Drawing stuff(Avatar Korra)

"I can help you find her."

(x)

hi guys!  for a long time i’ve wanted to draw katara in her fancy earth kingdom garb, and i’ve finally decided to do it—drawing reference from one of my favorite costumes in the legend of zhen huan.  this is one of the first times i’ve drawn clothing and liked the outcome, so that’s fun.  i also tried to draw katara as young as she was on the show (instead of aging her to an adult, like i normally do when i draw avatar characters).

It may be hard to believe since Book 3 hasn’t even aired yet (SOON!), but we just had the final Korra animatic meeting this afternoon for the Book 4 series finale episode. It’s been bittersweet saying goodbye to so many amazing crew members as their teams have rolled off the production these last few weeks. Pictured here, left to right: Melchior Zwyer (director), Lauren Montgomery (supervising producer), Joaquim Dos Santos (co-executive producer), Ki-Hyun Ryu (supervising producer), me, Owen Sullivan (assistant director), and Mike. In hindsight, I wish we had lined up this shot so it looked like the Mac desktop tiger’s ears were sprouting from Mike’s head. 

It’s a codependent dynamic that I think really defines Mako’s end of their Book 2 relationship (and Korra’s as well to a lesser extent). And it’s a stage that most people go through on their journey to figuring out how to have healthy relationships. It’s the stage where nothing is more important than being on the same side, in which agreement and unquestioning mutual support are demonstrations of love, and in which fighting therefore must mean the absence of it.

It definitely makes sense given who he is, but it’s not healthy in the slightest, and it’s the reason why Korra needs to break up with him at the end of Book 2.

When we get into relationships, we are so often looking for the other person to reflect ourselves (and our thoughts, opinions, and preferences) back to us. It makes us feel safe and secure and loved, and that’s fine. But so often we experience the other person’s failure to do that as a loss of love or as a problem with the relationship. 

In a codependent dynamic, usually this means that one person just represses everything that might cause discord, pretending not to have genuine feelings or opinions about what the other person is doing because the conflict it would potentially cause feels so much more threatening than the other person’s behavior.  And then when they can’t suppress it any more, it all comes out at once, often in a destructive way. And then there is a period of intense remorse and “oh, this person must hate me—I must do anything to get them to not hate me anymore—maybe its doomed anyway—oh god what have I done.”