My list of things to do doesn't seem to get any shorter
So I currently have 19,504 words written about Legend of Korra's finale. Whoops.
Technically, that's still a rough count- I'm still trying to sort through everything into a cohesive manner, there's probably a number of redundancies, so it'll probably end up being a bit shorter than that. Clearly, I have a lot to say about the finale, and a lot of time on the train to write down my thoughts. It still isn't all too well organized, but I've given up on making it into one giant, cohesive post and split it up cause otherwise it's never getting done. So here's about 2k words.
Also hi I didn't just drop off the earth, and I'm around in some degree. Life's been a little busy because papers don't write themselves no matter how much I wish, there's several very real clocks ticking, I have next to no free time, and there's an actual post not about LoK incoming.
Let's talk about Korra/Asami as canon, even if it's been talked about to death, cause it's a big point. Can we celebrate there's bisexual women in a canon interracial relationship? And even more importantly, not regulated to the background for tokenism, but front and center with one of them being the main character?
Aside- My general stance is that shipping shouldn't be a primary way to engage a show. Yes, I have ships I like and am invested in, and I whine when I feel like a show hasn't done anything to make me see why two people are together. The Korra-Mako-Asami triangle was pretty much that for me, since I never got why either of them were interested in Mako aside from the fact that he's the only single dude around who wasn't Bolin. I was plenty fine with Korra being single and being Korra.
That said, I'm still biased with the finale and subsequent confirmation. Horribly biased, cause Korra/Asami was my favorite crackship for Book 1-2. Which by virtue of the fact that I didn't like any of the other romantic relationships at the time, made it the only ship I had. In Book 3, it catapulted into top relationships next to Tenzin/Korra, and Book 4, well. Canon is canon.
To get out this out of the way here- this is important to people. Representation and affirmation and being told that your identity is valid matters. Especially in a world where depictions of them in media are rare, cause media is incredibly powerful but that's a huge digression. Having bisexual characters who aren't there only for their diversity, and instead have the female protagonist walk off into the metaphorical sunset with another woman like no big deal?
That said, I can get why some would've wanted it to end with a platonic relationship with Asami and Korra. Non-romantic love isn't something that you usually see given much attention in media outside of familial units. I get where the complaints are coming from- why does everything have to be about romantic love? It doesn't. Why is friendship considered lesser than romance? It isn't. Why can’t two individuals of the same sex be close without being romantically involved? They can.
So yes, it might've been a feminist statement to have Korra alone or Korra and Asami to be heterosexual life partners. Maybe it would've been a bit of a statement. But hey, you know what's even more rare? Non-romantic love between a male and female character, a bisexual female main character, and romantic love between female characters? Pretty low on the ranking.
Honestly, it feels like a lot boils down to this bizarre stance that somehow having a romantic relationship between two female characters undervalues female friendship? Because forbid that there are queer relationships in media, Personally, I can't wrap my head around the divide- female friendships are important, yes. I get that. Romantic relationships between females are also important, and I fail to see how having Korra/Asami together somehow detracts from its overall importance?
It feels like there's this forced dichotomy that female friendship and romance can't exist alongside each other. Except friendship doesn't invalidate romance, and romance doesn't mean you can't have friendship. They're two sides of the same coin, and are capable of being deeply intertwined.
I don't think there's any point in this where you can try to draw equivalence. Society is dominantly keyed into heterosexuality, and it isn't to say that one type of narrative is more compelling than the other. It really isn't, but fact is that for queer people, a romantic relationship they can relate to in media is rare, especially one that aren't regulated to the background to fill token representation.
Was it the was the most developed or the greatest representation ever? No. The story isn't a wild love story between two female characters. I don't think that the show was built up around queer representation or the finale, and that looking with that assumption is probably going to disappoint you. The show's always been first and foremost about Korra, and the ending was more about her coming to terms with what happened to her to deal with an external threat. It's about Korra, and her healing.
Before I go on, context- this show is an American produced/aired cartoon/animated series. Which means there's a lot (I mean a lot) of stuff you can't do. Imported or produced shows aimed at children, on a network for children in America, can't explicitly show a non-strictly heterosexual relationship. That's it- you try to say otherwise, you have to wade through a metric ton of backlash.
This is very different from having a show the freedom to show homosexual characters/relationships without too much backlash. Cartoons, you try that and you get censored, taken off the network, cancelled, and petitioned by angry parents. Networks, and by virtue the show, tend to play it safe. You do it, and you get a repeat of what happened with Adventure Time. I'm willing to bet that there were parents who sent in angry messages to Nick upon finding out Korrasami is confirmed canon.
Bearing that in mind, and that LoK already was having trouble staying on the air already, I'm willing to give the show leeway. So.
Korra and Asami isn't explicit. It isn't. If it was shown much earlier than the finale, I'm not sure if the show would've survived. I'm not saying that the foundations of the relationship weren't laid over a long period of time, but that it isn't a brazen statement of 'look at these two they're going to be a couple'.
There seems to be a lot of outcry of how this wasn't planned, that it was last minute, it came out of nowhere, etc. I think two of the bigger reasons why people were surprised by the finale is 1) that they actually opted to go there given the restrictions on the show, and more importantly 2) heterosexuality is the default sexuality that people tend to assume. As in, it's the baseline norm.
A slightly flawed, unrelated example would be how the character Sheppard from Mass Effect has a variable, player determined sex, but is presumed to be male as the default, and is otherwise referred to as fem!Sheppard when female. It's as if being female is a deviation- this is much the same regarding sexuality. Unless it's openly stated, audiences usually presume characters are straight. That's a fault of how society has primed itself, but in all honesty, I think if either Korra or Asami were male in an opposite sex friendship, and you didn't change anything else about the story, no one would've said that the ending wasn't built up. There wouldn't be any arguments of whether the last scene was ambiguous. There also wouldn't ambiguity either, since a kiss would've gotten through. Just consider- if Katara and Aang had ended in the exact situation sans a kiss, there wouldn't be statements of how it wasn't clear. Or there might be some, but not nearly so much, nor would anyone act too surprised.
Minor, but related digression-
Romance with two people of the opposite sex is handled through a degree of physical contact- if it isn't the primary route, it plays a heavy element. Not to say that verbal and non-physical cues don't have weight, but physicality does a lot of work. It also tends to be how visual media prefers to establish these sorts of things, just because of how visual media is primed, cause you know, visual presentation. It's what's the easiest, and works best in that medium.
The tricky thing is when you start involving people of the same sex, especially between women and men. With men, any sort of physical contact or otherwise emotional closeness is almost always automatically regarded homoerotic or open for interpretation. On the flip side, women have quite the opposite proposition- there's a huge amount of physical intimacy that is typified as within the boundaries normal behavior, that in any other situation would be considered irrecoverably romantic/homoerotic. It's just how some societies have set itself up, and there's a lot of interesting discussion around the roots of that behavior that I'm going to stop myself from going into.
/end digression on behavior differences between sexes
Basically, physical and emotional intimacy between females is regarded as normal behavior. There's a lot of common signals that are associated with developing romance, ie flirting, touching, looking at each other, emotionally charged dialogue, etc, that may be considered run of the mill for female characters. Which in part plays into Korra/Asami- it isn't that it is any harder to notice (again, I maintain if you made either Korra or Asami male, no one would be surprised) but that it's more open to misinterpretation. Again, this holds much truer for women than men in media, because platonic relationships between men are presented under different standards, while those between women have a lot of elements you'd see in a romance. There's also the really old stereotype of women being emotional and talking about things out with other women, so romance between women looks like friendship. Even when it does occur, it usually has to be openly stated.
Given the time spent with Korra and Asami through Book 3 and the previous lack of direct one on one time, it's pretty evident that the show's making an effort to do something with them. In Book 4, Korra replies to Asami's letter, they have ambiguous scenes when they rejoin each other. Even so, I personally had a lot of doubt, and thought that it'd just remain in the realm of subtext- mostly because of how improbable that Korra/Asami seemed as canon, given the restrictions. Things like that do color perception, which in turn affects interpretation of scenes that are already by nature straddles a blurry line.
In this situation, I do think more explicit material would've helped in the eventual reveal- pointing to the letters is great. But we already know that Korra and Asami are best friends, that they trust each other (I posit there's a lot of other reasons not related to romance as to why Korra replied to Asami) enough to write back. The problem is that it doesn't do is distinguish between romance and friendship. The show itself doesn't distinguish between the two until the last few minutes.
But on the other hand, I think the last scene is the turning point- they were friends who had romantic interests in each other right up until the final scene. Book 3 and 4 had built up their relationship, and I think an important thing to keep in mind is that the ending isn't saying that they're already in a relationship- but that it's the start of one. That's a very real distinction. Walking into the Spirit World, holding hands and looking into each other's eyes is a cautious confirmation of reciprocation if I've ever seen one.
Basically, it's a first date. By which first date is a vacation to the Spirit World. Until the very end, they were just friends who harbored feelings for each other.
Which is why I appreciate there not being a kiss at the end. You don't kiss someone right after you've found you that the other feels the same way. Or maybe you do, I don't know. It does fit the nature of their relationship- a slow evolution from 'other girl in the love triangle with Mako' to 'Mako's amicable ex-girlfriends' to 'best friends' to 'romantic partners'. It's a tender moment.
Maybe more open statements might've been helpful in its development, but I think it does work well enough the narrative. Neither of them are in a relationship with each other yet, they have feelings for the other, and wonder if the other feels the same way, but nobody's admitted any feelings. It's that limbo where you're cautiously feeling prospects and trying to gauge the other person's feelings- it's the cusp of a relationship, not the climax. There isn't a clear transitioning point for their feelings- admittedly, in a written narrative it is a little irksome. But reality is usually like that- you don't go pick a specific moment and say 'this is the exact moment I had decided I liked you'. Or maybe you can, I don't know.
That said, I don't know if regulating it solely to the finale is necessarily a good move. I get a lot of why they'd do it, and ending it on that frame is a powerful moment. But it has overwhelmed a lot of discussion points about the finale, and a lot of thoughts for a lot of people (one of the reasons why I stewed for so long about it). LoK is about a lot of things, and relationships are among them, but it has overshadowed a lot of other aspects of the story.
I also would've liked to see more of Korra and Asami together to develop them more. Especially towards the end, where there was a lot more focus on every other relationship but Korrasami- Bolin winning back Opal, Varrick and Zhu Li getting married, and even Kuvira and Bataar (arguably more to demonstrate Kuvira's resolve than their relationship, but still). Korra and Asami got maybe five minutes in together before heading off into the portal.
I'm fairly certain if you went and checked, you'd find that Korra and Asami spent more time together, communicating or otherwise, in Book 3 than the whole of Book 4. And I'll concede some ground on the fact that Book 4 was a lot more about Korra, so Korra in isolation is a natural product of what Korra's going through. But in the finale, Korra and Asami don't get to speak to each other much at all before the end. For that matter, Korra hardly manages to sneak in a conversation with most of the other characters, ie Lin, Bolin. A similar event does happen in TLA, with Aang ending up separated for pretty much all of the finale till the end, but TLA does have the benefit of having more episodes per season to fill in the gap.
It does feel like a chunk of the show re Korrasami is missing- and what do you know, that missing piece slots nicely into the clip show, where Korra and Asami have a sit down chat and talk things out way more than they have for a while. It's situated well enough that the time could've been used at the least to flesh out their relationship more.
So going from Korra and Asami being busy with stopping Kuvira to leaving for a vacation together feels like a sudden jump. They both had stuff to worry about- even so, we managed to slide in time for everyone else but them? More time was spent discussing Opal's relationship status than any other relationship, which is bizarre given the lack of them in the finale.
tl;dr- I wish Korra/Asami did get more time together this season as a followup, and I'm back and forth on how well developed they are in canon and how well it fits.
All things said, do I think the flaws affect how important Korrasami is? Eh, not really. Korrasami isn't just about a ship war or writing- there's a lot of to be said for representation in media, how it affects society and individual world views, and more interesting stuff I'm not qualified to talk at length about. Trying to talk about Korrasami in vacuo is possible, but that means extricating it from its larger social relevance, which means the values you'd get aren't going to be accurate.
It's as if you took a protein, put it into a vacuum without ions or solvent, then expect the behavior you observe to be relevant to in vivo behavior. It doesn't work, cause your system environments are too different. To disregard that Korrasami is queer representation would be saying 'hey, you know this story that might've been about your relationships or matter to you? Sorry, they're not all that important'. Criticize the show all you want, but don’t argue that Korrasami isn't relevant.
Technically, that's still a rough count- I'm still trying to sort through everything into a cohesive manner, there's probably a number of redundancies, so it'll probably end up being a bit shorter than that. Clearly, I have a lot to say about the finale, and a lot of time on the train to write down my thoughts. It still isn't all too well organized, but I've given up on making it into one giant, cohesive post and split it up cause otherwise it's never getting done. So here's about 2k words.
Also hi I didn't just drop off the earth, and I'm around in some degree. Life's been a little busy because papers don't write themselves no matter how much I wish, there's several very real clocks ticking, I have next to no free time, and there's an actual post not about LoK incoming.
Let's talk about Korra/Asami as canon, even if it's been talked about to death, cause it's a big point. Can we celebrate there's bisexual women in a canon interracial relationship? And even more importantly, not regulated to the background for tokenism, but front and center with one of them being the main character?
Aside- My general stance is that shipping shouldn't be a primary way to engage a show. Yes, I have ships I like and am invested in, and I whine when I feel like a show hasn't done anything to make me see why two people are together. The Korra-Mako-Asami triangle was pretty much that for me, since I never got why either of them were interested in Mako aside from the fact that he's the only single dude around who wasn't Bolin. I was plenty fine with Korra being single and being Korra.
That said, I'm still biased with the finale and subsequent confirmation. Horribly biased, cause Korra/Asami was my favorite crackship for Book 1-2. Which by virtue of the fact that I didn't like any of the other romantic relationships at the time, made it the only ship I had. In Book 3, it catapulted into top relationships next to Tenzin/Korra, and Book 4, well. Canon is canon.
To get out this out of the way here- this is important to people. Representation and affirmation and being told that your identity is valid matters. Especially in a world where depictions of them in media are rare, cause media is incredibly powerful but that's a huge digression. Having bisexual characters who aren't there only for their diversity, and instead have the female protagonist walk off into the metaphorical sunset with another woman like no big deal?
That said, I can get why some would've wanted it to end with a platonic relationship with Asami and Korra. Non-romantic love isn't something that you usually see given much attention in media outside of familial units. I get where the complaints are coming from- why does everything have to be about romantic love? It doesn't. Why is friendship considered lesser than romance? It isn't. Why can’t two individuals of the same sex be close without being romantically involved? They can.
So yes, it might've been a feminist statement to have Korra alone or Korra and Asami to be heterosexual life partners. Maybe it would've been a bit of a statement. But hey, you know what's even more rare? Non-romantic love between a male and female character, a bisexual female main character, and romantic love between female characters? Pretty low on the ranking.
Honestly, it feels like a lot boils down to this bizarre stance that somehow having a romantic relationship between two female characters undervalues female friendship? Because forbid that there are queer relationships in media, Personally, I can't wrap my head around the divide- female friendships are important, yes. I get that. Romantic relationships between females are also important, and I fail to see how having Korra/Asami together somehow detracts from its overall importance?
It feels like there's this forced dichotomy that female friendship and romance can't exist alongside each other. Except friendship doesn't invalidate romance, and romance doesn't mean you can't have friendship. They're two sides of the same coin, and are capable of being deeply intertwined.
I don't think there's any point in this where you can try to draw equivalence. Society is dominantly keyed into heterosexuality, and it isn't to say that one type of narrative is more compelling than the other. It really isn't, but fact is that for queer people, a romantic relationship they can relate to in media is rare, especially one that aren't regulated to the background to fill token representation.
Was it the was the most developed or the greatest representation ever? No. The story isn't a wild love story between two female characters. I don't think that the show was built up around queer representation or the finale, and that looking with that assumption is probably going to disappoint you. The show's always been first and foremost about Korra, and the ending was more about her coming to terms with what happened to her to deal with an external threat. It's about Korra, and her healing.
Before I go on, context- this show is an American produced/aired cartoon/animated series. Which means there's a lot (I mean a lot) of stuff you can't do. Imported or produced shows aimed at children, on a network for children in America, can't explicitly show a non-strictly heterosexual relationship. That's it- you try to say otherwise, you have to wade through a metric ton of backlash.
This is very different from having a show the freedom to show homosexual characters/relationships without too much backlash. Cartoons, you try that and you get censored, taken off the network, cancelled, and petitioned by angry parents. Networks, and by virtue the show, tend to play it safe. You do it, and you get a repeat of what happened with Adventure Time. I'm willing to bet that there were parents who sent in angry messages to Nick upon finding out Korrasami is confirmed canon.
Bearing that in mind, and that LoK already was having trouble staying on the air already, I'm willing to give the show leeway. So.
Korra and Asami isn't explicit. It isn't. If it was shown much earlier than the finale, I'm not sure if the show would've survived. I'm not saying that the foundations of the relationship weren't laid over a long period of time, but that it isn't a brazen statement of 'look at these two they're going to be a couple'.
There seems to be a lot of outcry of how this wasn't planned, that it was last minute, it came out of nowhere, etc. I think two of the bigger reasons why people were surprised by the finale is 1) that they actually opted to go there given the restrictions on the show, and more importantly 2) heterosexuality is the default sexuality that people tend to assume. As in, it's the baseline norm.
A slightly flawed, unrelated example would be how the character Sheppard from Mass Effect has a variable, player determined sex, but is presumed to be male as the default, and is otherwise referred to as fem!Sheppard when female. It's as if being female is a deviation- this is much the same regarding sexuality. Unless it's openly stated, audiences usually presume characters are straight. That's a fault of how society has primed itself, but in all honesty, I think if either Korra or Asami were male in an opposite sex friendship, and you didn't change anything else about the story, no one would've said that the ending wasn't built up. There wouldn't be any arguments of whether the last scene was ambiguous. There also wouldn't ambiguity either, since a kiss would've gotten through. Just consider- if Katara and Aang had ended in the exact situation sans a kiss, there wouldn't be statements of how it wasn't clear. Or there might be some, but not nearly so much, nor would anyone act too surprised.
Minor, but related digression-
Romance with two people of the opposite sex is handled through a degree of physical contact- if it isn't the primary route, it plays a heavy element. Not to say that verbal and non-physical cues don't have weight, but physicality does a lot of work. It also tends to be how visual media prefers to establish these sorts of things, just because of how visual media is primed, cause you know, visual presentation. It's what's the easiest, and works best in that medium.
The tricky thing is when you start involving people of the same sex, especially between women and men. With men, any sort of physical contact or otherwise emotional closeness is almost always automatically regarded homoerotic or open for interpretation. On the flip side, women have quite the opposite proposition- there's a huge amount of physical intimacy that is typified as within the boundaries normal behavior, that in any other situation would be considered irrecoverably romantic/homoerotic. It's just how some societies have set itself up, and there's a lot of interesting discussion around the roots of that behavior that I'm going to stop myself from going into.
/end digression on behavior differences between sexes
Basically, physical and emotional intimacy between females is regarded as normal behavior. There's a lot of common signals that are associated with developing romance, ie flirting, touching, looking at each other, emotionally charged dialogue, etc, that may be considered run of the mill for female characters. Which in part plays into Korra/Asami- it isn't that it is any harder to notice (again, I maintain if you made either Korra or Asami male, no one would be surprised) but that it's more open to misinterpretation. Again, this holds much truer for women than men in media, because platonic relationships between men are presented under different standards, while those between women have a lot of elements you'd see in a romance. There's also the really old stereotype of women being emotional and talking about things out with other women, so romance between women looks like friendship. Even when it does occur, it usually has to be openly stated.
Given the time spent with Korra and Asami through Book 3 and the previous lack of direct one on one time, it's pretty evident that the show's making an effort to do something with them. In Book 4, Korra replies to Asami's letter, they have ambiguous scenes when they rejoin each other. Even so, I personally had a lot of doubt, and thought that it'd just remain in the realm of subtext- mostly because of how improbable that Korra/Asami seemed as canon, given the restrictions. Things like that do color perception, which in turn affects interpretation of scenes that are already by nature straddles a blurry line.
In this situation, I do think more explicit material would've helped in the eventual reveal- pointing to the letters is great. But we already know that Korra and Asami are best friends, that they trust each other (I posit there's a lot of other reasons not related to romance as to why Korra replied to Asami) enough to write back. The problem is that it doesn't do is distinguish between romance and friendship. The show itself doesn't distinguish between the two until the last few minutes.
But on the other hand, I think the last scene is the turning point- they were friends who had romantic interests in each other right up until the final scene. Book 3 and 4 had built up their relationship, and I think an important thing to keep in mind is that the ending isn't saying that they're already in a relationship- but that it's the start of one. That's a very real distinction. Walking into the Spirit World, holding hands and looking into each other's eyes is a cautious confirmation of reciprocation if I've ever seen one.
Basically, it's a first date. By which first date is a vacation to the Spirit World. Until the very end, they were just friends who harbored feelings for each other.
Which is why I appreciate there not being a kiss at the end. You don't kiss someone right after you've found you that the other feels the same way. Or maybe you do, I don't know. It does fit the nature of their relationship- a slow evolution from 'other girl in the love triangle with Mako' to 'Mako's amicable ex-girlfriends' to 'best friends' to 'romantic partners'. It's a tender moment.
Maybe more open statements might've been helpful in its development, but I think it does work well enough the narrative. Neither of them are in a relationship with each other yet, they have feelings for the other, and wonder if the other feels the same way, but nobody's admitted any feelings. It's that limbo where you're cautiously feeling prospects and trying to gauge the other person's feelings- it's the cusp of a relationship, not the climax. There isn't a clear transitioning point for their feelings- admittedly, in a written narrative it is a little irksome. But reality is usually like that- you don't go pick a specific moment and say 'this is the exact moment I had decided I liked you'. Or maybe you can, I don't know.
That said, I don't know if regulating it solely to the finale is necessarily a good move. I get a lot of why they'd do it, and ending it on that frame is a powerful moment. But it has overwhelmed a lot of discussion points about the finale, and a lot of thoughts for a lot of people (one of the reasons why I stewed for so long about it). LoK is about a lot of things, and relationships are among them, but it has overshadowed a lot of other aspects of the story.
I also would've liked to see more of Korra and Asami together to develop them more. Especially towards the end, where there was a lot more focus on every other relationship but Korrasami- Bolin winning back Opal, Varrick and Zhu Li getting married, and even Kuvira and Bataar (arguably more to demonstrate Kuvira's resolve than their relationship, but still). Korra and Asami got maybe five minutes in together before heading off into the portal.
I'm fairly certain if you went and checked, you'd find that Korra and Asami spent more time together, communicating or otherwise, in Book 3 than the whole of Book 4. And I'll concede some ground on the fact that Book 4 was a lot more about Korra, so Korra in isolation is a natural product of what Korra's going through. But in the finale, Korra and Asami don't get to speak to each other much at all before the end. For that matter, Korra hardly manages to sneak in a conversation with most of the other characters, ie Lin, Bolin. A similar event does happen in TLA, with Aang ending up separated for pretty much all of the finale till the end, but TLA does have the benefit of having more episodes per season to fill in the gap.
It does feel like a chunk of the show re Korrasami is missing- and what do you know, that missing piece slots nicely into the clip show, where Korra and Asami have a sit down chat and talk things out way more than they have for a while. It's situated well enough that the time could've been used at the least to flesh out their relationship more.
So going from Korra and Asami being busy with stopping Kuvira to leaving for a vacation together feels like a sudden jump. They both had stuff to worry about- even so, we managed to slide in time for everyone else but them? More time was spent discussing Opal's relationship status than any other relationship, which is bizarre given the lack of them in the finale.
tl;dr- I wish Korra/Asami did get more time together this season as a followup, and I'm back and forth on how well developed they are in canon and how well it fits.
All things said, do I think the flaws affect how important Korrasami is? Eh, not really. Korrasami isn't just about a ship war or writing- there's a lot of to be said for representation in media, how it affects society and individual world views, and more interesting stuff I'm not qualified to talk at length about. Trying to talk about Korrasami in vacuo is possible, but that means extricating it from its larger social relevance, which means the values you'd get aren't going to be accurate.
It's as if you took a protein, put it into a vacuum without ions or solvent, then expect the behavior you observe to be relevant to in vivo behavior. It doesn't work, cause your system environments are too different. To disregard that Korrasami is queer representation would be saying 'hey, you know this story that might've been about your relationships or matter to you? Sorry, they're not all that important'. Criticize the show all you want, but don’t argue that Korrasami isn't relevant.