Pop Culture x Neurodiversity II.1: An Analysis of The Legend of Korra — The Introdution

Before I really begin, I wanna get a few things out of the way:

1) SPOILER WARNING! If you haven’t seen The Legend of Korra (aka LoK)– which, why are you depriving yourself of such joy? – you should probably go no further than here.

2) I think that LoK is better than Avatar: The Last Airbender (aka ATLA), that Korra is a better character than Aang, and that Team Avatar is better than the Gaang. I know a lot of ATLA fans/stans (especially neurotypical cis men) would disagree, and will probably find this article and damn me to hell; however, just know that I don’t care.

3) Korra is not canonically autistic, and I’d wager that it wasn’t the intentions of Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino to code Korra as autistic. So don’t read this as an authoritative declaration that Korra is, in fact, autistic. I am but a queer autistic peasant explaining why Korra makes me feel seen.

4) How I characterize Korra as autistic is based mostly on my personal experiences as an autistic person, and is not and should not be read as a definitive statement about all autistic people. No two autistic people are alike even though we all have similar/identical characteristics. And trying to stereotype all autistic people based on the autistic people you know and your understanding of autistic people that is limited to what’s in medical texts is harmful, irresponsible, and ableist.

5) Something important to understand is that LoK was only supposed to be a one-off miniseries. It wasn’t supposed to have more than one season; however, because of how well Book 1 did Nickelodeon ordered more seasons — which is why season one feels more like a self-contained story, and season two feels like an afterthought and disconnected from season one.

6) How I’ll go about this and my future breakdowns is I’ll consider all benders to be autistic and all non-benders to be allistic. No, I’m not doing this from a “disability as a superpower” approach. It just makes sense when you consider LoK from the perspective of Korra, Team Avatar, and the antagonists trying to navigate an ableist society, and how their trauma affects their politics and motivations.

7) I’m not entirely sure what I’m gonna say, so I hope by the end of this (likely very long) think piece you’ve found some nugget of logic that makes it all make sense and that it will entice you to read the other five subsequent pieces I’ll write about LoK.

There is so much I want to and probably can say about The Legend of Korra, which is what makes writing these four (in total) pieces all the more difficult.

Since April 14, 2012 LoK has dominated a good portion of my waking existence. I remember between 2005 and 2008 when Avatar: The Last Airbender was airing on Nickelodeon, and the excitement (and agony) of the entire experience. And somehow, Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino managed to excite and engage me in a way that I didn’t even know was possible with LoK, especially in comparison to ATLA.

LoK, in my opinion, is a deconstructionist approach to ATLA, and it succeeded incredibly well at most of everything it did.

The way that the entire world of LoK was allowed to evolve and grow over the course of all four seasons/52 episodes (including all characters and the environment itself) that didn’t center so heavily on Korra, the way each main antagonist was used to challenge Korra and the status quo of their respective seasons on a fundamental level that were meaningful, everything about how LoK was handled makes me still feel like I’m experiencing it all for the first time.

Important to all of that we’re how Korra is allowed to be a complex, nuanced, and dynamic character who grew over the course of the series in a realistic way; and how the themes addressed throughout and the tone of the series were more adult. And how I’m going to try and tackle this is by writing about the contrast between Korra and Team Avatar and the main antagonist of the season in the context of four major themes: antipathy, apathy, sympathy, and empathy.

And important to each of the four overall themes are their political underpinnings. A lot of people have talked about how LoK fails politically because they argue that Michael Dante DiMartino, Bryan Konietzko, and the writers of the series both don’t understand the political concepts (communism in Book 1, colonization in Book 2, anarchy in Book 3, and nationalism in Book 4) they’re allegedly critiquing and are championing capitalism as the only and best logical solution humankind has to offer. I think those takes only work if you improperly map out each season onto said concepts, and criticize Korra for not perfectly explaining and critiquing said concepts.

It’s an incorrect and unfair framing of an imperfect series that’s largely due to the fact that — and this is the biggest point of contention practically everyone who doesn’t like LoK but adores ATLA has with LoK — the series isn’t an exact carbon copy of ATLA, and Korra isn’t a carbon copy of Aang (I would’ve said “Aang 2.0”; however, in many ways, and very literally, Korra is Aang 2.0, which I will explain in probably the final essay I write about the series). To many, ATLA is a perfect series. I’d argue that viewpoint, in large part, is driven by nostalgia since ATLA came out during a formative time in many of our lives. The other parts I think are at play is the fact that Korra is a Brown Asian female-character who isn’t people’s idea of what a female protagonist should be. There’s also the fact that she’s very clearly queer (I guessed it since Book 2 back when it aired), and, at the time, Korra was breaking a lot of ground, which made way for shows like Steven Universe and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power.

To circle back a bit, though, I think the better way to understand what’s being talked about in LoK is by looking at the motivations of each antagonist, what it reflected about Korra and Team Avatar as a whole, what they said about the world in which they were occupying at the time, how movements led by leaders with motivations that are antithetical to the movements they lead — no matter how noble said movements are — are always doomed to fail, and the lessons we can learn from them.

And that is what I aim to explore in this essay series on The Legend of Korra.

Here’s hoping I stick the landing.