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Shows: Picard, The Legend of Korra, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power
Lut and I have been meaning to watch "The Legend of Korra" pretty much since it came out in 2012. We watched "Avatar: the Last Airbender" back when Netflix had it the first time, and figured Korra would eventually come to Netflix.
This year, we got the free 30-day subscription offered by CBS All Access, and we watched "Picard" on it. "Picard" was the least Star-Trek-like Star Trek I have yet seen, but my exposure to Star Trek in the last 25 years has been pretty limited. As a smol child, I saw all of the original series, but I was so young that I have forgotten most of it. I watched a season or two of Next Gen when it came out, and a smattering of DS9 during its original run. I've seen, I don't know, 8 of the movies? Lut and I gave up on the movie remakes after the second one.
"Picard" had some good qualities -- I really enjoyed Elnor and found how the show handled "the Way of Absolute Candor" to be interesting and surprisingly nuanced. There are a lot of ways to weaponize candor and the choice to emphasize candor as a way of making oneself vulnerable was interesting.
But there was so much grimdark and I have enough grimdark in the real work, thanks, I know life sucks, I've watched the news.
~
After we finished "Picard", we started watching Korra. CBS All-Access had the seasons 1 & 2, and when we finished those, we got seasons 3 & 4 from Netflix's DVD.com. I do not know how the licensing managed to get split up like that, but here we are.
"The Legend of Korra" is excellent. There were so many things I enjoyed about it.
The diversity of ages and cultures in the cast. The main "Team Avatar" characters are in their teens/early 20s for most of the show, but there are important supporting cast members ranging in age from small children to parents to grandparents. You get to see some the cast from Avatar -- both in flashbacks as adults in their prime, and in the present day as very old and still a force to be reckoned with. But they never overshadow the younger cast. I particularly liked that, as a whole, adults in the story were allowed to be present and important figures in the lives of Korra and her friends, even as the focus remained on the choices and actions of the main characters. The cultural diversity is good too -- you get a strong sense of Earth/Fire/Air/Water nations as having their own history and traditions, and of Republic City being a new place that has ties to all of the nations.
The villains are nuanced. In each season, the central villain has a goal the viewer can sympathize with: "Equality between benders and non-benders." "Harmony between humans and spirits." "Ending the tyranny of hereditary monarchs." The villains are unambiguously villainous and do a lot of terrible things, pursuing what looks like a sympathetic goal to a horrific extreme. But you can see the appeal of their message. I found Kuvira, in the final season, particularly fascinating. She is the archetype of the revolutionary leader gone wrong, of what happens when a nation realizes its government has completely failed it and turns to a strongman to "fix" it. Of how easy it is to replace one kind of dictator with a different kind of dictator and think "this is progress".
I don't often see this kind of nuance in a TV show, much less in a kid's TV show, and I am impressed by the thoughtfulness of it, by the way it grapples with sympathetic ideals leading to wrong actions.
The treatment of romance and friendship. In the first season, especially, there is a tangled mess of romantic tension among the four Team Avatar characters. Bolin is attracted to Korra, Korra likes Bolin but is attracted to Mako, Mako starts dating Asami but he's also attracted to Korra.
And at the end of season four, all four of these characters are still friends. They have make-ups and break-ups and arguments, but no one ever, ever says "If we can't date, we can't be friends either." When Korra and Asami are vying for Mako's favor, neither one of them goes "I hate her because she want the same guy I do."
What I want to say is: this is an amazing instance of modeling healthy but imperfect relationships. The characters have complicated feelings and they struggle to decide what they want for themselves, and balancing their needs with the needs of others. They get jealous, and they take immature and foolish actions. But the arc of the story is towards maturity, friendship, and mutual support. It is SO GOOD.
Story progression. I loved "Avatar: The Last Airbender", and it certainly had a story arc and a lot of character development and progression over the course of its three seasons. But it also had a lot of episodic installments that didn't contribute much to the overall story. At the very end of the show, you get the return of many characters who only showed up in one or two episodes, and that does help to tie the whole thing together. But Korra has a much more solid narrative. I never felt like I was watching a "monster of the week" episode, and rarely got to the end of an episode thinking "well, nothing changed during that." This is one of the major advantages, from my perspective, that modern shows have over older shows. When I was growing up, almost all shows were modeled on the principle of "your audience will miss episodes, re-runs will be shown out of order, and there is no market for a show outside of first-run and re-runs." So every episode was self-contained and had to reset at the end. Maybe, if you were lucky, the creators could add or remove characters in between seasons. In the late 90s, shows started to break that mold, but I really think this was fueled by technology. Until video recordings were easy, affordable, and widely accessible -- until it became not only possible but inexpensive and painless to watch the entirety of a show's first three seasons after you decided to give it a try when it was starting its fourth -- making a show that relied on continuity was a huge risk.
One final note: I have heard a lot of people herald Korra for having a bisexual protagonist, and honestly: I wish they wouldn't. I get that the creators probably wanted Korra to have a romance with Asami and that the parallels between the ending of Korra and the ending of Avatar are intended to suggest that Korra and Asami will be a couple in the future. But over the course of the entire four seasons of the show, there are zero on-screen same-sex pairings framed as romantic. There's evidence that Korra feels a particular kinship with Asami, but they don't get anything that looks like a standard romance trope: no kissing, no dates, no long lingering looks, nothing. Korra is a great show and I loved it, and I am aggravated that I was led to expect it to be queer-positive when it is deafeningly silent on that topic instead.
~
Another show I finished watching in May is "She-Ra and the Princesses of Power", Netflix's remake of the 80s cartoon.
As a teen in the 80s, I watched both He-Man and She-Ra when they first aired. I have certain nostalgic fondness for them. She-Ra was originally created by J. Michael Stracynzki, the same man who would later write/produce/direct Babylon V, and it had a lot of good material in it. It didn't surprise me that She-Ra got a remake first, because there was a lot more about She-Ra that was innately interesting: she had a more varied power set, a more interesting villain, a more compelling backstory, and higher stakes as the key figure in a rebellion against a tyrant. It also incorporated both sf and fantasy elements.
The She-Ra remake kept all of that, and also much of the cast from the original show, including "Netossa" and "Spinnerella", two of the most gimmicky names and toys from the original. It also made many other changes to the backstory. Most importantly, the remake had a five-season long story arc, with changes and progression in the characters' lives over the course of the run.
There is a lot of appealing diversity in She-Ra: you get human characters of all different races, and you get adult characters that are important and influential without detracting from the youthful protagonists. There's not as much cultural diversity as in Korra -- I didn't get nearly as strong a sense of history and culture from the different kingdoms in She-Ra.
I didn't enjoy the pacing in She-Ra as much as with Korra; I felt like there was a lot of filler in first two and a half seasons especially, and a lot of episodes where nothing that happened made much of a difference. I watched the first three seasons slowly, but I think I finished each before the next one came out. The fourth season, however, I quit after five episodes. I came back to it after season five had been out for a while, and then finished the entire series over the course of a couple of weeks.
I found the sympathetic antagonists in She-Ra both engaging and frustrating. She-Ra framed almost all of its villains as people the audience would want to root for: they're funny and snarky and they form friendships and bonds and you want these characters to see the error of their ways and then do better.
And then, for most of four seasons, they do not. None of them. And they are instead doing terrible things: the bad guys almost blow up the planet in season one, and one of the bad guys nearly destroys reality -- ON PURPOSE, in a deliberate "I would literally rather destroy everyone and everything than risk losing" move -- in season three. I find it very unpleasant to have these characters doing OUTRIGHT EVIL at the same time that they are framed as "just people in need of love and understanding." Folks, they also need to freaking take responsibility for their actions and CUT IT OUT.
I do not love the lovable villain trope, is the thing.
Season four is also about infighting among the protagonists, which, surprise, I also do not love.
The main thing that kept me going through the show was how engaging the cast was (both antagonists and protagonists), the healthy portrayal of friendship, and the queer-positive nature of the show. She-Ra not only ends with the titular character in a sapphic relationship, but has supporting characters in queer relationships. One of the main characters has two dads. Netossa and Spinnerella are married. There's a canon enby character. There's an annual ball where it is 100% normal to invite a same-gender romantic date, or a friend of a different gender, or vice-versa. You get to watch characters work through friendship jealousy -- not "I want you all to myself as my romantic partner" but "You are my best friend and I feel threatened when I see you getting close to someone else." And that's a real thing that happens but it's so rarely addressed in media, and it was refreshing to see it.
I enjoyed season five a lot more than first four seasons. Season five featured a new and completely unsympathetic villain (which the show had been building towards slowly throughout) and gave all the sympathetic antagonists a chance to redeem themselves.
Overall, I'd recommend She-Ra, if not as enthusiastically as Korra. I'm sad about this, because She-Ra is so delightfully queer. But while it has a lot to recommend it, it just doesn't have the same depth as Korra.
This year, we got the free 30-day subscription offered by CBS All Access, and we watched "Picard" on it. "Picard" was the least Star-Trek-like Star Trek I have yet seen, but my exposure to Star Trek in the last 25 years has been pretty limited. As a smol child, I saw all of the original series, but I was so young that I have forgotten most of it. I watched a season or two of Next Gen when it came out, and a smattering of DS9 during its original run. I've seen, I don't know, 8 of the movies? Lut and I gave up on the movie remakes after the second one.
"Picard" had some good qualities -- I really enjoyed Elnor and found how the show handled "the Way of Absolute Candor" to be interesting and surprisingly nuanced. There are a lot of ways to weaponize candor and the choice to emphasize candor as a way of making oneself vulnerable was interesting.
But there was so much grimdark and I have enough grimdark in the real work, thanks, I know life sucks, I've watched the news.
~
After we finished "Picard", we started watching Korra. CBS All-Access had the seasons 1 & 2, and when we finished those, we got seasons 3 & 4 from Netflix's DVD.com. I do not know how the licensing managed to get split up like that, but here we are.
"The Legend of Korra" is excellent. There were so many things I enjoyed about it.
The diversity of ages and cultures in the cast. The main "Team Avatar" characters are in their teens/early 20s for most of the show, but there are important supporting cast members ranging in age from small children to parents to grandparents. You get to see some the cast from Avatar -- both in flashbacks as adults in their prime, and in the present day as very old and still a force to be reckoned with. But they never overshadow the younger cast. I particularly liked that, as a whole, adults in the story were allowed to be present and important figures in the lives of Korra and her friends, even as the focus remained on the choices and actions of the main characters. The cultural diversity is good too -- you get a strong sense of Earth/Fire/Air/Water nations as having their own history and traditions, and of Republic City being a new place that has ties to all of the nations.
The villains are nuanced. In each season, the central villain has a goal the viewer can sympathize with: "Equality between benders and non-benders." "Harmony between humans and spirits." "Ending the tyranny of hereditary monarchs." The villains are unambiguously villainous and do a lot of terrible things, pursuing what looks like a sympathetic goal to a horrific extreme. But you can see the appeal of their message. I found Kuvira, in the final season, particularly fascinating. She is the archetype of the revolutionary leader gone wrong, of what happens when a nation realizes its government has completely failed it and turns to a strongman to "fix" it. Of how easy it is to replace one kind of dictator with a different kind of dictator and think "this is progress".
I don't often see this kind of nuance in a TV show, much less in a kid's TV show, and I am impressed by the thoughtfulness of it, by the way it grapples with sympathetic ideals leading to wrong actions.
The treatment of romance and friendship. In the first season, especially, there is a tangled mess of romantic tension among the four Team Avatar characters. Bolin is attracted to Korra, Korra likes Bolin but is attracted to Mako, Mako starts dating Asami but he's also attracted to Korra.
And at the end of season four, all four of these characters are still friends. They have make-ups and break-ups and arguments, but no one ever, ever says "If we can't date, we can't be friends either." When Korra and Asami are vying for Mako's favor, neither one of them goes "I hate her because she want the same guy I do."
What I want to say is: this is an amazing instance of modeling healthy but imperfect relationships. The characters have complicated feelings and they struggle to decide what they want for themselves, and balancing their needs with the needs of others. They get jealous, and they take immature and foolish actions. But the arc of the story is towards maturity, friendship, and mutual support. It is SO GOOD.
Story progression. I loved "Avatar: The Last Airbender", and it certainly had a story arc and a lot of character development and progression over the course of its three seasons. But it also had a lot of episodic installments that didn't contribute much to the overall story. At the very end of the show, you get the return of many characters who only showed up in one or two episodes, and that does help to tie the whole thing together. But Korra has a much more solid narrative. I never felt like I was watching a "monster of the week" episode, and rarely got to the end of an episode thinking "well, nothing changed during that." This is one of the major advantages, from my perspective, that modern shows have over older shows. When I was growing up, almost all shows were modeled on the principle of "your audience will miss episodes, re-runs will be shown out of order, and there is no market for a show outside of first-run and re-runs." So every episode was self-contained and had to reset at the end. Maybe, if you were lucky, the creators could add or remove characters in between seasons. In the late 90s, shows started to break that mold, but I really think this was fueled by technology. Until video recordings were easy, affordable, and widely accessible -- until it became not only possible but inexpensive and painless to watch the entirety of a show's first three seasons after you decided to give it a try when it was starting its fourth -- making a show that relied on continuity was a huge risk.
One final note: I have heard a lot of people herald Korra for having a bisexual protagonist, and honestly: I wish they wouldn't. I get that the creators probably wanted Korra to have a romance with Asami and that the parallels between the ending of Korra and the ending of Avatar are intended to suggest that Korra and Asami will be a couple in the future. But over the course of the entire four seasons of the show, there are zero on-screen same-sex pairings framed as romantic. There's evidence that Korra feels a particular kinship with Asami, but they don't get anything that looks like a standard romance trope: no kissing, no dates, no long lingering looks, nothing. Korra is a great show and I loved it, and I am aggravated that I was led to expect it to be queer-positive when it is deafeningly silent on that topic instead.
~
Another show I finished watching in May is "She-Ra and the Princesses of Power", Netflix's remake of the 80s cartoon.
As a teen in the 80s, I watched both He-Man and She-Ra when they first aired. I have certain nostalgic fondness for them. She-Ra was originally created by J. Michael Stracynzki, the same man who would later write/produce/direct Babylon V, and it had a lot of good material in it. It didn't surprise me that She-Ra got a remake first, because there was a lot more about She-Ra that was innately interesting: she had a more varied power set, a more interesting villain, a more compelling backstory, and higher stakes as the key figure in a rebellion against a tyrant. It also incorporated both sf and fantasy elements.
The She-Ra remake kept all of that, and also much of the cast from the original show, including "Netossa" and "Spinnerella", two of the most gimmicky names and toys from the original. It also made many other changes to the backstory. Most importantly, the remake had a five-season long story arc, with changes and progression in the characters' lives over the course of the run.
There is a lot of appealing diversity in She-Ra: you get human characters of all different races, and you get adult characters that are important and influential without detracting from the youthful protagonists. There's not as much cultural diversity as in Korra -- I didn't get nearly as strong a sense of history and culture from the different kingdoms in She-Ra.
I didn't enjoy the pacing in She-Ra as much as with Korra; I felt like there was a lot of filler in first two and a half seasons especially, and a lot of episodes where nothing that happened made much of a difference. I watched the first three seasons slowly, but I think I finished each before the next one came out. The fourth season, however, I quit after five episodes. I came back to it after season five had been out for a while, and then finished the entire series over the course of a couple of weeks.
I found the sympathetic antagonists in She-Ra both engaging and frustrating. She-Ra framed almost all of its villains as people the audience would want to root for: they're funny and snarky and they form friendships and bonds and you want these characters to see the error of their ways and then do better.
And then, for most of four seasons, they do not. None of them. And they are instead doing terrible things: the bad guys almost blow up the planet in season one, and one of the bad guys nearly destroys reality -- ON PURPOSE, in a deliberate "I would literally rather destroy everyone and everything than risk losing" move -- in season three. I find it very unpleasant to have these characters doing OUTRIGHT EVIL at the same time that they are framed as "just people in need of love and understanding." Folks, they also need to freaking take responsibility for their actions and CUT IT OUT.
I do not love the lovable villain trope, is the thing.
Season four is also about infighting among the protagonists, which, surprise, I also do not love.
The main thing that kept me going through the show was how engaging the cast was (both antagonists and protagonists), the healthy portrayal of friendship, and the queer-positive nature of the show. She-Ra not only ends with the titular character in a sapphic relationship, but has supporting characters in queer relationships. One of the main characters has two dads. Netossa and Spinnerella are married. There's a canon enby character. There's an annual ball where it is 100% normal to invite a same-gender romantic date, or a friend of a different gender, or vice-versa. You get to watch characters work through friendship jealousy -- not "I want you all to myself as my romantic partner" but "You are my best friend and I feel threatened when I see you getting close to someone else." And that's a real thing that happens but it's so rarely addressed in media, and it was refreshing to see it.
I enjoyed season five a lot more than first four seasons. Season five featured a new and completely unsympathetic villain (which the show had been building towards slowly throughout) and gave all the sympathetic antagonists a chance to redeem themselves.
Overall, I'd recommend She-Ra, if not as enthusiastically as Korra. I'm sad about this, because She-Ra is so delightfully queer. But while it has a lot to recommend it, it just doesn't have the same depth as Korra.
no subject
Stars, whole long... LJ? DW? post about how it was, indeed, not queer-baiting, but it was canon Korrasami, because of all the parallels in the wedding during the same episode -- and how this was Hit You Over The Head without quite coming out and making parents scream about What Are You Doing On Network TV OMG.
Which is to say: yeah, it's been surpassed in sapphic content. What a difference six years makes!
no subject
Haven't seen Picard, I really enjoyed both Korra and She-Ra... but I'm biased towards Catra and I loved Melog when that character showed up. I can see Rowyn's point about the villains doing bad things and the show expecting unreasonable forgiveness, though.
no subject
And of course, my complaints are based on my own biases, too. Eg, Double Trouble was extremely well-done but I find watching traitor/infighting plots to be extremely unpleasant. That's a reflection on my tastes, not on the quality of the show.
no subject
If you want to hassle Lut, you should totally queue up Show By Rock next. ^.^