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The Legend of Korra: Book 4

Wasn't expecting a discussion on color theory. I'm glad I stepped in this thread though as I didn't notice that Kuvira had Korra's face and was wondering what that was all about.
 
Opal and Jinora did save Korra though. It looked like Kuvira was about to kill her. She bent her armor into some sharp objects that she was about to use on Korra.
 
Granted that it was a vision of Korra's own face, but I wonder if there could be something more to it than just a hallucination. We thought (or at least I thought) that the bedraggled Avatar-state Korra vision was emblematic of the poison inside Korra, but that's gone now. Now, it could be a representation of her fears, but spiritual apparitions in the Avatarverse tend to be more than just hallucinations. So what if some fragment of her did break off and possess or influence Kuvira somehow? Think about how much less aggressive Korra is now. She's quicker to want to talk and reason things out, which is good in principle, but what if it's more than just personal growth? When she is called upon to fight, she doesn't have the edge she had before. Even with the poison gone, she's still weaker. Could we be dealing with a "The Enemy Within" situation? Korra's lost her "dark side" and is weaker without it, like Captain Kirk was? And maybe that more aggressive side, the "You gotta deal with it" side, the side that wanted to save the world by punching things, has somehow latched onto Kuvira and combined with her own military sensibilities, driving her to try to save the Earth Kingdom by force.
 
Yes, but we've only seen it within the past few weeks or months of story time. Kuvira's been on the warpath for three years, ever since shortly after Zaheer's defeat and Korra's injuries. So if Korra lost a piece of herself as a result of her poisoning/trauma, it could be that it latched onto Kuvira and started her on her path to conquest.
 
I don't like the idea of Kuvira being under the influence of anything. What she's doing had legitimate motives. She didn't need any influence beyond wanting to rebuild her nation. Her only problem is that she's gone too far. Things like fear and insecurity are good enough culprits.
 
I think it's fairly implicit that Korra's issues are internal, not external--at least now the last of the poison is out of her system. The idea that Kuvira has anything to do with her loosing her mojo would *MASSIVELY* cheapen her character arc.

Small aside,; I suspect this was the story they'd originally intended to tell in Book 2. Not sure if I'm reading it right, but I get the feeling her suddenly connecting with her spiritual side and undoing what Amon did to her was an 11th hour addition. Assuming the initial intent was to end the first season with her totally de-powered, then this arc would be what comes next. No wonder the whole series has felt unbalanced since Korra's whole character arc seems to have been scrambled. One assumes Nick is to blame for this.
 
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That was clearly Korra seeing her own face on Kuvira ie more internal problems. I thought that was a disappointing way to end the fight. I'm tired of them gimping Korra left and right just to continue the drama/story/tension. They've been doing it ever since the start of S3. I want to see her in a fair fight.

Great episode but I was pretty disappointed "The Battle of Zaofu" wasn't actually a battle but a one on one duel. I wanted to see a major army battle like we haven't seen on this show before, like when the kids attacked the Earth King's palace in the original series or the Day of Black Sun.

You can't handle all this Meelo!!! :lol:
 
I've been having trouble watching Nickelodian on my computer, so the episode was kind of jumpy and I missed the last couple minutes. But what saw of this one was really good.
I loved Bolin and Varrik.
I'm pretty sure Korra seeing her own face on Kuvira was just a sign of the psychological and/or spiritual issue Korra is having, and had nothing to do with Kuvira herself. I'm very curious to see what exactly it is going to take for Korra to get back to her old self. I just hope they keep her with the rest of the cast and don't send her off by herself again.
 
Yeah, the stuff with Hiroshi Sato was a nice character bit but I wonder where it's leading? And we haven't seen Mako for awhile now.

Personally I don't see how anybody could, at this stage, support Kuvira. She may have started with noble intentions but now she's just one step above Chin (Qin?) the Conqueror back in Kyoshi's day. Aside from what it says about that she'll use humanitarian aid as a bargaining chip to get people to swear personal loyalty to her, aside from deciding to launch a military coup and declare herself Empress, there was no legitimate reason to attack Zao Fu. It was stable, it was prosperous, and it hadn't taken any moves against her "Empire."

I would love it if Korra could redeem her and appeal to her earlier nobility - I think that's why she hallucinated Kuvira as herself, she can see the similarities between them and her subconscious didn't want her to kill Kuvira - but it needs to be clear what she's doing is wrong.

I wonder if Air Nomad "interference" in her duel with Korra - even if to keep her from being killed - is going to spark Kuvira to make a point of going after any Air Nomad activity within the Earth Kingdom's borders? Aren't 2 of the Temples in EK territory?
 
Aren't Republic City and the United Republic itself made up of former Earth Kingdom territory that was conquered and colonized by the Fire Nation during the war? Now that she's taken Zaofu, I'm expecting Kuvira to go after Republic City next.
 
I just realized we're almost halfway through the series and we have barely seen some of my favorite characters like Tenzin, Kya, Bumi... Mako and Asami disappeared...
 
Personally I don't see how anybody could, at this stage, support Kuvira. She may have started with noble intentions but now she's just one step above Chin (Qin?) the Conqueror back in Kyoshi's day.

I've felt all along that Kuvira was an analog for Mao Zedong in his early revolutionary days in the 1920s and '30s. Mao started out as an idealist seeking to liberate and rebuild his country after decades of corrupt, rapacious governance and Japanese invasion/occupation, but he became increasingly totalitarian later in life and ended up horrifically betraying the ideals he'd written about in his youth. Kuvira shows a lot of the same qualities, the idealism and nationalism being taken too far and applied in too authoritarian a manner. And what she said in the latest episode about wanting to forcibly redistribute Zaofu's wealth among the people makes the analogy all the stronger.
 
Personally I don't see how anybody could, at this stage, support Kuvira. She may have started with noble intentions but now she's just one step above Chin (Qin?) the Conqueror back in Kyoshi's day.

That is exactly how I felt during the duel. I just wanted Korra to go all Avatar-state and kill the bitch.

I feel like Korra still has a lot of Avatar training to do. Kyoshi was able to harness the elements and create her own frickin' island! We saw Roku battle a volcano. Korra's bending mainly seems used for combat.
 
However, that does make me wonder...could different spirits join with humans to give them superpowers?
Possibly, if they had the energy from the harmonic convergence to permanently fuse them. With some spirits though, you could run into the problem of the human host's body being warped into whatever the spirit looks like. Maybe that didn't happen with Raava because she was more ethereal than the "animal" spirits.
A few more thoughts...

We know that element bending can be granted through energybending and we know that people used to bend the energy within themselves. So, could people learn energybending and grant themselves element bending? We don't know but that's a possibility. Maybe people can learn to bend all four elements but what makes the avatar special isn't the ability to bend all four elements, but to do so at the same time. If people did learn all the elements, they'd probably only be able to switch between them and bend them one at a time, and they wouldn't have an avatar state. Maybe whatever allows bending only has one "setting" and can't be set to multiple elements at once. To solve this, they'd need to be fused with a spirit (or the right spirit at least).

And on a side note, I suspect that Varrick's airbender detector did work but didn't work on Korra because she's not an airbender. She's a waterbender who just happens to have the other three elements thanks to Raava.
 
Personally I don't see how anybody could, at this stage, support Kuvira. She may have started with noble intentions but now she's just one step above Chin (Qin?) the Conqueror back in Kyoshi's day.

That is exactly how I felt during the duel. I just wanted Korra to go all Avatar-state and kill the bitch.

I feel like Korra still has a lot of Avatar training to do. Kyoshi was able to harness the elements and create her own frickin' island! We saw Roku battle a volcano. Korra's bending mainly seems used for combat.
When Kuvira spouted her rhetoric about saving the Earth Kingdom before dueling with Korra, I wanted so badly for Korra to shout, "You're not a savior! You're a hypocrite and a tyrant! You're a disruption to balance!"
 
Could we see a return of Vaatu?

Saw these on tumblr. The spirit vines were created by Vaatu in season 2.
tumblr_nec0xsvuZ21rxm4zlo1_r1_400.gif


Vaatu's spirit attacks look like this.
tumblr_neejopddAS1rss05ao2_500.gif


Varrick's spirit vine weapon looks like this.
tumblr_neejopddAS1rss05ao1_500.gif



They look the same and have the same sound effect when fired. Could Kuvira become the next host for Vaatu?!
 
^Vaatu was scattered and should require 10,000 years to reform. Although I suppose it's conceivable that the spirit-vine weapon is tapping into his scattered power somehow.
 
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