Naebulokk's Writing Corner

               Nearly twelve years after The Last Airbender first aired on television, I find myself trying figure out what about the series made it so amazing. The simple answer? Everything was done right with the show. Save for three episodes in the whole series, I cannot think of a single actual flaw in the show. The creators have made a world with the utmost care and meticulousness in regards to world history, geography, and even the different cultures. When you strip away bending, the four nations are essentially Imperial Japan (The Fire Nation), Feudal China (The Earth Kingdom), the Inuit Peoples (Water Tribe), and the Buddhist Monks of Tibet (Air Nomads), but it’s presented in a way that doesn’t insult the cultures and differentiates greatly enough that we can see them as separate entities. World-building and even wildlife creation is very consistently well-done, and the inventiveness of bending (blood-bending will never cease to horrify me) is incredibly creative. But the series pays careful attention to each of its characters. All of the main cast are developed as incredibly complex and thoughtful human beings with struggles, desires, and fears of their own. Katara’s revenge arc and Zuko’s season 2 development both stand out as diamonds in this show, and no one is a one trick pony. Even the filler episodes mesh well with the world, so much so that I almost didn’t notice them. It’s not just a work of art, it’s almost perfect in inception, execution, and even after it’s done.

End of part seven

 Part Eight: How LoK Holds Up

               This one will be a bit trickier to explain, as we’ve already been over what held this series back. Corporate meddling, mismanagement, and outright sabotage damaged the show several times over the course of its run, but in spite of that, I’d say it represents not only a perfect sequel but a perfect maturation of the Avatar franchise. Not only are you literally starting out with older characters, but the content and themes of the show matured with the original Avatar fanbase, allowing for a more complex and serious discussion of real-world problems through the conflicts of republic city. Racism, spiritualty, anarchy, fascism,  equality, theocracy, freedom, order, control, growth, pain, hope, despair, war, peace, and even sexuality are all addressed within the show in such a way that I truly hope the next generation grows up on material like this because it’s all done with such care, respect, accuracy and honesty that the show oozes humanity as a result. Also, it follows what Code Geass did and takes it even further. At no point in the series is there ever a truly evil character who we can’t recognize as a human being with genuinely compelling dreams and concerns. In fact, the main ‘villains’ of the story are actually explicitly stated within the show as not being evil, but good people who took their dreams too far and ended up going down the misguided path. There is no villain because we as people cannot be good or evil. We simply try to do what we think is right, which becomes beautiful and terrifying in alternate measures. Korra adheres to this philosophy more than even The Last Airbender did, ending on a note that shows us just how close any hero can be to villainy and how villains can be the most tragic people alive but are not beyond hope. On a more personal note, I’m bisexual. It wasn’t until after the Legend of Korra ended with a bisexual reveal that I started feeling comfortable with the idea of my sexuality, because I had never seen people like me represented before. When I saw those two at the end of the show, I didn’t feel invisible anymore. Also of worthy note is Korra’s struggle with PTSD in season four. I didn’t realize it until the second viewing, but Korra’s struggle is incredibly real in presentation. The writers take the time to move her through the necessary steps of recovery: acknowledge the problem, work to overcome it, accept that it happened, remind yourself that you need to want to get better, and realize that it’s okay to need help. Every step is presented accurately and with such respect for real-life victims of PTSD that I cannot stress the importance enough. Overall, through a rough start, Korra not only cemented the Avatarverse as a gem of fiction, but the standard all should write to. Both Korra and Aang are perfect characters because they are imperfect as humans, like we all are. To this day I keep the entirety of both series on my writing desk to remind me of how characters, world-building, and story should be done. It is, to me, the perfect series, never to be outdone or matched.

Part Six: A Finale to End All Finales (End of Experience Portion)

               If you weren’t aware of just how the series ended, I’ll assume you were under a rock for the entirety of December 2014 and January 2015, because I swear the internet f*cking exploded that winter. I’ll get to that in a bit. See, coming fresh off of the harrowing s3 Finale, Korra had set the bar pretty damn high, and it did not disappoint. It came right out of the gate with what may have been one of the most respectful and accurate portrayals of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder I’ve ever seen on-screen, and proceeded to counter the anarchistic villain of the previous season with a fascist enemy that hit really hard. But overall, what struck me was that the season was entirely about personal growth and accepting change. Korra herself undergoes more character development in this season than in any other, changing from a hotheaded brawler to someone who genuinely understands the value of the mediator and diplomacy. She hasn’t just matured, she’s grown up, and even the metaphor-laden recovery from PTSD for her is a symbol of growth. Maybe it got a bit out of hand with the final fight, but then THAT ENDING CAME! You know, the one that shook the world in regards to what you can do with mainstream animation? The one that became famous across the media for ending on what the creators themselves confirmed as a bisexual pairing?! It will never stop being amazing to me for that. When the series finally ended, it echoed its amazing predecessor with the final spoken word: “PERFECT”. It wasn’t trying to be its predecessor, it had become its own show and shook the world just the same as Aang did.

Part Five: Shattered Expectations and Hearts

               After season two, it’s understood why fan investment in Korra dropped a smidge. However, the real problem plaguing the series came from the fans themselves, specifically those who leaked season premieres early.

               The starting episodes of Korra’s third and arguably best season were leaked so far in advance of the actual airing date that Nickelodeon was forced to forgo and kind of actual advertisement for the season and run it early, causing a dive in viewership that Nickelodeon then saw as a reason to start killing the show. It was soon announced that the rest of LoK would air online at Nickelodeon’s website. While this may seem an understandable move, think on this; Nickelodeon had done NO merchandising for Korra on any level, apart from a meh video game by Deep Silver. In addition, the show almost wasn’t created because Nickelodeon didn’t want to “gamble on a female protagonist that young boys couldn’t relate to”. Nick screwed this series over hard, but we’ll get to that later.

               When it was announced that the series wasn’t getting tv screentime anymore, people assumed that the show would die. Instead, the online-only viewership allowed the creators to do something unexpected; they began testing the limits of just how dark and terrifying a kid’s show could be. I went back and watched recently, counting enough graphic character and extra deaths to fill a game of thrones episode. There was genuine tension, fear, and palpable drama in the season, all culminating in what may have been one of the best, most gut-wrenching and heart-stopping season finales I have ever seen in ANY SHOW, AT ALL. We weren’t presented with the image of our hero triumphantly standing over a defeated enemy, ready to kick more ass and take more names.

               We were given a genuinely shocking image of our hero, broken and wheelchair-bound, and absolutely traumatized in return for a nearly hollow victory. This was a new show now, and everyone knew it. The somber tones of the Zhonghu instrument in the final song, “Service and Sacrifice”, still give me cold chills every time I see the show. People kept bringing up Iroh’s “Brave Soldier Boy” and for the first time in a long while, I was desperate to see how a character could recover, and you know that means the writers are damn good at their jobs.

Part Four: The Bumpy Ride that was Korra

               So now that I’ve got my nostalgia out of the way, it’s time to acknowledge the elephant in the room; Korra’s fluctuating quality in the first two seasons.

               For those who weren’t aware, the Legend of Korra was originally meant to be a ten-twelve episode miniseries. That was it, 10-12 and then done, boom. But what no one had expected was for the fan reaction to the show to be so absolutely explosive and overwhelmingly positive, and within weeks, Nickelodeon had approved the show to be a full-length series. While this would later be a blessing….eughh….

               The first season of Korra had some huge damn shoes to fill, coming off the praise and acclaim its predecessor had gathered with a season that was rushed and crammed to fit a genuinely good story and characters, along with a side of the bending world we had never expected, into it. While I won’t say it was bad, it wasn’t absolutely perfect like every season of the show before had been. But the reason I refuse to knock Legend of Korra down for this is because this drop in quality wasn’t due to shoddy writing or poor attempts at art. Far from it: it showed that the Avatar team could adapt their writing to any circumstance and still pull it off. The drop in quality was due to corporate mismanagement and an inability to anticipate just what the series could do. In all honesty, I can’t say I dislike season one, especially because it had some of the strongest emotion I’d seen in a fictional character and in such diverse ways.

               Oh boy, the second season though… This was where I nearly fell off the train. Season 2 aired almost entirely while I was away at college, and thus I missed out until I got back to watch the re-recorded episodes. I refuse to say it was as awful as the fans claim, but I will say that it suffered bigtime from being demanded at the last minute by Nickelodeon. It’s clear that Koneitzko, DiMartino, and De Santos put an INSANE amount of work into worldbuilding and planning out the plot. Hell, we finally got to see that danger of losing the avatar cycle (which had been built up for four seasons already) come to fruition! Everything about this should have worked! But because they were forced to press it into one season, it suffered from having so much going on at once that it was nearly impossible to remember what actually happened once it ended. Every character had a separate plot arc that extended the length of the season and they were all well done for the most part, but it was just too damn much to keep up with. However, Korra’s arc over the season and ESPECIALLY the revelation of how the first avatar came to be made, this season worth it. Hell, the “First Avatar” arc made the series feel more like a Buddhist or hindu epic than a simple tv show, and that’s when I realized this series could be something even better.

Part Three: A Most Welcome Surprise

               Fast forward to 2012, in March. I had heard no news whatsoever that there was going to be a sequel series to The Last Airbender, and was browsing Memebase, as high-school juniors did back then. Suddenly, something caught my eye and made my heart skip a beat. There, posted in the page as if it were simply going to be a Rick-Roll video, was a twenty-minute long youtube video with the title “AVATAR SEQUEL SERIES LEAKS FIRST EPISODE: LEGEND OF KORRA!!!” I had to watch it, all my ethics about internet leaks and the like went out the window because OH MY LORD THIS WAS A THING! I wasn’t being cheated either, it was there! A full episode of a new avatar, new characters, and a future seventy years after the last series! The show wasn’t supposed to air until May, and even with the lack of any ad campaign, this leak rocketed the series into the attention of everyone I knew. When the series finally dropped, I was in heaven, man. This perfect universe was back, baby, and with an avatar who couldn’t be more refreshingly different than Aang if she tried. I watched every episode as it aired, and felt that familiar feeling rekindling. I felt at home with this story, with this fictional universe.

Part Two: From the Beginning

               I remember that the first time I had ever heard of the Avatar series was at my neighbor’s house. It was June of 2004, and we were watching Danny Phantom on the TV in my neighbor’s upstairs lounge. We were both still in elementary school, so we had an expectation for goofiness on tv, when this new trailer dropped during the commercial break. It was simply what would later become the opening for every Avatar episode, followed by a montage of pre-made clips, but something was different about it. This show seemed like it would be fun, yeah, but much more serious and engaging than anything else Nickelodeon had ever attempted. Even as a fourth grader, I had a feeling in my gut that the series would either soar or go full-Icarus and crash. Months later, November rolls around and the same neighbor tells me excitedly that the series just released an hour-long premiere which he recorded on TiVo. This was before I had any access to cable or dish, so I didn’t have nickelodeon. I went over to his house after school and was instantly blown away by just how engaging the characters were right off of the bat, and how the plot had actual weight to it. I was a kid who had never even thought a plot-driven animated series was possible, and here it was, staring me right in the face.

               Eventually, my neighbor stopped watching the series and thus I lost my access to it, but my sister and I caught up by grabbing the DVD sets. Eventually, not just my siblings were hooked, but my parents were too! This was becoming something amazing and indescribable. Each character showed a real depth of personality and emotion, and even the darkest subjects of war and loss were done with respect. This show managed to cover themes of genocide and orphans of war without becoming too much for us kids to handle while also handling the subject matter of any given episode with real heart, empathy and respect for the issues. I didn’t realize it then, but now I look back and see a show that managed to be more passionate about human nature and more respectful about the world it inhabited than anything I had seen before or since.

               Of course, I had no friends at the time who would admit to watching a ‘cartoon’, so it was a secret obsession. Then season 3 came out: Fire. Everyone I knew was watching it now, feeling the weight of a series that followed through on its promises coming to a close. When the finale, Sozin’s Comet, was aired, I remember my sister and I were glued to the couches for a full two hours as we watched the strongest ending of any show we had ever seen unfold. Seeing the Chinese characters for “The End” fade on-screen at the end was actually the first time I remember crying as a child over something that made me happy. At the same time, I was being forced to say goodbye to a series that I didn’t want to leave, and I wasn’t sad. I found myself strangely content, in a warm and fuzzy way, over just how…FINAL…the ending had truly been. It wasn’t rushed or botched, it was, as Toph said in the show’s final line, “perfect”. I had followed it from my early fascination in fourth grade until the ending in seventh, and I loved the series.

Part One in this Topic: A Lingering Admiration

               To start, I’ll clarify something. The following topic will be in several parts because I know it’ll run too long for just one post. This is something I’ve personally felt strongly about for a long while now, and feel the need to explain in detail. Summed up, this is going to be why I think that the Avatar series, both the Last Airbender show and The Legend of Korra, constitutes the greatest work of fiction ever made, period. Note that this will of course be purely subjective, and will likely differ from the opinions of others.

               For those of you who don’t know me personally, it could be enough to just say that The Last Airbender series and its sequel, The Legend of Korra, have had an impact on me. However, that sentence is only a hypothetical because it is nowhere near enough to leave it at that. The influence that the Avatarverse has had on my life and ESPECIALLY ON MY WRITING is immense.

There have been multiple times where I went through a serious obsession with a show or fictional universe, following it closely from start to finish, and it left me hungry for more because of how much the fictional universe in question meant to me. Possible the strongest example of this was Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion. CG for a time had a big influence in my writing and my views, mainly because I identified so strongly with the mindset and logic behind the series protagonist of Lelouch that I felt I had found myself in a story. But why I really still hold it up there as a great is because it did what few other shows will ever do: IT REFUSED TO MAKE ANYONE 100% IRREDEEMABLE. Even the supposed bad-guys had understandable reasons for what they did, and it came to show the audience that no one is bad or good, but humanity itself causes both immeasurable beauty and pain because of the complexity. It ended on the understanding that we’ll never be free of conflict because we are human, but that same humanity will always drive us to end conflict and be better as a species.

Hey all, Naebulokk here. I know it’s been a while since I really did anything with this page, and bear with me for a moment.

We all got life stuff to deal with, and between my junior year of College, summer work and budgeting, managing a chapter house, and doing a lot of planning for the future, I’ve had ZERO time to even work on my second novel in the trilogy I’ve been slaving away at for almost a decade, much less time to spend on my writing blog. But anyway, I had sort of a realization this morning, going back to something I learned from writer Anne Lamott. Write every day; it doesn’t have to be good, or even part of your project. Just make sure to write something down. So from here on out, I’ll be intending to be more active on this blog, and it won’t just be writing advice. Expect a lot of writing journals, thought diaries, reviews and the like of whatever I want to write about. This blog is going to be my practice page, a whetstone to keep a proverbial writing blade from dulling into a cheap plastic butterknife.

 Thank you for your patience,