So When Did The Avatar Team Forget How To Do Fight Scenes? (mild spoilers for both shows)

[Budget_Player_Cadet]

(I’m going to spoil part of S4E6 here. It’s important, but I’m willing to bet most of you saw it coming a mile away.)

Okay, so anyone seriously content with the quality of the fight scenes from Korra, I welcome you to watch any of the significant fights from TLA. In particular, ones involving Firebenders. The cave fight from the end of season 2. Azula vs. Team Avatar in “The Chase”. Azula vs. Zuko in “The Phoenix King”. Virtually everything in “The Blue Spirit”. The fight at the end of “The Waterbending Master”. The list goes on and on. They’re visually interesting and functionally compelling. It feels like a real fight, involving the power of the elements, and even the ones that feel one-sided act like, yanno, real fights.

Now look at some of the fights in Korra. Even at its worst, I cannot name a fight scene in TLA that was quite as dull as Korra vs. Kuvira. That fight would have been dull even if it wasn’t the same as virtually every other fight in the show. It was obviously and stupidly one-sided. This at least made a little sense with Amon; Amon was supposed to be this unstoppable badass nobody understood, and they offered a reason for why they kept missing, his bloodbending. But even then it was horribly dull. Even with the justification that Korra’s not on her A-game, there’s no reason for her attacks to be so ineffectual. There’s a fundamental difference between “I can avoid your attacks” and “I can avoid your attacks by emulating Little Mac”.

In TLA, most powerful bender attacks were treated as though they were powerful. You either countered it with your own bending, you blocked it and it was gonna hurt, or you got out of the way, and not just by ducking and weaving. It made the fights feel real. It made them feel powerful and meaningful. It made it feel like the people involved were tapping into the elements themselves, rather than throwing glorified Hadokens.

And beyond that, there’s the aspect of balance. In TLA, there was very rarely a case where a fight was completely one-sided. Even the fights between enemies with an obvious skill gap - fights like Katara vs. Master Paku - there’s still an actual fight there. The only times you see fights go truly one-sided is when the point of the fight is to completely humiliate the victim, and this is used sparingly enough that it’s actually meaningful (for example, Toph vs. The Boulder - that’s not a fight scene, that’s a “this is how OP Toph is” scene). And more often than not, this is subverted - see also: Aang vs. Admiral Zhao in “The Firebending Master”.

In Korra, that’s almost every fight. There’s little drama - the winner is clear right from the start. Korra doesn’t land a single hit on Kuvera, and Kuvera spends the entire fight toying with her. That would make sense if Korra was some greenhorn bender with no experience, but she’s a fully-grown avatar who has been bending and training since she was a toddler. Somehow, this doesn’t add up to “anywhere near as good as Zuko, Katara, or Aang were in season 1”, let alone Toph in season 2. The fight becomes a farce; completely unbelievable even given the circumstances, and the way they do it treat Korra’s bending not as the mighty power of the elements, but rather like a person throwing rocks who happens to have a zippo lighter and a super soaker. It’s pathetic and disappointing, until she goes into the avatar state… Which lasts all of about 10 seconds before the plot kicks in. Yes, it makes sense to show some contrast there. It makes sense to build up Kuvera as a badass and show that she’s a talented, dangerous bender. But this does nothing of the sort. Kuvera is just your standard metalbender; it’s just that Korra sucks. It’s just really disappointing. These are the high points of tension in the show, and they’re just completely flubbing them almost every time by making the fight a foregone conclusion, and never throwing any curveballs. It’s awful. And it bugs the crap out of me.

[GargoyleWB]

Good post, I agree. TLA had wondeful fight ebb/flow like you’d see from a good Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee sequence. Skill levels, emotion, and situational effectiveness of techniques seemed consistent and convincing when building the fantasy world.

With the exception of the bending arena matches, the LoK fights seem very randomly applied. Shlub lackeys are one-touch death machines in some fights, and pesky fodder in others. Same with the A-list characters, I’ve never seen so many ‘masters’ flailing about ineffectively. LoK is still a wonderful show, but you’re correct in that there isn’t a single fight that I recall treated for anything other than an obligatory plot mechanic.

[Bone]

The only way to save that fight scene is to rely on the fact that Korra is not 100%. Otherwise, it’s stupid pathetic for her to use her abilities in that fashion.

She has firebending - but she doesn’t launch waves upon waves of fire, only single beams that are easily avoided.

She has airbending - apparently children can create tornadoes sufficient to keep mech suits at bay, but she can only put out paltry gusts that are easily avoided.

Korra can metal bend too - but no attempt at the metal on Kuvera’s uniform.

Aang could create a shield of air that was enough to defend against the fire lord. In Season 3 Korra used the same type of shield to defend against a bomb.

That was a frustrating episode.

[Budget_Player_Cadet]

@GargoyleWB

Good post, I agree. TLA had wondeful fight ebb/flow like you’d see from a good Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee sequence. Skill levels, emotion, and situational effectiveness of techniques seemed consistent and convincing when building the fantasy world.

With the exception of the bending arena matches, the LoK fights seem very randomly applied. Shlub lackeys are one-touch death machines in some fights, and pesky fodder in others. Same with the A-list characters, I’ve never seen so many ‘masters’ flailing about ineffectively. LoK is still a wonderful show, but you’re correct in that there isn’t a single fight that I recall treated for anything other than an obligatory plot mechanic.

I remember Korra vs. Varrock as being an at least decent fight. But yeah, we’re really struggling here aren’t we? In TLA, almost every fight was awesome. In fact, I’d be hard-pressed to name a bad one. Maybe a few that were only decent, but everything worked.

@Bone

The only way to save that fight scene is to rely on the fact that Korra is not 100%. Otherwise, it’s stupid pathetic for her to use her abilities in that fashion.

She has firebending - but she doesn’t launch waves upon waves of fire, only single beams that are easily avoided.

She has airbending - apparently children can create tornadoes sufficient to keep mech suits at bay, but she can only put out paltry gusts that are easily avoided.

Korra can metal bend too - but no attempt at the metal on Kuvera’s uniform.

Aang could create a shield of air that was enough to defend against the fire lord. In Season 3 Korra used the same type of shield to defend against a bomb.

That was a frustrating episode.

Yeah, that was just embarrassing. You can only excuse so much with “this person is not feeling well”. I mean, at least before there was still the “she was poisoned” excuse.

[AtomicDog]

I can accept it. Korra has lost every bit of self-confidence she ever had. Until she gets it back, she’s a dead duck.

[DSeid]

They way overplayed Korra being off her game (for whatever reason) … they made her completely pathetic as a fighter. And that particular fight scene was a function of hamhandedly demonstrating that.

OTOH many of the other fight scenes in Korra have been beautifully executed, as choreography, as animation, and as drama, at least as good as anything in TLA. Some much better.

[marshmallow]

Korra has good fight scenes with clever bending attacks. They just cut away from them too much or they’re not very long. Korra hasn’t done anything like when the Gaang broke into the Earth Palace where it’s basically two minutes of them demolishing all the incoming guards in the most entertaining ways possible.

Another factor is everything was fresh in the original series, now it’s all ho hum unless they introduce new techniques like metal bending cables, Amon’s bending removal, or the Red Lotus group.

For this season, Korra will have her umpteenth epiphany and come back better than ever, but oh no, Kuvira has some spirit vine magic BS to make her a match. I agree the Kuvira fight was weak sauce for how long it was. At least let Korra get some hits in and make her look competent. That way Kuvira would look a bit more intimidating, instead of it seeming like the only reason she won is because Korra is a shell of herself. But that’s another problem with the story. It took Aang three seasons to learn all the elements, and even in the final episode he didn’t have complete control of the Avatar state. Korra did that in S1, and then supposedly got in touch with her spiritual side in S2. Ever since then they have to invent reasons to gimp her and give her opponents crazy powers.

I hope Korra ends up winning the final battle by herself. She always needs help. That’s fine to an extent, but if Jinora comes and saves the day again it really should be renamed the Legend of Jinora.

Another thing with Kuvira is she’s not much of a villain to root against or fear. She hasn’t much of a connection to Korra. She doesn’t have much screen presence. Honestly, I kinda agree with her, just the writers keep giving her kitten kicking moments. I assume she’ll attack Republic city to absorb it back into the Earth Empire to make her look super evil and raise the stakes for the finale. She certainly doesn’t feel like a series finale villain yet. That would’ve been Vaatu.

One way to spin it would be to say Kuvira isn’t supposed to be particularly strong as an individual, just to highlight Korra’s personal problems. But I’m not sure if they did that very well either. Kuvira tried to press Korra’s button about the Avatar no longer being needed in the world, but I feel like that’s a dry well by this point. Korra has to know that’s obviously wrong. Does she need to go back to the swamp and have Toph slap her around or what?

I’m OK with Korra always having pedestrian air bending. It’s her weakest element due to her personality, as shown in S1.

Going back to the Kuvira fight, if one wanted to make it more interesting, what if she used some crazy metal bending? Like if she grabbed a ton of spears or brought a cart of metal implements and did some T-1000 shit with it. Then again, who knows, maybe Toph or her daughters will do that later.

I called bullshit when they said if they took out Kuvira the army would fold. She should be a hero to the Earth Kingdom people. They’ve been humiliated for decades. First at the hands of the Fire Nation, then the world takes territory from them to build Republic City, then some random anarchists kill their queen and everything descends into chaos while the rest of the world twiddles their thumbs before deciding to install a prince who wasn’t fit to lead a boy scout troupe. Finally, one of their own stands up and says enough is enough and restores order and dignity. So she’s authoritarian. Arguably she has to be, but nationalists eat that up all throughout history anyway, including into the modern “enlightened” era. She may as well be fem Putin, who enjoys widespread domestic support for restoring Russian pride and sticking it to the West.

[Budget_Player_Cadet]

@marshmallow

Another thing with Kuvira is she’s not much of a villain to root against or fear. She hasn’t much of a connection to Korra. She doesn’t have much screen presence. Honestly, I kinda agree with her, just the writers keep giving her kitten kicking moments.

Pretty much. From an objective standpoint, I can totally understand her wanting Zaofu, a city within the territory of the earth kingdom, to come back under earth kingdom rule. Especially when Zaofu is so clearly technologically advanced and wealthy. It’s kind of like the US going into a civil war, and then at the end of it Manhattan deciding “Yanno, we don’t need this central authority”. In fact, I’m entirely sympathetic to her goals - “you’re on earth kingdom territory; you will abide by earth kingdom law”. You know, basic rule of law shit. In any other circumstance, Sue would appear completely unreasonable.

But.

They literally turned Kuvera into Hitler.

I mean, what the fuck, right? After the relatively sensible and nuanced villains in season 3, the best they can come up with to ensure we root for the right guy is “the bad guy is Hitler”? It’s not enough for her to have some mild ideological blinkers, she has to also be Hitler? I mean, c’mon. We were already against her when she refused to offer help to people in need unless they signed her contract. That was even before it was heavily implied that she was the one making life impossible for them in the first place. That was well before there was any talk of slavery or reeducation camps.

The bad guy does not have to be Hitler. In fact, the bad guy should not be Hitler. The moment we start talking about “reeducation camps” for political opponents, the villain has stopped being a relatable (huh, there’s a weird word for Firefox not to know) human being we can sort of identify with and started being a caricature.

This sort of worked with The Fire Nation in TLA - Sozen and Azula were clearly twisted, fucked-up human beings with little to no redeeming value, but much of what we saw was through the eyes of Zuko and Iro, who were both deep, relatable characters, and the idea of a nation’s policy being evil is far more understandable than a person being evil. Especially when that nation has been twisted by propaganda for the last 100-odd years.

But Kuvera? Her established motivation is “I want to rebuild the earth kingdom”. The only significant “pushing moments” are when Sue tells her “no”. You want to tell me that’s going to turn her into a cross between Hitler, Stalin, and The Dai Li? It would be one thing if this was the first thing we knew of her. Azula kinda worked - it’s clear that she was, from start to finish, a complete psychopath, and we didn’t really need to question that. But here, the show tries to explain to us how a valiant, intelligent, and overall good person turned into Hitler by showing us her being shot down by her superior. I’m sorry, am I supposed to buy that?

I called bullshit when they said if they took out Kuvira the army would fold. She should be a hero to the Earth Kingdom people. They’ve been humiliated for decades. First at the hands of the Fire Nation, then the world takes territory from them to build Republic City, then some random anarchists kill their queen and everything descends into chaos while the rest of the world twiddles their thumbs before deciding to install a prince who wasn’t fit to lead a boy scout troupe. Finally, one of their own stands up and says enough is enough and restores order and dignity. So she’s authoritarian. Arguably she has to be, but nationalists eat that up all throughout history anyway, including into the modern “enlightened” era. She may as well be fem Putin, who enjoys widespread domestic support for restoring Russian pride and sticking it to the West.

This is the saddest part. If Kuvera was merely morally questionable, rather than “cloaked in the skin of aborted infant puppies”, there could be some interesting things going on. You could reasonably say “Well, I disagree with her, but the people who don’t have a few good points”. You can’t do that when she’s that evil.

[Banquet_Bear]

@Budget_Player_Cadet

(I’m going to spoil part of S4E6 here. It’s important, but I’m willing to bet most of you saw it coming a mile away.)

Okay, so anyone seriously content with the quality of the fight scenes from Korra, I welcome you to watch any of the significant fights from TLA. In particular, ones involving Firebenders. The cave fight from the end of season 2. Azula vs. Team Avatar in “The Chase”. Azula vs. Zuko in “The Phoenix King”. Virtually everything in “The Blue Spirit”. The fight at the end of “The Waterbending Master”. The list goes on and on. They’re visually interesting and functionally compelling. It feels like a real fight, involving the power of the elements, and even the ones that feel one-sided act like, yanno, real fights.

Now look at some of the fights in Korra. Even at its worst, I cannot name a fight scene in TLA that was quite as dull as Korra vs. Kuvira. That fight would have been dull even if it wasn’t the same as virtually every other fight in the show. It was obviously and stupidly one-sided. This at least made a little sense with Amon; Amon was supposed to be this unstoppable badass nobody understood, and they offered a reason for why they kept missing, his bloodbending. But even then it was horribly dull. Even with the justification that Korra’s not on her A-game, there’s no reason for her attacks to be so ineffectual. There’s a fundamental difference between “I can avoid your attacks” and “I can avoid your attacks by emulating Little Mac”.

In TLA, most powerful bender attacks were treated as though they were powerful. You either countered it with your own bending, you blocked it and it was gonna hurt, or you got out of the way, and not just by ducking and weaving. It made the fights feel real. It made them feel powerful and meaningful. It made it feel like the people involved were tapping into the elements themselves, rather than throwing glorified Hadokens.

And beyond that, there’s the aspect of balance. In TLA, there was very rarely a case where a fight was completely one-sided. Even the fights between enemies with an obvious skill gap - fights like Katara vs. Master Paku - there’s still an actual fight there. The only times you see fights go truly one-sided is when the point of the fight is to completely humiliate the victim, and this is used sparingly enough that it’s actually meaningful (for example, Toph vs. The Boulder - that’s not a fight scene, that’s a “this is how OP Toph is” scene). And more often than not, this is subverted - see also: Aang vs. Admiral Zhao in “The Firebending Master”.

In Korra, that’s almost every fight. There’s little drama - the winner is clear right from the start. Korra doesn’t land a single hit on Kuvera, and Kuvera spends the entire fight toying with her. That would make sense if Korra was some greenhorn bender with no experience, but she’s a fully-grown avatar who has been bending and training since she was a toddler. Somehow, this doesn’t add up to “anywhere near as good as Zuko, Katara, or Aang were in season 1”, let alone Toph in season 2. The fight becomes a farce; completely unbelievable even given the circumstances, and the way they do it treat Korra’s bending not as the mighty power of the elements, but rather like a person throwing rocks who happens to have a zippo lighter and a super soaker. It’s pathetic and disappointing, until she goes into the avatar state… Which lasts all of about 10 seconds before the plot kicks in. Yes, it makes sense to show some contrast there. It makes sense to build up Kuvera as a badass and show that she’s a talented, dangerous bender. But this does nothing of the sort. Kuvera is just your standard metalbender; it’s just that Korra sucks. It’s just really disappointing. These are the high points of tension in the show, and they’re just completely flubbing them almost every time by making the fight a foregone conclusion, and never throwing any curveballs. It’s awful. And it bugs the crap out of me.

…I read this before I had a chance to catch up on the series, and now I’ve seen the whole thing I have to say you completely missed the point.

Korra wasn’t just off her A-game. She wasn’t just a bit under the weather. She was suffering post traumatic stress disorder. She deliberately isolated herself from society for three years. But that isolation wasn’t enough: and instead of heading back to Republic City she just took off and left everything and everyone she loved behind. Korra looses the cage fight against the airbender. She gets beaten by the thieves at the wharf. She gets her ass whipped by Toph. Korra wasn’t weighed down by the metal that was in her system. She was weighed down by the demons that affect many people that walk away from war zones, traumatising incidents or destructive relationships.

So Korra never had a hope in hell of winning that fight. And she probably would have lost to any other really experienced fighter. Korra was not fighting instinctively. She took an extra split second before making a move: practically telegraphing what she was going to do next to Kuvera. It was brilliantly written and the choreography of the fight showed this perfectly. Nothing was flubbed here: you can’t overcome something like post traumatic stress by having someone else literally pulling the weight off your shoulders (Toph pulling out the rest of the metal) and by trying really really hard.