Nickelodeon’s sequel to Avatar: The Last Airbender ran for 52 episodes across four seasons, from April 14, 2012, to December 19, 2014. It follows a seventeen-year-old girl from the Southern Water Tribe who can bend all four elements and would rather punch a problem than meditate on it. The Legend of Korra is a harder, messier show than the one that came before it, and it is better for that.
Trailer, via IGN.
A Seventeen-Year-Old Who Breaks Things
Korra arrives in Republic City already a fully trained waterbender, earthbender and firebender. What she lacks is air, and the spiritual patience that comes with it. Her teacher is Tenzin, voiced by J.K. Simmons, one of Aang’s grown children and the last airbending master standing.
Janet Varney plays Korra as a brawler first and a student second. The character was inspired by Bryan Konietzko’s “pretty tough” sister and by female MMA fighters, and it shows in how she carries a fight. Michael Dante DiMartino has described her arc as a transformation “from brash warrior to a spiritual being.” That is the spine of the whole series.
The show does not pretend this is easy. Korra’s confidence is the thing that gets her hurt, over and over, and the series is honest about the cost.
Pro-Bending, and the Brothers Mako and Bolin
Season one puts Korra on a pro-bending team, a spectator sport where two squads of an earthbender, a waterbender and a firebender try to throw each other out of a ring. It is the cleanest metaphor the show has: bending, once a renowned martial art, is now a job, a crime and a cable sport.
The brothers who team with her are the best-written pair in the series. Mako, voiced by David Faustino, is a firebender described as “dark and brooding” — a description he earns. Bolin, voiced by P.J. Byrne, is an earthbender who is lighthearted and funny and, per the show’s own framing, always has a lady on his arm.
Mako’s name is a tribute to the late Mako Iwamatsu, who voiced Iroh in the first two seasons of the original series. It is a small thing. It is also the kind of small thing this production cared about.
Asami Sato and the Equalists
Seychelle Gabriel plays Asami Sato, the only non-bender among the leads and the daughter of the industrialist Hiroshi Sato. She is not a sidekick. She fights, she runs a company, and she is the character the show trusts most with its own themes.
Season one’s villain is Amon, masked leader of the Equalists, an anti-bender uprising that wants to strip bending from the world. The politician Tarrlok enlists Korra to fight them. The reveal — Amon is a waterbender, and Tarrlok’s brother — lands because the season spent its time making the grievance real.
That is the argument the first book makes and never quite drops: a world that has industrialized bending has also given people a reason to resent it.
The Hard Numbers
- First aired: April 14, 2012
- Last aired: December 19, 2014
- Seasons: 4
- Episodes: 52
- Network: Nickelodeon
- Creators: Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko
- Score: 8.9/10
Unalaq, Wan, and the Spirit Portals
Book Two: Spirits is the show’s biggest swing and its shakiest. Korra’s uncle Unalaq, chief of the Northern Water Tribe, seizes power in the south. While her friends look for support, Korra learns the origin of the Avatar: Wan, who fused his soul with the spirit of light, Raava, to imprison Vaatu, the spirit of darkness.
Unalaq frees Vaatu during Harmonic Convergence, a decamillennial alignment of planets, and merges with him to become a dark Avatar. Korra beats him and then does something more interesting: she leaves the portals between the material world and the spirit world open, forcing humans and spirits to live together again.
The Wan episodes are the best two chapters the series ever produced. The rest of the season is a slog through a civil war that never quite coheres, and Unalaq is the weakest antagonist in four books. The ending earns its place anyway.
Zaheer and the Red Lotus
Book Three: Change is where The Legend of Korra becomes genuinely dangerous. Nonbenders start developing airbending after Harmonic Convergence, and Tenzin, Korra and her friends try to recruit them to rebuild the extinct Air Nomads.
One of the new airbenders is Zaheer, leader of the anarchist Red Lotus. Henry Rollins voices him with a calm that is worse than shouting. The Red Lotus assassinates the Earth Queen and throws her kingdom into chaos, then captures Korra to kill her and end the Avatar cycle for good.
They are stopped by Korra’s friends and the new airbenders. Korra is left severely injured and psychologically traumatized, and the show does not wave that away.
What Book Four Does With a Broken Avatar
The final season, Book Four: Balance, opens with an Avatar who can barely walk. Korra is still carrying the injuries and the trauma of her fight with the Red Lotus, and the season makes her deal with them.
This is the part of The Legend of Korra that has aged best. A children’s action series on Nickelodeon in 2014 did not have to put a damaged lead at the center of its last run. It did, and it did it without a cure-all.
The supporting cast is deep in a way that rewards a rewatch: Aubrey Plaza, John Michael Higgins, Kiernan Shipka, Lisa Edelstein, Steve Blum, Eva Marie Saint, Anne Heche and Zelda Williams all pass through. Mindy Sterling is in the main voice cast alongside Varney, Gabriel, Faustino, Byrne and Simmons.
A Sequel That Refused to Repeat Itself
The world is the same one Aang left, seventy years on. Four nations — the Water Tribes, the Earth Kingdom, the Fire Nation and the Air Nomads — and bending that works like Chinese martial arts, taught through spiritual and physical exercise. Only the Avatar bends all four elements, reincarnating among the nations to keep the balance.
Republic City is the new thing. A multicultural sovereign state founded by Aang after the end of the last war, described by its creators as “if Manhattan had happened in Asia.” It is a 1920s metropolis with a crime problem, a press, an underclass and a sport.
Veterans of the original returned for this one, including designer Joaquim Dos Santos, writers Joshua Hamilton and Tim Hedrick, composer Jeremy Zuckerman and sound designer Benjamin Wynn. The continuity shows in the animation and in the score.
Where the show stumbles, it stumbles loudly. Book Two’s pacing sags. Some romances are dragged past their usefulness. The love triangle in season one is the least interesting thing on screen whenever it appears, and it appears often.
But the ambition is real, and the series has since continued as a comic book line, which tells you the audience never let it go.
The Legend of Korra is not Avatar: The Last Airbender, and it should not be graded as though it were. Aang’s story was about a boy learning to carry a responsibility he never asked for. Korra’s is about a young woman who wanted the responsibility, got it, and found out it would break her.
That is a harder sell for a kids’ network, and Nickelodeon’s handling of the show — moving it around, pulling it online — never matched what it had. The show survived anyway, on the strength of Varney’s performance, a villain roster that peaks with Zaheer, and a final season that treats a broken Avatar as a story worth telling rather than an obstacle to the next fight.
Fourteen years on, the argument holds. This is the rare sequel that took the original’s rules and asked what they would cost in a modern world. Bending as labor. Bending as spectacle. Bending as a thing people resent you for. The Avatar as a public figure who is bad at politics.
The Legend of Korra is uneven, and it is never boring. It is one of the most ambitious animated series an American children’s network has put on air, and it earns the room it takes up.
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