I have never seen a show so thoroughly wrap up all of its dangling plot threads in a season finale as Legend of Korra did in its past episode. Each time the finale approached a moment where I thought "Aha! Here's where they'll lay the groundwork for the next season," the episode thwarted my expectations and brought that storyline to a close. (I was sure, for instance, as Tarlokk slipped that electro-glove on, that Tarlokk was going to kill Amon and become the new villain of the show. And then of course he exploded.) After its last episode, Legend of Korra doesn't need to go on. It has wrapped up its story and could, more or less satisfactorily, end now. That it will go on anyways leaves me scratching my head wondering where it could possibly go next.
And after thinking about this exact topic for too long no doubt, here are my guesses!
One area in which Legend of Korra really let me down was in its conflict between benders and non-benders. I had some issues with this conflict from the start because in three long seasons of Avatar: The Last Airbender, I don't remember a single instance of non-bender oppression at the hands of benders. Probably the worst non-benders ever suffered in the original show was Sokka being made fun of for his boomerang. Not exactly the centuries-long history of oppression to spark a civil rights movement.
(I'm about to go off-topic here but whatever, it's my blog, I do what I want: I don't know how planned this was, if at all, but one intriguing layer of Avatar's world is the way that its women, even in a pre-industrial society, occupy the public sphere in ways that women in the real world didn't until very recently. It's not that sexism is entirely out of the picture in Avatar: Katara had to convince that one guy whose name you can't make me look up on Avatar.wiki.com to teach her waterbending. But still! The Kyoshi Warriors run around unsupervised. There have been just as many female Avatars as male ones. Azula holds the second highest military command post in the Fire Nation army (which she uses to fight a race war with, but hey, at least the charred citizens of the Earth and Water nations will die knowing that women are just as capable of mass murder as men!). Point is, if male oppression of women hinges in large part on men's sheer physical strength, maybe bending explains why women in Avatar so successfully achieve gender equality. It's hard to oppress someone who can light your face on fire.)
Nonexistent though non-bender oppression was in Avatar: The Last Airbender, I was willing to shrug off the lack of continuity in the interest of seeing what Legend of Korra would do with the material. And as Legend of Korra went on, it raised the intriguing possibility that maybe the Equalists had a point. Korra and Tarlokk's crew violently attack a group of Equalists. Even more memorably, Tarlokk's police force rounds up and arrests non-benders for peacefully protesting. The show seemed to be hinting that as the Avatar, Korra would have to find some middle ground between the legitimate complaints of the Equalist movement and her obviously pro-bending stance as the ultimate bender in the world. These themes, however, tapered off as the season went on, and the Equalist movement gradually just became a general-purpose group of bad guys for Korra & Co. to fight. I hope that in the coming season, the show spends more time grappling with the Equalist movement and with what its philosophy means for Korra.
Finally, and this is pure speculation, but Legend of Korra is now noticeably missing a villain (assuming Amon didn't parachute to safety like every single one of his men seemed to). Perhaps the show will move on without a main villain, perhaps an existent character like Hiroshi or that mustachioed Equalist will step in to fill the part, or perhaps someone new will enter the scene. I'm going to make a completely wild guess on what will happen based on the absence of an important part of Avatar's universe: we did not see the spirit world in season one of Korra at all. In the original series, there was a whole two-part episode about a spirit's attacks on a village that was chopping down the spirit's forest. If that was how the spirit world reacted to the destruction of a single forest, how are they taking the rapid industrialization of Korra's time? You don't get Republic City without chopping down a few trees, among other things. I don't know how all the creatures in the spirit world feel about the spreading modernization in the Four Nations, but I'm willing to bet that some of them are pretty pissed off about it. Whether that means Avatar will gets its first non-human antagonist in the next season of Korra remains to be seen, but it would certainly tie in well with what's been set up so far.
(I'm about to go off-topic here but whatever, it's my blog, I do what I want: I don't know how planned this was, if at all, but one intriguing layer of Avatar's world is the way that its women, even in a pre-industrial society, occupy the public sphere in ways that women in the real world didn't until very recently. It's not that sexism is entirely out of the picture in Avatar: Katara had to convince that one guy whose name you can't make me look up on Avatar.wiki.com to teach her waterbending. But still! The Kyoshi Warriors run around unsupervised. There have been just as many female Avatars as male ones. Azula holds the second highest military command post in the Fire Nation army (which she uses to fight a race war with, but hey, at least the charred citizens of the Earth and Water nations will die knowing that women are just as capable of mass murder as men!). Point is, if male oppression of women hinges in large part on men's sheer physical strength, maybe bending explains why women in Avatar so successfully achieve gender equality. It's hard to oppress someone who can light your face on fire.)
Nonexistent though non-bender oppression was in Avatar: The Last Airbender, I was willing to shrug off the lack of continuity in the interest of seeing what Legend of Korra would do with the material. And as Legend of Korra went on, it raised the intriguing possibility that maybe the Equalists had a point. Korra and Tarlokk's crew violently attack a group of Equalists. Even more memorably, Tarlokk's police force rounds up and arrests non-benders for peacefully protesting. The show seemed to be hinting that as the Avatar, Korra would have to find some middle ground between the legitimate complaints of the Equalist movement and her obviously pro-bending stance as the ultimate bender in the world. These themes, however, tapered off as the season went on, and the Equalist movement gradually just became a general-purpose group of bad guys for Korra & Co. to fight. I hope that in the coming season, the show spends more time grappling with the Equalist movement and with what its philosophy means for Korra.
Finally, and this is pure speculation, but Legend of Korra is now noticeably missing a villain (assuming Amon didn't parachute to safety like every single one of his men seemed to). Perhaps the show will move on without a main villain, perhaps an existent character like Hiroshi or that mustachioed Equalist will step in to fill the part, or perhaps someone new will enter the scene. I'm going to make a completely wild guess on what will happen based on the absence of an important part of Avatar's universe: we did not see the spirit world in season one of Korra at all. In the original series, there was a whole two-part episode about a spirit's attacks on a village that was chopping down the spirit's forest. If that was how the spirit world reacted to the destruction of a single forest, how are they taking the rapid industrialization of Korra's time? You don't get Republic City without chopping down a few trees, among other things. I don't know how all the creatures in the spirit world feel about the spreading modernization in the Four Nations, but I'm willing to bet that some of them are pretty pissed off about it. Whether that means Avatar will gets its first non-human antagonist in the next season of Korra remains to be seen, but it would certainly tie in well with what's been set up so far.
