Korra's Powerlessness

 This week has been exhausting, but I’m hoping for a relaxing weekend of playing Assassin’s Creed and reading and eating delicious food.

I finished watching Justice League on Netflix, and will soon be starting Justice League Unlimited. The Batman cartoon is also on Netflix, and I’m debating with myself whether or not I want to re-watch it, too.

Also I finished rewatching Legend of Korra (which inspired this Note) and Leverage (which did not).

Korra’s Powerlessness

There was a fan question to Dresden Files about the difference between angels and someone like Queen Mab, and author Jim Butcher. He points out that an archangel, like Uriel, has the juice to destroy the planet, but he can’t use that strength in any way that he wants, because angels are limited in how they throw it around (essentially, what God lets them do). Whereas someone like Mab is significantly weaker than that, but has much fewer limits on how to use her strength, and can do much more of the things she wants. She’s not as strong, but she’s more powerful.

He defines this as the difference between strength and power.

Is this accurate? I don’t know! But I’m applying it to Legend of Korra.

Korra, from the beginning of the series, is incredibly strong. If her bending fire, water, and earth as a child wasn’t enough of a hint, Katara tells the White Lotus teachers (and the audience) that she’s strong. And this is something we’re shown throughout the series–Korra is aggressive in her fighting style and throws around a lot of elements around. Heck, out of all the other characters her age, she’s arguably the most obviously muscular.

But she’s not very powerful. In fact, the Plot continually takes power out of her hands. In theory, she’s more powerful than Amon, but when she actually faces Amon, in both instances he easily disables her and she’s unable to break his hold until the Plot lets her–either through Mako’s intervention, or through unlocking airbending.

The same thing happens in Book II, in which even with the Avatar State, Korra’s strength isn’t enough to beat Unalaq, Amon, or both of them combined. She doesn’t beat Unalaq until she’s given a spirit power she didn’t know she could do, and even then, not until Jinora uses vague spirit magic stuff to win.

And then in Book III, she’s constrained through not ever actually meeting the main antagonists until late in the game, and then she has to hold back because she’s captured (there’s a hostage situation where she gives herself up), and then when she finally fights Zaheer, she’s been poisoned and chained up–not at her best, though she still almost kills him.

And THEN in Book IV, Korra is still dealing with the trauma of her poisoning and near suffocation, so she can’t actually beat Kuvira in a one-on-one fight until the end of the series.

In almost every one of these cases, this is immensely frustrating; Korra is stronger than all of her opponents, but she’s been handicapped to be less powerful in every situation by the Plot so that it can be dramatic and drawn out for a few more episodes. Book III is the one that doesn’t bother me, because she doesn’t actually fight the main antagonists until the end, and they’ve prepared for her–and even then, she gives them a run for it. Book IV wouldn’t bother me in theory, because a character arc of overcoming trauma is a good idea! But after three previous seasons of not letting the hero beat the villain to keep the Plot going, it’s a difficult pill to swallow.

[Also Book II’s climax is stupid. When Aang goes into the Avatar State in his finale, Ozai, despite being super-powered by Sozin’s Comet, starts running scared. When Korra is in the Avatar State, Unalaq is somehow able to quite handily beat her despite him having much less power at his disposal.]

What makes it even more irritating is that so often, Korra can’t win without being saved. I don’t mean ‘without help’, because Avatar has always been about characters working together to defeat long odds, but Korra is never allowed to just win with the abilities she has or through her own personal traits. Yes, Aang’s energybending comes a bit out of nowhere, but it is a solution that he comes up with–defeating Ozai on his own, as the Avatar, and then finding a way to keep Ozai from being a threat without killing him.

Korra? Well, she doesn’t beat Amon on her own, Mako has to zap him, and then she unlocks airbending because Reasons. We can argue it’s the same as energybending for Aang, so fine, we’ll let it slide.

Unalaq? He’s got Plot on his side, Korra can’t beat him until she gets extra spirit powers from a magic tree, and even then she needs Jinora to do… a thing, which lets her beat Unalaq.

Zaheer? She’s poisoned and chained down, and she still breaks free and fights Zaheer, chasing him as he desperately flees her wrath and hopes the poison takes its toll. When she’s weakening, he almost suffocates her with airbending, until the other airbenders capture him in a tornado.

Kuvira? She does in the end, beat on her own. Freaking finally.

Korra is a great character, but the narrative constantly robs her of power. It constantly doesn’t let her strength add up to anything, and she has to be saved from forces beyond her power by circumstances beyond her control. Part of this is transparently the writers going, “Well fudge, we can’t let her beat the villain now, we’ve got to give a reason for the story to go on a few more episodes!” And I understand that Nickelodeon screwed the team over a lot, but this keeps happening. It’s annoying to rewatch.

This isn’t to say Legend of Korra sucks or you shouldn’t ever watch it; overall, it’s very good. But this is an element of the story that’s incredibly weak once you start to notice it, and its repetition shows that the writers didn’t think about it enough to subvert it. They created an incredibly strong and memorable female lead… and then kept taking away her power through Plot-Mandated inconveniences or tragedies.

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