Korra’s Defining Villains and What Does it Mean to be The Avatar
The Legend of Korra is defined by its villains.
Each season brings a new set with ambitious goals to change the world, from Amon looking to bring equality through ridding the world of bending to Zaheer trying to bring about freedom through anarchy. But somehow every season always seem to end with the villain personally staring down Korra and telling her that the world no longer needs the avatar.
Korra is also meant to have learnt from these villains, especially as by the beginning of the next season, she (or others) have put in place changes that are vaguely in line with what the villains’ end goals were. Toph says as much in the episode The Calling, that Amon wanted equality for all, that Unalaq wanted to bring the spirits back to the physical world, and that Zaheer believed in freedom. It’s an episode that tries to frame these villains as part of a larger arc for Korra personally, that she must learn from them, recognise their extremism but also let them go.
However whatever thoughts Korra has had about these big ideas, she very much keeps to herself. She doesn’t take the time out to question whether or not the Equalists might have a point, whether or not there is an imbalance of power within the city (after all, the council has four benders on it). She hurls herself into the fight against them in very much the same way as she decides that the Equalist demagogue in the first episode must be stopped, even as she heads up a task force to fight them.
In the end, Amon is stopped not by refuting the ideals of equality he espouses, but by proof that he is himself a hypocrite, being secretly a bender. There is plenty for the viewer to speculate about Amon’s childhood traumas and him continuing those cycles of that abuse, but when it comes to Korra, we do not see her come to realise these things herself. When season two opens and we are told that there is an elected president now instead of a council of benders, it is hard to say if Korra herself had any influence on this or if it all just happened without her.
In much the same vein, Korra never articulates out loud why she keeps the portals to spirit world open and even as the seasons go on, there are obviously huge impaces on a plot, glowing pets and environmental hazard front, but Unalaq’s point about humans losing touch with spirituality remains unanswered. Or rather, it turns out there was nothing special about the spirit world. It may be powerful and fantastical, but it holds no great religious or cultural significance to people. To have ready access to it is not actually a revelation.
In the aftermath of Zaheer assassinating the Earth Queen, we are shown looting and chaos. The narrative has no empathy for what frustrations these people may have felt or what injustices they are now trying to correct. They are shown simply as greedy and opportunistic, despite the Earth Queen’s obvious established despotism. And again, Korra doesn’t really come to appreciate or learn from Zaheer’s philosophy, for all that they have a little more time to talk than the others, what with them meeting in the spirit world.
Which all make it feel like retroactive justification. Or at least, an inability to meaningfully dramatise those moments of personal revelation and growth on the part of Korra herself, the bits that should be the most interesting. Even her fighting a dark mirror of herself feels more like interesting visuals than a moment of emotional growth.
We don’t see Korra realising the importance of the spirit world and why the material world needs to be in contact with it again. Nor do we see her notice the inequality of the world around her and redirect her labour to mitigate it, to change it. All this makes the claim that she has genuinely grown and been of significance to the world ring very hollow when Tenzin reassures her of this. Even her bringing back airbending feels accidental as no one knew that it would be a side effect of her keeping the portals open.
More than that, though, each villain asks by the end of their own season: What use is the Avatar in modernity? What use are her powers in the face of tanks and nukes? What can she do?
And there is no answer to be found within the four seasons of Korra. She doesn’t seek to understand conflicts going on by understanding cultures and their history (like Aang does, however crudely, in The Great Divide). She doesn’t seek to hear out angry or discontented people, doesn’t move to side with rebels or people who seek freedom. She shows little to no interest in or knowledge of the many cultures and factions that she’s implicitly meant to balance.
Some of this can be blamed on Legend of Korra’s structure.
The Last Airbender starts with Aang having mastered Air and knowing a lot about the corresponding culture, but having to learn about everything else. The he spends three seasons looking for masters and learning about the element, which also means he is learning about the culture. Element and culture are bound together and implicitly, learning to balance one means learning to balance the other.
Korra has no such elegance in its setup. In being opposite Aang, Korra has mastered three elements and doesn’t know how to bend air. However, at the same time, the White Lotus Society has been keeping her secluded and as far as we know, she has almost no knowledge fire and earth culture. She is also shown to be ignorant of Northern Water Tribe culture when in conversation with Unalaq. The plot gives her no time or opportunity to learn and she’s left trying to avoid decisions and judgement on the world stage whilst at the same time being hot-headed and eager to punch things in personal interactions.
Furthermore, the narrative gravity around the United Republic means Korra just cannot reimagine herself as a diplomat and peace-weaver, instead she’s taking decisions back to Republic City and calling upon their armies and warships.
Korra brings neither nuance nor insight to the conflicts that she is faced with. Her solution to seeing a man talk about the inequality in a city she has literally just arrived in is to punch him in the face and silence him with her strength in precisely the way he is describing — that benders are able to oppress those without the same power as them. This should be a setup for a lesson that she learns. That she shouldn’t have taken that man’s statements personally and reflect on the power she has wielded so effortlessly since childhood. But that just doesn’t happen.
She makes no move to correct the idea that the war between the Northern and the Southern Water Tribes is a “civil war.” The nuances of whether or not the North has jurisdiction in the South is potentially an interesting one, especially the sending of resources to rebuild after the war shouldn’t necessarily mean being the same nation again. The same applies to the questions of whether or not the Earth Queen can claim ownership of all the people within her borders.
But Korra faces these questions more like inconveniences to her quest. She focuses entirely on how the Earth Queen shouldn’t claim ownership of the airbenders, who should be offered a chance to join the new Air Nation, but offers no further thought to the idea that perhaps the Earth Queen shouldn’t have such authority over anyone. That her rule is fundamentally unjust and needs to be toppled. Of course, this isn’t a decision that Korra should make by herself but the plot has no time for her to meet and talk with anti-royalist forces. Or consider the implications of what it means to create a new nation of airbenders without allowing their family or loved ones to also join[6].
That the role of the avatar is to be a bridge between the human and spirit worlds is brought to the forefront in season two, which also contains vast reams of backstory, answering questions no one should be asking. Perhaps it is just a personal bugbear of mine, but season two reimagines the spirit world as very much just another place and imposes this rigid Manichaeist dualism to it. In The Last Airbender, it was very much strange animistic landscape with beings that never explained their motivations, responding instead to how humans treated nature. The Painted Lady reappeared when the pollution was cleaned up, for example. Many seem associated with places of significance, echoing various animistic spiritual traditions like Shinto.
Much of this was never articulated a specific rule or norm that Korra rewrites, so much as it is that unspoken world building and evoking of things familiar to me from the real world. I felt like I understood what they meant and the thing is, Korra then offers me an understanding of those things so divergent from what I thought that I wonder if what I liked in The Last Airbender was ever intentional. Maybe it was only good by accident.
I will also never understand how anyone can present the idea of the Light defeating Darkness forever as the epitome of “balance.” That is surely definitionally too much Light and not enough Darkness? But again, I digress.
Perhaps that’s why she can just walk off on a holiday with her maybe girlfriend by the end of the season four.
There just is nothing left for her to do in the world.
This blog post began life as a footnote in this other thing I wrote about Korra, mostly about how we imagine futures.
