It had plenty of good beats that are core to the Avatar style, but it just felt... rushed. Unfocused. There were too many points where I questioned either the motivations of the characters or the intentions of the storytellers. The story certainly contained a lot of change, but spent close to no time on the change still happening from the events of the previous season, which occurred only weeks earlier. Further, the new changes introduced in the new season were not given the attention necessary to feel like anything more than your standard action movie destruction.
There will definitely be spoilers in the rest of this post, so be weary if that matters to you.
There were a few places where characters make uninformed or unwise decisions, and I chalked those up to being an artifact of the show being, ultimately, a children's cartoon on a children's network. These sorts of things allow the characters, who really should know better, to take actions, fail, and then learn a lesson from them.
The biggest example here is Tenzin's early enthusiasm for rebuilding the Air Nation to the point where he just assumed the new airbenders would abandon their existing lives to join him in rebuilding a completely different culture. He believed this to the point that he was apparently willing to take people away from their established families. And none of the other characters with him, including his wife nor usually-empathetic sister Kya, nor the entirety of Team Avatar, thought that this might not work. And, of course, it didn't.
But instead of Tenzin realizing this wasn't going to work, the mechanization of the Earth Queen provided him with an entire crop of recruits who were perfectly willing to follow him, but mostly because they already had everything taken from them in the Earth Kingdom, so they had nothing else to do anyway. There was no lesson learned about Tenzin's desire to rebuild a dead culture against the wishes of those he would have carry the burden.
One issue like this would be a minimal note. But there were many more, at various levels of nitpicking. Since I am unable to leave well enough alone, here are several of them that occurred to me when I sat down to write this summary:
- There was lots of actual change in this book, but it didn't really feel like it. Instead of dealing with the fallout of the spirit/human worlds remixing, societal or political, it dealt with the assassination plot and the attempt to rebuild the past. It did end with Tenzin's shift in focus for his new airbenders... from "rebuild the past" to"forge a new future"... but he didn't even put it in those terms.
I would have liked to see more exploration of the erosion of the concept of elemental-based Nations. Not in the way of the Red Lotus who wanted to tear down all government, but in the sense that the world had divided itself up very cleanly among elemental allegiances before the Fire Nation's war. Now, two generations later, many places on the central continents are becoming increasingly mixed.
Republic City is the most diverse, as it was founded from the mixed Earth and Fire peoples of the Fire Nation Colonies. The Fire Nation probably second-most so, as they have had dealings with everyone else for so long. The Earth Kingdom's isolationism and protection of its own culture is interesting, as it never (fully) fell to the Fire Nation, so it may be pretty close to Earth-only in both culture and ethnicity. The Water Tribes are fairly isolated geographically and didn't experience much forced integration under the Fire Nation, but they've also been more politically open. The Air Nation/Nomads simply don't exist except for a single family, and their rebuilding efforts have ended up with them being "citizens of the world" more than as a Nation.
The appearance of airbenders EVERYWHERE mirrors the mixing of the elements even within bloodlines. I guess maybe this theme will be explored more in Book 4: Balance. - The sudden appearance of Airbenders among non-benders... what impact did that have in the other nations? Earth Kingdom decided to round them up... what impact would this have on the still politically raw "non-bender" movement from Book 1? That the underlying complaint of the bad guys in that Book was actually VALID has yet to be addressed.
It's understandable that this wasn't investigated too closely, and was covered well enough considering the parts of the world directly viewed in this season. - Why, exactly, would airbenders be a good "elite fighting force" for the Earth Kingdom? Because other benders don't have experience fighting them? Simply because they were a exploitable minority that could be press-ganged / brainwashed? They certainly weren't being taught any techniques that would be taking special advantage of Air... unless the point was to specifically fight against Earth benders, and thus the "elite army" was really meant to be a pacification force for the Earth Queen's own people. Which actually fits, somewhat.
- The Korra era's focus on "advanced techniques" of bending continues,
which is unsurprising. Metalbending has been in heavy use since Book 1, but this wasn't really tied in with Change at all. Bolin's Metal/Lava
bending thread was part of his personal arc. Ultimately Mako
defeats the waterbender Ming-Hua via lightning bending.... but no deal is made
of this, and it's the first time he did it at all in the season. He'd
gotten a job at a power plant in Book 1 (2?) where he bent electricity
into dynamos, so we know he can do it... but it was NEVER mentioned as
being especially noteworthy, and he never does it in combat before this
final fight. It was a MAJOR accomplishment for firebenders in the first
series.
The Legend of Korra runs with the idea that, in two generations, "advanced" bending has become so incredibly common, you can find/hire benders at the "laborer" level in many cases. Hell, there's an entire city of metal benders, in addition to a large number of them employed in Republic City's police department. And if only one in a hundred Earthbenders can Metalbend, then just how many Earthbenders are there? And what's the percentage of non-benders, with Book 1's focus on the conflict of non-benders being subject to the whim of an implicit bender "nobility" class. - Lin uses Toph's "Earth Radar" once as a neat sort of reminder that it exists, but also for a reason that serves the plot. I forget if she's done this in the past or not. Didn't Toph need to be barefoot to do it? Either way, this was a back-reference that felt more appropriate than fan-service.
- Bumi getting airbending was incredibly convenient. There was no investigation of why people were gaining airbending beyond "harmonic convergence" so there's no exploration of why these
specific people gained the ability. Was it that people with an existing
potential, but one that did not meet some invisible threshhold, found
the barrier to entry reduced? That would make sense for Bumi... but then
why would Opal, whose entire family are (very nearly) all
earthbenders, gain AIR bending? A weak bloodline from her father? Maybe.
- Suyin Beifong's children get very little screen time beyond
Opal. I'm not sure if the eldest son (who was most architect-like and
really only seen once following his father) is a Bender. Even if not, he
and Opal would have been non-benders while the other three sons were
all earth benders.... so Opal suddenly becoming an Airbender would have
been pretty damn noteworthy. What was Opal before she was "the new airbender"? But this aspect of things are never mentioned,
even in a "whatever, we don't pride benders above non-benders" sort of
way.
- Iroh did not need to be in this season. He really didn't need to be in Book 2 either, but he was more vital to the path the plot took, so fine. But his appearance in Book 3 was entirely because he's a popular character. Literally any other (adult) character could have told Korra the exact same thing he did, which wasn't especially spiritual or enlightening.
- We see Lord Zuko in this era for the first time (I think), though he really doesn't do much, so he's just there to be seen. He's apparently not Fire Lord, his unnamed daughter is.That's interesting, but not relevant to the action or theme of the current season.
- Toph's current status is mentioned: she's wandering the world, and hasn't been heard of for years. I expected she'd show up, but she never did (other than in a flashback). I was pleasantly surprised by that. It felt like someone decided they needed to pull in all the original season references they could whether they made sense or not. Toph's family makes more sense than shoehorning her into the story in person. Even though Toph is awesome.
- We don't actually see Katara this Book. That is actually somewhat surprising. We do get more of Korra's father Tonraq, again mostly because he could be there and to have Korra think he's dead for a short time.
- Asami had a couple chances to kick ass and a couple minor character moments, but otherwise she was just there to be the Other Female on Team Avatar... Lin and Suyin had more screen time than her. Hell, Opal probably had more character development than Asami. She had a nice moment with Korra early in episode 1, gets one episode of agency in the middle of a desert, but mostly exists just to play the straight man and for occasional jokes about awkwardness between her, Korra, and Mako. Speaking of which...
- The convincing of Mako to join in the expedition was... weak. Yes, only Bolin could do it, but it felt like this was something they had to resolve quickly, so they could get back to status quo and get on with the actual story they wanted to tell. This is doubly evident because the awkwardness that almost prevented Mako from joining in the first place was effectively a non-issue starting in the next scene.
- I had heard that the show runners wanted this season to move a bit closer to the "explore the world" sensibility of The Last Airbender... and in this, it was a bit hit-and-miss. We see two new locations, one of which was revisiting one we saw in the earlier series, Ba Sing Se. This would have been an excellent opportunity to highlight Change, but instead we get an Earth Kingdom being run by a cruel and oppressive ruler.... which is what it was when we first see it in TLA as well. So... change!
- Have we seen female Airbender masters before, even in the original series? None of the other female acolytes have shaved heads, which I find interesting. Just an idle thought during the final scene.
In the final two episodes, I found myself hoping that someone important would die, though I didn't think it would be incredibly likely due to the Nickelodeon thing. I felt like there needed to be something at the character level that would drive home the idea that "nothing will ever be the same again".... i.e. Change. You know, like the season title. The story more skirted around Change than explored it.
However, ending with a possibly paralyzed Korra was interesting and had a hint of this "not the same" mentality. Korra was presented as being mentally broken and depressed, though it was never made clear whether this was just due to her physical injuries or something deeper. I feel this may have been a missed opportunity for explaining her attitude. Imagine if her father had died in the battle, perhaps with someone else. As is, Korra fought another major fight and eventually won with the help of her friends. Her body is broken from the fight and the poison, but she was still victorious. Is she simply broken that she's too weak to move, since she's always expressed herself physically? Did the poison affect her mind? Is she worried that, in her current state, she can't function as the Avatar and is letting the world down? No idea. Leave that open for the next season to explain, I guess.
My greatest fear, however, is that this cost will be glossed over quickly in the first episode of the next season. Book 4: Balance takes place three years after the end of Book 3, so it's the biggest time jump in the Korra era yet. Speculation is that it starts with Korra finishing her recovery from this ordeal, being exactly that "narrative reset" I am apprehensive of . The first episode is actually on Nickelodeon as I write this, so I guess I will find out shortly.
I did, honestly, really enjoy this Korra story. It didn't suffer from the problem of requiring multiple layers of new mythology to explain the various motivations that Book 2 did. It was refreshingly straightforward but, perhaps, too much so. In reflection, it just felt a bit flat. Too compressed. Lots of interesting ideas implied, too few explored.
