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I am the solution
The Legend of Korra has just made the jump from fun and impressive to unputdownable, which is a bit of a problem considering the show is still airing and Viking Zen and I just watched the last of the new episodes tonight. The rest of this post is devoted to speculation and squee.
Between the mask we have never seen him without and his claims of support from the spirit world, I would love to discover that Amon made some kind of bargain for his powers with Koh the Face-Stealer, trading his face for the ability to affect a person's bending. I still don't know toward what end; Amon's true motives are as much of a mystery as his identity. (I have my doubts about the firebender took my face story: it is too exactly what a disenfranchised crowd looking for a symbol-story—the Equalists' ichthys is that white-and-red mask—would want to hear.) Nor do I know what stake a spirit, even one as ancient, game-playing, and amoral as Koh, might have in changing the balance of bending in the world. But we know from the previous show that it is possible for an ordinary human to travel into the spirit world (I always hoped we would hear more about Iroh's journey. I still don't know whether it's canon or just fan speculation that it had to do with the death of his son) and I cannot imagine that relations between the two worlds are not going to become a prominent part of the show, considering the recent stress on the difficulties Korra has with the spiritual portion of her duties as Avatar. Mastering the four elements will not be enough to make her a fully realized Avatar. She needs to be a bridge between the two worlds, like Aang before her—he just had the advantages of a monk's training, like an easier time with meditation and openness to his past lives. Korra thinks first in terms of the physical, the here and now, what she should be doing. The show is not arguing against progress: it seems like a significant statement that the original Team Avatar traveled by flying bison, while a present-day attempt to pile onto Naga in the same way ends in a disgruntled polar bear dog collapsing under the weight of four strapping young adults; Asami saves the day and everybody's pride by roaring up in the sleek black satomobile Tarrlok originally tried to bribe Korra with, clearly the Lagonda or Lincoln-Zephyr of its time. (She is the only one of the team who can drive. Motorcycles, roadsters, the steam-powered streetcar in the Equalists' tunnels. Non-benders have always been the innovators of this world—Amon uses electrocution, Hiroshi Sato mecha-tanks to level the playing field against the benders of Republic City. Sokka was mechanically-minded, too.) Asami stepping into shot with her right hand sheathed in an Equalist electro-glove is unequivocally badass. But I think we are meant to start wondering: what does the modern metropolis of Republic City have to say to the spirit world? It's one thing to live in the middle of a bamboo forest out of which a black-and-white spirit might wander either benevolently or in a bad mood depending on how the local environment has been treated. This isn't an old city. Seventy years at most: all skyscrapers and tomorrow (which means different things to different people) and it has no native population. Its past is what was brought to it. We haven't seen any spirits so far in its gutters, its parks, its train tracks. I'd love to. And cities are where you come to reinvent yourself, to become someone else. Korra thought she was coming to Republic City to become an airbender, mission accomplished. It's no accident that while she loses to Tarrlok in a bending battle, it's her finally successful contact with a past life that gives her the information she needs to make sense of his plans. She needs more than that one side of herself. Yes, there are the practical aspects to consider—Korra would have seen Tarrlok coming sooner if she had been able to interpret those hallucinatory flashes as Aang's memories of Yakone, which I imagine must have greater significance than just their application to the bloodbender at hand. But this has never been a universe in which ignoring the spiritual side of things has been a good idea, as the ghost of Admiral Zhao could tell you. The spirit world and history, the roots of things. They are real and extant forces and it is her job.
And it is the Avatar's job to keep the balance of the world, but that is not as straightforward a directive as it sounds. In Aang's time, it meant the elemental balance of the Four Nations. In Korra's time, it is looking as though balance means that which exists—or, right now, doesn't—between benders and non-benders. The Equalists are violent revolutionaries and it is ever more likely that Amon has his own agenda, but the show is very clear that it is not right for non-benders to be treated as second-class citizens, casually preyed on or curfewed like criminals. "You're our Avatar, too!" a woman shouts at Korra from a crowd of supposed Equalist sympathizers, just an ordinary neighborhood of people trying to go home without getting kettled. (To her credit, Korra immediately goes after the councilman in charge of the roundup. It just doesn't work out as planned. She doesn't strategize well; she reaches for a slashing handful of water or a kick of fire before she stops to think. It makes her easy to manipulate.) The message isn't that non-benders should be more polite about securing their rights; it's that Amon is using their justified anger for purposes of his own. Another pair of worlds to bridge.
Briefly, because I have not slept more than four hours the last couple of nights and my brain just quit on me—
I believe it was Alison who theorized first that Amon may not actually be able to remove a person's capacity for bending, but he may be able to neutralize somehow all the ways in which they have learned to use it (after which the psychological devastation of finding themselves stripped of a lifelong skill and the fact that they have been told it's a permanent condition will combine to ensure they never even see if it can be relearned). We know already there's a difference between the two: by virtue of being the Avatar, Korra has the ability to airbend, but she hasn't been able to do anything with it. I find this a tantalizing theory; it would explain why Amon is waiting for Korra to become a fully realized Avatar before confronting her. He can't actually touch her potential for bending. If he only cut off her access to water, fire, and earth, no matter how overwhelmed in the short term, she could still learn to airbend from scratch. Blocked from all four elements in one go, she wouldn't know, quite literally, what to do with herself. It is also possible, of course, that Amon can do exactly what he claims: the chi-bending which Aang learned from the lion-turtle at the end of Avatar: The Last Airbender was a lost art, an ancient skill which predated elemental bending. We were led to believe only the Avatar of pure, unbendable spirit could bend another person's energy, but chi-blocking is practiced solely and frequently by non-benders; I wondered initially whether Amon was merely using a more advanced form of the technique. It might still for all I know turn out to be true.
We have seen the crescent moon twice now, once in the design of the pin at Yakone's throat and once in the sky when Tarrlok bloodbent Korra; it made me wonder whether the received wisdom that bloodbending can only be performed at the full moon was merely a case of limited information. The only known bloodbenders of the original series were Katara and Hama, who was driven to the technique by years of brutal captivity—but who's to say it wasn't independently discovered over the centuries by other waterbenders, who linked it to other phases of the moon? Hama herself admitted it was an inevitable conclusion, that the water in living things can be bent as easily as the water in the air or the earth. How many other traditions are out there? (And if a well-known truth about bloodbending is incorrect, then what else don't we know about the ways bending works?) I am still a little sorry this form of bending is being used only for nightmare fuel. It's extreme, it's body horror, and almost every conceivable application could be used to kill someone in another grotesque way, but I had this idea it might come in handy for hospital work.
(I want to know what Amon wants Tarrlok for. He's already taken the man's bending; he's never showed much concern for what happens to the people he's "purified" afterward.)
Are we going to see any more of the world beyond Republic City? The first episode showed us a little of the Southern Water Tribe, which is doing much better than the thin ring of tents and single igloo of the first episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender, but I know nothing about the current Firelord and that nebbishy Earth King must have reproduced or handed the throne off to a cousin and joined the circus or something. If this season is Air, following the Water, Earth, and Fire of the previous show, then I expect the next season to be Spirit, but I'd like to see what there is of this world, too.
I was glad to hear the radio announcer (Shiro Shinobi, the internet informs me: has his name ever been mentioned on the show?) return as narrator of the newsreel recaps after that one week of blandly ominous PSA Tarrlok; I didn't expect him to have died explicitly on a Nickelodeon show ("You know, it was really unclear"), but I wasn't sure if he would be out of the picture permanently, especially after the destruction of the pro-bending arena. He had better not turn out to be a secret villain, or get killed in some casual, ironic fashion, or any of the things that often happen to minor characters I like. His Hindenburg moment during the Equalist attack was surprisingly poignant for a pee joke.
At one o'clock, I thought I was too tired to write anything. Am I still on New Zealand time?
Between the mask we have never seen him without and his claims of support from the spirit world, I would love to discover that Amon made some kind of bargain for his powers with Koh the Face-Stealer, trading his face for the ability to affect a person's bending. I still don't know toward what end; Amon's true motives are as much of a mystery as his identity. (I have my doubts about the firebender took my face story: it is too exactly what a disenfranchised crowd looking for a symbol-story—the Equalists' ichthys is that white-and-red mask—would want to hear.) Nor do I know what stake a spirit, even one as ancient, game-playing, and amoral as Koh, might have in changing the balance of bending in the world. But we know from the previous show that it is possible for an ordinary human to travel into the spirit world (I always hoped we would hear more about Iroh's journey. I still don't know whether it's canon or just fan speculation that it had to do with the death of his son) and I cannot imagine that relations between the two worlds are not going to become a prominent part of the show, considering the recent stress on the difficulties Korra has with the spiritual portion of her duties as Avatar. Mastering the four elements will not be enough to make her a fully realized Avatar. She needs to be a bridge between the two worlds, like Aang before her—he just had the advantages of a monk's training, like an easier time with meditation and openness to his past lives. Korra thinks first in terms of the physical, the here and now, what she should be doing. The show is not arguing against progress: it seems like a significant statement that the original Team Avatar traveled by flying bison, while a present-day attempt to pile onto Naga in the same way ends in a disgruntled polar bear dog collapsing under the weight of four strapping young adults; Asami saves the day and everybody's pride by roaring up in the sleek black satomobile Tarrlok originally tried to bribe Korra with, clearly the Lagonda or Lincoln-Zephyr of its time. (She is the only one of the team who can drive. Motorcycles, roadsters, the steam-powered streetcar in the Equalists' tunnels. Non-benders have always been the innovators of this world—Amon uses electrocution, Hiroshi Sato mecha-tanks to level the playing field against the benders of Republic City. Sokka was mechanically-minded, too.) Asami stepping into shot with her right hand sheathed in an Equalist electro-glove is unequivocally badass. But I think we are meant to start wondering: what does the modern metropolis of Republic City have to say to the spirit world? It's one thing to live in the middle of a bamboo forest out of which a black-and-white spirit might wander either benevolently or in a bad mood depending on how the local environment has been treated. This isn't an old city. Seventy years at most: all skyscrapers and tomorrow (which means different things to different people) and it has no native population. Its past is what was brought to it. We haven't seen any spirits so far in its gutters, its parks, its train tracks. I'd love to. And cities are where you come to reinvent yourself, to become someone else. Korra thought she was coming to Republic City to become an airbender, mission accomplished. It's no accident that while she loses to Tarrlok in a bending battle, it's her finally successful contact with a past life that gives her the information she needs to make sense of his plans. She needs more than that one side of herself. Yes, there are the practical aspects to consider—Korra would have seen Tarrlok coming sooner if she had been able to interpret those hallucinatory flashes as Aang's memories of Yakone, which I imagine must have greater significance than just their application to the bloodbender at hand. But this has never been a universe in which ignoring the spiritual side of things has been a good idea, as the ghost of Admiral Zhao could tell you. The spirit world and history, the roots of things. They are real and extant forces and it is her job.
And it is the Avatar's job to keep the balance of the world, but that is not as straightforward a directive as it sounds. In Aang's time, it meant the elemental balance of the Four Nations. In Korra's time, it is looking as though balance means that which exists—or, right now, doesn't—between benders and non-benders. The Equalists are violent revolutionaries and it is ever more likely that Amon has his own agenda, but the show is very clear that it is not right for non-benders to be treated as second-class citizens, casually preyed on or curfewed like criminals. "You're our Avatar, too!" a woman shouts at Korra from a crowd of supposed Equalist sympathizers, just an ordinary neighborhood of people trying to go home without getting kettled. (To her credit, Korra immediately goes after the councilman in charge of the roundup. It just doesn't work out as planned. She doesn't strategize well; she reaches for a slashing handful of water or a kick of fire before she stops to think. It makes her easy to manipulate.) The message isn't that non-benders should be more polite about securing their rights; it's that Amon is using their justified anger for purposes of his own. Another pair of worlds to bridge.
Briefly, because I have not slept more than four hours the last couple of nights and my brain just quit on me—
I believe it was Alison who theorized first that Amon may not actually be able to remove a person's capacity for bending, but he may be able to neutralize somehow all the ways in which they have learned to use it (after which the psychological devastation of finding themselves stripped of a lifelong skill and the fact that they have been told it's a permanent condition will combine to ensure they never even see if it can be relearned). We know already there's a difference between the two: by virtue of being the Avatar, Korra has the ability to airbend, but she hasn't been able to do anything with it. I find this a tantalizing theory; it would explain why Amon is waiting for Korra to become a fully realized Avatar before confronting her. He can't actually touch her potential for bending. If he only cut off her access to water, fire, and earth, no matter how overwhelmed in the short term, she could still learn to airbend from scratch. Blocked from all four elements in one go, she wouldn't know, quite literally, what to do with herself. It is also possible, of course, that Amon can do exactly what he claims: the chi-bending which Aang learned from the lion-turtle at the end of Avatar: The Last Airbender was a lost art, an ancient skill which predated elemental bending. We were led to believe only the Avatar of pure, unbendable spirit could bend another person's energy, but chi-blocking is practiced solely and frequently by non-benders; I wondered initially whether Amon was merely using a more advanced form of the technique. It might still for all I know turn out to be true.
We have seen the crescent moon twice now, once in the design of the pin at Yakone's throat and once in the sky when Tarrlok bloodbent Korra; it made me wonder whether the received wisdom that bloodbending can only be performed at the full moon was merely a case of limited information. The only known bloodbenders of the original series were Katara and Hama, who was driven to the technique by years of brutal captivity—but who's to say it wasn't independently discovered over the centuries by other waterbenders, who linked it to other phases of the moon? Hama herself admitted it was an inevitable conclusion, that the water in living things can be bent as easily as the water in the air or the earth. How many other traditions are out there? (And if a well-known truth about bloodbending is incorrect, then what else don't we know about the ways bending works?) I am still a little sorry this form of bending is being used only for nightmare fuel. It's extreme, it's body horror, and almost every conceivable application could be used to kill someone in another grotesque way, but I had this idea it might come in handy for hospital work.
(I want to know what Amon wants Tarrlok for. He's already taken the man's bending; he's never showed much concern for what happens to the people he's "purified" afterward.)
Are we going to see any more of the world beyond Republic City? The first episode showed us a little of the Southern Water Tribe, which is doing much better than the thin ring of tents and single igloo of the first episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender, but I know nothing about the current Firelord and that nebbishy Earth King must have reproduced or handed the throne off to a cousin and joined the circus or something. If this season is Air, following the Water, Earth, and Fire of the previous show, then I expect the next season to be Spirit, but I'd like to see what there is of this world, too.
I was glad to hear the radio announcer (Shiro Shinobi, the internet informs me: has his name ever been mentioned on the show?) return as narrator of the newsreel recaps after that one week of blandly ominous PSA Tarrlok; I didn't expect him to have died explicitly on a Nickelodeon show ("You know, it was really unclear"), but I wasn't sure if he would be out of the picture permanently, especially after the destruction of the pro-bending arena. He had better not turn out to be a secret villain, or get killed in some casual, ironic fashion, or any of the things that often happen to minor characters I like. His Hindenburg moment during the Equalist attack was surprisingly poignant for a pee joke.
At one o'clock, I thought I was too tired to write anything. Am I still on New Zealand time?
no subject
I wondered about that at the end of the last show; I expected it to explain where the next generation of airbenders would come from.
I keep thinking back to when Aang was temporarily dead from a well-timed lightning bolt while he was in the Avatar-state. What if a portion of the Avatar essence went off to a new body then?
Amon is being positioned as an anti-Avatar, agreed. I am not sure how I would feel about finding out that he was Aang's gebbeth.
no subject
Right now I am envisioning a firebender who not only knows cold-fire bending, but he has figured out enough of it to be able to warp magnetic impulses and has figured out how to subtly zap impulses in people's heads. It might be too advanced for this particular series, but a sequel series which still has bending might well have the firebender's answer to the bloodbender.
no subject
What that makes me wonder, honestly, is not whether Amon is some kind of splinter of Aang, but how much non-benders who train in the martial arts learn of various bending moves; it's not as though they're worthless without the elements behind them.
Right now I am envisioning a firebender who not only knows cold-fire bending, but he has figured out enough of it to be able to warp magnetic impulses and has figured out how to subtly zap impulses in people's heads.
I'm just waiting for Mako's proficiency with lightning to extend to taking on the Equalists' electrified weaponry (which I don't think it quite has, yet). It's all electricity.