#paladins of grey morality and poor(?) choice making | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

danguy96 · 7 years

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i agree with that voltron statement like volton the characters grow alot while in kora they grow but not well and what i mean is in voltron it shows them slowly learning and being better paladins, while in kora it was ya shes trying but failing to learn air except for at the end when she suddenly becomes a master of it right after achieving bending because it was a dire situation, also it starts out here she is as kid a master of everything while ang never started as a master he had to learn

I can see what you’re trying to say (I apologize, but the grammar here isn’t the best, and I had some trouble making it out, and I understand if it’s because English isn’t your first language), and yeah, that is one of the many, many problems I have with The Legend of Korra, at least when comparing it to what we currently have with Voltron. I know I’m probably going to rephrase or reiterate a lot of stuff that’s been said before, including what’s been said by this guy I occasionally check up on at DeviantART here and here (they’re actually good summaries of what I think of LoK), but I still think they contain some bit of truth as to why I think Voltron is a better successor to Avatar than LoK was.

In fact, I think I can separate the reasons as to why Voltron works where LoK didn’t into four main categories (yes, there’s several reasons, but I feel like these are the main four which are the most important to me): 1. The Main Character (or Main Characters, in Voltron’s case), 2. The Villains/Antagonists, 3. The Characters and Their Relationships, and 4. The Story Itself

Firstly, as you said, I get what they were going for with Korra when they made her a bending prodigy who needed to learn that was more to being Avatar than just being the chosen one, rather than learning how to control all four elements but it just isn’t pulled off very well, at least to me, anyway. I get that she’s supposed to be a flawed character, but her development felt rushed and sloppily handled most of the time to me, some of her arcs either go on for too long or just end up going nowhere and being abandoned (Dark Avatar Korra, anyone?), she becomes more than a bit too grating and arrogant at times, and she kind of keeps learning the same lessons over and over again. Not to mention, it feels like we spend less and less time on her own personal character with each passing season, and instead focus more on either what new, big central threat we get (which takes away the personal time we get with the characters, which was made Avatar so great) or which character Korra is gonna end up banging in the end (I’ll get to that part later, and why it felt detrimental to the show, including the end result).

With the Paladins, we have to see them grow and develop as a team, and learn the clear goal of mastering how to control Voltron during the series, much like how Aang learned how to control the four elements throughout Avatar. And each of them have their own straightforward goals and characters, which do develop as the show goes, and will hopefully continue to develop as the show goes on.

Secondly, although it’s pretty early in Voltron’s case, so we still have to wait until other villains and characters appear, the villains in Voltron so far feel a bit better than we mostly got in The Legend of Korra. The villains in LoK try to present a more grey morality approach with the ongoing archetype of “person with good intentions that went too far”, but they get weaker and more predictable after Amon, and they fail at grey morality by having the villains end up acting so obviously evil near the end to the point of it being ridiculous. Some people may think that revealing that he was a bloodbender may have spoiled Amon, but at least he was intimidating, charismatic, and the fact that we didn’t see his face most of the time added to his intimidation level. Same could be said with Ozai, because even though he was mostly power-hungry and selfish, he was still intimidating enough to leave an impact, and Azula was charismatic and manipulative to make up for that as well. With antagonists like Unalaq, he was just a bad Ozai wannabe who claimed that he wanted to bring balance between the spirits, yet he was going to merge with what was the Avatar equivalent of the freakin’ devil, and that he would become the “Dark Avatar”, so any grey morality is thrown out the window. Vaatu kind of gets a pass since he’s basically evil incarnate, so I’d expect just that. Zaheer may have been better, but I still think there was room for improvement, and I would’ve liked more personal time with him and his companions, so that we could better understand him and his motives. Finally, with Kuvira, it seems that they were running low on ideas for villains, so they used a minor character from season 3 and turned her into a villain without showing us how she came to that point or why she wanted to conquer the world other than power and “order”, but even then the latter may have just been a lie she told in order to gain support. And like many have said before, she feels like combination of Ozai and Azula, the way she ended up basically being rule 63, metalbender Hitler is just silly (the concentration camps for non-native Benders didn’t mesh well with was established about her earlier, I feel that she borders on being a boring, invincible, villain sue, and, in my personal opinion, she’s kind of a poor choice to have as your final villain when comparing what we previously had. In fact, I think that Vaatu should’ve been the final villain, due to him being end-all, be-all evil of their universe.

With Voltron, we have more of a straightforward set of bad guys with Emperor Zarkon and the Galra Empire, but like Ozai and the Fire Nation, they work because we have a clear singular enemy which the heroes will face throughout the series. And like the Fire Nation, since we have a single main threat to deal with over the course of an entire series (instead of having to deal with one new main threat per season, squeezed in over the course of 12 to 13 episodes), it allows for a bit more time for personal character interaction and development, which actually is rather good place to segue into my next point.

The third thing I would like talk about is the characters and their relationships. Avatar is very well-known for it’s excellent character development, and the relationships built between the characters, both platonic and romantic. LoK, to me at least, felt rather lacking in that department. While they started off well in that department (and, to it’s credit, they did carry on with it for some characters, since I liked most of Tenzin’s interactions with his family), a lot the character subplots and interactions kind of felt rushed at times (you can see that there’s theme with things being rushed), and some characters were even pushed aside or forgotten about. For example, while I don’t he’s as bad as people say, and that could’ve been more well-received if his character was written better, Mako sort of almost became a non-entity by the end of the series, and while I didn’t mind it at first, I look back and think that it would’ve been better if they just went and redeemed his character by writing him better, and not just shoving him to the side (in fact, I heard they were originally going to kill him off in Book 4, but they figured that would to some unfortunate implications for Korrasami, and I don’t know about some people, but even I think that’s just plain bad writing, no matter how poorly handled Mako was). And poor Bolin, even after getting some spotlight in Books 3 and 4, I think he’s been forgotten about for the most part. And that’s not getting into the side characters, which I think there eventually became too many of, and there were just not enough episodes per season to flesh them out, so they just ended up disappearing aside from the occasional cameo, or showing up for the final season (General Iroh II, Hobo Man, Mr. Sato, Eska & Desna, Spirit Iroh, Kya, Ginger, Zaheer, Kai, etc.). Finally, I believe many of us can agree that one of the most annoying parts of LoK was that stupid love triangle/square/dodecahedron/whatever, which plagued the series until the vey end (and possibly even after that, depending on who you ask), and also reduced all the characters involved into merely being love interests for one another, by both the staff and the fandom.

Speaking of reducing characters and their personalities into being nothing but being an item by the staff and the fandom (and I hope you don’t think I’m going off on a tangent a little), another thing which I felt was detrimental to the rest of the characters was making Korrasami canon. Now, I have nothing against the rational people who ship Korrasami, but I personally feel it’s done harm than good for the show. Ever since it became canon, the Korrasami fandom became a haven of obnoxiousness and toxic-ness, only surpassed by the Steven Universe fandom and, ironically, extremist Voltron yaoi shippers. As seen here and here, not only did the Korrasami fandom harass and cyberbully people who didn’t like or ship Korrasami (with two internet memes, “Feudal Lord and Handmaiden” and “Poppin’ Bottles”, being the direct result of harassing people), but the show to the fandom (and, to some extent, the show’s staff and creators) became less and less about the adventures of the new Team Avatar and the ongoing fight between good and evil, and more about constantly yammering on about a single same-sex pairing and how “look how gay Korra and Asami are!!” (seriously, tell me the last piece of fan content you remember which doesn’t bring up Korrasmi or imply it), obnoxiously bragging about said pairing to every single person, and eventually forgetting and shoving aside almost everything about the show that’s not Korrasami. And if you didn’t like it, the fandom would just say that you’re homophobe/”lesbophobe” (never mind that that’s erasing bisexuality) for not shipping it or not liking the way things turned out, and even one of the staff (I believe it was Bryan) more or less said that if you didn’t think their relationship was really that developed, you were just a homophobe and “looking through a ‘hetero-lens’”. All the show seems to be now is just a singular pairing, with so many characters stories tossed aside in the name of leaving some sort of legacy behind and being “progressive”, and to me, it just all ends up feeling hollow. Also, on a unrelated note, I think short hair doesn’t suit Korra at all.

Going back at last to Voltron, the cast of characters is (as of this writing) much smaller, allowing for more focus on individual characters and their relationships in a way similar to that of the original Avatar, and with the more straightforward plotline (that’s another theme going on with Voltron being more “straightforward”), they can spend as much time developing the characters as they can focus on the main threat. Also, as far as canon goes (and in spite of the previously mentioned extremist shippers and the Social Justice Warriors), there’s hardly any romance in the show, aside from the occasional ship tease and any moment of Lance flirting. And, in all honesty, I’m kind of with @celticpyro that there probably shouldn’t any too major canon pairings, because not only do I think that Voltron just isn’t the type of show to do anything too romantic (don’t get me wrong, shipping can be fun, and I do have a few Voltron pairings myself, but I don’t think Voltron’s the type of show for anything too major, unless it’s done well), I also think that, again, while shipping can be fun, it can also easily corrupt a fandom, and making certain ships canon can unleash a whole new can of worms. Basically, I want Voltron’s legacy to be based around a great show about a battle between the forces of good and evil, and not solely based on a same-sex pairing made solely to please the fans.

But the biggest and most important area which I consider Voltron to have done better is this: the story itself and how it was planned out. You see, while Voltron is clearly being planned out ahead with certain twists and an ending in mind, LoK was basically written by the seat of Bryke and company’s collective pants, mostly because they originally planned and wanted it to be a mini-series, but Nickelodeon ordered at the last minute for it to be a full series. And honestly, I think it would’ve been better as a mini-series. But as is, it’s more than a little apparent that a lot of behind the scenes difficulties went on (hell, they had to create clipshow just to save on the budget near the end). I can handle having a storyline that’s not overarching across the seasons, but with the amount of stuff that was going on in each season, I think that most of the series would’ve benefitted from at least having more episodes per season (18 to 20 at the most), that way they could spend more time on the rest of the characters’ story arcs, as well as the main threat. Also, they seemed to have sort of a case of “tell, don’t show” with stuff like the time skips explaining things at the beginning of each new season.

With Voltron, even though the storyline is more straightforward and overarching, it works in a similar way the original Avatar’s overarching story did; they had an end goal in mind, but the journey to that end was filled with twists and turns, and the characters felt fully developed for the most part by the end. I just didn’t get that feeling of being satisfied that I did with Avatar as I did with Korra.

And I know that there are those saying I’m being unfair, and that I should judge LoK on it’s own merits and not compare or contrast it with AtLA so much. My response to that is that I hold LoK, AtLA, and Voltron: LD on the same level of standards I set for nearly every piece of media I partake in, no matter what it is, and comparisons to both AtLA and Voltron: LD are most likely going to happen, since LoK is literally a sequel to the former (and keeps reminding us about that with nearly every other episode), and the latter at least has a couple of people who’ve worked on both AtLA and LoK. To put it more clearly, I judge LoK both on it’s own merits as well as on it’s merits as being a sequel to Avatar, and the merits of both, I think it’s a show that ranges from above average at best to slightly irritating at worst, and while I sadly think it got screwed over by the powers that be, I also felt it was too overhyped, especially the ending, and I just don’t see myself coming to it as much as I do with Avatar and probably will with Voltron.

And I am aware that there may be some people out there who may rudely tell me that I’m apparently an unwashed idiot who “doesn’t get” LoK and what it tried to do, and tell that I’m a moron if I don’t agree with them and think it’s some sort of revolutionary series which “broke boundaries”. And to those people (and no, in case anyone is wondering for this case or the previous case, I’m not vague-posting about anyone), I say, congratulations, you’ve missed the point of a little something called “subjectivity”, and you automatically assume that I’m one of those people who mindlessly bash the show, when I’m just saying that it’s not my own personal cup of tea, and that I don’t think it’s as great as other people think it is.

Now, that is to say that didn’t want The Legend of Korra to be a complete clone of Avatar, and that I get what they going for in many instances, but I just personally don’t think they pulled it off that well, and calling me stupid or insinuating that I am stupid and saying that I “can’t see it” isn’t going to change my mind.

TL;DR: I personally don’t really think The Legend of Korra is that great of a series either on it’s own merits or on the merits of it being a sequel to Avatar, as well feel that it was overhyped, and I much more enjoy Voltron: Legendary Defender to LoK, as well as feel that Voltron better captures some of the spirit of Avatar. That’s just my personal opinion, and you disagree with me on some or even most of it, but just don’t tell me or insinuate that I’m idiot who doesn’t “get it” because I dislike something you like.

I really didn’t mean for this to become an essay. I apologize for that.

#Anonymous

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