignore other considerations, even to their obvious strategic detriment in several cases. Surrounding them are a few followers/allies who do have names and backstories, which show why they have a personal attachment to the leaders and their ideas, but always in a way that heavy-handedly implies that their reasoning is impaired by the strong emotions associated with their past experiences. These are there to "humanize" the villains without actually making them sympathetic.

Finally, these bad leaders are defeated by the show's good guys, who are broken up into the sources of moral wisdom (Jinora, Tenzin, the Beifong sisters plus Opal, Mako, anyone from the old team avatar, irrespective of what their roles in ATLA were, etc.) and the others, who are sort of hapless comedy/shipping pieces. The moral sources have the significant characteristic of not arriving at correct conclusions through knowledge, logic, or intelligence, but rather are either good because of innocence and moral purity (the girls) or because a lifetime of experience in "the real world" of fighting wrongdoers gives them instincts that make them seem grumpy or mistrustful or outright bigoted but in fact gives them extrasensory detection of evil. So goodness comes from either lack of contact with social struggle, or being a veteran of fighting on the right side.

It's the opposite of a Run the Jewels line I like: here, the vow to seek vengeance on the vicious becomes a vision, the vision gives us the villain, the villain creates conditions requiring intervention.

All that would be weird enough if not for the fact that the show's political order (and the cosmology that supports its legitimacy) are unbelievably hosed up when you put it in real world terms. The present world leadership are a god living in the heir to a tribal monarchy, the royal parents of that heir, the son of the god's previous vessel, the daughter of a monarch who seized the throne from a sibling with the help of the previous vessel, and a political body set up by the previous vessel. They were about to install a puppet ruler on the Earth Kingdom throne, thus completing an unprecedented centralization of world power and realizing a major aspect the Fire Lords' project of a single world empire united under a virtually all-powerful leader who knows what's best for everyone. And they've deliberately gone and set it up so that it is literally impossible to oppose this without supporting "fascism." And it's impossible to support the idea that bending is a dangerous thing that normal people need protections against without supporting attacks on innocent people. And a desire to preserve cultural traditions from globalization is smeared with suspicion about authoritarian theocracy, which in turn is always deceived by evil spirits. At least they left open the possibility to support freedom from monarchy without supporting a grotesque caricature of revolutionary anarchism, but that only seems to be because the system in Republic City exists as the only acceptable improvement. An amazingly contrived moral universe constructed for the purpose of advocating for an eternal social peace within the status quo represented by Republic City, i.e. modern Western style liberal capitalist rule.

And to be honest, that's why I'm still watching it. It's like a modern liberal version of the hosed up moral universes of shows like 24 or I guess Homeland is today's copy of the same world where everything is a didactic morality play about the necessity of our brutality and the irredeemable nature of our enemies. And well, if you've never gotten silly on an intoxicant of choice and watched something like that to marvel at the absurdity of the premises and the gleeful pride the producers apparently take in their creation, you're missing out.

I agree.

In Korra's defence I think it's an unfortunate artefact of using villains as flawed copies of the hero and not giving enough time to explore why they fail as heroic figures. The show accepts that these characters' various ideologies are necessary and good (in 'moderate' amounts, of course), but doesn't develop it beyond that.

Season 3 does it best, where Zaheer the anarchist is defeated not by Korra, but by 'good' practitioners of his philosophy (the airbenders, the metalbenders) and, ultimately, his own hypocrisy.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2014 20:08

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 21:16

Lt. Danger: Dec 22, 2006; jolly good chaps we sure showed the hun

OldTennisCourt posted:

I feel like on some level it would have made more sense to have used Vaatu as the overarching villain considering he was probably the 'biggest' villain in the whole Avatar series. It really felt weird for basically the God of Evil to be a season villain. Plus it would have been a good tie into the idea of Korra needing to focus on the spiritual side of the Avatar role.

Korra is the main villain of the series. Every season villain is a dark mirror of her in some way (and they made this explicit in Season 4). She achieves final victory when, instead of beating herself up, she finds compassion and forgives/accepts her failures in the form of Kuvira.

What a great ending.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2014 17:00

Lt. Danger: Dec 22, 2006; jolly good chaps we sure showed the hun

Vaatu is the spirit of spiritiness. He has dominion over all spirits and he wanted to usher in ten thousand years of spirit rule in Season 2. So, yeah, the spirit vines are Vaatu vines, but every spirit is as well.

Season 2 was not well written.

# ¿ Dec 21, 2014 21:42

Lt. Danger: Dec 22, 2006; jolly good chaps we sure showed the hun

I think Korra sparing and forgiving Kuvira is also foreshadowed more - not literally, but in a thematic sense. A lot of Season 4 is about people forgiving each other, and that's because isolation (v fascism) v interdependence is a major theme.

# ¿ Dec 22, 2014 19:58

Lt. Danger: Dec 22, 2006; jolly good chaps we sure showed the hun

TheKingofSprings posted:

S2-4: Democracy is kinda lovely sometimes and doesn't get much done

S1: revolutionary communism v conservatism
S2: spiritual atavism v globalised capitalism
S3: anarchism v authoritarianism
S4: fascism v isolationism

It turns out the answer is always in the middle, AKA liberal democracy.

S3 and 4 feel like the best because they give the fairest showing to their concepts - Zaheer, the new airbenders and Suyin are all honest anarchists, Kuvira is about as sympathetic a dictator as you can get. By contrast both Amon and Unalaq are liars and hypocrites and it's difficult to know what they actually stand for.

# ¿ Dec 23, 2014 23:05

Lt. Danger: Dec 22, 2006; jolly good chaps we sure showed the hun

Covok posted:

Kuvira is the most sympathetic even with the rounding up of non-earth benders and dissenters into camps?

That's not quite what I said. Like someone else said earlier, Kuvira is more of a Roman dictator than a Hitler analogue. That's very generous to fascism.

# ¿ Dec 23, 2014 23:27

Lt. Danger: Dec 22, 2006; jolly good chaps we sure showed the hun

ufarn posted:

She was originally harkening back to the Northern Expedition, but the show went full Hitler.

It decidedly didn't. Concentration camps existed before Hitler.

# ¿ Dec 23, 2014 23:42

Lt. Danger: Dec 22, 2006; jolly good chaps we sure showed the hun

Mymla posted:

Let go of your hetero tethers
enter the homo
become gay

Great post, however it was a bit abrupt and unrealistic. Really it needs between 26 and 39 episodes setting it up beforehand to be believable.

# ¿ Dec 25, 2014 17:13

Lt. Danger: Dec 22, 2006; jolly good chaps we sure showed the hun

Oh no! A children's cartoon about growing up and becoming an adult has a plot point where the main character can no longer rely on their elders explaining everything to them!

# ¿ Dec 28, 2014 22:18

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 21:16

Lt. Danger: Dec 22, 2006; jolly good chaps we sure showed the hun

DrPaper posted:

Good riddance to this awful show that was never good, and was indeed an anime.

# ¿ Dec 31, 2014 23:15

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > Legend of Korra Book 4.44: This is (Not) Anime