Korra: Turf Wars: my ship is at least 50% seaworthy

[spoilers ahead for Legend of Korra: Turf Wars part 1]

The new Legend of Korra comic Turf Wars part 1 won't be out in the UK for a couple of weeks. Still, lucky fans in the US have posted various odds and ends, including the following that made my old romantic heart very, very happy:

There is so much to love about this panel and this plot point before we get to my selfish, shippy personal reasons to love it. For a start, there's Kya's age. I'm not sure exactly how old the Kataang kids are but since her brother Bumi is retired I'd lay even odds Kya's at least fifty. In a media landscape where so many sapphic characters are still designed for male consumption here's a wlw with grey hair and crow's feet. Its just nice to have an older woman coming forward to congratulate Korra and Asami (as is the context here), assuring both them and us that they aren't alone in the Avatar world.

Incidentally, another scene that presumably follows this has Kya confirm there was no sexuality-based prejudice among the Air Nomads (which presumably continues with Tenzin's revived Air Nation) and that Avatar Kyoshi was bisexual. As someone who is so heartily sick of the way writers just tend to assume that the past always has to be uniformly awful for LGBTQ+ people, this is truly heartening.

Now, let's get on to my own selfish love for this scene:

I bloody love the Kyalin ship. I know that it is crack shipping at its absolute best. I mean, we're pairing two characters up who never meet on screen. Kya and Lin Beifong share exactly zero minutes and zero seconds of screen time in the whole four seasons of the series and, to my knowledge, that total doesn't get any better in Turf Wars part 1. The best we can say is that the two characters almost certainly know one another, Lin having dated Kya's elder brother for some years.

And yet, the fan fiction for the pairing is amazing. It was one of the first tags I stumbled upon when I first started reading fic on AO3 and the I absolutely fell in love with the dynamic: the cynical police chief and the laid back free spirit. Plus, pairing two middle-aged women together is a refreshing change, at least from my point of view at the time, from the usual pairings of a series' young and beautiful protagonists (not that Korrasami content isn't appreciated, of course, and I understand how much that pairing means to people, believe you me).

Now, I'm certainly not one of those people who feels a need for “their” pairing to be canon but, as I say, there is some joy in knowing the ship is at least halfway seaworthy. 

Voltron: second verse same as the first?

I have never, ever in my life read or watched anything from the Voltron franchise. I'd heard of it, knew it was a big deal but never experienced it. The only time it really pinged my radar was when that rumour went around that Cloverfield was a secret Voltron reboot and that was... about as wrong as its possible to be, let's face it.

Now I'm planning to watch a Netflix reboot of the thing. Why?

Well, one of the oldest marketing ploys known to man: “This thing is like a thing you loved before!” Netflix put up a trailer full of animation, voice acting and humour that reminded me of Legend of Korra and, of course, a short Google search later it turns out that Joaquim Dos Santos and Lauren Montgomery of Legend of Korra are working on this thing.

So, philosophical question: do I want truth in this advertising?

Short answer: … ish. Long answer: I think this is one of the greatest traps in the creative world. You absolutely cannot predict what someone will enjoy except by looking at what they already enjoy. This is as true of a friend recommending a book as it is of a multi-national corporation greenlighting a movie. Netflix poured money into this thing because some of the makers of Legend of Korra wanted to make a Voltron reboot and here is how it has been marketed to me:

1. The animation looks like Legend of Korra.

2. The humour sounds like Legend of Korra.

3. There is a comedy coward like Bolin in Legend of Korra.

4. Press were very clearly told about Dos Santos and Montgomery's involvement.

5. Press have speculated about the series based on this connection, as they were meant to.

What we need to disentangle here is that using this connection to interest me and using it to entertain me are different ideas. Would I like more Korra? Yeah, of course I want more of the thing I enjoyed and I'm well up for Dark Horse's sequel comics when they eventually deign to publish them. I'm a nerd, which is just hedonism disguised as literary taste.

The thing is that just producing the same thing again and again bores your audience no matter how much they loved the first thing. I loved Legend of Korra but I already watched four seasons of it. What I hope, given that Korra was a 1930s movie serial in cartoon form and Voltron seems to be a Sentei series, is that I'm going to get a very different experience from this series almost by default.

Essentially, once I knew Dos Santos and Montgomery were involved I wanted to see what they were going to do next, not see what they did before again. I want to see them run off in a new direction, just as Legend of Korra ran off in a very different direction from The Last Airbender. 

10 years of Avatar: The Last Airbender

Broken internet didn't allow me to post this on the day but Saturday was the tenth anniversary of Avatar: The Last Airbender, one of the best cartoons ever. I'll admit I was late to the party, only checking it out around the time the HERESY... ahem, I mean “film” was being advertised. There was a lot of buzz about how good the series was but I'd only vaguely heard of it (not a fandom I'm connected to, honestly) so I decided to check out a couple of episodes, one or two, just to try it...

I think I got all the way to Sozin's Comet in about a fortnight. It grabbed me, it really grabbed me in afew series do. Its a great piece of work on every level: the stories are well-structured and engaging; the animation is first rate; and, most of all, the characters are genuinely complex and fascinating. You could lecture on those characters. Even a few years down the line Azula is still one of my favourite villains ever and I think Sokka is right up there with Xander Harris as one of the best “everyman” fantasy sidekicks of all time.

Apropos of nothing, every time I re-watch the series I'm always surprised how little Suki is in Fire. The memory cheats and I do so love that character.

It takes a lot for a cartoon to impress me, quite simply because my generation always has Batman: The Animated Series to compare things to. One of the greatest legacies of the Batman series, as well as its fantastic writing and art direction, was its long history of getting away with shit. Time moves on, though, and every legacy will be bettered. Over a decade separates Batman and The Last Airbender so obviously the technical side improved: Avatar's animation was smoother, it was written more as a serial instead of an anthology, but most of all it got away with more shit than Batman could.

We're talking about a series here whose main character is the sole survivor of a genocide; where another was facially mutilated by his own father; and multiple characters suffers enduring emotional scars from bereavement. Hell, there's at least one pretty obvious gag about Sokka and Suki sneaking into each other's tents at night. Each and every villain has a solid, explicable motivation and none are irredeemable (except perhaps Ozai, who's less a character and more a force of nature in the narrative).

And that's all before going into Legend Of Korra, which actually managed to sneak in the development (even if not the actual culmination) of two of its principal female characters becoming a couple. Be quiet, they are, that's textbook walking off into the sunset, right there.

Why is getting away with stuff so important? Well, it ensures that art is remembered. As I say, my generation's go to example is Batman because nothing else we watched as kids had villains using actual guns or would make any of them as evil as the Joker, who actually killed and left the victims' corpses with horrible rictus grins. People who grew up in the Seventies still remember the golden age of Doctor Who when it was a horror series that delighted in scaring the pants off them. Pushing boundaries isn't the only reason these things are remembered but I do think it was an important factor in making a quality product with a traceable cultural legacy.

Pushing boundaries also respects the audience's intelligence. I have a lot of younger cousins and I have watched some absolute dreck aimed at their age bracket. I concede that I found some awful stuff entertaining when I was their age and there's no shame in that, kids are kids and critical taste develops with age and experience. I do think its important for children's fiction to respect their intelligence. Kids understand more than most adults think they do, subtext is not an alien concept to them because if it was then fairy tales and religious parables would be pointless as teaching tools.

The Last Airbender and Legend Of Korra are series about complex young characters inheriting a screwed up world from the older generation and using their creativity and fresh perspective to make a better world. Brilliantly, this is even true of Korra, where the characters are inheriting and fixing the world the Last Airbender kids inherited and fixed because progress should be continuous. Both series operate with an explicit spiritual dimension not to proselytise but to foreground individual personal development against the huge overarching plots of war and social unrest. Whole essays could be written on Korra's body type in light of her being the series lead; on Sokka's evolving attitudes towards women; on Zuko's morality; on how the series treats the concept of destiny; on Toph's spirituality; the glorious confidence trick of Varrick in Spirits; and any number of other subjects.

And you know what? I think I'm gonna. These are two of my favourite series of all time, I want to celebrate them for a while and a tenth anniversary seems as good an excuse as any. 

Context and the bisexual Avatar

(Spoiler warning for the series finale of Legend Of Korra)

I've just started watching the third season of Legend Of Korra, thanks to the generosity of the internet since Nickolodean has an almost HBO-esque inability to release timely DVDs. Anyway, I'm doing this after the end of season four was spoilered for me by the whole of tumblr going crazy about it. Not that I blame them, this was a biggie.

So I'm going into watching these final two seasons knowing who Korra walks off into the sunset with. This means I have a context for things denied the audience at first transmission, especially given the creators' insistence that they intended to develop Korra and Asami's relationship towards a romantic conclusion since somewhere in the planning phase of season three.

Anyway, I just watched the episode where Asami tries to teach Korra to drive. The two of them are sitting in Asami's car and each confesses to the other that they kissed Mako whilst the other was dating him (long story and if you don't know it then, seriously, watch this series its great). After they have this off their chests Korra tells Asami's she glad they're still fine as growing up as sheltered as she did she's never had a girlfriend before...

… and God help me but the moment Korra says that Asami has a look of shock on her face, I'm sure of it. I was aware of the moment in question because of some fanfic I read but I assumed it was just the sort of moment 'shippers grab onto regardless of authorial intent (and ain't nothin' wrong with that) but it really does look like Asami's internal monologue is going “Girlfriend? She said girlfriend! Oh spirits, I wish, but she blatantly means 'friend who is a girl'... I'm glad she's driving or I'd have crashed the car when she said that...”.

I wonder what else I'll notice on the way to these two ladies walking off into the sunset/spirit world.