KORRA FINALE

[psocoptera]

OH MY GOD OH MY GOD YOU GUYS SCREAMING AND CRYING. (Only, silently, so as to not wake the two-year-old next door. BUT IN MY HEAD.) SHE WENT OFF INTO THE FUCKING SUNSET WITH ASAMI OH MY GOD.

::deep breaths::

Okay. I loved it. Absolutely loved it. I loved that they tried all of the obvious solutions against the mech (blind it, trip it, lavabend under it) in the first five minutes, creating genuine suspense as to what else might go down. I loved Bolin and Lin and Su dropping a building on it, my god that was epic. I love that Korra finally remembered about water, the other element (although I wish they'd done even more with that). I loved that Asami's dad bit it promptly in the first half leaving the possibility of a major-character finale death open in the second half - oh man I was crying when Mako and Bolin say goodbye to each other and Mako goes into slowmo, I had not thought of Mako as an obvious candidate for the heroic sacrifice play and then it was suddenly so obvious, the big brother, the ex-lover, oh, man. I'm glad they didn't though since I think it would have made the focus too much all about Mako and not Korra.

I loved Korra, sitting and talking quietly with Kuvira at the end. That right there is why I love Avatar so so much, that it's not just the amazing spectacle, but also that, like, humanist ethical spirit. The war ends not when one side is obliterated but when two people are finally able to acknowledge each other. The control room fight was pretty amazing too, of course, and I thought the creation of a new spirit portal was a really nice solution to the whole gun-turning-into-The-Bomb problem they'd been building up to.

I liked Wu. I thought the thing with the badger moles was great - finally brings the Earth-royalty animal fixation back around to something positive - and I liked that in the end he was part of the change the Earth Kingdom needed instead of being run over by it or left behind by it. I liked Varrick and Zhu Li - I haven't been a fan of their relationship but I thought all of their lines were really funny ("that's exactly what I thought it would be like") and I liked that pairing them meant we got to have a wedding at the end without it being any of the main cast. (I was initially very hung up on the exact seating order of Mako, Asami, and Korra there in the audience and now I don't even remember and don't even care because HAND HOLDING GAZING INTO EACH OTHER'S EYES ON A PRIVATE VACATION OH MY GOD.) Pretty much the only thing I really didn't like was Korra and Tenzin's conversation at the end about how she had to go through disability to learn compassion, which, I don't know, on the one hand maybe their universe *does* work like that to teach spiritual lessons to Avatars, but I don't think it works like that in our universe and we're the ones watching the show. So. Pretty much hit it out of the park otherwise (even the costuming - Korra's outfit at the end was fabulous) and I'm kind of amazed that they pulled it off so well after those first couple seasons.

Wait, why aren't they taking Naga with them?? Shit, I need fanart fixing that.

Comments

[cereph.livejournal.com]

AGREE. OMG the end <3 <3 <3 The whole episode was sooooo good, and such a satisfying ending to the show as a whole.

[sildra.livejournal.com]

I'm sort of amazed that they really did go as far as a Nick show possibly could with making Korrasami explicit. I just saw someone on Tumblr post a screen shots of the end of AtLA compared with LoK, and basically the last shot right before the Chinese characters (I assume they say "the end" or something like it) in AtLA was Aang and Katara kissing--Korra and Asami holding hands and staring into each other's eyes was clearly meant to be analogous to that.

Other than that Baatar Jr, Varrick, and Zhu Li are the only ones who know how to make the spirit weapon and none of them want to make another, they didn't address the possibility of future weapons proliferation.

[q10.livejournal.com]

yeah, my biggest problem is that you really can't put that back into the bottle.

well, that and that it's a little naive to assume that the entire earth empire army is going to fold without any additional awkwardness just because Kuvira sees the error of her ways. i mean, Kuvira seeing the error of her ways was great and all, but...

but mainly that was amazing and OMG Korrasami squeeeeee!

[sildra.livejournal.com]

I figure Wu, with his newfound diplomacy, and Kuvira, having fixed her moral compass slightly (in shackles and chaperoned by Su and maybe some other Beifongs), are going to do a tour of the Earth Empire and slowly turn it into the Confederation of Earth States. It would have been better if Korra could have been the chaperone, but she needs her alone time with Asami first--I guess she can join later.

[q10.livejournal.com]

the idea of a very grumpy Lin having to supervise Wu, Kuvira, and, oh ... let's go ahead and say Zaheer on some kind of ‘hey everybody we're going to try a thing where we have political reform without murdering people’ national tour has the makings of best worst road trip story ever.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Proliferation: I agree the show didn't spell this out explicitly, but I got the impression that because spirit vines are all connected, people like Korra and Jinora will always know if someone is harvesting them in any significant way, so nobody is going to be able to build another spirit weapon in secret?

Army: I think they handled this just as well as the original show did, which is to say I don't mind that they skipped showing the cleanup phase. (My most-popular fanfic story is about Zuko figuring out how to get from defeating Azula with Katara to actually having authority in the Fire Nation, and I think people primarily like that story because it's a Zuko character piece with fun worldbuilding, but I do also think people see a gap in the narrative there and are interested in what might fill it.)

[q10.livejournal.com]

i thought that was pretty glaring in the original too.

and what with Bolin's ‘oh, did i forget to mention it? no of course i didn't know!’, which i took as an apology for the ... underwhelming job they did of timing the big reveal of Ozai's apocalypse plan, i was hoping they might be a little more careful about some of the other stuff.

and unlike in the original, the army is right there. i mean, in the original show, the airship fleet is down, the army has been expelled fro Ba Sing Se, and there are occupying forces in other places, but there's not anything else obviously in progress that can't be handled in the cleanup phase. whereas here, there are platoons of mecha tanks marching in, and it's not obvious that they're all going to stand down right away just because Kuvira says so. i mean, the personality cult that Kuvira has cultivated, and the shock and awe value of huge glowy explosion + new spirit portal, will together go a long way, but still...

[q10.livejournal.com]

and yeah that was a pretty great fic.

and yeah sure, nobody can do it in secret, but just because you have good enough intelligence to know another superpower is enriching a bunch of uranium doesn't mean you necessarily have the political and military opportunity to do something about it. that is all too clear from the history of this stuff in the real world.

[q10.livejournal.com]

i think the conversation with Tenzin works better when taken in the context of the way she draws on that experience in talking down Kuvira.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

I feel like they could have written something quite similar and I would have been fine with it, but the actual wording still bugs me. There's a difference between "I don't think I could have convinced Kuvira to surrender without the compassion I learned from being poisoned" and "now I see why I had to suffer like that".

[sildra.livejournal.com]

I think that sort of phrasing (and the literal idea behind it, even) tends to be really common among people who are religious. Some religions don't accept that direction of causality (Judaism mostly doesn't, for example--suffering is because of something you already did--although there are exceptions), but a lot do. Christianity very notably can work that way, but I'm pretty sure various Eastern religions that the show drew inspiration from have examples of it too, whether or not it's a primary theme in any of them.

[q10.livejournal.com]

i'm used to reading that kind of causal language as not very literal in these kinds of settings.