I truly love all these three. Xena: Warrior Princess was a breath of fresh air in my late teens, a show that was intense, silly, grim, and had a central relationship to die for (as the characters themselves did, repeatedly (they got better)). Revolutionary Girl Utena was a show that starts out as a quirky genderbent "prince"-in-school story and then turns the premise on its head so many times, and gets dark and scary while still keeping the focus on a hero who will do anything to attempt to save the one who suffers. Avatar: The Legend of Korra is such a cool sequel to The Last Airbender both with personalities, technology, and politics. It's Avatar a bit more grown up and more complex.
Xena is such a jock, albeit a broody one. She revels in her physical abilities, she's cocky when up against powerful opponents, and she can perform feats above and beyond those of the many, many warriors and warlords around her. She's a force of nature and can get a stubborn singlemindedness to go beyond all limits of her strength, like when she protects Gabrielle in One Against An Army.
She's the epitome of the cool outsider to Gabrielle who starts following her out of the sense that she is someone who can show you how to go your own way. At the same time she's desperate to change, to do good, and finds the inspiration to do that in her plucky tag-along turned sidekick turned partner. She is strong, and funny, and protective, and learns to accept herself one staggering step at a time.
Utena is the prototypical jock: good at sports (extremely good at sports, as all the school sports clubs are desperate for her to join), passionate and impossible to dissuade from her goals. She sees a girl being treated poorly and despite being thrown into the weirdest duelling game ever she chooses the path of helping that girl. But she's far from perfect, in a very jock-like manner!
She thinks that becoming the substitute to an abusive "boyfriend" is enough, that the binary makes sense as long as she can be on the other side of it, that a prince can save the princess by pure heart and drive. To be fair, that is also what everyone in her world also thinks.
But like Xena, she is capable of learning a different way, despite being the stubborn and reckless hero that I love so very much. (not mentioned here: also often accused of being dumb as a brick, but really it's more oblivious to certain things we can all be blind to and bad at reading some social cues)
Korra is a jock superstar. She's the Avatar, the most admired person in all the four nations, she's a sports star, and has never met a problem she couldn't bicep her way out of. Until she comes to Republic City and politics, adult villains, and relationships all come crashing down on her. I got very annoyed at Legend of Korra because I felt that it didn't do her character justice.
As I wrote above for Xena and Utena, a big part of them is that they learn, they change. And a lot changes for Korra during the course of the first few seasons but the large lessons generally don't stick. So she keeps being a stereotypical jock well after the world around her has changed, and that bothered me. Because she's cool, and physically accomplished, and she tries so very hard but it's never enough because the problems she faces, political, personal, and metaphysical, are such that punching them doesn't work in the long run. Yet it felt that the show creators were pushing for that to work, and thus Korra felt like she was treading water for quite a while (which she can, because she's a physical marvel).
Luckily the show faces up to that in the final season, and Korra becomes a Better Jock, and gets together with the Coolest Girlfriend. But it was a long time coming. She's so cool though!
areudirty
pixelskylines
vaporwave
tangentwithtanner
gummygunk
