People often compare the writing and Korra's accomplishments to Aang's. While LOK is inferior in both, this isn't the main reason why LOK is so much more disliked than TLA, at least not for me.
TLA had shitty writing at times and some episodes were downright boring (The Great Divide). But where this didn't bother me in TLA, it did in LOK. Mainly because TLA had such a good supporting cast.
Each of Aang's travel companions had a story of their own and a reason to help Aang besides saving the world. They have their place rooted in the story and the series would've gone a lot different if any of the main cast was left out. It felt like it was their destiny to help the avatar.
Katara:
The last waterbender on the south pole. Without her Aang would still be stuck in that iceberg. She has great talent but lacks a teacher and she just so happens to meet the avatar who needs to learn waterbending aswell.
Sokka:
A brightmind who lacks the inspiration to use it. Traveling the world gives him that inspiration. When necessary he comes up with great strategies and solutions. The guy invented fucking submarines and air balloons.
Toph:
A genius earthbender with unusual abilities. Not only is she strong, she has ridiculous utility. Besides metalbending she's a seismic radar, lie detector and has voice recognition. Before she met Aang she was caged in by her overprotective parents and could only express herself in underground arenas.
>>78048033
Zuko:
I don't even know where to start. Throughout the story his character grew to what he became in the finale. If it wasn't for Aang, he would still be a banished prince wandering aimlessly around the world.
Helping the avatar made them grow to their full potential.
Compare these to the LOK cast. It felt like Korra just happened to meet them and they decided for whatever reason to tag along. You can swap any character of team avatar with someone with the same bending element and the story wouldn't change all that much. Only Bolin has some growth and gets lavabending, but that had no prior foreshadowing and it was hardly used to advance the story.
The group dynamic in TLA was so much better than in LOK. If any of the group members in LOK just decides to leave mid season 1, it wouldn't be all that unrealistic. They had no real attachments to the team besides helping a friend they just met. Aang and his team became an essential aspect in each other's lives.
Whereas team Korra feels like a group of shallow friends, team Aang feels like a tight family.
>>78048033
More like the legend of failed expectations am I right?
They should've just had the avatar not even be the main character in the show anymore because the universe doesn't revolve around them and things would eventually come to balance without them fucking shit up.
Op's pic what I expected.
Op's second pic what I got.
>>78048312
In LOK the image of the avatar was so messed up. In TLA the avatar was considered this force of nature that you should respect and fear. If you act out of line the guy comes looking for you and fucks your shit up. Korra was seen as a nuisance most of the time. She was treated like a special ed kid. She was given all this attention, but nobody really wanted her around.
If people treated Aang with some disrespect, it would be somewhat believable. He disappeared for 100 years and neglected his duties to stop the fire nation. People still respected him because of what he could do and what he stood for.
Everyone treating Korra like a commoner made no sense. Her previous life literally saved the world. The feats of Aang were still fresh in everyone's memory. They should know what she's capable of. Instead of being thankful of the world her past life created, they act like she has no place in that same world.
>>78048041
>>78048033
Okay.
I mean, you're right but we all knew this stuff a few years ago.
Final arc should have been about using technology to give common folk the abilities of benders. Have Asami use her tech to become a sort of Iron Man Avatar rival.
>>78048567
Korra is no Aang. She's the Avatar, yeah, but she was just not as amazing as people had come to think of Aang as.
>>78048582
When people bash LOK the usually target Korra and says she's such a shitty avatar. While she isn't the best, her incompetence isn't the main fault of the series. Aang's behaviour was annoying at times too. He refused to kill an unredeemable man to end a war and became a dick when Appa was stolen.
The difference in LOK and TLA was there was a group of competant and caring friends to lead Aang during those times. The only support Korra's team gave her was with their bending and fighting abilities.
>>78048648
Aang gained respect when he mentoined he's the avatar even when talking to complete strangers. He was an honored guest at the north pole and in the Beifong household. The earth king was willing to listen to their story when Aang told him who he was. People had not heard from Aang for 100 years and he had done nothing noteworthy during TLA. He was still considered as an authority figure.
>>78048652
To be fair to Aang, he's a twelve year old kid who just lost one of the few connections he has to his old life, who was also his beloved pet. Can you really blame him for flipping out? Not that it was the right thing to do, but he's only human.
>>78048695
>The earth king was willing to listen to their story when Aang told him who he was
if i remember right he ignored Aang even after he told him he is the avatar; heard his story but called bullshit on it until they finally prove to him there was something going on. I don't think he holds that much power on that title, and i don't see how his feats would pass to Korra. They're not the same people, and i doubt Aang stayed relevant after the 100 years war. The world probably advanced without him after that.
>>78048041
>and gets lavabending
The more I reflect on this the more I think it was hamfisted. At least in the way it was presented.
>>78048830
Aang getting pissed was understandable. It was only lightly annoying when he yelled at the group in the desert. Luckily his attitude didn't last long because his friends cheered him up.
Meanwhile Korra was struggling with dark Korra for almost the entire fourth season. None of her friends even noticed this and helped her.
Aang and Korra both have faults. But Aang's faults get corrected by his supporting cast. Korra's faults just stay there and make her character unlikable.
>>78048848
The earth king didn't intend to even listen to their story and let them be taken away by Longfeng. It's when he finds out Aang is the avatar, he reconsiders and allows them to prove their claim.
>>78048912
>Meanwhile Korra was struggling with dark Korra for almost the entire fourth season.
And her own angst and relationship drama from seasons 1-3.
>>78048848
The Earth king would have thrown them in jail without even hearing their story if Aang hadn't been the avatar. He basicly gave them a chance based solely on who Aang was.
And while the avatars are different people, they all hold the title and power of the avatar. In ATLA Aang was considered the last true hope for defeating the firelord and returning to a normal way of living. And i certainly don't feel the same holds true for Korra. Most of the time i think she was treated as an unruly teenager, when in fact she has the worlds wellbeing as her responsibility, they just don't deal very well with this in LoK.
Part of the problem was that the characters in TLA were all hanging out with each other at all times, and that they had to be constantly on the move to hide from Zuko/Zhao/Azula. In LoK, the characters were all old teenagers/young adults who had their own lives, jobs, and most importantly, homes. They're not nomads who have nothing to do with their time other than find themselves, they have responsibilities (the police force/bodyguard, movers/army humanitarian projects, running a huge manufacturing company).
Plus they've all basically figured out who they are as people anyways, Bolin is arguably the only one who goes through any kind of growth by getting over himself after he stops being a movie star. Even the Kuvira's army thing isn't really him growing, he's a little dumb and he genuinely thought Kuvira was doing good because all he did was hand out food and clothes to poor people, he had to see her doing awful shit directly before he could tell himself it wasn't good.
Why would Aang want to reincarnate into a person thats the exact opposite of him?
Has more flaws than him, confused about spuritality, sexuality, and didn't even want to find peaceful solutions to conflict anymore.
I'll just have to wait until korra dies and we get an earth avatar because a water avatar is just horribly out of wack.
>>78050075
>Why would Aang want to reincarnate
Because then his soul goes to the afterlife and it's of no use to anyone and the world doesn't have an Avatar anymore.
You can argue all you want about how Korra was whiny and seemed ineffective (I didn't like her or her series as much either!) but the bottom line is she got a lot of shit done. Aang whined and shirked his responsibilities a lot too.
>>78049849
More interaction between the characters isn't always a positive thing.
Aang and his team spent every day together during their travels. There were conflicts but those were heavily outweight by the refreshing group dynamics. Each character was strong on their own and they brought out the best in each other.
Korra saw her group every other day and sometimes you wished they saw each other less. The first interactions between Korra, Mako, Bolin and Asami were romatic. This hurt the foundations of the group immensely. Korra didn't see Mako as anything but a romatic love interest and that was her main goal in getting to know him better. Bolin thought the same way about Korra. Mako and Asami thought the same way about each other. These retarded love triangles fall apart and you can't help but wonder why they still hang out together afterwards.
>>78050152
>but the bottom line is she got a lot of shit done
She really didn't though. She needed Aang's visions to find out who Amon really is and had him energybend everyone. She needed Jinora's help to take down Vaatu. She was saved from Zaheer by the airbenders. She could have stopped Kuvira in their duel, but pussed out.
>>78050075
Well as we see in LoK, it's not up to the avatar. It's Raavas choice.
Even in ATLA i never got the feeling that the avatars choose the next one. I always assumed it happened according to some cosmic chance which is also why it always alternated between the nations.
>>78050455
The whole Ravaa thing was such a Mcguffin. You'd think that the lion-turtles were enough already with the outside influences to the identity of what the avatar can and can't do. Ravaa further complicates that the avatar is solely a force completely under its command like some kind of God constantly judging if the avatars doing good or not.
I understand that they wanted to make it about yin and yang energies. Then why did the good Ravaa not have some bad, and the Bad Ravaa was just all bad and no good. Sealing away or suppressing the bad one completely just cause it's the devil. Isn't dealing with it. It's just making it somebody's problem a thousand years later.
>>78050869
The avatar's job is to maintain balance, but how can you call it balance when you just remove something that's been around since the beginning of time? The whole Ravaa thing feels cheap. Wan carried those episodes all by himself. If it weren't for him the Wan episodes would just be as bad as the rest of season 2.
Speaking of season 2 what was the motivation of Unalaq again? At first I thought he was thinking the same thing as me and he wasn't really a bad guy. That the world needed Vaatu and that Raava and Vaatu were two sides of the same coin. But then he turned into the DARK avatar. You know you are doing evil and wrong stuff if you call yourself the dark counterpart of something. Then he proceeds to destroy Raava making my assumption of him restoring balance null. At the end he was just evil for the heck of it. He had no gain in all of this. Sure he was powerful but he was before aswell. He was chief of the northern water tribe and a powerful waterbender. Vaatu destroying everything had no benefits for him.
>>78051315
If Raava is light and Vaatu is darkness, then what else would the avatar of Vaatu call himself but "dark"?
Or were they order and chaos rather than light and dark? I can't even remember.
>>78051401
He could just call himself avatar aswell, since Raava's hosts aren't called light avatars. I don't know, dark avatar just seemed way too much like fanfiction to me.
>>78048033
Second series should've followed young adult Aang and his shenanigans. The jump to Korra IMO was too sudden. Fans were watching the series hungry as fuck for any information about the old team instead of trying to appreciate the new one.
Greatest cartoon event in television history would've been a series finale episode about Aang passing on.
>>78051538
The transition wouldn't be a problem if the characters of LOK were proper replacements for the TLA characters. But the new group was so shit, they made everyone miss the old group even more. In the following seasons the creators thought they could pander to TLA fans and brought back the old characters. These supposed aged TLA characters were a disgrace to the original series. If they weren't dead, then they were bitter and hated their lives. They also didn't feel like stepping in when the world they fought so hard for was endangered.
Their appearance in LOK had no impact at all to the story. I don't even remember if Katara did or said anything significant. Zuko only appeared to job against Zaheer's group and Toph tried to get Korra back on her feet with no results.
This poor show of hamfisting in great characters only made LOK even worse.
>>78050366
Shit, you're right, I completely forgot that Aang never once got advice from his past lives, got help from any of his friends, or hesitated from killing someone when he had an opportunity to do so. Completely forgot about how Aang did exactly the correct thing 100% of the time, by himself.
Not like Aang ever had spirit problems. Not like he ever completely blew off total mastery of the avatar state because he liked a girl.
>>78052177
I never said anything about Aang's competence, you just assumed I did. But fine I'll tell you why it's different.
Aang took advice from his past lives, but that's not what Korra did. She just became a channel for Aang to fix everyone's bending.
Aang got help from his friends, but when the time came to defeat the firelord he did that alone.
I never said Korra had to kill Kuvira in their duel. Just preventing her from commanding her army would be more than enough.
I didn't even mention anything about Korra and how she fails as a bridge between humans and spirits. Since you brought it up, yes, Korra sucks at spirit stuff. Aang had more affinity with spirits than Korra could ever dream of having.
Aang was relunctant to give up Katara, who was the closest person alive to him. When the time asked for it though, he did what he had to do. This happened the next episode. He was relunctant for one day.
