In Defense of Korra and Asami's Relationship

So I've discovered that I'm a coward because I wrote a long fucking YouTube comment on a video about Korra (yeah what else) and decided not to post it because it's been over six months and it's in defense of the ending relationship. I realize I've already talked about that here but I already spent too much time writing the comment and I need to put it somewhere. Nobody reads my blog anyway so I can just treat this post as a rebuttal. Maybe that makes it more professional. Anyway, the video was by BlackCriticGuy and here's the link so you have context if you want it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8womOTSkNqU

"Thing is, you're not wrong about their friendship being strong. It's just not on a binary scale, where Friendship /= Romance. I think there are plenty of people who would say that their significant other is their best friend. It's just this mindset in the video that it can't possibly be romantic in any form because it's based on a friendship that frustrates me.

I'm not too judgmental of people who didn't like it or see it coming, one of the bigger problems of the fourth season was rushed writing and Asami on the whole suffered from it (along with several other characters). That said, I don't know why people seem to think they were supposed to have been in love or a relationship the whole season. The way I viewed it, they developed that friendship in the third season very well, and then spent three years apart, during which time Korra was severely depressed and Asami was pretty busy. Suddenly they come back into each others' lives and rekindle that friendship, but there's something different going on and they don't really understand it right away. More importantly they've got an immediate threat on their hands so it's not until Kuvira's dealt with that they're able to sit back and enjoy each other's company, and the first thing they do is slip away to be alone.

The points about the vacations girls take: I honestly thought that you might just be trolling at that point because it sounded ridiculous. But even if I accept that as a common occurence, in a TV show you have to accept that some things are focused on for a reason. It is very weird if Korra and Asami just take a friend's vacation in the spirit world alone together. Thematically it would have been better, if they were going the friend route, to involve the other two friends in the group, end the show with all four on another adventure. The entire mood of the last scene was giving me romantic vibes, I really have struggled to even see how anyone else could miss it. Again, the importance of focusing on their hands and gaze, in a show that means something.

I feel like the points about putting a label on their relationship and asking why the Avatar has to be in a relationship just don't matter. You might as well ask why Aang needed to have a relationship and why could he and Katara just have been close friends? After all, Aang was a monk and if any character could be expected not to engage in romance it would be the 12 year old bald monk. You can ask those questions sure but it doesn't really help the conversation any. You can ask them about any couple. They could have done that but they didn't, the answer is because they wanted Korra to have a relationship.

It bugs me when people try to devalue the relationship or make excuses for why they're only friends. Criticize how its done all you like, it's definitely not written particularly well, but the creators confirmed the relationship as romantic. In my personal opinion it feels like it's just starting, not in full swing and I don't know why more people don't even seem to consider it.

I know this video is six months old and practically no one cares anymore, especially in the wake of Gay Marriage being legalized. I usually like your videos BCG and I think you're a swell guy, but stumbling upon this video just hit my buttons and I felt obligated to retread my defense of Korrasami. I understand where you were coming from but I just felt a bit insulted while watching."

I legitimately do feel like BlackCriticGuy was kind of insulting to people like me in this video. It's not that Korra and Asami weren't good friends or that they always had romantic interactions, but just denying that anything they did together could be romantic in some way just bothers me. The denial that there just wasn't any romantic subtext at all and I'm just reaching to draw a conclusion that just is not substantiated by the show at all, when it's been confirmed by the creators that I'm correct is just crazy and maddening. Hell, claiming that he believes the creators were merely trying to stir up controversy in order to get more exposure is far more guilty of reaching than any Korrasami speculation from season 4. Even at the end of the video when he's saying that it's okay to have different opinion or interpretations just felt like covering himself rather than sincerely believing it.

One point I left out of the comment as well was my exasperation with trying to find ways around Korra and Asami being together romantically. I mean, shippers always go crazy whenever their favorite pairing isn't realized (exaggeration, don't get your pants in a knot) but just the amount of people who suddenly ask why Korra just can't be single or why their can't be just a strong friendship between her and Asami is irritating. Nobody was asking why Aang got in a relationship. Maybe it's just that I don't see it much, but it really does feel like people were just trying to deny a homosexual relationship instead of legitimately wanting Korra single with a friend. Would most of those people still have asked that it she had ended up with Mako? Was anyone asking that in the first season finale when it looked like that might be the end of the series?

Obviously I really enjoy this pairing, enough to spend a few posts writing about it, and it really irks me that people just try to undermine it any way they can. I don't want to be harsh but the fact is that Korrasami is a romantic relationship and trying to deny it is pointless and irritating. Again I say, criticize it if you don't like it, and if you hate it because you're a homophobe at least come out and freaking say it if you're going to talk about it. Write or read fanfiction if you really need an alternate version or something but denying romantic Korrasami is factually wrong. Hopefully the upcoming comic will make it so obvious it can't be denied anymore.

Boy, how embarrassing would it be if this whole issue had settled down already and people had already come to terms with it and I'm just stupidly stoking the embers to a conflict I wish was dealt with? Well, in that hypothetical, there would be no one to read this anyway so it's almost like it couldn't happen.

-Subtle

The Legend of Korra: Oh my stars I can't believe the series finale y'all

So... I'm glad I don't pay for this space on the internet. A year and half goes by with barely a thought spared for the poor Falsification. Part of it may just be that I've not really seen anything that inspired any passion in me, positive or negative. I mean, I loved Frozen but I didn't feel the need to write about it or anything. I mostly stayed the hell away from GamerGate because I couldn't understand anything with everyone yelling about it. I watched Gravity Falls for the first time a couple of months ago and I like it a lot. Regular Show's most recent episode upset me but still, yeah, didn't feel like writing about it much.

S-S-S-S-S-SPOILERS!!!!!!!

From the title of this post you can then guess what has gotten me out of my year-and-a-half silence: The Legend of Korra ended the series with a lesbian couple. Guys, gals, I can't even deal.

I don't know if I've ever mentioned The Legend of Korra or its prequel series Avatar: The Last Airbender, but they are my favorite shows of all time. Korra mostly benefits from the connection to the previous series, otherwise I think Regular Show or Adventure Time would have topped it, or even something older like Justice League or Nicktoons I grew up with. Still, I think it's one of the best shows to have ever come out, even while I acknowledge that there are plenty of flaws to be found within it.

I'm inclined to blame whatever problems Korra has on Nick. As fans of the show know, in the middle of its third season that aired this summer, Korra was taken off the air and made an online-only show. That was the biggest strike against Korra, others being no advertising for the third season until a week before its premiere and then season four being trotted out around a month after the third season ended. Suffice to say, the show has been screwed by the network. This isn't even the first time it's happened, but it certainly was the biggest middle finger presented.

The series ends with Korra and Asami walking into the spirit world, holding hands and looking into each others eyes. There's subtext, and then there's this middle finger to the censors. It boggles my mind that they actually got away with such an overt LGBT message, and it saddens me as well that this is something to celebrate but I'll take it. Since season 3 began I actually had started to enjoy the possibility of Korra and Asami getting together. They are the best characters out of the four main characters, though with Asami that status is debatable, and Korra finally seemed to have good chemistry with someone other than her airbending master and Zuko's grandson.

I'm not much of a shipper, I generally like canon relationships just fine as long as they're written decently and don't create a romantic plot tumor. I never thought Korra and Asami would end up as an official couple though, and I mostly just enjoyed the possibility and hoped that their friendship would get adequate time in the somewhat rushed narrative the show deals with. I haven't much talked about what aside from shipping I like about Korra, pretty much because it doesn't have much to do with shipping and that's kinda what I've been on about.

Honestly in hindsight Korra seems to be a show constrained by its running time. The creators clearly have ambitious stories to tell but, unlike Avatar: The Last Airbender they didn't have the benefit of years to work on the story and the necesarry amount of episodes to properly tell it. Avatar was penned out years in advance and was given 61 episodes early on to achieve it. Three seasons were adequate to fully explore the story, the characters and rarely felt rushed or constrained. Korra began life as a 12 episode mini-series, and the first season already felt utterly constrained by the episode limit. Nickelodeon, toward the end of the first season's development and way too late to make any changes, ordered an additional 40-something episodes, and not all at once either. The result is that individual seasons are more individual than Avatar's long-flowing narrative. Each one has had to tell a new story in the space of 12-14 episodes, and that is hard to achieve when you have big ambitions and big shoes to fill.

So I don't blame the co-creators of Avatar and Korra for the pacing issues and rushed feeling that Korra sometimes has. They were cramming arcs that probably should have been closer to 20 episodes into a little more than half that amount of time. So Asami got shafted a fair bit in representation and character development throughout the series. Bolin and Mako suffered this to some degree but not nearly as bad, and this is the biggest shame. Avatar was so great in large part because it had fleshed out characters who were so compelling. It was obvious so much work had gone into writing them and delving into what made them tick, and they felt real.

Korra's characters, on the other hand, lost the time to get focus. Avatar could dedicate part of an episode to Iroh celebrating/mourning his dead son's birthday (and his voice actor's death) because the plot was in no rush to finish itself. Korra's plots always felt like they had no room to breathe. The moments we aren't dealing with the plot moving forward can be great moments (Asami reconciling with her father, Korra talking down a new airbender before he tries to kill himself by jumping off a bridge) but they're fewer and farther between than they should be.

All of this is basically leading up to me saying that although I love that Korra and Asami got together, I really wish they had more development as a couple. Not even romantically, just more to show how they grew together, more interactions, scenes that show us how they work together. The few we got were great, but consider Avatar again. All three seasons were littered with the development of Aang and Katara's relationship. Sure Aang was crushing on her pretty hard throughout, but they were also friends. They had tons of time to work off each other and show how they worked together as individuals, not just love interests. Korra and Asami by comparison really lacked that.

This isn't a problem with just the one relationship though, few relationships really got much to work with. Korra and Tenzin probably came out the best, the student and teacher scenes were plentiful. Lin and Su Yin's sister bond was done well, despite a short time together on screen you could really tell they had a history and worked well. Varrick got two decent relationships with Zhu Li and Bolin, but there are precious few others I would say really worked well. This is opposed to the numerous strong relationships that Avatar had: the main four kids all worked insanely well off of each other and accomodated Zuko wonderfully late in the series; Zuko and almost anyone he interacted with actually were super; Azula and her gang were pretty developed together, and the list can go on.

So yes, Korra has flaws, which I blame on Nick pretty solidly. That said, I loved the show and I'm super sad to see it's ended. I really hope the co-creators find something new to work on if they can't return to the world of Avatar, they obviously have a lot of talent and passion for telling stories and they need to continue on in some capacity. I just absolutely love that Korra ended by breaking a bunch of stereotypes and giving a giant middle finger to the people who try to keep this kind of relationship down in children's media. The final shot is wonderful and I really hope that we begin to see more shows take these kinds of risks. A dark-skinned bi/lesbian woman is the lead character in a wonderful animated show that kids can also watch, and that really does make me happy.

-Subtle