I’m glad I haven’t had an opportunity to check in again on this show before now, because just this week its setups have begun to pay off. Korra, for her part, is finally back in the picture in earnest, largely free both physically and mentally of the damage that has weighed upon her since last season and ready to once again to do what she does best. Well, maybe not best, but she’s getting much better. These last few episodes, though comparatively bereft of the action sequences we would expect when the Avatar is involved, have nonetheless been very valuable. Not only have they served to deepen and complicate character dynamics (who would’ve guessed Kuvira was practically raised by Suyin?) and advance narrative elements (so glad we were freed of Prince Wu’s inevitably incompetent rule and got to go straight to Kuvira’s despotism), but it’s finally begun to tie some thematic threads together.

Great (if ornery) mentor. Bad storyteller.

Naturally, the character to make these connections nice and explicit would be Toph, now turned into the curmudgeonly, brusque Yoda we could all see she would become, even as a twelve year old. For almost the entirety of its run, Korra had left me a little cold with the treatment of its primary antagonists, not because they weren’t compelling, but because their very legitimate grievances were always seemingly put by the wayside to allow their despotism, treachery, and extremism to come to the fore. After all, the corruption of a movement’s leader doesn’t necessarily invalidate their wider groups’ concerns.

Until now, the defeat of the Equalists, Tarlok and the Red Lotus, seemed to put to rest the issues of inequality, spiritual alienation and authoritarianism that they each respectively addressed, without ever addressing the root causes of their dissent. During Korra’s healing arc, however, this all finally (and very casually) came to a head with Toph’s assertion that Korra’s inability to free herself of the metallic poison running through her body was directly tied to her denial of the past and her refusal to learn from her enemies as interlocutors.

What Legend of Korra does here bears some underlining, because what Toph makes explicit while reproaching Korra is something quite unusual for children’s programming, suggesting as it does, a whole other category of understanding conflict in which antagonists are neither wholly dismissed by protagonists nor reintegrated into society after conversion. Rather, audiences here are being encouraged to critically assess and “judge” these figures by separating not only their motivations from their methods, but also different elements of the ideological frameworks they espouse.

As this short exchange furthermore suggests, the past can’t really be overcome, but must be considered critically — not in relativistic or complacent terms, but as something we have no choice but to build upon. This is the essence of agonistic thinking, and for a franchise so concerned with the allegorization of real interpersonal and political conflicts as Avatar has been, this framing is essential to what seems to be Korra’s thematic project. With the deepening of Kuvira’s own despotism and complexity this season so far, the highlighting of such agonistic notions suggests some really satisfying conflict in the weeks to come, not only in terms of visual and narrative terms (the show’s still as great in these areas as ever) but also with regard to this show’s broadly political project in terms of its depiction of gender dynamics, cultural diversity/hybridity, as well as interpersonal and political conflict.

In my next post I’ll engage more with what’s actually happening on screen, I promise. Suffice it to say what’s happening is still as engaging as ever, and I’m really looking forward to talking more about (mostly women) ass-kicking, Varrick’s mad science in servitude of Kuvira’s war machine (another allegory of wartime scientific innovation), and the characters’ interpersonal intrigue (so glad to see Jhu Li being developed as she has been). See you again in the aftermath Zhaofu’s siege.

Jhu Li: Badass lady in a show full of them.

The Legend of Korra on nick.com

This leak, it appears, was the precipitating event that lead both to Season 3’s rushed exhibition, and this season’s seemingly early release, premiering as it has less than two months since last season’s finale. This is unusual, at least for this franchise. After all, while it is fairly common for animated shows in the US to more or less seamlessly transition from season to season, this has not been the case until now for either Korra or it’s predecessor, Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-8), both of which have been handled much more along the lines of prestige TV programming (or indeed, anime) than typical US kid’s animation. When taking into account budgets, production values, franchise history, cultural impact, and narrative complexity, one would expect Korra to be treated much more like a flagship series than it has been by Nickelodeon as of late. This move to an exclusively online distribution model for the show as such speaks not only to questionable management decisions on Nick’s part, but is also indicative more widely of the rocky process of transition to, and integration of, online distribution models by established TV networks. After all, Nick’s own online exhibition platform was the very source of the leaks that have now obliged Korra to reside solely online.

Though the decision to enact this transition was made well after this season was produced, it is entirely fitting with The Legend of Korra’s increasing departure from the profile Nickelodeon seems to want to build, with the show’s progressively conspicuous forays into interpersonal and sociopolitical depth and complexity. This is not to say the Avatar franchise hadn’t already set the groundwork for such development. The Last Airbender centered its own narrative within a hundred-year war of imperialist colonisation and genocide, and the first season of Korra itself featured (and actually engaged with) allegories of ethnic scapegoating and class struggle, as well as concluding with both a murder-suicide of its antagonists and contemplations of suicide by its main character—the titular Avatar, Korra. As the show has progressed, its narrative has moved decidedly away from The Last Airbender’s own brand of medieval Asian high fantasy towards a world that is starting to look much more like our own, albeit with elemental superpowers and an Asian inflection to Fordism and the Jazz Age.

Chapter One: After All these Years

With the premiere of Season 4 (Book 4: Balance), it seems as if the Avatar world shares another similarity with this time period, signaling as it does the rise of fascism, and the conditions that give rise to it. Where season 3 concluded with the Avatar’s defeat of the Red Lotus, a group of monomaniacal—though very well fleshed out and motivated—anarchist revolutionaries, the damage done by their assassination of the Earth Kingdom’s admittedly despotic queen has seemingly plunged the vast and diverse Earth Kingdom into disarray. Season 4 picks up thee years later, and quickly updates us on the whereabouts of all of Team Avatar except Korra herself, who only shows up in the last two minutes. Given the little we get to see of her in this first episode, she looks to be caught in a Deerhunter (or X-Men’s Wolverine)–style dynamic of post-traumatic self-destructive disassociation, fighting in low-rent earthbending cage matches and subtracting herself from her inherited and taxing role as this world’s spiritual (and political) mediator. Subsequent episodes will be dealing more closely with her.

In contrast, all our other protagonists have since entered into pivotal positions in the current political order as captains of industry (Asami), right-hands of monarchy (Mako), members of UN peacekeeper-style forces (The airbenders), and soldiers directly serving military elites in charge of national re-consolidation (Bolin).

Most notably, the female Earth Kindgom soldier Kuvira—a peripheral character introduced very late into last season—has now ascended to become the figure seemingly in sole charge of this re-consolidation, traveling the countryside by rail and incorporating territories —and gangs of bandits— to her cause through intimidation, resource extortion, and, it seems, a strong cult of personality. It is here that we appear to have this season’s primary antagonist (if you may forgive this review’s titular reference to another contemporary and complex animated show, the Venture Brothers). Kuvira’s ascendance from soldier to nationalistic despot may perhaps be more akin to the rise of Mussolini or Franco than Hitler, but it is clear that, given the shades of class, ethnic scapegoating and political sedition that have gone on up until now, the Avatar world is seeing its own brand of fascism in the wake of its portrait of the inter-war period.

If this is the case, this will mark the first instance of a primary female antagonist in the franchise —something that runs par for the course in the show’s already strong and increasing integration of complex female representation. This presence was already present and notable in The Last Airbender, but has entered much more into the fore in Korra, from the positioning of women in active protagonistic roles, to their quotidian inclusion as political leaders, business executives, soldiers, civil servants, revolutionaries, and even low-level thugs. Indeed, if anything, the normalcy with which this productive presence is treated within this show’s diegesis is one of the series’ strongest indicators that this version of the 20s and 30s is truly not our own. This factor (along with both this show’s other agonistic narrative complexities and its position as a hybrid of Asian and Western models of animation production) certainly warrant some closer inspection. As the series progresses over the next several weeks, I’ll be checking in again —albeit with briefer pieces— to see how these threads are picked up, and where this final season of Korra leaves its allegorical world.

Authors note: This piece has been posted a bit belatedly, but is still consistent with Korra’s narrative development to date. See you next week!

For its part, and despite its neutered (spayed?) title, Frozen’s loose adaptation of “The Snow Queen” plays as a consolidation of this bent, with a plotline centred above all on a sororal relationship—one that is furthermore presented as the surprise lynchpin to the film’s climax in a winking subversion of Disney’s hetero-romantic narrative tendencies. Love saves the day again, but this time it is familial, sisterly love. This, in conjunction with the supposed LGBT-friendliness of “Let it Go”—its central, Oscar-winning musical set-piece—has created some renewed popular interest in the role of gender politics in Disney films.

For a while now, Disney has been negotiating a compromise between some of the more regressive social values it has attached to itself, and the need to maintain cultural relevance and dissuade potentially harmful critique. Frozen maintains the princesses, Eurocentrism and cookie-cutter character design (look at those tiny women and huge men), but places less emphasis on idealised heteronormative pairing in order to highlight other modes of female characterisation. In the context of Hollywood, and Disney in particular, this is commendable. At the same time, it shouldn’t be taken in any way as if it is at the vanguard of media representation within these parameters. It is simply indicative of symptomatic shifts within an otherwise largely entrenched ideological core.

The extent of this entrenchedness is most visible when examining how more recent Disney fare treats modes of representation discursively detached from girlhood’s growing importance in Disney’s media profile. In Frozen itself, this may be seen in the construction of ethnic/cultural otherness implicit in the film’s troll characters. Magical, familial, communal, amiable, open and deferential to the film’s human characters, Frozen’s trolls fulfill a checklist of characteristics distinctive of subservient cultural others, particularly of the type that serve narratively to facilitate white people’s ability to love and understand each other better thanks to their intuitive wisdom and connection to the natural world. In the trolls’ case this is both symbolic and literal, with the characters themselves being composed of living rock. In terms of performance, this communal otherness is accentuated by the ways in which the trolls act as a collective unit, scrambling and speaking over each other, often in the evident voices of non-white performers —all supremely interested and supportive of the protagonist’s agenda and eager to play matchmakers for her.

This characterisation is all the more notable for the contrast it presents to the behaviour and attitudes that inform the basis of the film’s main interpersonal conflicts, all of which are centred on intra-familial secrecy and individual self-control and denial. Indeed, the main conflict of Frozen is possibly the whitest to ever happen in a Disney film, based as it is in problems predicated by a conception of whiteness that sees itself in opposition to the raucous, communal earthiness so often attributed to other cultures and ethnicities, particularly those of Black, Hispanic and Mediterranean heritage. Throughout such conflicts, whites overcome the trappings of their over-civilisation by balancing them with the subservient wisdom freely offered by cultural others. In perpetuating these narrative relationships, Disney in particular and Hollywood in general demonstrate how relative discursive progression in some areas (or freedom for interpretation, as in Let it Go’s adoption as a coming out anthem) comes with little regard for entrenched regressive values in others. While Disney’s female characters have begun ever so slightly to shed their role as satellites to male protagonists, other modes of otherness persist in much the same way as they have since Song of the South. It’s almost as if Disney’s perception of cultural otherness is immobile. Petrified or static, if you will.