On August 12, 2020, DiMartino and Konietzko announced they left the production in June, citing creative differences with Netflix.
Everyone around her was laser focused on teaching her to be the Avatar no one taught her how to people and then, when the time came, they pushed her out of the nest and we all expected her to fly with perfect grace.Īang didn’t.
Aang got to live before he took on his full responsibilities Korra was forced to take on her full responsibilities before she had any idea that life was a thing. She was always the Avatar, always the role, never a person, and certainly never a child. She, unlike Aang, wasn’t raised by a tribe: she was raised by instructors and soldiers. She was removed from that family and taken to be trained in a secure, remote location. Korra was identified as the Avatar when she was a toddler still living with her family. Let’s give her the same benefit of the doubt people gave Aang. To figure out how her story is different. So, let’s step back for a minute and look at where Korra came from. If it had been Korra knocking over that cabbage cart, people would have been baying for blood. Which means the audience is cued to dislike Korra, to see her as a trope rather than to see her, to not give her origin story a single moment of the consideration it has given Aang’s.
And it is most certainly predisposed to disliking a teenage girl who isn’t demure, polite, and deferential. The thing is? The audience is predisposed to dislike teenage girls.
Being sent out into the world to begin her mission doesn’t change any of that. We see her as a child only once, at the very beginning of the first episode of TLOK, and then we meet her again as a teenage girl. Korra starts with two strikes against her. It’s the story of a human learning to be the Avatar and we love him for that. That’s all a very long way of saying that Aang’s story is one of a human accepting his destiny and its challenges. Aang deals with some extremely heavy stuff but he does so amidst opportunities to go penguin sledding and explore new places, and in the end, after a lot of work, his enemy becomes one of his best friends. His primary antagonist is only a few years older than him. When he’s unfrozen, the first people he encounters are other tweens who immediately take up his cause. Yes, the social dynamic changed when he was identified as the Avatar, but he remained inside that community and he had a teacher who made certain he was allowed time to be a kid, time to be human. He had, to the point where he left the monastery, been raised by a wholeass tribe that included both adults and children of all ages. When Katara and Sokka find Aang, he is literally frozen in childhood. Here is why I am calling bullshit: you can’t compare Aang and Korra because while they share the single and singular characteristic of being the Avatar, they are otherwise two different people living two entirely different lives and two entirely different truths. Here is where I call bullshit on that interpretation. Yes, Aang sometimes runs away from his responsibilities but he’s like, 12 and he didn’t really have proper teachers and he always gets there in the end whereas Korra, who has been properly trained, rushes in and gets people hurt and makes all the mistakes and she should know better. Aang puts others first while Korra puts her position as Avatar first. People slap TLOK and its titular Avatar down for all sorts of reasons, the main one being that while Aang is altruistic and adorable and kind, Korra is arrogant and rude and unlikeable.