@@The_Magman I don't think Koh meant that in a literal sense. He was just hammering home how both Tui and La represented balance, they were two halves of the same whole. You can't have Tui without La, and vice versa.
@@pn2294I mean, that would be true of the fire nation as a whole, right? Everyone in the fire nation held their own opinions of what was happening, but only so many of them had any sort of influence. You could say the fire lords were evil, but the video even describes that they're amoral within the narrative, not immoral. And the fire nation is still the fire nation under Zuko, who is not evil.
Yeah, but i think they meant pokemon (besides legendaries) as the simplistic comedy they can be made into: wathever-colorful-thingies with eyes and names that gotta be catched. Catch all the demonic vatuumons before you can visit vatuu and use your master-tree-ball to capture him.
I saw a comment about the moon and ocean spirits a while back that made me appreciate the scene even more. The moon is "pull", and the ocean is "push". When the moon spirit is gone and Aang basically lets the ocean spirit run wild, all of its attacks are "push". It's such a small detail but it shows the spirits have a domain they fit into.
The "dilemma" of whether or not to let the spirts co-exist with humans again was so absurd to me. You really want Koh the face stealer walking around republic city? We're on the fence about that? How about that scorpion spirit with a star that lures people close so it can grab them and take them to a literal eternal hell in the spirit world. Or the goat spirit that disfigures people for fun. Guess we got lucky that the spirts that crossed were all the cute animal ones and not the nightmare monsters.
Dude they didn't know the Face stealer exist and even then they wouldn't be much of problem because they have bending, something that was shown to be very effective ! Lastly the redcon isn't as bad as people are making out to be . It just flesehes out more were bending and explains why it is so spiritually connected .
@@Dojafish I think you're forgetting that Koh has canonically fought a fully realized Avatar that was enraged and bloodlusted (he stole the avatar's fiancee's face) and lived to tell the tale. I severely doubt that Korra and friends are going to do much. Secondly, the retcon is indeed shit, it completely upends the entire understanding of bending established in ATLA and ruins the mystique of the art with that unnecessary bullshit with the Lion turtles.
It is legit insulting how the spirit world is treated as a commodity in LOK. Iroh becoming a spirit after death is one thing, Korra and Asami going there for a first date/vacation (in the post story comics) is a freaking joke.
Imagine if instead of being plain evil, Vaatu appeared evil when imbalanced because he is a being that acts on pure impulse alone, he represents chaos and passion unrestrained But at the same time, when Raava is imbalanced, she becomes obsesed with order, completely rejecting emotion and change. She represents knowledge and serenity, but taken to an extreme leads her to inaction.
That was the goal through vaatu’s actions (creating spirit portals so spirits can enter physical world) and raava’s actions (order I guess) but the writers questionable decision to include “10,000 years of darkness” or “destroy the world” every other line did not help them out. In fact it wasn’t until season 3 with the airbenders return that I understood the “chaos” nature of vaatu and how he was needed. But then korra calls vaatu a “force of pure evil” in the same episode, so I don’t think she learned anything from her fight
I wrote a comment on this too before I noticed yours. I think raava would also be obsessed with order and control. Almost sorting as well. (By sorting I mean borderline phobic society of separate but equal🤮). If you’ve ever read or heard of The Giver, I think their perfect society would be like that. Which is all notably bad and therefore imbalance is bad both ways. Both sides should’ve been in the avatar and maybe unalok (idc about spelling) wanted to steal one side. Instead of him wanted chaos, it would make more sense for him to want Raava because of his more traditional views. It would be an interesting flip of expectations when chaos is usually deemed as more bad. It would also be interesting cause if unalok succeeded for a bit, it would fundamentally change korra and she would act more brash then she already does.
@pn2294 That wouldn't be boring, that would be setting up the spirits, their world, and how they operate. It would only be boring if writers didn't know how to write it correctly.
The spirits in Avatar have intent though. Hei Bai is seeking revenge for his home being destroyed; just like any human would. We don't know how Koh benefits from what he does, but he his hurting people for his own benefit; just like many humans do. Some of the spirits live in nature or are otherwise connected to nature, but they are not nature.
Yeh, that’s kind of why the spirits can’t be evil expect Vatu” thing fell flat for me. They don’t act like forces of nature, they just act like assholes with superpowers.
@@lordpisces5019nature willingly letting itself be destroyed irreparably would not make sense. It’s human nature to desire more, to push for continual growth, whereas the spirits seek only to maintain. Hey Bai is attempting to drive the humans out of the area, however when a human shows it that nature will return to the area, and that humanity also cares for the land, he exits peacefully. It’s not revenge, as the spirit could easily devastate the town in the name of vengeance. However, it chose to take one person a night as a message, and returned them all once his goal was understood.
It's kinda funny how a show with more "adult" characters has an immature take on spirits, while the show where all the main characters are kids have a more nuanced take on spirits.
Because in addition to the two creators Michael and bryan , there was a 3rd guy. Who left after 2nd season Also, both Michael and bryan interacted with fans via tumblr ...so you can understand how predictably bad korra turned out
I also felt like the late teenagers in legend of Korra were profoundly less mature than than the preteens and young teenagers in Avatar. Obviously it's different because the original gang grew up during a war, so of course they have to be more mature than kids who grew up in peace time, but still. The petty jealousies and romantic triangles felt like a soap opera, not high school or college
I just struggle to understand how the same writers could have worked on both of the series, when there is a clear drop in the quality of the story. I don't hate LoK, I think it's a solid 7/10. But it's just disappointing after ATLA's near-10/10
@@apostatecactus5355its not the same writers. The main writers that drove the ATLA series were aaron ehasz and his wife elizabeth. They went on to make dragon prince on netflix. Korra is the show where the creators of atla, brian and mike, wanted to write their own characters and own story. They clearly arent good writers. They created a great concept and world, but cant write characters or plot for shit.
@@michaelgarrett139 that makes more sense. Although, what do you mean when you say "creators", if not the ones who wrote it? Were they simply the producers?
First time watching Korra I remember not trusting Rava. Her story seemed so cookie cutter purity and goodness that it felt like she was trying to deceive Wan. And I was hoping it would lead to us finding out that she was just trying to give Vaatu a bad name by only presenting her half, and the only way to have a balanced view was to hear them both out or something. But nope.
I saw some fanfics that used that as a premise, where the order Raava promoted was something that the Fire Nation's war would have achieved, by exterminating the "Chaos" of diversity of people of the world, and Vaatu was looking to get the diversity and balance back by making an opposing dark Avatar.
That's a consistent gripe I have with LOK. EVERYTHING is as it seems. They never said X person was bad as a distraction. It was all, "Look over there" and then proceed to go that direction. Nuance did not exist.
@@boardcertifiable I've read fics like this as well- especially in Consider the Wildflowers with Chaos Avatar!Zuko where Raava's 'peace' is where everyone thinks the same thoughts, do the same things and never even imagine fighting because they can't remember how and have nothing to fight over anyway because if everyone's the same, there's no differences to divide and fight over which is why the 100 year war is something she was content to sleep through- if the Fire Nation win then everyone is *one* nation and she is that much closer to achieving her goal- hence why Vaatu is needed to balance her out with his chaos to let people remain diverse and different, even if that isn't especially peaceful. Obviously if she was gone and it was just him, things would be bad as well but that's why they're meant to BALANCE eachother out
the creation of spirit portals also undermines Iroh's and Aangs own spiritual prowess of finding enough focus to meditate into the spirit world, something that was very difficult for the common man to do. and Korra's "solution" to appeasing dark spirits feels very much like a psychologist prescribing anti-depresant medication to people who got mildly depressed because they got dumped or something
Well meditating into the spirit world is still very hard. The portals don't really change that, or undermine the journey they went to before it was open
@@artistaroundtheblock2047 No, because they don’t have to think about or work for it. It’s harder to appreciate something that you can just have whenever you want with little to no effort.
And let's not forget: *Airbenders Are Just Back!* What LOK did in season Three would be the equivalent of Aang snapping his fingers and Hei Bai Forest just growing back to what it was!
The best part: this would have actually made WAY more sense before Korra retconned the origins of bending. In ATLA, humanity taught _themselves_ how to bend the elements, so in theory airbending would be a "lost art" which could be relearned. And then Korra made bending into a gift from the spirits and accidentally ruined their villain's origin story 💀
@@error-try-again-later I love all this criticism towards LOK, such a horrible show. Yet the delusional fans are such dick riders for weird random love drama between 4 people. So many flaws and it truly ruined the Avatar universe, and what adds salt to the wound is that we're gettin another shitty live action movie which is gonna ruin all the messages and characters. They had the most perfect world and yet they fumbled so hard.
@@opportunity3278Fans of Lok always say that it's more "mature" than Atla and that Korra is better avatar than Aang.......i don't see how a spoiled and idiotic teenager who destroyed a 1000 year old airbending relic with firebending is more "mature" They also compare Korra to Katara, saying "if you hate Korra than you hate Katara" which shows that they don't pay attention to the show cuz Katara was good natured, motherly and compassion but could also be impulsive, hot tempered and bitchy at times, she was well rounded so if you take away the good natured things about her you're left with an annoying brat and that's what Korra is
So we’re just going to pretend the owl spirit didn’t just lay down the coldest line in the series with “You think your the first person to believe their war was justified?” That will automatically awaken you as a child yall don’t even know. Nothing is black and white, sometimes things are grey.
I saw that as "both sides" BS. The Fire Nation were clearly against the balance of the world. They genocided one race of people and everything they ever did, they were planning on doing it over and over, and they had just almost killed the MOON. Did Wan Shi Tong really miss all that?
And yet the owl is also seeing things in black and white. All humans are theives who want to take knowledge just for war, even though the professor is sitting right there all he wants is to learn to learn because he loves knowing things. And while war is a terribly complex thing, some battles do need to be fought. Sokka's vigor for vengence needed taming, most of the world needed that. If Zuko hadn't reformed and Aang chosen a route of pacifism likely the earth kingdom would have wanted to crush the fire nation in return potentially destroying it. Still the battle had to be fought, Aang had to defeat Ozai.
@@Jasonwolf1495 This is the whole point of the video. The spirits don't care about the mortals, their business doesn't concern them. Sure there are good people who want knowledge just for knowledge. But there are people who want to abuse knowledge. Heck, harmed his library. This is what he cares about.
4:24 The fact that the Painted Lady DIDN’T watch over the town & abandoned it when her home was tainted makes me think that a lot of the legends people had about their land’s spirits were misconstrued to an extent & that the Painted Lady may have just been thanking Katara for saving her home rather than saving the villagers & just didn’t have the power people thought she did to protect the river 😕
And that's the right choice! The entire point of the episode is telling kids taking care of nature is OUR responsibility. WE have the power and the responsibilty to protect our Earth. Letting spirits take care of it, naratively, would be the wrong choice. And in universe, spirits aren't shown to have a lot of ability to affect the human world. They can't stop their forest from burning down, they can't stop their rivers being polluted, even spirits as old as the moon and ocean can't fight back against Zhou. But this makes sense, after all this isn't their world. They're from the spirit world, they're just living in the human one, but they aren't a physical form there. They represent nature, and forests can't stop people from burning down trees, knowledge can't stop itself from being used for evil, the moon can't hurt us from way up there. They can only watch as humans attack and misuse them. But what happens when we do that? We wind up just hurting ourselves, aka the spirits lash out. Stories of humans being killed by spirits are almost always tales of hubris or idiotcy. It all fits quite well :)
The way I took it was polluted river means polluted spirit, polluted spirit means no power. She didn’t show up until after the river was clean thus cleaning it restored her power
Something that I thought they were going for is having Avatar Wan absorb Vaatu alongside Raava. Where Raava gave him the knowledge to bend every element, Vaatu gave him the power to control them all at once. My thought was that the 'Avatar Spirit' is actually Vaatu and Raava becoming one, which is why every spirit respects the Avatar to some degree. They are the literal embodiment of harmony. Instead Vaatu and Raava are just Jesus and Satan.
The animais in ATLA are made up, most of the time fused with other animals, such as the turtle-ducks. But the spirits are not, they are full animals of real life. Like Pandas, foxes owls and monkeys, it gives this aura of familiarity as well as highlight they don't belong in the world but a particular one just for them. They have their own habitat/ home where they live. The painted lady lived in one lake, such as the fish spirits and the panda in his forest, as well. So just like wild animals you mind to be respectful and careful when going to their domain. In legend of korra this was lost, the spirits became pratically pokemon. Just another fused animal that could exist on the normal world of the series or a simple blob that carries no atmosphere whatsoever
I thought there'd be a twist that neither Ravaa or Vaatu were good or evil. Maybe Ravaa went around oppressing people in the name of peace and order, while Vaatu allowed everyone unchecked freedom even if it led to destruction and harm. Avatar Wan would convince the two to coexist instead of fighting for control
It's funny because thats the whole premise of The Divide episode in ATLA and while it's considered one of the weakest episodes in the whole series its still leagues better than "dis good dis bad'
This would have worked if LoK had kept that the Avatar is the incarnation of the world’s spirit. Because which other spirit would be so invested in balance between the two?
I was so excited when LoK described Raava and Vaatu as "Order" and "Chaos" thinking they were going to do a proper balance of Order and Chaos subplot and have Korra have to realize Rava isn't goodness personified and Vaatu isn't evil, they just both think the world would be better without the other, and Korra would have to make peace between them to restore the balance the first Avatar failed to understand. It would've made Unalock such a good parallel, falling for the same thing Wan did but with Vaatu, believing Raava's reign was making the world worse, segregating the world between spirits and humans, and Raava would never coexist with Vaatu. Meanwhile Raava is trying to convince Korra of the same thing from the other direction, and having Korra realize that and realize the past can't guide her this time because the past didn't work, and her having to figure out on her own that Vaatu has their own place in the world that they need to fill right alongside Raava. And then the ending came and it was literally just good kite kills evil kite. 🙄
@@Lanoira13 i hope this helped you with your day and i hope you take this idea of yours and make a difference story about it because you sure have talent on this .But yeah happy i made your day better 😊
I hate having random airbenders come back it makes the scar on the world from the war to just kinda be fixed out of no where. It takes away from what happened
@@asad5986 not to mention it took what? 150 years for it to start recovering? I don't think it's "cheating" on the writers side, but the natural course of events, the way elements to balance themselves.
As a Christian myself, I also absolutely loathed the Christianization/Westernization of LoK. It was genuinely _beautiful_ that AtLA articulated both a non-Westernized values-system _and_ a genuinely mysterious, _spiritual_ world completely outside of human understandings. LoK trashed that. (Now, that doesn't mean you _can't_ tell a great good-vs-evil story--you absolutely can. They just tried to shoehorn a very basic, poorly-written one into a world that neither needed nor wanted it.) Which is really quite a shame, especially since the Avatar Wan episodes are incredibly beautiful stylistically. One of my favorite things about Aang's run actually came up, not in the show proper, but in the Nickelodeon web game, Escape from the Spirit World, which connected Book II: Earth and Book III: Fire, while Aang was recovering from the wound he received in the caves beneath Ba Sing Se. He reconnects with his four previous lives (including Kuruk), and specifically has an important philosophical conversation with Yangchen, the previous Air Nomad Avatar. He tells her that, having observed the three lives between Yangchen and himself, he's learned that every Avatar lifetime is full of mistakes, foibles, good intentions that lead to bad outcomes, etc. But he has also learned that the Avatar Spirit _is a spirit._ As you say, it's a spirit driven by its own interests and desires and needs. So he asks: Why doesn't the Avatar just rule the world, as an all-powerful spirit that can't die or age? And Yangchen's answer is truly beautiful. "I don't think [it would be better if the Avatar were an all-powerful spirit that never died.] The Avatar must be compassionate toward all people, and the only way to do that is to live with them. The Avatar must experience sadness, anger, joy, and happiness. By feeling all these emotions, it helps you to understand how precious life is, so you will do anything to protect it. If you were an all-powerful spirit living on the top of some mountain, you wouldn't have much in common with an ordinary person. So the Avatar continues to take human rebirth. And with each life, learns what it means to be human." Note: continues to _take_ human rebirth. Yangchen strongly implies that the Avatar Spirit _could_ choose to be a pure spirit, if it wished to, _but it doesn't._ It wants to know what it means to be human, and it wants to experience that through being connected to the land--all of the land, in every corner of the world. Under your analysis, each spirit has something it is connected to, usually in a pretty physical sense (a specific forest, a specific river, the whole Ocean, the Moon, etc.) but sometimes in a more abstract sense (Wan Shi Tong and knowledge). This begs the question: _What is the Avatar the Spirit of?_ It's clearly a spirit, and it clearly chooses to incarnate as human beings in order to connect with life, _all_ life, everywhere in the world. Every Avatar starts from a particular place, but must grow from that context to learn all four elements, to connect with many different cultures, to both protect the world and nurture it. But what sort of spirit could want such a connection--not just to a single forest or river or even the ocean in general, but to the entire world? Well...how about the Spirit of the World itself? And through this, we see a beautiful piece of genuine Buddhist philosophy: that loving-kindness is the necessary result of freeing yourself from petty attachment and grasping, something each Avatar _must_ learn to do in order to master their greatest strengths and aid and protect those they care about (which, when their training is complete, should mean "all people and spirits collectively.") The Spirit of the World, unlike the _genii locorum_ of individual places or things (even things as great as the whole ocean!), would care about _all_ of the world, and everything in it--because that's where its priorities lie. Finally, Avatars that are lax in their duties (like Kuruk and, to an extent, Roku) tend to _permit_ serious problems to arise in the world, often ones that their later incarnations must struggle greatly against; Avatars that are too zealous in their duties (like Kyoshi) tend to personally _create_ problems, often with the same result. Avatars out of balance. Aang has to learn, not just how to fix the problems the world is facing, but how to find balance within himself, so that he can prepare a world for the _next_ Avatar that has neither excessive Yin nor excessive Yang, neither pushed nor pulled out of place. The World-Spirit must seek balance, which means leaving well enough alone when that is the correct choice, and taking decisive action when _that_ is the correct choice. It's terribly hard! Most Avatars we've seen screwed up at least once in that regard. But every rebirth is a new chance to restore balance. To try again--and build something better.
I liked your take but your dead wrong on Kuruk if you read the Kyoshi books you would know he was incredibly hard working and spent his entire life fixing Yangchen's idiotic mistakes
@@marsultor9078 She focused to much on humans and ignored the spirits. As such when ever a dispute broke out between them she always favoured ˈ the human side which lead to the spirits feeling neglected angry and go dark beacuse of this Kuruk had to spend his entire time as avatar hunting down dark spirits which is how he fought Kouh the Face Stealer
I saw in a comment somewhere else, but they brought up a good point that now Koh has access to the human world, hes probably going to go crazy stealing faces
I also don't like how the spirits can just be easily beaten with waterbending even though Kuruk lived a life of pain and suffering trying to keep them at bay
@@racool911 It's ridiculous that it's a water bending technique. All of the elements should have been able to do it, just following the same "harmonious" shape, or such. Waterbending was pushed FAR over the line with LoK. Korra sucked...
@@racool911 well we are 70% water, i don't care how much minerals we have on ourselves water is still a more prominent element, also is not that water is magical is Just that the element in itself is used as a conductor for chi, or at least thats what i understand from atloa, so it makes sense water has healing, is the only element that can work so close and direct with the body, now spirits dont have physical forma, so the idea that any element can help them is dumb since you are using something from the physical world to heal a non physical entity, how? Water makes sense since is part of our biology but theres no reason for it to work on spirits who even when are present in the physical world don't nessesarily have a physical form, let me know if this makes sense since my first language isn't english haha
@@pabloaulestia6310 Your English is good, but the thing is if Water can be used as a conductor for chi, why not spirtual enegy. Also is it confirmed Spirits don't have chi like humans do? It doesn't really matter either way, fictional worlds can have fictional rules. There was nothing that directly contradicts water being able to heal spirits as well, since the reason water is able to heal was never completely established.
For lack of a better word, LoK’s spirits were all just way too human. I never liked the idea personifying “chaos” and “balance” as such clear good and evil, nor have I ever liked the idea of the Avatar as a Spirit/Human hybrid. I’ve really soured on the Wan episodes over the years because they cement the history of the setting and the Avatar as a spiritual concept in a way that I think undermines the mystique of the original series.
it started out really well with raava being the primordial force of order and vaatu as chaos, with too much chaos factions fell to ruin and devastation took the land wherever vaatu tread, I was expecting raavas sole presence to be shown as equally detrimental with too much order robbing their surroundings of freedom and the area becoming stagnant, a fun twist where wan is forced to instead of imprison them, to forcibly unite them and put in a constant effort to hold them together for eternity, and korra breaking the avatar spirit ruined Millenia of work she now has to restart and uphold
One thing I heard from another vid is that raava and vaatu should have been order and chaos, not peace and chaos. This would actually fix a lot as you can explore the good and bad of both. Sure too much chaos isn’t good, but too much order also causes massive problems too. While the writing isn’t that good, this at least doesn’t break the themes of the original.
You might not like it, but that's how it is in real mythology. I always wondered why the show was called Avatar if it had nothing to do with the concept.
For those who are wondering. Koh chose the name "Koh" for himself after becoming distanced from his mother, the Mother of Faces, though legends say that, despite their strained relationship, he steals faces as a way to be close to his mother, who has the ability to give faces.
I remember watching season 2. And after seeing Vaatu locked away, I expected something happening like, people starting to lose the ability to feel anger, or people being way too relaxed during a life or death situation. And then realisng that Vaatu needs to be free. But then he was locked away and it didn‘t make any difference. Like he literally isn‘t needed at all. Goes against the message.
@@aiyeina Yes. And that's because they decided that's how he works. They could have written him as a concept of negative emotions for all beings. But they did'nt.
It was disappointing to go from the idea of spirits being part of the natural world to the more modern interpretation of good and evil. I really enjoy the dualism you can see in beliefs like Shintoism, Dao, and the like, where the goal is balance, not one being better than the other. I mean, I grew up on an island that was created by volcanic activity, and the Kupua responsible for the activity was greatly respected, even while the locals feared her wrath. She created the land that was lived on, but she could easily destroy all the forest and fields on that land should she be angered. She was very much an embodiment of the volcanoes, which are both creative and destructive. That is just how the world is. No good and evil, just forces moving from one state of being to the next. ATLA got that, Korra did not.
Korra is general was missing a lot of Last Airbender's "Secret Sauce": It felt like a series that didn't really grasp any of the original's *subtleties* unless they were explained directly. The different elements didn't feel like they had unique philosophies, styles, and themes tied to them anymore, like they were no longer *spiritual* or *thematic* but simply things that existed. Airbending fared a bit better than the other 3, because the airbenders got so much focus in the latter half of the series, but then you get stuff like Lightning Bending becoming commonplace, and loosing its thematic ties to abuse and how tragically *ruined* the Fire Nation royal family is. It felt like, where the world was driven before by themes, and explored practical application of bending when it suited those themes, like Earth Bending trains in Ba Sing Se, Korra just dove 100% into exploring the practical and physical existence of these things, and lost the sense that there was a greater importance to thing *beneath* what was physically going on. The series felt, in a word, *utilitarian* with how it presented ideas and concepts from The Last Airbender.
Honestly, with the industrial revolution themes we have in LOK, they could've turned it into a story about how lightning bending being commom is a result of exploitation of cheap labor. This would push the connection between lightning and abuse FURTHER. Imagine, workers collapsing on factory floors cause their bosses are driving them to KEEP BENDING LIGHTNING!!!! YOU'RE BEHIND ON YOUR POWER QUOTA!!!! and, much like the real world, with their bosses screaming at them, the workers are too frustrated and upset to bend and they burn out and get replaced. God, so many disappointing, missed opportunities.
That secret sauce's name is Aaron Echoes who wrote the majority of Atla's script. Interestinly, Bryke's solo LoK failed narratively while Echoes' solo Dragon Prince had the correponding opposite problem. Them working together was such a lightning in a bottle.
@@ag8454 Yeah! You could've even tied in Iroh's statements about lightning, that it requires complete equilibrium and the ability to know yourself to such a degree that you can separate the yin and yang energies within your chi, and then bring them back together to release them as a bolt of lightning. You could've had a story about the first power plants being developed with the help of passionate firebenders capable of lightning, and slowly degrading throughout the years as the essence of what actually makes the energy happen is lost, replaced with rote memorization and muscle memory. Power Plants losing power year by year, with the owners being unable to understand *why,* applying the same punishment techniques they would to someone who shovels coal, unable to comprehend that it's the stress itself, the pressure and demand, which is making their benders lose inner equilibrium.
Honestly the spirit world in Korra would make for a pretty poor afterlife, considering that you can't even have the freedom of having a bad day, without risking the world collapsing under your emotions and causing a nightmare
The spirits of Korra seem like a poor understanding of Yokai and Shinto rites of purification. With the little I know of Shinto faith and Kami, they become vengeful if you slight them or allow their shrines to be damaged or dirtied. But at the end of the day they are capricious beings, just as likely to smite you as heal you, like the Kamaitachi it will slice you up then immediately apply salve to mend your wounds before you even notice.
Or the thing that they represent. For example if you have a forest spirit and then clear fell that forest, it hurts the spirit and drives it to a rage, like in Princess Mononoke. Iirc Mononoke literally means an angry or sick Kami basically, who is corrupted by the things occurring in their land or shrine.
The hill I will die on is that Aaron and Elizabeth Ehasz were the secret key to ATLA's incredible writing and unique vibe, that honestly for the most part just died in TLOK. Their writing styles gave the ATLA spirits (as just one example) such a strange and otherworldly aesthetic, beyond full comprehension or understanding, which gave the show an overarching feeling of "epic" or "legendary"-ness, that you just don't see in TLOK, even in its season 2 story of the first Avatar, Wan. A lot of ATLA seriously felt like the retelling of legends, of things happening long ago that we can't fully explain, but just understand through feeling. Almost everything in TLOK is cartoonish and over-explained, with basic black and white thinking. I don't hate the show by any means, but it's always disappointed me that the Ehasz's were never a part of the sequel series.
I imagine the whole team was integral, like the original teams that did Silent Hill 1-3; without just the right people all in one place and time, bad ideas go unchallenged, good ideas don't get properly developed, and nothing is executed quite as well as it could have been
@@aff77141 I honestly agree, I think ATLA was lightning in a bottle and it couldn't have existed without all of the complicated variables and individuals working on it. But I do still find it hard not to see TLOK as like "what ATLA might've been if the Ehasz's hadn't been there," knowing that they sometimes had to reel in some of Bryke's dumber ideas. And just knowing that Elizabeth wrote essentially all of the more mature and fundamental episodes of the show always felt significant to me, idk. That being said I know TLOK already had a LOT working against it from basically the very beginning, so it's probably a miracle in itself.
What really bothered me was how the series kept saying that humans and spirits must coexist and how humans are flawed, but like, spirits are colossal arrogant, not to mention racist assholes. Like, legit , most people had to live in the backs of Lion turtles because spirits would go full murder hobo on them. That really makes it feel less like "humans are destructive and ignorant, and have lost their way" and more like, "why should humans have to try to appease and share their world with a bunch of beings that straight up do not like them? And why do spirits get to have any say on how beings from another dimension should treat their own world when they themselves are shown to be just as flawed?"
Yeah it never made sense we are told Vaatu the dark evil spirit destroyed the boundary between the two world and this action pretty much drove humanity to extinction with the only thing keeping them alive being the lion turtles who spirit dare not mess with. If Wan did not close the portal the conflict would still continue. It only thanks to 10,000 years of isolation that humans can now fight back the spirits if they attempted what they tried before. This ironically also makes peace possible the bender who are a minority can keep the spirit in check allowing for human and spirits to coexist.
It's not like humans were respectful too? Each spirit they saw, they immidiately attacked with their bending bc of fear. They lived on the lion turtles bc out of fear, for being something else then a human. That's how humans now days are too. Wan proved that with showing respect towards them, you can earn their respect too.
@@ayoubazahaf1511 That’s a bit muddled though if recall the worlds were never originally together and were once separate realms before Wan’s time, and when the realms merged the spirits essentially colonized the human world and pretty much put them on reserves. Would paint the spirits in a darker light and makes the idea of humans having to just tolerate spirits in there homelands a bit icky.
@@brandonlyon730 Colonize is a big word. No one told the humans not to enter the spirit world. Even ancient monks visited the spirit world to meditate in te tree of time, so it's not like they weren't welcome? Spirits were misunderstood by humans (due to their fear), which led to spirits to misunderstand humans.
Well, first off, I would like to clarify that "yin" is represented by the black section of the typical Yin-Yang symbol, not the white. Thus, Raava is meant to correlate with the yang, and Vaatu the yin. Which leads into the main reason I actually have with the whole idea of these two: if anything, _Raava_ should have been the one to start the conflict. As stated by the video, yin and yang are not simply "good" and "evil". For one they don't apply to morality, but the forces of the universe. To illustrate, let's use the sun and the moon. In fact, the words yin-yang are derived from sun and moon! In Chinese, they are written as "阴"(yīn) and "阳"(yáng), derived from the words "月" or "月亮"(yuè or yuè liàng, both "moon"), and 太阳(tài yáng, "sun"). Why the sun and moon are such good examples is because of their relationship with light. The sun generates light, yes, but the moon doesn't "suck in" light, because it's not simply the sun's opposite. It instead takes in the sun's light, and then reflects it. It's not an opposing force to the sun, but instead complements it. And this dynamic also exemplifies one of the most common examples of yin-yang: the active vs. passive. Raava is coloured white, which means she represents the yang force. She, not Vaatu, should have been the one to take action. She, the embodiment of the powerful and active yang force, should have been the one *doing* something instead of Vaatu, the subdued and passive yin force. This is not to say I agree that there should have been conflict at all, at least the kind shown in Legend of Korra, but it would have adhered more to this real-world philosophy the writers were attempting to adapt into their story. Raava cannot represent both light and peace, if she was truly meant to serve as a yang force in the world of Avatar. She would be far too active to be considered "peaceful" by human standards. And conversely, Vaatu would never instigate a conflict because he embodies passivity and calmness. And they must constantly keep _each other_ in check, because neither is good in excess. Too much light or too much darkness, either way the world goes blind.
Thank you for clarifying Yin is the Black Side & Yang is the white side. I was both confused and frustrated seeing the terms being used incorrectly. However it isn't like Rava & Vatuu are an accurate representation of Yin & Yang by any stretch of the imagination. As you said Rava should have been the active one and Vatuu should have been the passive one, but there's also the fact the gendered voices the spirits have are wrong. The Yin side is considered feminine while the Yang side is considered masculine.
The fact that the whole point is that “good” and “evil”/yin and yang are supposed to be in balance so they decide the best course of action is for them LOCK YANG UP PERPETUALLY SETTING EVERYTHING OUT OF BALANCE.
Not only is The Legend of Korra inferior in its depiction of spirits, it also fails in building upon the lore we had gotten in The Last Airbender. The humans are said to have learned bending from the original benders - the Moon, the badgermoles, the dragons and the bison. These animals developed bending as a means to survive, and the Moon is, well, the Moon. As humans continued to coexist with these animals (and the Moon), they adopted their techniques to better their lives. In The Legend of Korra, that narrative is chucked into the bin and is replaced by the lion turtles. Suddenly, humans didn't learn bending from the first benders, but instead were given bending by the lion turtles when they were venturing out into the Spirit Wilds. So which one is it? Trying to mesh these explanations together just creates so much confusion and unnecessary ands and buts.
Bruh, it's a miniserie of 13 episodes and almost each season was renewed. What do you expect? They've got to focus to tell their plot in that short of episodes.
The Animals lore was stupid and made every non bender look stupid in turn. If Oma and Shu were non benders that became benders then every non bender in the north and South Pole are completely dumb and Aang is dumb too since Appa can just teach Sokka air bending anyways
@@ayoubazahaf1511 Yeah I still respect the creators of Korra. They did their best with what they had and as much as people hate on it, as a stand alone show it's actually all right but it's still very frustrating how it kind of ruined Avatar.
I think that while that's how they learned, it later became genetic. Besides people weren't just running into animals and asking them to teach them how to bend either. What I think tlok could've meshed in the two was that everyone has chakras, in order to bend (before it becomes mainly genetic) The lion turtles could open people who they felt wortty to bend chakras that made them able to do so. Then they would learn from the animals how to make it possible, then as humanity modernized and evolve, people would start to be born with the ability to do so. Also toph even mentions that she learned earthbending from the badgermoles so idk why they even they kinda ignored it in tlok.@@The_Magman
Amazing analysis. It hurts when I see comments like "I love how Korra expanded the lore of the spirits and the Avatar". I'm always like "dude, that's no expansion, that's an absolute retcon". We didn't need to know any of that. Sometimes just the mystery is way better, but especially if you're going to replace the mystery for something so shallow. Korra fans always claim this show to be darker and more mature and all they did was take a genuinely mature show disguised as a kids show and turn it into a true kids show disguised as a teenagers show.
The animal aspects of the spirits in ATLA felt natural and if the spirit was provoked like heibai, they would take a more unnatural form, it just worked they felt so much more believable
I remember watching S2 for the first time and seeing big blue Korra battle it out with Vaatu and laser beams shooting out of their chest and wondering if it was a joke. By the time Jinora came on the scene as a magic fairy, I knew I was done and I hated it.
My favorite bit is in S4 when Korra asks that Bird-Eel thing for the spirits help in stopping Kuvira. He dismisses her, basically saying that it was a "human war/problem". Several seasons of trying to co-exist, and Korra gets blown off. We get this psycho dictator absolutely razing old growth forests and spirit vines to fuel her dumb mech superweapon, and the spirits can't lift a finger. Kuvira is literally grinding up their homes for ammo, they should all hate her and want her stopped on principle, but they go "nope, you deal with it". They're just awful.
My personal favourite had to be Wan Shi Tong, who in avatar made it very clear that he has no interest in either side of a conflict and shows great disdain for those hunting for power, who in Legend of Korra was written to just... Pick a side in a conflict and aid someone longing for power. Good job guys.
Honestly it would be interesting if (without those portals of course xD) Harmonic Convergence wasn't an ultimate battle between evil and good, but rather a phenomenon, where the spiritual energy kinda "overflows" the world of the living, and all humans could interact with spirits. Imagine, the spiirts all come to the world of living and are devastated about the mentioned industrialization and destruction of natural environments. Just imagine the conflict for Korra to solve. In my opinion that would have been much better than dealing with a classic battle between good and evil
@@archont2343 much like how if book 1 ended and the rest was Korra getting her other bending back that coulda been awesome, not to discount book 3 and book 4. And a good chunk of book 2
I always thought that killing the moon spirit and the ocean spirits reaction was also a subtle nod at science. Cause im pretty sure if the moon disappeared in the real world, the oceons would reak havoc on earth
No he’s right. Not just the ocean either. the moon’s pull is part of earth’s balance. So basically the earth would start wobbling a ton, and that would DEFINITELY slosh around the ocean, and the weather would be hellish too.
@@Mavuika_Gyaru the removal of the moon would cause the current tides to crash down to ocean level, which would cause insane tsunamis all over the planet. The moon doesn't stop pulling on the ocean, it circles the earth and causes a "bump" in the water directly below it - that bump is gradual, though, which means it rises and falls smoothly from the perspective of one point on Earth. If the moon just vanished, that bump would collapse instantly, flooding the world.
A good fix for hellkite story would have been if Korra had let Hellkite join her and rava in becoming one being. Rava and Vatu could have had their eternal spirit struggle inside the avatar and restore a major imbalance to the spirit world all in one go.
lol, I'm pretty sure the Giant Blue Korra vs Red Una-Kite fight is around where I dropped the series even though I tried to give Season 2 a shot but the more bs they added about the spirits and the first avatar the more I hated it. The retconning was just too much for me in general but then they had the ridiculous Kaiju fight between red and blue and then Aang and the previous avatars being basically erased.... nope, I was done.
@@PyttStop no they weren't. it was season 2 when unalaq ripped raava out of korra's body and killed her, severing korra's connection to the past avatars
The most interesting aspect of the avatar was that he drew his power and wisdom from his past lives. But at the end of the day the avatar still was human and could do mistakes as all humans do. But in Korra the avatar is presented as an ultimate force of good than can do no wrong and it ruins everything
One of the rare times when I view a sequel made by the original creates as non-canonical fanfiction. Really glad I never wasted my time watching Korra on it's own
Imagine being a fan who wants the bad taste of the movie washed out, and then you wait and get this steaming pile of crap of a show. 🙄 They caught lightning in a bottle with ATLA, but something changed and couldn’t do it again after.
It's a shame we'll never get any kind of interesting representation of Zoroastrianism culture and beliefs and storytelling, since it's almost inevitably going to be bogged down by Christian bullshit
I was just thinking that it was akin to Zoroastrianism! I thought that “Ahura Mazda Kite” and “Ahriman Kite” would be more accurate that “God Kite” and “Satan Kite.” In early Christianity, Satan was subservient to God, and tested his people. They only become opposed to each other largely because of the influence of Zoroastrianism.
@@the_aberration7398 Glad to know I wasn't the only one. I don't see the dualistic "pure good vs pure evil" as a bad trope, I mean it has been a pretty successful trope for a reason, it just doesn't fit in with the Avatar universe and it's take on the supernatural. Would've been interesting if the light/order spirit had gained dominance and the world began to grow stagnant and people began losing their drive to do anything, forcing Korra to have to team up with the dark/chaos spirit to shake things up again. This would have show the balance between yin and yang better than what we got. In most denominations of Christianity, at least the protestant ones, Satan is still seen as subservient to God and is just a corrupting influence tempting people to sin. Possibly a result from breaking off from Catholicism and rejection said Zoroastrian influences, even if unknowingly.
Interesting idea. And yeah that's my only problem with this video. I wish she had pointed out the black and white good and evil trope isn't always bad. It can be done well. Samurai Jack is an example of this.
@@darksideofevil13 Black and White mortality is a good trope and has been used well countless times. I think the main problem people have with it being used in Legend of Kora is the fact the Avatar world takes place in a world inspired by Asian cultures, so one would expect the spiritual aspect to also follow a more Buddhist view on good and evil instead of defaulting to the black and white view.
I'm extremely curious to see what the creators would have done with the Legend of Korra if they weren't surprised by the approval of 3 more seasons than the 1 they planned on.
Yea I really hope they don't do isolated seasons for the next show. Korra did it well but it would've been so much better if the seasons were connected more
Where do y’all keep getting this misconception from? Last Airbender was approved one season at a time, Korea’s team was initially a 12 episode miniseries but was later greenlit for 52 episodes. So how do you figure they were waiting for each season to be approved?
One thing I really didn’t like from the introduction of Raava and Vaatu is that by having the “spirit of light and peace” merge with the Avatar the writers transformed the Avatar themselves as someone inherently good without nuance. Before LoK, I always thought that the Avatar was conflicted between human morality and the spirits amorality, thus making the role of “the bridge between the two worlds” much more complex and difficult. Futhermore, by having the spirit of light in them and not something more neutral, or “evil”, I feel that it takes away the struggle of what the right corse of action is for the avatar to take, that because not everything what is best for the spirits is also the best for the humans. A good example form me of the Avatars being morally gray is Avatar Kyoshi when she protected her people and “killed” Chin the conquerer (it was an accident but she had all the intention to do it), in this scene I always felt she was outside human morality.
No kyoshi was just a hard bitch. Like she said she was willing to kill him, but tried for the more peaceful approach. Honestly kyoshi is one of my favorite avatars because she explored the idea of the opposite of aang. She was slow to react but quick to destroy. If you got her attention congratulations you now have her undivided attention. You don't want her undivided attention. But the avatar is supposed to reflect the world back into balance. So the time kyoshi lived was so dangerous and hectic that her iteration of the avatar was violent and strong. Willing to kill. Every avatar is shaped into the person they become by their struggles they have to deal with. The shape of the world at the time. They are one spirit reincarnating into 1000's of different lives. Each one unique, but still the same a balancing scale. If it's to violent whatever it takes to bring back to the middle if its too peaceful, there are probably many avatars that directly caused turmoil. We know there are thousands but we only know of like 8. Most of the time it was accidental but they still caused unbalance that the following avatar would rectify.
As someone who only saw book 1, I was curious to watch book 2 since I love the water tribe and the concept of Civil War sounded cool. It's disappointing to hear that it wasn't anything I hoped it would be.
Actually the first half of book 2 is incredible. Honestly the writing is on par with ATLA but then it just throws all of it out the window to focus on the ultimate spirit battle of good and evil nonsense. Such a shame
Another thing that breaks the analogy of Raava and Vaatu to Yin and Yang: Raava, who represents the positive principle or Yang, is female, while Vaatu, who represents the negative principle or Yin, is male. But we can't have Satan be a woman so they flipped the genders around.
It’s almost though it was never supposed to be a one to one comparison to begin with. If it was, then Avatar should’ve been a Woodbender rather than an Airbender
@@pn2294 Not only is that an apples to oranges comparison, the Chinese element analogous to Air is Metal, not Wood. If you're going to try and dismiss my argument with whataboutism, at least make sure your own facts are straight.
@@HunterStiles651 I am getting my facts straight. Wind is oftentimes lumped in with the Wood Element in Wu Xing. You’re arguing that Air is Metal because they both represent Autumn, correct? Ultimately, I singled out Wind because Fire, Water, Metal, and Earth are already in the series.
Raava and Vaatu were never Good and Evil (Yin and Yang) to begin with. Those are Tui and La. Vaatu is darkness and chaos and Raava is light and peace, although it sounds similar, it is different
This is a really solid video essay. Lots of citations from the show to prove points, and a clear and distinct knowledge of the subject. It's obvious this essay was made out of love for these shows, and I really appreciate the information presented. I've always been irked by many things in Korra, but I could never put my finger on exactly why the spirits in TLOK bugged me. This video did an amazing job of helping me understand that why.
if the kites were going to exist they should've been Order and Chaos, Subjugation and Freedom. and Unalaq should've learned the other 4 elements so it was an actual avatar v avatar fight, and at the end Korra should've either taken Vaatu along with Raava and been the avatar of both, learning to balance the two concepts, or both spirits should've been eliminated
ATLA: "Twi and La, Push and Pull, Moon and Ocean, Good and Evil...in an eternal dance to keep the balance." LoK: "Here's LIGHT and DARK, White and Black, one is definitely GOOD, one is definitely BAD. lelz" Gone was the nuance. Not to mention the over-abundance of decorative, shapeless "spirits" in LoK, while the actual Spirits we met in ATLA had a function. They really cheapened the Spirit World in Legend of Korra. I still wonder what LoK would've been if Mike and Bryan were still working with Aaron Ehasz, the main head writer for most of ATLA. Ehasz went on to do his own series, The Dragon Prince, which also had some shortcomings -- making me think he excels if Mike and Bryan are around to "balance" him out. They must have had some sort of falling out, which sucks, because they, as a team, really did some magic in ATLA.
The good and evil spirits just feels like a Paper Mario Toad situation with everything feeling generic. And this video is phenomenal in summarizing why Book 2 of Korra always felt off.
There’s a snippet showing the spirits early in the video that made me think “That looks straight out of ghibli not avatar.” Not five minute later you bring up that exact issue. I think it’s safe to say I agree with you lol
Avatar vs Korra is a great example of why the writing staff matters, especially in today’s climate. While the creators worked on both shows, the actual show runner and writing staff were completely different for each series. The creators built a fantastic world and story, but the show runner and writing staff were the ones responsible for bringing that world and story to life When you swap them out you’re not going to get the same product. You can see this with the Dragon Prince which was created by Avatar’s show runner and does a much better job at capturing the original feeling of Avatar than Korra ever did
Thank you for putting into words why I had such problems connecting with Korra after Aang. I always had a strong sense for good media but seldom the ability to express why. Watching essays like yours help me understand myself so very much
I'd also like to point out that the often associated Colours of White and Black for Yin and Yang are actually not correct as while the Yin-Yang Symbol is typically portrayed s this contrast of light and darkness in Chinese Cosmology the two were actually represented by the Colours Orange, or sometimes Red, (Yin) and Blue (Yang) because each these were the colours of the Tiger and Dragon which also represented/embodied Yin and Yang. This is why the Korean version of this symbol, the Taegeuk, is Red and Blue, rather than Black and White.
The only time it made any sense of the spirits being upset in Korra was the scene where those bat spirits flew out of the neglected Air Nomad meditation circle. A circle that has clearly not been used in 200 years. Which begs the question as to why it had not been used that long.
I would have liked more if Legend of Korra decided to make dark good/peace spirits and light evil/chaos spirits and not just stereotypical good = light, evil = dark situation
My idea was that both Vatuu and Rava should of been the spirits that inhabit the avatar. Where the avatar is can be both chaos and order, light and dark, good or evil. This allows for Aangs no kill rule while also allows for Kyoshi absolute abandonment for concern of her opponents. It keeps them able to have flaws. Verse having just the embodiment of light inside of them more or less justifying everything they do. Since they have the embodiment of light in them.
Why is it that chaos is always considered bad? I always found it interesting that in the Mistborn series, the shard Ruin is technically not "evil" in the traditional sense even though he is definitly made out to be. He simply wants what he was owed, the destruction (aka "ruin") of what he helped create.
Picture it: Korra becomes Avatar at a time when the spirits are diminishing and facing extinction due to humanity's rapid industrialization and modernization. Although Aang meant well, his focus on Republic City lead to his inability to see the damage being done by this change, ironically enabling the environmental damage he and Team Avatar chastised and witnessed under Fire Lord Ozai. Korra would have to figure out how to restore balance between the natural / spiritual world and the mechanized / modern human world, or face increasing agitation from the spirits, or them abandoning the human world completely. It's also possible that Korra would be witnessing the decline of the Avatar Cycle. Aang's descendants are only airbenders left in the world, so Korra would be the first Avatar to encounter the difficulties of learning airbending, since it's understandable that a lot of airbender knowledge would have been lost. Also, the dragons would also be facing extinction, if they haven't died out by Korra's time. And although firebending is still widespread, the deaths of the last dragons could signal the decline of firebending as well. So, Korra would be in a very difficult position, humanity's expansion and destruction of the natural world, the spirit's agitation and withdrawal from the human world, Korra facing the challenge of how an Avatar can exist in a modern, technological world, and Korra potentially witnessing the decline of the Avatar Cycle, or even *being* the Last Avatar.
I vote for retconning/redoing The Legend of Korra altogether. Excellent video by the way! I think a lot of us had the same issues with LoK but we didn’t know how to put our thoughts into words as you did!
I learned this from studying the Ancient Egyptian deities. None of them are classified are good or evil and they all represent natural entities who have done mischievous acts in their lifetimes. Thank you much for this video ❤
You mentioned it briefly but I feel like if the kites were order and chaos it would’ve been so much better. Like order would be rigid, obedient, controlled, maybe even sorted and phobic (separate but equal 🤮). With order the dominating force the would be like the giver, it would explain why humans and spirits were so separated. Where as chaos would change, creativity, mixed peoples & thoughts. With chaos in control it would be ultimate freedom of choice, lawless, anarchy. Then a balance would be entirely necessary. And both should’ve been taken into the avatar. If you wanted to make unalok (idk how spelled and I don’t care) “the bad guy” you could’ve made him want to take 1 part which with his traditional views order would make more sense. And if it was stolen it would fundamentally change Korra as she’s missing a part of her self and leaning more into chaos which at this time she already did more.
Maybe, to be in line with ATLA's concept of spirits, the plot of LoK season 2 could instead have been that one of Vaatu and Rava had disappeared and that's why the other was causing having. Instead of locking one of them away forever, Korra would have to find/free the one that was gone to restore balance.
The idea of humans and spirits having to coexist basically went nowhere. Book 3 started off with showing the struggle of living together only for it to get forgotten about for the rest of the season and resolved offscreen. Then in book 4, when Kuvira attacked republic city, it would’ve been the perfect opportunity to show that spirits and humans had bonded and truly could work together, but when Korra asked them for help they just went “nah” and left
Spirits in TLOK are written as either super evil bad juju stuff, or awwwww so cute look at the little whatever it's so cute. Spirits are all over the place, and don't serve a purpose like in ATLA. They're not there to explain natural phenomena, they're just... there.
“Lore is not a story” - THANK YOU! It blows my mind that the Korra writers fell into the same lore hole that Lucas did when writing the Star Wars prequels, which were still pretty new when Korra was being written. If you explain the minutiae of a fantasy world, it stops being a fantasy world!
The whole light and dark thing also takes agency away from spirits. They no longer do “good” or “bad” things because of their own interests, the pain they feel, their anger towards humans, no. They’re just “thrown out of balance” and forced into doing good or evil things. Maybe we could have had spirits who side with Raava or Vaatu without being good or evil. Maybe Raava supports human/spirit integration while Vaatu is a purist and believes spirits must be kept separate and spirits join either cause depending on their individual beliefs (or maybe remain neutral because they just don’t care). But that’s nuance and we banned that from 2010 onwards sooo…
i had these EXACT thoughts nearly word for word when i was watching the legend of korra with my friends. i recall vividly having a visceral, gut reaction of dislike for the way the spirits were brought up in korra and you laid out all of the feelings i had about them so thoroughly here. awesome stuff
I wish so much that we could go back in time and make it so 1) Vaatu represented aspects of growth, passion, and change, thus chaos, 2) Korra had to fuse with Vaatu to reunite with Raava, 3) the lesson is to embrace and balance both sides of yourself, never suppressing one over the other.
To be honest Amon has a lot more nuanced then unalock Because his motivations came from a place of genuine good despite his methods not being the best it came from a place of genuine good and wanting to help the oppressed
Yeah, though I’d also like to add that Unalaq’s motives were also more nuanced before the second half of season 2 where it was revealed to all be a lie and the only goal was to release the Pure Evil spirit kaiju.
I know I'm a year but I'm saying this, I would have liked season 2 to focus more on the civil war aspects than the spirits, like during the second half spirits are more focused wrongly and the civil war is ignored and just fixed itself
notice how aang didnt just fight haybai for 'destroying' the town, but instead, came at the situation from a rational standpoint and tried to understand why haybai was so angry and how to fix it. it's an infinitely more mature approach and gives the spirits depth and motives that humans and the avatar must try to understand, so as to live in harmony with each other. in direct contrast to its predecessor, as so exceptionally expressed in this video, LOK decides to simplify and reduce spirits to blanket white and black morality and shoehorn them into humanity's moral framework that leads to scenes like Korra fist fighting a spirit because cool action scenes are better than good writing
I always liked how the original series spirits were mostly designed after things that exist in reality (Owls, fish, centipedes and so on) but heightened to 11 to give them this vibe that blurs between reality and the supernatural. Taking a familiar thing and twisting it slightly results in more of an emotional reaction from the audience than just an ambiguous...glowing...thing...
Another reason I hated the spirit portals is that they just felt like an excuse to allow people the bend in the spirit world therefore making things easier for our "heroes" to 'route-one' the solutions to their challenges more frequently than not.
I think another thing that annoyed me about there being spirit portals is the fact that it cheapens the purpose of the Avatar being the bridge between the two worlds. The Avatar was supposed to pretty much the only person that could link with and understand spirits on a fundamental nature in them being basically a half-spirit, half-human. But, in Korra now, it seems the Avatar only really gained this title since they locked the door to get into the spirit world so no one else could really speak to them
The Rava Vatu backstory could have been saved ( as you mentioned briefly) if Wan in the end combined both into himself, forming the avatar soul, then we would atleast have a balance motif. Also the lion turtles being bending dispensers could have been reworked. you had the Moon,Sun (+dragons), bisons & badgers Bryke!
My thoughts exactly. Or Korra could’ve done it. If we have to go the light vs dark route, imagine the storytelling possibilities of Avatars now harboring both Raava and Vaatu within them
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
I also loved how in the show, Koh the face stealer isn’t described as “evil”, he’s simply described as “dangerous”.
But Koh describes the Moon and ocean spirit as GOOD and EVIL
@@The_Magman I don't think Koh meant that in a literal sense. He was just hammering home how both Tui and La represented balance, they were two halves of the same whole. You can't have Tui without La, and vice versa.
He wasn't evil, he just really likes stealing people's faces.
I think that’s dumb to be honest. It’s like saying that the Fire Nation was just “dangerous”.
@@pn2294I mean, that would be true of the fire nation as a whole, right? Everyone in the fire nation held their own opinions of what was happening, but only so many of them had any sort of influence. You could say the fire lords were evil, but the video even describes that they're amoral within the narrative, not immoral. And the fire nation is still the fire nation under Zuko, who is not evil.
In ATLA, the spirits felt like something otherworldly. In Korra, they were glowy cartoons.
Straight up Pokemon
@@Olivetree80even Pokemon can be otherworldly
Yeah, but i think they meant pokemon (besides legendaries) as the simplistic comedy they can be made into: wathever-colorful-thingies with eyes and names that gotta be catched. Catch all the demonic vatuumons before you can visit vatuu and use your master-tree-ball to capture him.
no they're still otherworldly. They aren't mysterious but they are otherworldly
In Korra they're just aliens in a world where everyone knows about aliens but not everyone has met one.
I saw a comment about the moon and ocean spirits a while back that made me appreciate the scene even more. The moon is "pull", and the ocean is "push". When the moon spirit is gone and Aang basically lets the ocean spirit run wild, all of its attacks are "push". It's such a small detail but it shows the spirits have a domain they fit into.
Funnily enough the only pull movement I saw was when the moon spirit returned, and zhao got pulled into the water.
@@creativeartivity Moon Spirit goes 'yoink'.
@@marcelocapeljunior3579 Ocean Spirit goes 'yeet'
Imagine if the Ocean Spirit was killed instead and Aang just became a black hole
Ocean Spirit: "Shinra Tensei!" xD
The "dilemma" of whether or not to let the spirts co-exist with humans again was so absurd to me. You really want Koh the face stealer walking around republic city? We're on the fence about that? How about that scorpion spirit with a star that lures people close so it can grab them and take them to a literal eternal hell in the spirit world. Or the goat spirit that disfigures people for fun.
Guess we got lucky that the spirts that crossed were all the cute animal ones and not the nightmare monsters.
Added to the retcon that human were given bending to not get killed by spirits.
he can steal the face of korra and her idiot friends i wouldn't mind
Dude they didn't know the Face stealer exist and even then they wouldn't be much of problem because they have bending, something that was shown to be very effective !
Lastly the redcon isn't as bad as people are making out to be . It just flesehes out more were bending and explains why it is so spiritually connected .
@@Dojafish I think you're forgetting that Koh has canonically fought a fully realized Avatar that was enraged and bloodlusted (he stole the avatar's fiancee's face) and lived to tell the tale. I severely doubt that Korra and friends are going to do much. Secondly, the retcon is indeed shit, it completely upends the entire understanding of bending established in ATLA and ruins the mystique of the art with that unnecessary bullshit with the Lion turtles.
It is legit insulting how the spirit world is treated as a commodity in LOK. Iroh becoming a spirit after death is one thing, Korra and Asami going there for a first date/vacation (in the post story comics) is a freaking joke.
Imagine if instead of being plain evil, Vaatu appeared evil when imbalanced because he is a being that acts on pure impulse alone, he represents chaos and passion unrestrained
But at the same time, when Raava is imbalanced, she becomes obsesed with order, completely rejecting emotion and change. She represents knowledge and serenity, but taken to an extreme leads her to inaction.
That was the goal through vaatu’s actions (creating spirit portals so spirits can enter physical world) and raava’s actions (order I guess) but the writers questionable decision to include “10,000 years of darkness” or “destroy the world” every other line did not help them out. In fact it wasn’t until season 3 with the airbenders return that I understood the “chaos” nature of vaatu and how he was needed. But then korra calls vaatu a “force of pure evil” in the same episode, so I don’t think she learned anything from her fight
That would be boring.
I wrote a comment on this too before I noticed yours. I think raava would also be obsessed with order and control. Almost sorting as well. (By sorting I mean borderline phobic society of separate but equal🤮). If you’ve ever read or heard of The Giver, I think their perfect society would be like that. Which is all notably bad and therefore imbalance is bad both ways.
Both sides should’ve been in the avatar and maybe unalok (idc about spelling) wanted to steal one side. Instead of him wanted chaos, it would make more sense for him to want Raava because of his more traditional views. It would be an interesting flip of expectations when chaos is usually deemed as more bad. It would also be interesting cause if unalok succeeded for a bit, it would fundamentally change korra and she would act more brash then she already does.
@pn2294 That wouldn't be boring, that would be setting up the spirits, their world, and how they operate. It would only be boring if writers didn't know how to write it correctly.
Makes me think of Yune and Ashera in Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn
The spirits designs are some of the best of all medias. The painted lady is just BEYOND gorgeous.
Wan's backstory also has gorgeous art.
@@OpticalSorcerer no,just no
@@OpticalSorcerertrue except for the actual spirit designs. Everything else looks amazing but the spirits and the writing sucks so it makes it awful
@@alarrim29574 Yeah, the cartoony aspect felt very early 2000s American tv show. ATLA's spirits looked mystical and unique.
@@OpticalSorcerernope. Its more like a ghibli knock-off
"Nature acts without intent and therefore cannot be said to be malevolent or benevolent." TaoTeChing
The spirits in Avatar have intent though. Hei Bai is seeking revenge for his home being destroyed; just like any human would. We don't know how Koh benefits from what he does, but he his hurting people for his own benefit; just like many humans do.
Some of the spirits live in nature or are otherwise connected to nature, but they are not nature.
Yeh, that’s kind of why the spirits can’t be evil expect Vatu” thing fell flat for me.
They don’t act like forces of nature, they just act like assholes with superpowers.
Nature and spirits are two separate things. So you're both right.
@@07Flash11MRC I suppose a nature spirit can then act on intent, but have no real malevolent or benevolent drive to it? That'd be interesting.
@@lordpisces5019nature willingly letting itself be destroyed irreparably would not make sense. It’s human nature to desire more, to push for continual growth, whereas the spirits seek only to maintain. Hey Bai is attempting to drive the humans out of the area, however when a human shows it that nature will return to the area, and that humanity also cares for the land, he exits peacefully.
It’s not revenge, as the spirit could easily devastate the town in the name of vengeance. However, it chose to take one person a night as a message, and returned them all once his goal was understood.
It's kinda funny how a show with more "adult" characters has an immature take on spirits, while the show where all the main characters are kids have a more nuanced take on spirits.
Because in addition to the two creators Michael and bryan , there was a 3rd guy.
Who left after 2nd season
Also, both Michael and bryan interacted with fans via tumblr ...so you can understand how predictably bad korra turned out
@@KanishQQuoteslol Tumblr! Now things are starting to make sense
I also felt like the late teenagers in legend of Korra were profoundly less mature than than the preteens and young teenagers in Avatar. Obviously it's different because the original gang grew up during a war, so of course they have to be more mature than kids who grew up in peace time, but still. The petty jealousies and romantic triangles felt like a soap opera, not high school or college
Bryke are hacks
@@KanishQQuotes You mean eren, who is also responsible for the creation of dragon prince.
Avatar saw Spirits as embodiments of nature while Korra saw them as Pokémon
It really does feel like that
The good spirits reminded me of Pokémon but the bad spirits reminded me of heartless from kingdom hearts .
I just struggle to understand how the same writers could have worked on both of the series, when there is a clear drop in the quality of the story.
I don't hate LoK, I think it's a solid 7/10. But it's just disappointing after ATLA's near-10/10
@@apostatecactus5355its not the same writers. The main writers that drove the ATLA series were aaron ehasz and his wife elizabeth. They went on to make dragon prince on netflix.
Korra is the show where the creators of atla, brian and mike, wanted to write their own characters and own story. They clearly arent good writers. They created a great concept and world, but cant write characters or plot for shit.
@@michaelgarrett139 that makes more sense. Although, what do you mean when you say "creators", if not the ones who wrote it? Were they simply the producers?
First time watching Korra I remember not trusting Rava. Her story seemed so cookie cutter purity and goodness that it felt like she was trying to deceive Wan. And I was hoping it would lead to us finding out that she was just trying to give Vaatu a bad name by only presenting her half, and the only way to have a balanced view was to hear them both out or something. But nope.
That would of been awesome
I saw some fanfics that used that as a premise, where the order Raava promoted was something that the Fire Nation's war would have achieved, by exterminating the "Chaos" of diversity of people of the world, and Vaatu was looking to get the diversity and balance back by making an opposing dark Avatar.
Now THAT would have been some good tv
That's a consistent gripe I have with LOK. EVERYTHING is as it seems. They never said X person was bad as a distraction. It was all, "Look over there" and then proceed to go that direction. Nuance did not exist.
@@boardcertifiable I've read fics like this as well- especially in Consider the Wildflowers with Chaos Avatar!Zuko where Raava's 'peace' is where everyone thinks the same thoughts, do the same things and never even imagine fighting because they can't remember how and have nothing to fight over anyway because if everyone's the same, there's no differences to divide and fight over which is why the 100 year war is something she was content to sleep through- if the Fire Nation win then everyone is *one* nation and she is that much closer to achieving her goal- hence why Vaatu is needed to balance her out with his chaos to let people remain diverse and different, even if that isn't especially peaceful. Obviously if she was gone and it was just him, things would be bad as well but that's why they're meant to BALANCE eachother out
the creation of spirit portals also undermines Iroh's and Aangs own spiritual prowess of finding enough focus to meditate into the spirit world, something that was very difficult for the common man to do. and Korra's "solution" to appeasing dark spirits feels very much like a psychologist prescribing anti-depresant medication to people who got mildly depressed because they got dumped or something
In the 20th century, what use to be attributed to spirits was found to be psychiatric or psychological
Well meditating into the spirit world is still very hard. The portals don't really change that, or undermine the journey they went to before it was open
@racool911 it makes the feat kinda meaningless though. Nobody will ever have to do that anymore because they can just walk through a portal
@@samoth5161
Wouldn’t that help people connect with their spirituality more? Those that want to of course
@@artistaroundtheblock2047 No, because they don’t have to think about or work for it. It’s harder to appreciate something that you can just have whenever you want with little to no effort.
And let's not forget: *Airbenders Are Just Back!*
What LOK did in season Three would be the equivalent of Aang snapping his fingers and Hei Bai Forest just growing back to what it was!
The best part: this would have actually made WAY more sense before Korra retconned the origins of bending.
In ATLA, humanity taught _themselves_ how to bend the elements, so in theory airbending would be a "lost art" which could be relearned. And then Korra made bending into a gift from the spirits and accidentally ruined their villain's origin story 💀
"Somehow Airbendine returned..."
@@delivererofdarknessshoguno1133they fly now?
@@error-try-again-later I love all this criticism towards LOK, such a horrible show. Yet the delusional fans are such dick riders for weird random love drama between 4 people. So many flaws and it truly ruined the Avatar universe, and what adds salt to the wound is that we're gettin another shitty live action movie which is gonna ruin all the messages and characters. They had the most perfect world and yet they fumbled so hard.
@@opportunity3278Fans of Lok always say that it's more "mature" than Atla and that Korra is better avatar than Aang.......i don't see how a spoiled and idiotic teenager who destroyed a 1000 year old airbending relic with firebending is more "mature" They also compare Korra to Katara, saying "if you hate Korra than you hate Katara" which shows that they don't pay attention to the show cuz Katara was good natured, motherly and compassion but could also be impulsive, hot tempered and bitchy at times, she was well rounded so if you take away the good natured things about her you're left with an annoying brat and that's what Korra is
So we’re just going to pretend the owl spirit didn’t just lay down the coldest line in the series with “You think your the first person to believe their war was justified?” That will automatically awaken you as a child yall don’t even know. Nothing is black and white, sometimes things are grey.
I saw that as "both sides" BS. The Fire Nation were clearly against the balance of the world. They genocided one race of people and everything they ever did, they were planning on doing it over and over, and they had just almost killed the MOON. Did Wan Shi Tong really miss all that?
And yet the owl is also seeing things in black and white. All humans are theives who want to take knowledge just for war, even though the professor is sitting right there all he wants is to learn to learn because he loves knowing things. And while war is a terribly complex thing, some battles do need to be fought. Sokka's vigor for vengence needed taming, most of the world needed that. If Zuko hadn't reformed and Aang chosen a route of pacifism likely the earth kingdom would have wanted to crush the fire nation in return potentially destroying it. Still the battle had to be fought, Aang had to defeat Ozai.
@@Jasonwolf1495 This is the whole point of the video. The spirits don't care about the mortals, their business doesn't concern them. Sure there are good people who want knowledge just for knowledge. But there are people who want to abuse knowledge. Heck, harmed his library. This is what he cares about.
@@DeathKitta I'm literally pointing this out. You don't need to literally say what i said again.
@@Jasonwolf1495 @DeathKitta has as much right as you to needlessly state the point just as you did.
4:24 The fact that the Painted Lady DIDN’T watch over the town & abandoned it when her home was tainted makes me think that a lot of the legends people had about their land’s spirits were misconstrued to an extent & that the Painted Lady may have just been thanking Katara for saving her home rather than saving the villagers & just didn’t have the power people thought she did to protect the river 😕
And that's the right choice! The entire point of the episode is telling kids taking care of nature is OUR responsibility. WE have the power and the responsibilty to protect our Earth. Letting spirits take care of it, naratively, would be the wrong choice.
And in universe, spirits aren't shown to have a lot of ability to affect the human world. They can't stop their forest from burning down, they can't stop their rivers being polluted, even spirits as old as the moon and ocean can't fight back against Zhou. But this makes sense, after all this isn't their world. They're from the spirit world, they're just living in the human one, but they aren't a physical form there.
They represent nature, and forests can't stop people from burning down trees, knowledge can't stop itself from being used for evil, the moon can't hurt us from way up there. They can only watch as humans attack and misuse them. But what happens when we do that? We wind up just hurting ourselves, aka the spirits lash out. Stories of humans being killed by spirits are almost always tales of hubris or idiotcy.
It all fits quite well :)
@misteryA555 wow well put, changed my perspective on the painted lady
The way I took it was polluted river means polluted spirit, polluted spirit means no power. She didn’t show up until after the river was clean thus cleaning it restored her power
@@misteryA555great explanation
Exactly. Just bc people moved into HER home, doesn't mean she has to protect them, or can at all for that matter, she is "just a spirit".
Something that I thought they were going for is having Avatar Wan absorb Vaatu alongside Raava. Where Raava gave him the knowledge to bend every element, Vaatu gave him the power to control them all at once. My thought was that the 'Avatar Spirit' is actually Vaatu and Raava becoming one, which is why every spirit respects the Avatar to some degree. They are the literal embodiment of harmony. Instead Vaatu and Raava are just Jesus and Satan.
No no you, keep talking
This would be so much nicer tbh
Vaatu and raava are also kinda anagrams of avatar.
The two of them working together to help a human would be an interesting thought
Wow that's actually such an interesting concept, shame they didn't go with it in Korra:/
The animais in ATLA are made up, most of the time fused with other animals, such as the turtle-ducks. But the spirits are not, they are full animals of real life. Like Pandas, foxes owls and monkeys, it gives this aura of familiarity as well as highlight they don't belong in the world but a particular one just for them. They have their own habitat/ home where they live. The painted lady lived in one lake, such as the fish spirits and the panda in his forest, as well. So just like wild animals you mind to be respectful and careful when going to their domain. In legend of korra this was lost, the spirits became pratically pokemon. Just another fused animal that could exist on the normal world of the series or a simple blob that carries no atmosphere whatsoever
Good point. Makes me think--does this mean bosscoe was a spirit who just didn't do anything? 🤔
@@aff77141the earth queen ate a spirit then 💀
@@aff77141Considering how much time passed with him being alive still, I'd believe it.
Ooooh, good point!
@@aff77141 And Miu too
I thought there'd be a twist that neither Ravaa or Vaatu were good or evil. Maybe Ravaa went around oppressing people in the name of peace and order, while Vaatu allowed everyone unchecked freedom even if it led to destruction and harm. Avatar Wan would convince the two to coexist instead of fighting for control
Thats not too terrible
Assassin’s Creed’s conflict between the Templars and Assassin’s was this very idea.
Yeah, instead of seeling vaatu away he had to absorb them as well and become balance instead of just light
It's funny because thats the whole premise of The Divide episode in ATLA and while it's considered one of the weakest episodes in the whole series its still leagues better than "dis good dis bad'
This would have worked if LoK had kept that the Avatar is the incarnation of the world’s spirit. Because which other spirit would be so invested in balance between the two?
I was so excited when LoK described Raava and Vaatu as "Order" and "Chaos" thinking they were going to do a proper balance of Order and Chaos subplot and have Korra have to realize Rava isn't goodness personified and Vaatu isn't evil, they just both think the world would be better without the other, and Korra would have to make peace between them to restore the balance the first Avatar failed to understand. It would've made Unalock such a good parallel, falling for the same thing Wan did but with Vaatu, believing Raava's reign was making the world worse, segregating the world between spirits and humans, and Raava would never coexist with Vaatu. Meanwhile Raava is trying to convince Korra of the same thing from the other direction, and having Korra realize that and realize the past can't guide her this time because the past didn't work, and her having to figure out on her own that Vaatu has their own place in the world that they need to fill right alongside Raava.
And then the ending came and it was literally just good kite kills evil kite. 🙄
Wow, I'm really impressed of your way of thinking.Really smart the way you thought about it. Seriously amazing 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻😯😁😁
@@seal_makes_art Thank you! I appreciate the praise, I was feeling a bit shit today. lol
@@Lanoira13 i hope this helped you with your day and i hope you take this idea of yours and make a difference story about it because you sure have talent on this .But yeah happy i made your day better 😊
I hate having random airbenders come back it makes the scar on the world from the war to just kinda be fixed out of no where. It takes away from what happened
It doesn't though. the air nation is still nowhere near the numbers it used to be, and is still Vunerable, as shown in season 3.
@@asad5986 not to mention it took what? 150 years for it to start recovering? I don't think it's "cheating" on the writers side, but the natural course of events, the way elements to balance themselves.
@@tabalugadragon3555if only it wasn’t executed in such a “deus ex machina” way, like pretty much the antagonists and spirits of Korra.
As a Christian myself, I also absolutely loathed the Christianization/Westernization of LoK. It was genuinely _beautiful_ that AtLA articulated both a non-Westernized values-system _and_ a genuinely mysterious, _spiritual_ world completely outside of human understandings. LoK trashed that. (Now, that doesn't mean you _can't_ tell a great good-vs-evil story--you absolutely can. They just tried to shoehorn a very basic, poorly-written one into a world that neither needed nor wanted it.) Which is really quite a shame, especially since the Avatar Wan episodes are incredibly beautiful stylistically.
One of my favorite things about Aang's run actually came up, not in the show proper, but in the Nickelodeon web game, Escape from the Spirit World, which connected Book II: Earth and Book III: Fire, while Aang was recovering from the wound he received in the caves beneath Ba Sing Se. He reconnects with his four previous lives (including Kuruk), and specifically has an important philosophical conversation with Yangchen, the previous Air Nomad Avatar. He tells her that, having observed the three lives between Yangchen and himself, he's learned that every Avatar lifetime is full of mistakes, foibles, good intentions that lead to bad outcomes, etc. But he has also learned that the Avatar Spirit _is a spirit._ As you say, it's a spirit driven by its own interests and desires and needs. So he asks: Why doesn't the Avatar just rule the world, as an all-powerful spirit that can't die or age?
And Yangchen's answer is truly beautiful. "I don't think [it would be better if the Avatar were an all-powerful spirit that never died.] The Avatar must be compassionate toward all people, and the only way to do that is to live with them. The Avatar must experience sadness, anger, joy, and happiness. By feeling all these emotions, it helps you to understand how precious life is, so you will do anything to protect it. If you were an all-powerful spirit living on the top of some mountain, you wouldn't have much in common with an ordinary person. So the Avatar continues to take human rebirth. And with each life, learns what it means to be human."
Note: continues to _take_ human rebirth. Yangchen strongly implies that the Avatar Spirit _could_ choose to be a pure spirit, if it wished to, _but it doesn't._ It wants to know what it means to be human, and it wants to experience that through being connected to the land--all of the land, in every corner of the world.
Under your analysis, each spirit has something it is connected to, usually in a pretty physical sense (a specific forest, a specific river, the whole Ocean, the Moon, etc.) but sometimes in a more abstract sense (Wan Shi Tong and knowledge). This begs the question: _What is the Avatar the Spirit of?_ It's clearly a spirit, and it clearly chooses to incarnate as human beings in order to connect with life, _all_ life, everywhere in the world. Every Avatar starts from a particular place, but must grow from that context to learn all four elements, to connect with many different cultures, to both protect the world and nurture it. But what sort of spirit could want such a connection--not just to a single forest or river or even the ocean in general, but to the entire world? Well...how about the Spirit of the World itself? And through this, we see a beautiful piece of genuine Buddhist philosophy: that loving-kindness is the necessary result of freeing yourself from petty attachment and grasping, something each Avatar _must_ learn to do in order to master their greatest strengths and aid and protect those they care about (which, when their training is complete, should mean "all people and spirits collectively.") The Spirit of the World, unlike the _genii locorum_ of individual places or things (even things as great as the whole ocean!), would care about _all_ of the world, and everything in it--because that's where its priorities lie.
Finally, Avatars that are lax in their duties (like Kuruk and, to an extent, Roku) tend to _permit_ serious problems to arise in the world, often ones that their later incarnations must struggle greatly against; Avatars that are too zealous in their duties (like Kyoshi) tend to personally _create_ problems, often with the same result. Avatars out of balance. Aang has to learn, not just how to fix the problems the world is facing, but how to find balance within himself, so that he can prepare a world for the _next_ Avatar that has neither excessive Yin nor excessive Yang, neither pushed nor pulled out of place. The World-Spirit must seek balance, which means leaving well enough alone when that is the correct choice, and taking decisive action when _that_ is the correct choice. It's terribly hard! Most Avatars we've seen screwed up at least once in that regard. But every rebirth is a new chance to restore balance. To try again--and build something better.
I love this take!
I liked your take but your dead wrong on Kuruk if you read the Kyoshi books you would know he was incredibly hard working and spent his entire life fixing Yangchen's idiotic mistakes
@@ErenKruger-qx3dt what mistakes did Yang Chen make? Could you give a cliffnotes version, haven’t read the books. 😅 🙏
@@marsultor9078 She focused to much on humans and ignored the spirits. As such when ever a dispute broke out between them she always favoured ˈ the human side which lead to the spirits feeling neglected angry and go dark beacuse of this Kuruk had to spend his entire time as avatar hunting down dark spirits which is how he fought Kouh the Face Stealer
@@ErenKruger-qx3dt is it dark spirits in the way Korra establishes them?
The spirit portals where you can literally walk into the spirit world is one of the dumbest things in korra
agreed. And their locations are horrible
I saw in a comment somewhere else, but they brought up a good point that now Koh has access to the human world, hes probably going to go crazy stealing faces
@@boardcertifiable that's a great point. Another reason why korra is a terrible avatar and makes the most asinine decisions
@@coreywigent7693 Girl boss...
@@OdellAtkinson Another feminist ego
I also don't like how the spirits can just be easily beaten with waterbending even though Kuruk lived a life of pain and suffering trying to keep them at bay
Something that would be cool is if Kuruk was the one who invented the ability
@@racool911 It's ridiculous that it's a water bending technique. All of the elements should have been able to do it, just following the same "harmonious" shape, or such. Waterbending was pushed FAR over the line with LoK. Korra sucked...
@@OdellAtkinson But healing is alright?
@@racool911 well we are 70% water, i don't care how much minerals we have on ourselves water is still a more prominent element, also is not that water is magical is Just that the element in itself is used as a conductor for chi, or at least thats what i understand from atloa, so it makes sense water has healing, is the only element that can work so close and direct with the body, now spirits dont have physical forma, so the idea that any element can help them is dumb since you are using something from the physical world to heal a non physical entity, how? Water makes sense since is part of our biology but theres no reason for it to work on spirits who even when are present in the physical world don't nessesarily have a physical form, let me know if this makes sense since my first language isn't english haha
@@pabloaulestia6310 Your English is good, but the thing is if Water can be used as a conductor for chi, why not spirtual enegy. Also is it confirmed Spirits don't have chi like humans do?
It doesn't really matter either way, fictional worlds can have fictional rules. There was nothing that directly contradicts water being able to heal spirits as well, since the reason water is able to heal was never completely established.
For lack of a better word, LoK’s spirits were all just way too human.
I never liked the idea personifying “chaos” and “balance” as such clear good and evil, nor have I ever liked the idea of the Avatar as a Spirit/Human hybrid.
I’ve really soured on the Wan episodes over the years because they cement the history of the setting and the Avatar as a spiritual concept in a way that I think undermines the mystique of the original series.
it started out really well with raava being the primordial force of order and vaatu as chaos, with too much chaos factions fell to ruin and devastation took the land wherever vaatu tread, I was expecting raavas sole presence to be shown as equally detrimental with too much order robbing their surroundings of freedom and the area becoming stagnant, a fun twist where wan is forced to instead of imprison them, to forcibly unite them and put in a constant effort to hold them together for eternity, and korra breaking the avatar spirit ruined Millenia of work she now has to restart and uphold
One thing I heard from another vid is that raava and vaatu should have been order and chaos, not peace and chaos. This would actually fix a lot as you can explore the good and bad of both. Sure too much chaos isn’t good, but too much order also causes massive problems too. While the writing isn’t that good, this at least doesn’t break the themes of the original.
I'm confused; hasn't the Avatar always been a spirit/human hybrid, being the link between the human world and the spirit world?
You might not like it, but that's how it is in real mythology. I always wondered why the show was called Avatar if it had nothing to do with the concept.
@@OpticalSorcerer Yeah, the avatar was always depicted as the bridge between two worlds... Of course it would be part spirit.
For those who are wondering. Koh chose the name "Koh" for himself after becoming distanced from his mother, the Mother of Faces, though legends say that, despite their strained relationship, he steals faces as a way to be close to his mother, who has the ability to give faces.
I remember watching season 2. And after seeing Vaatu locked away, I expected something happening like, people starting to lose the ability to feel anger, or people being way too relaxed during a life or death situation. And then realisng that Vaatu needs to be free. But then he was locked away and it didn‘t make any difference. Like he literally isn‘t needed at all. Goes against the message.
such a cool idea!
I fully expected the end of that arc to be Raava and Vaatu being one spirit and needing to be reconciled with itself.
Why would people lose their ability to feel anger? Vaatu only affects spirits.
@@aiyeina Yes. And that's because they decided that's how he works. They could have written him as a concept of negative emotions for all beings. But they did'nt.
@tacticstories7159 If you want that, go write your fan fic lol. That would have been lame imo.
Aang:"I respect all spirits"
Vaatu:"even me?"
Korra:"not you you're black!"
Underrated comment
Damn 😂
😂
🗿
He didn’t respect OLD IRON THO
It was disappointing to go from the idea of spirits being part of the natural world to the more modern interpretation of good and evil. I really enjoy the dualism you can see in beliefs like Shintoism, Dao, and the like, where the goal is balance, not one being better than the other. I mean, I grew up on an island that was created by volcanic activity, and the Kupua responsible for the activity was greatly respected, even while the locals feared her wrath. She created the land that was lived on, but she could easily destroy all the forest and fields on that land should she be angered. She was very much an embodiment of the volcanoes, which are both creative and destructive. That is just how the world is. No good and evil, just forces moving from one state of being to the next. ATLA got that, Korra did not.
I guess Korra decided to go the Indian mythos route lmao
@@racool911Hinduism doesn't portray a basic good vs evil narrative mostly
Korra is general was missing a lot of Last Airbender's "Secret Sauce": It felt like a series that didn't really grasp any of the original's *subtleties* unless they were explained directly.
The different elements didn't feel like they had unique philosophies, styles, and themes tied to them anymore, like they were no longer *spiritual* or *thematic* but simply things that existed. Airbending fared a bit better than the other 3, because the airbenders got so much focus in the latter half of the series, but then you get stuff like Lightning Bending becoming commonplace, and loosing its thematic ties to abuse and how tragically *ruined* the Fire Nation royal family is.
It felt like, where the world was driven before by themes, and explored practical application of bending when it suited those themes, like Earth Bending trains in Ba Sing Se, Korra just dove 100% into exploring the practical and physical existence of these things, and lost the sense that there was a greater importance to thing *beneath* what was physically going on.
The series felt, in a word, *utilitarian* with how it presented ideas and concepts from The Last Airbender.
Honestly, with the industrial revolution themes we have in LOK, they could've turned it into a story about how lightning bending being commom is a result of exploitation of cheap labor. This would push the connection between lightning and abuse FURTHER. Imagine, workers collapsing on factory floors cause their bosses are driving them to KEEP BENDING LIGHTNING!!!! YOU'RE BEHIND ON YOUR POWER QUOTA!!!! and, much like the real world, with their bosses screaming at them, the workers are too frustrated and upset to bend and they burn out and get replaced.
God, so many disappointing, missed opportunities.
That secret sauce's name is Aaron Echoes who wrote the majority of Atla's script.
Interestinly, Bryke's solo LoK failed narratively while Echoes' solo Dragon Prince had the correponding opposite problem.
Them working together was such a lightning in a bottle.
@@ag8454 Yeah! You could've even tied in Iroh's statements about lightning, that it requires complete equilibrium and the ability to know yourself to such a degree that you can separate the yin and yang energies within your chi, and then bring them back together to release them as a bolt of lightning. You could've had a story about the first power plants being developed with the help of passionate firebenders capable of lightning, and slowly degrading throughout the years as the essence of what actually makes the energy happen is lost, replaced with rote memorization and muscle memory. Power Plants losing power year by year, with the owners being unable to understand *why,* applying the same punishment techniques they would to someone who shovels coal, unable to comprehend that it's the stress itself, the pressure and demand, which is making their benders lose inner equilibrium.
Honestly the spirit world in Korra would make for a pretty poor afterlife, considering that you can't even have the freedom of having a bad day, without risking the world collapsing under your emotions and causing a nightmare
TBF its never exactly known if the Spirit World IS the afterlife
yea it’s not
@@spazzout1k350I would agree but iroh seems to be an exception though
@@TheB0sss He lefth his body and whent there.
In other words he in a way killed himself by taking his soul permanently away from his body.
@@stefankatsarov5806 yeah but if his soul becomes a spirit that inherently means that the spirit realm can also function as some kind of afterlife
The spirits of Korra seem like a poor understanding of Yokai and Shinto rites of purification. With the little I know of Shinto faith and Kami, they become vengeful if you slight them or allow their shrines to be damaged or dirtied. But at the end of the day they are capricious beings, just as likely to smite you as heal you, like the Kamaitachi it will slice you up then immediately apply salve to mend your wounds before you even notice.
Or the thing that they represent.
For example if you have a forest spirit and then clear fell that forest, it hurts the spirit and drives it to a rage, like in Princess Mononoke.
Iirc Mononoke literally means an angry or sick Kami basically, who is corrupted by the things occurring in their land or shrine.
Legend of Korra turned godly mysterious spirits into household pets
The hill I will die on is that Aaron and Elizabeth Ehasz were the secret key to ATLA's incredible writing and unique vibe, that honestly for the most part just died in TLOK. Their writing styles gave the ATLA spirits (as just one example) such a strange and otherworldly aesthetic, beyond full comprehension or understanding, which gave the show an overarching feeling of "epic" or "legendary"-ness, that you just don't see in TLOK, even in its season 2 story of the first Avatar, Wan. A lot of ATLA seriously felt like the retelling of legends, of things happening long ago that we can't fully explain, but just understand through feeling.
Almost everything in TLOK is cartoonish and over-explained, with basic black and white thinking. I don't hate the show by any means, but it's always disappointed me that the Ehasz's were never a part of the sequel series.
I imagine the whole team was integral, like the original teams that did Silent Hill 1-3; without just the right people all in one place and time, bad ideas go unchallenged, good ideas don't get properly developed, and nothing is executed quite as well as it could have been
@@aff77141 I honestly agree, I think ATLA was lightning in a bottle and it couldn't have existed without all of the complicated variables and individuals working on it. But I do still find it hard not to see TLOK as like "what ATLA might've been if the Ehasz's hadn't been there," knowing that they sometimes had to reel in some of Bryke's dumber ideas. And just knowing that Elizabeth wrote essentially all of the more mature and fundamental episodes of the show always felt significant to me, idk. That being said I know TLOK already had a LOT working against it from basically the very beginning, so it's probably a miracle in itself.
I recently just finished the show, and for the most part (with a few exceptions) I did like it, but the way the spirits were handled was so poor.
What really bothered me was how the series kept saying that humans and spirits must coexist and how humans are flawed, but like, spirits are colossal arrogant, not to mention racist assholes.
Like, legit , most people had to live in the backs of Lion turtles because spirits would go full murder hobo on them.
That really makes it feel less like "humans are destructive and ignorant, and have lost their way" and more like,
"why should humans have to try to appease and share their world with a bunch of beings that straight up do not like them? And why do spirits get to have any say on how beings from another dimension should treat their own world when they themselves are shown to be just as flawed?"
Yeah it never made sense we are told Vaatu the dark evil spirit destroyed the boundary between the two world and this action pretty much drove humanity to extinction with the only thing keeping them alive being the lion turtles who spirit dare not mess with. If Wan did not close the portal the conflict would still continue.
It only thanks to 10,000 years of isolation that humans can now fight back the spirits if they attempted what they tried before. This ironically also makes peace possible the bender who are a minority can keep the spirit in check allowing for human and spirits to coexist.
It's not like humans were respectful too? Each spirit they saw, they immidiately attacked with their bending bc of fear. They lived on the lion turtles bc out of fear, for being something else then a human. That's how humans now days are too. Wan proved that with showing respect towards them, you can earn their respect too.
Than*
@@ayoubazahaf1511 That’s a bit muddled though if recall the worlds were never originally together and were once separate realms before Wan’s time, and when the realms merged the spirits essentially colonized the human world and pretty much put them on reserves. Would paint the spirits in a darker light and makes the idea of humans having to just tolerate spirits in there homelands a bit icky.
@@brandonlyon730 Colonize is a big word. No one told the humans not to enter the spirit world. Even ancient monks visited the spirit world to meditate in te tree of time, so it's not like they weren't welcome? Spirits were misunderstood by humans (due to their fear), which led to spirits to misunderstand humans.
Well, first off, I would like to clarify that "yin" is represented by the black section of the typical Yin-Yang symbol, not the white. Thus, Raava is meant to correlate with the yang, and Vaatu the yin. Which leads into the main reason I actually have with the whole idea of these two: if anything, _Raava_ should have been the one to start the conflict.
As stated by the video, yin and yang are not simply "good" and "evil". For one they don't apply to morality, but the forces of the universe. To illustrate, let's use the sun and the moon. In fact, the words yin-yang are derived from sun and moon! In Chinese, they are written as "阴"(yīn) and "阳"(yáng), derived from the words "月" or "月亮"(yuè or yuè liàng, both "moon"), and 太阳(tài yáng, "sun").
Why the sun and moon are such good examples is because of their relationship with light. The sun generates light, yes, but the moon doesn't "suck in" light, because it's not simply the sun's opposite. It instead takes in the sun's light, and then reflects it. It's not an opposing force to the sun, but instead complements it. And this dynamic also exemplifies one of the most common examples of yin-yang: the active vs. passive.
Raava is coloured white, which means she represents the yang force. She, not Vaatu, should have been the one to take action. She, the embodiment of the powerful and active yang force, should have been the one *doing* something instead of Vaatu, the subdued and passive yin force. This is not to say I agree that there should have been conflict at all, at least the kind shown in Legend of Korra, but it would have adhered more to this real-world philosophy the writers were attempting to adapt into their story.
Raava cannot represent both light and peace, if she was truly meant to serve as a yang force in the world of Avatar. She would be far too active to be considered "peaceful" by human standards. And conversely, Vaatu would never instigate a conflict because he embodies passivity and calmness. And they must constantly keep _each other_ in check, because neither is good in excess. Too much light or too much darkness, either way the world goes blind.
Thank you for clarifying Yin is the Black Side & Yang is the white side. I was both confused and frustrated seeing the terms being used incorrectly. However it isn't like Rava & Vatuu are an accurate representation of Yin & Yang by any stretch of the imagination. As you said Rava should have been the active one and Vatuu should have been the passive one, but there's also the fact the gendered voices the spirits have are wrong. The Yin side is considered feminine while the Yang side is considered masculine.
No no man, you don’t get it, raava can’t be the bad one because she’s white don’t you see it? (This is satire)
@@jenv.7995👏🏾
@@jenv.7995😂😂😂😂 i smile a lot
"Too much light or too much darkness, either way the world goes blind"
This quote hit me so hard it broke 36 bones.
The fact that the whole point is that “good” and “evil”/yin and yang are supposed to be in balance so they decide the best course of action is for them LOCK YANG UP PERPETUALLY SETTING EVERYTHING OUT OF BALANCE.
Not only is The Legend of Korra inferior in its depiction of spirits, it also fails in building upon the lore we had gotten in The Last Airbender. The humans are said to have learned bending from the original benders - the Moon, the badgermoles, the dragons and the bison. These animals developed bending as a means to survive, and the Moon is, well, the Moon. As humans continued to coexist with these animals (and the Moon), they adopted their techniques to better their lives. In The Legend of Korra, that narrative is chucked into the bin and is replaced by the lion turtles. Suddenly, humans didn't learn bending from the first benders, but instead were given bending by the lion turtles when they were venturing out into the Spirit Wilds. So which one is it? Trying to mesh these explanations together just creates so much confusion and unnecessary ands and buts.
Bruh, it's a miniserie of 13 episodes and almost each season was renewed. What do you expect? They've got to focus to tell their plot in that short of episodes.
The Animals lore was stupid and made every non bender look stupid in turn.
If Oma and Shu were non benders that became benders then every non bender in the north and South Pole are completely dumb and Aang is dumb too since Appa can just teach Sokka air bending anyways
@@ayoubazahaf1511 Yeah I still respect the creators of Korra. They did their best with what they had and as much as people hate on it, as a stand alone show it's actually all right but it's still very frustrating how it kind of ruined Avatar.
@@yoloswaggins7121 Nothing was ruined, what are you talking about?
I think that while that's how they learned, it later became genetic. Besides people weren't just running into animals and asking them to teach them how to bend either. What I think tlok could've meshed in the two was that everyone has chakras, in order to bend (before it becomes mainly genetic) The lion turtles could open people who they felt wortty to bend chakras that made them able to do so. Then they would learn from the animals how to make it possible, then as humanity modernized and evolve, people would start to be born with the ability to do so. Also toph even mentions that she learned earthbending from the badgermoles so idk why they even they kinda ignored it in tlok.@@The_Magman
Amazing analysis. It hurts when I see comments like "I love how Korra expanded the lore of the spirits and the Avatar". I'm always like "dude, that's no expansion, that's an absolute retcon". We didn't need to know any of that. Sometimes just the mystery is way better, but especially if you're going to replace the mystery for something so shallow. Korra fans always claim this show to be darker and more mature and all they did was take a genuinely mature show disguised as a kids show and turn it into a true kids show disguised as a teenagers show.
@diamond_dogs Yes, it's always baffling to me how they claim Korra has better villains. Especially that one is a freaking joke.
If you cobtinue a universe you gave to remove misterys
@@indedgames4359 Seems you skipped the "if you're going to replace the mystery for something so shallow" part.
The animal aspects of the spirits in ATLA felt natural and if the spirit was provoked like heibai, they would take a more unnatural form, it just worked they felt so much more believable
I remember watching S2 for the first time and seeing big blue Korra battle it out with Vaatu and laser beams shooting out of their chest and wondering if it was a joke. By the time Jinora came on the scene as a magic fairy, I knew I was done and I hated it.
I think last season had giant robot that shoots laser beam from its hand.
@mandu859you mean eska and Desna?? 😭🙏
My favorite bit is in S4 when Korra asks that Bird-Eel thing for the spirits help in stopping Kuvira.
He dismisses her, basically saying that it was a "human war/problem".
Several seasons of trying to co-exist, and Korra gets blown off. We get this psycho dictator absolutely razing old growth forests and spirit vines to fuel her dumb mech superweapon, and the spirits can't lift a finger. Kuvira is literally grinding up their homes for ammo, they should all hate her and want her stopped on principle, but they go "nope, you deal with it".
They're just awful.
My personal favourite had to be Wan Shi Tong, who in avatar made it very clear that he has no interest in either side of a conflict and shows great disdain for those hunting for power, who in Legend of Korra was written to just... Pick a side in a conflict and aid someone longing for power. Good job guys.
The LoK felt half baked and needed more time in the oven.
Honestly it would be interesting if (without those portals of course xD) Harmonic Convergence wasn't an ultimate battle between evil and good, but rather a phenomenon, where the spiritual energy kinda "overflows" the world of the living, and all humans could interact with spirits. Imagine, the spiirts all come to the world of living and are devastated about the mentioned industrialization and destruction of natural environments. Just imagine the conflict for Korra to solve. In my opinion that would have been much better than dealing with a classic battle between good and evil
Remember season 2 was the only season they thought they were gonna get after s1
@@TimothyGod Fair Point
@@archont2343 much like how if book 1 ended and the rest was Korra getting her other bending back that coulda been awesome, not to discount book 3 and book 4. And a good chunk of book 2
@@archont2343 Korra isn't as bad as most people make it out to be
oh that's a MUCH better fix! the spirits aren't "evil," it's just hei bai x1,000
I always thought that killing the moon spirit and the ocean spirits reaction was also a subtle nod at science. Cause im pretty sure if the moon disappeared in the real world, the oceons would reak havoc on earth
The tides are caused by the moon's gravity so how
No he’s right. Not just the ocean either. the moon’s pull is part of earth’s balance. So basically the earth would start wobbling a ton, and that would DEFINITELY slosh around the ocean, and the weather would be hellish too.
@@Mavuika_Gyaru the removal of the moon would cause the current tides to crash down to ocean level, which would cause insane tsunamis all over the planet.
The moon doesn't stop pulling on the ocean, it circles the earth and causes a "bump" in the water directly below it - that bump is gradual, though, which means it rises and falls smoothly from the perspective of one point on Earth. If the moon just vanished, that bump would collapse instantly, flooding the world.
A good fix for hellkite story would have been if Korra had let Hellkite join her and rava in becoming one being.
Rava and Vatu could have had their eternal spirit struggle inside the avatar and restore a major imbalance to the spirit world all in one go.
lol, I'm pretty sure the Giant Blue Korra vs Red Una-Kite fight is around where I dropped the series even though I tried to give Season 2 a shot but the more bs they added about the spirits and the first avatar the more I hated it. The retconning was just too much for me in general but then they had the ridiculous Kaiju fight between red and blue and then Aang and the previous avatars being basically erased.... nope, I was done.
No retconning was done but okay
Wait but Aang and the rest were "erased" at season 3 how do you know that then?????
@@PyttStop no they weren't. it was season 2 when unalaq ripped raava out of korra's body and killed her, severing korra's connection to the past avatars
@@kbreezy1581 not it was not was even Aang the one to help her go kaiju mod and the true way everybody knows how and you can easily find it
@@PyttStop It was Tenzin who suggested Korra meditate in the tree, ending up with her going "kaiju mode". Aang was gone at that point.
The most interesting aspect of the avatar was that he drew his power and wisdom from his past lives. But at the end of the day the avatar still was human and could do mistakes as all humans do. But in Korra the avatar is presented as an ultimate force of good than can do no wrong and it ruins everything
23:57 “Lore is NOT a story. It can be used to TELL a story.” Thank you for this statement!
I find in interesting that they made Vaatu a force of chaos without understanding that chaos exists naturally and is not necessarily good nor evil.
One of the rare times when I view a sequel made by the original creates as non-canonical fanfiction. Really glad I never wasted my time watching Korra on it's own
Imagine being a fan who wants the bad taste of the movie washed out, and then you wait and get this steaming pile of crap of a show. 🙄
They caught lightning in a bottle with ATLA, but something changed and couldn’t do it again after.
So Legend of Kora went from Buddhist and Taoist worldview on spirituality to a more dualistic Zoroastrian view on spirituality.
It's a shame we'll never get any kind of interesting representation of Zoroastrianism culture and beliefs and storytelling, since it's almost inevitably going to be bogged down by Christian bullshit
I was just thinking that it was akin to Zoroastrianism! I thought that “Ahura Mazda Kite” and “Ahriman Kite” would be more accurate that “God Kite” and “Satan Kite.” In early Christianity, Satan was subservient to God, and tested his people. They only become opposed to each other largely because of the influence of Zoroastrianism.
@@the_aberration7398
Glad to know I wasn't the only one. I don't see the dualistic "pure good vs pure evil" as a bad trope, I mean it has been a pretty successful trope for a reason, it just doesn't fit in with the Avatar universe and it's take on the supernatural.
Would've been interesting if the light/order spirit had gained dominance and the world began to grow stagnant and people began losing their drive to do anything, forcing Korra to have to team up with the dark/chaos spirit to shake things up again. This would have show the balance between yin and yang better than what we got.
In most denominations of Christianity, at least the protestant ones, Satan is still seen as subservient to God and is just a corrupting influence tempting people to sin. Possibly a result from breaking off from Catholicism and rejection said Zoroastrian influences, even if unknowingly.
Interesting idea.
And yeah that's my only problem with this video. I wish she had pointed out the black and white good and evil trope isn't always bad. It can be done well. Samurai Jack is an example of this.
@@darksideofevil13
Black and White mortality is a good trope and has been used well countless times. I think the main problem people have with it being used in Legend of Kora is the fact the Avatar world takes place in a world inspired by Asian cultures, so one would expect the spiritual aspect to also follow a more Buddhist view on good and evil instead of defaulting to the black and white view.
I'm extremely curious to see what the creators would have done with the Legend of Korra if they weren't surprised by the approval of 3 more seasons than the 1 they planned on.
Yea I really hope they don't do isolated seasons for the next show. Korra did it well but it would've been so much better if the seasons were connected more
@@racool911
I hope there ISNT a next show.
We didn’t need Korra and we certainly don’t need another colossal screw up
Where do y’all keep getting this misconception from? Last Airbender was approved one season at a time, Korea’s team was initially a 12 episode miniseries but was later greenlit for 52 episodes. So how do you figure they were waiting for each season to be approved?
One thing I really didn’t like from the introduction of Raava and Vaatu is that by having the “spirit of light and peace” merge with the Avatar the writers transformed the Avatar themselves as someone inherently good without nuance. Before LoK, I always thought that the Avatar was conflicted between human morality and the spirits amorality, thus making the role of “the bridge between the two worlds” much more complex and difficult.
Futhermore, by having the spirit of light in them and not something more neutral, or “evil”, I feel that it takes away the struggle of what the right corse of action is for the avatar to take, that because not everything what is best for the spirits is also the best for the humans.
A good example form me of the Avatars being morally gray is Avatar Kyoshi when she protected her people and “killed” Chin the conquerer (it was an accident but she had all the intention to do it), in this scene I always felt she was outside human morality.
No kyoshi was just a hard bitch.
Like she said she was willing to kill him, but tried for the more peaceful approach.
Honestly kyoshi is one of my favorite avatars because she explored the idea of the opposite of aang. She was slow to react but quick to destroy.
If you got her attention congratulations you now have her undivided attention.
You don't want her undivided attention.
But the avatar is supposed to reflect the world back into balance. So the time kyoshi lived was so dangerous and hectic that her iteration of the avatar was violent and strong. Willing to kill.
Every avatar is shaped into the person they become by their struggles they have to deal with. The shape of the world at the time. They are one spirit reincarnating into 1000's of different lives. Each one unique, but still the same a balancing scale. If it's to violent whatever it takes to bring back to the middle if its too peaceful, there are probably many avatars that directly caused turmoil. We know there are thousands but we only know of like 8.
Most of the time it was accidental but they still caused unbalance that the following avatar would rectify.
As someone who only saw book 1, I was curious to watch book 2 since I love the water tribe and the concept of Civil War sounded cool. It's disappointing to hear that it wasn't anything I hoped it would be.
Actually the first half of book 2 is incredible. Honestly the writing is on par with ATLA but then it just throws all of it out the window to focus on the ultimate spirit battle of good and evil nonsense. Such a shame
The first Book is the best
You should power through, it’s also not as bad as people make it out to be! Plus seasons 3 and 4 are beautiful and grand and perfect
I knew that I could count on you to call out the moral binary of spirits in Legend of Korra.
Another thing that breaks the analogy of Raava and Vaatu to Yin and Yang: Raava, who represents the positive principle or Yang, is female, while Vaatu, who represents the negative principle or Yin, is male. But we can't have Satan be a woman so they flipped the genders around.
It’s almost though it was never supposed to be a one to one comparison to begin with.
If it was, then Avatar should’ve been a Woodbender rather than an Airbender
@@pn2294 Not only is that an apples to oranges comparison, the Chinese element analogous to Air is Metal, not Wood.
If you're going to try and dismiss my argument with whataboutism, at least make sure your own facts are straight.
@@HunterStiles651 I am getting my facts straight. Wind is oftentimes lumped in with the Wood Element in Wu Xing.
You’re arguing that Air is Metal because they both represent Autumn, correct?
Ultimately, I singled out Wind because Fire, Water, Metal, and Earth are already in the series.
Raava and Vaatu were never Good and Evil (Yin and Yang) to begin with. Those are Tui and La. Vaatu is darkness and chaos and Raava is light and peace, although it sounds similar, it is different
@@thatsroughbuddy_ in LoK they say that to be the case, but everything we’re shown indicates that it’s just good and evil
i like the face stealer because he respects the game, he'll play dirty but refuses to cheat
Koh is a real homie
This is a really solid video essay. Lots of citations from the show to prove points, and a clear and distinct knowledge of the subject. It's obvious this essay was made out of love for these shows, and I really appreciate the information presented.
I've always been irked by many things in Korra, but I could never put my finger on exactly why the spirits in TLOK bugged me. This video did an amazing job of helping me understand that why.
if the kites were going to exist they should've been Order and Chaos, Subjugation and Freedom.
and Unalaq should've learned the other 4 elements so it was an actual avatar v avatar fight, and at the end Korra should've either taken Vaatu along with Raava and been the avatar of both, learning to balance the two concepts, or both spirits should've been eliminated
This. This would have been perfect.
ATLA: "Twi and La, Push and Pull, Moon and Ocean, Good and Evil...in an eternal dance to keep the balance."
LoK: "Here's LIGHT and DARK, White and Black, one is definitely GOOD, one is definitely BAD. lelz"
Gone was the nuance. Not to mention the over-abundance of decorative, shapeless "spirits" in LoK, while the actual Spirits we met in ATLA had a function. They really cheapened the Spirit World in Legend of Korra. I still wonder what LoK would've been if Mike and Bryan were still working with Aaron Ehasz, the main head writer for most of ATLA. Ehasz went on to do his own series, The Dragon Prince, which also had some shortcomings -- making me think he excels if Mike and Bryan are around to "balance" him out. They must have had some sort of falling out, which sucks, because they, as a team, really did some magic in ATLA.
Thought of Moon being the first waterbender gets me in the heart everytime.
The good and evil spirits just feels like a Paper Mario Toad situation with everything feeling generic. And this video is phenomenal in summarizing why Book 2 of Korra always felt off.
There’s a snippet showing the spirits early in the video that made me think “That looks straight out of ghibli not avatar.” Not five minute later you bring up that exact issue. I think it’s safe to say I agree with you lol
Avatar vs Korra is a great example of why the writing staff matters, especially in today’s climate. While the creators worked on both shows, the actual show runner and writing staff were completely different for each series. The creators built a fantastic world and story, but the show runner and writing staff were the ones responsible for bringing that world and story to life
When you swap them out you’re not going to get the same product. You can see this with the Dragon Prince which was created by Avatar’s show runner and does a much better job at capturing the original feeling of Avatar than Korra ever did
Thank you for putting into words why I had such problems connecting with Korra after Aang.
I always had a strong sense for good media but seldom the ability to express why.
Watching essays like yours help me understand myself so very much
I'd also like to point out that the often associated Colours of White and Black for Yin and Yang are actually not correct as while the Yin-Yang Symbol is typically portrayed s this contrast of light and darkness in Chinese Cosmology the two were actually represented by the Colours Orange, or sometimes Red, (Yin) and Blue (Yang) because each these were the colours of the Tiger and Dragon which also represented/embodied Yin and Yang. This is why the Korean version of this symbol, the Taegeuk, is Red and Blue, rather than Black and White.
That finally explains the South Korean flag!!!
Korra just seems like a fanfic to me
And? Atla is just a kids show
The only time it made any sense of the spirits being upset in Korra was the scene where those bat spirits flew out of the neglected Air Nomad meditation circle. A circle that has clearly not been used in 200 years. Which begs the question as to why it had not been used that long.
I would have liked more if Legend of Korra decided to make dark good/peace spirits and light evil/chaos spirits and not just stereotypical good = light, evil = dark situation
My idea was that both Vatuu and Rava should of been the spirits that inhabit the avatar. Where the avatar is can be both chaos and order, light and dark, good or evil. This allows for Aangs no kill rule while also allows for Kyoshi absolute abandonment for concern of her opponents. It keeps them able to have flaws. Verse having just the embodiment of light inside of them more or less justifying everything they do. Since they have the embodiment of light in them.
Why is it that chaos is always considered bad? I always found it interesting that in the Mistborn series, the shard Ruin is technically not "evil" in the traditional sense even though he is definitly made out to be. He simply wants what he was owed, the destruction (aka "ruin") of what he helped create.
Yes! This! Absolutely right, nice tie in!
I can only think of very few examples. Most prominent in my mind would be fire emblem radiant dawn. That game did the chaos vs order theme well.
Picture it:
Korra becomes Avatar at a time when the spirits are diminishing and facing extinction due to humanity's rapid industrialization and modernization. Although Aang meant well, his focus on Republic City lead to his inability to see the damage being done by this change, ironically enabling the environmental damage he and Team Avatar chastised and witnessed under Fire Lord Ozai.
Korra would have to figure out how to restore balance between the natural / spiritual world and the mechanized / modern human world, or face increasing agitation from the spirits, or them abandoning the human world completely.
It's also possible that Korra would be witnessing the decline of the Avatar Cycle. Aang's descendants are only airbenders left in the world, so Korra would be the first Avatar to encounter the difficulties of learning airbending, since it's understandable that a lot of airbender knowledge would have been lost. Also, the dragons would also be facing extinction, if they haven't died out by Korra's time. And although firebending is still widespread, the deaths of the last dragons could signal the decline of firebending as well.
So, Korra would be in a very difficult position, humanity's expansion and destruction of the natural world, the spirit's agitation and withdrawal from the human world, Korra facing the challenge of how an Avatar can exist in a modern, technological world, and Korra potentially witnessing the decline of the Avatar Cycle, or even *being* the Last Avatar.
The spirit world had such a mystique around them in Alta, they greased it all in lok 🤦🏽♂️
I think saw a shorter video about this subject a while back. Glad to see it brought up again in so much detail. Wonderful work.
"Lore us not a story"
THANK YOU
I vote for retconning/redoing The Legend of Korra altogether. Excellent video by the way! I think a lot of us had the same issues with LoK but we didn’t know how to put our thoughts into words as you did!
So it's like a doctor vs a healer.
A doctor knows and can tell you whats wrong and all the steps to get better.
But a healer just heals and that's it.
I learned this from studying the Ancient Egyptian deities. None of them are classified are good or evil and they all represent natural entities who have done mischievous acts in their lifetimes. Thank you much for this video ❤
Except Anubis. He was a good boy
@@Lutherstrode17492 yeah true, he’s my patron deity and I know he’s good hearted ❤️
@@silverquillproductions4076 I hate when Hollywood tries to villafy him😤 he was a good, mummification god; not an evil one
@@Lutherstrode17492 exactly! He’s only black because of fertile soil and decaying bodies!
@@Lutherstrode17492 reminds me of how often Hades is given the villain treatment when he honestly wasn't that bad compared to the other gods 💀
The other thing is that spirits could destroy the mortal world. Thus, the avatar needing to keep them in check. Like nah they got nerfed
You mentioned it briefly but I feel like if the kites were order and chaos it would’ve been so much better. Like order would be rigid, obedient, controlled, maybe even sorted and phobic (separate but equal 🤮). With order the dominating force the would be like the giver, it would explain why humans and spirits were so separated. Where as chaos would change, creativity, mixed peoples & thoughts. With chaos in control it would be ultimate freedom of choice, lawless, anarchy. Then a balance would be entirely necessary. And both should’ve been taken into the avatar.
If you wanted to make unalok (idk how spelled and I don’t care) “the bad guy” you could’ve made him want to take 1 part which with his traditional views order would make more sense. And if it was stolen it would fundamentally change Korra as she’s missing a part of her self and leaning more into chaos which at this time she already did more.
Maybe, to be in line with ATLA's concept of spirits, the plot of LoK season 2 could instead have been that one of Vaatu and Rava had disappeared and that's why the other was causing having. Instead of locking one of them away forever, Korra would have to find/free the one that was gone to restore balance.
You put into words everything I ever thought about this topic and more.
The idea of humans and spirits having to coexist basically went nowhere. Book 3 started off with showing the struggle of living together only for it to get forgotten about for the rest of the season and resolved offscreen. Then in book 4, when Kuvira attacked republic city, it would’ve been the perfect opportunity to show that spirits and humans had bonded and truly could work together, but when Korra asked them for help they just went “nah” and left
Spirits in TLOK are written as either super evil bad juju stuff, or awwwww so cute look at the little whatever it's so cute. Spirits are all over the place, and don't serve a purpose like in ATLA. They're not there to explain natural phenomena, they're just... there.
“Lore is not a story” - THANK YOU! It blows my mind that the Korra writers fell into the same lore hole that Lucas did when writing the Star Wars prequels, which were still pretty new when Korra was being written. If you explain the minutiae of a fantasy world, it stops being a fantasy world!
i've been saying this to my friends for years. it's so so great to hear someone else agree with me.
The whole light and dark thing also takes agency away from spirits. They no longer do “good” or “bad” things because of their own interests, the pain they feel, their anger towards humans, no. They’re just “thrown out of balance” and forced into doing good or evil things.
Maybe we could have had spirits who side with Raava or Vaatu without being good or evil. Maybe Raava supports human/spirit integration while Vaatu is a purist and believes spirits must be kept separate and spirits join either cause depending on their individual beliefs (or maybe remain neutral because they just don’t care).
But that’s nuance and we banned that from 2010 onwards sooo…
i had these EXACT thoughts nearly word for word when i was watching the legend of korra with my friends. i recall vividly having a visceral, gut reaction of dislike for the way the spirits were brought up in korra and you laid out all of the feelings i had about them so thoroughly here. awesome stuff
0:53 Thank you for so eloquently putting to words exactly hous i felt about the spirits in Kora but never quit articulating on my own!
I wish so much that we could go back in time and make it so 1) Vaatu represented aspects of growth, passion, and change, thus chaos, 2) Korra had to fuse with Vaatu to reunite with Raava, 3) the lesson is to embrace and balance both sides of yourself, never suppressing one over the other.
Korras treatment of spirits was the final nail in the coffin that to me makes me ignore Kora as cannon… there is no legend of korra in ba sing se
100% agree. I can't consider it cannon because it undoes so much of what I loved about atla
Very well said.
Canon
To be honest Amon has a lot more nuanced then unalock Because his motivations came from a place of genuine good despite his methods not being the best it came from a place of genuine good and wanting to help the oppressed
Amon suffered from "villain has a valid point"-itis and that's why they had to get rid of him some early lmao
Yeah, though I’d also like to add that Unalaq’s motives were also more nuanced before the second half of season 2 where it was revealed to all be a lie and the only goal was to release the Pure Evil spirit kaiju.
Realizing that "Unalaq" came from the word "Unlock"
I know I'm a year but I'm saying this, I would have liked season 2 to focus more on the civil war aspects than the spirits, like during the second half spirits are more focused wrongly and the civil war is ignored and just fixed itself
notice how aang didnt just fight haybai for 'destroying' the town, but instead, came at the situation from a rational standpoint and tried to understand why haybai was so angry and how to fix it. it's an infinitely more mature approach and gives the spirits depth and motives that humans and the avatar must try to understand, so as to live in harmony with each other.
in direct contrast to its predecessor, as so exceptionally expressed in this video, LOK decides to simplify and reduce spirits to blanket white and black morality and shoehorn them into humanity's moral framework that leads to scenes like Korra fist fighting a spirit because cool action scenes are better than good writing
I always liked how the original series spirits were mostly designed after things that exist in reality (Owls, fish, centipedes and so on) but heightened to 11 to give them this vibe that blurs between reality and the supernatural. Taking a familiar thing and twisting it slightly results in more of an emotional reaction from the audience than just an ambiguous...glowing...thing...
Another reason I hated the spirit portals is that they just felt like an excuse to allow people the bend in the spirit world therefore making things easier for our "heroes" to 'route-one' the solutions to their challenges more frequently than not.
i remember being so frustrated watching korra. thank you for putting my feelings into words!!
I think another thing that annoyed me about there being spirit portals is the fact that it cheapens the purpose of the Avatar being the bridge between the two worlds. The Avatar was supposed to pretty much the only person that could link with and understand spirits on a fundamental nature in them being basically a half-spirit, half-human. But, in Korra now, it seems the Avatar only really gained this title since they locked the door to get into the spirit world so no one else could really speak to them
4:19 The checkpoint for Slavs who also laughed when they heard "Hui"
This is the best argument about the spirits I've seen so far. It hits the nail right on the head.
The Rava Vatu backstory could have been saved ( as you mentioned briefly)
if Wan in the end combined both into himself, forming the avatar soul, then we would atleast have a balance motif.
Also the lion turtles being bending dispensers could have been reworked. you had the Moon,Sun (+dragons), bisons & badgers Bryke!
My thoughts exactly. Or Korra could’ve done it. If we have to go the light vs dark route, imagine the storytelling possibilities of Avatars now harboring both Raava and Vaatu within them