coldWhat a lovely show, except for the way the canon relationships landed at the end, which yes I'm still bitter about. Actually, even more so after seeing them from two generations in the future, but I suppose we'll get to that later. Anyway I was feeling pretty pumped about continuing my Avatar rewatch, despite knowing I didn't like Korra as much as TLA, so naturally the next event in this sequence is me discovering that none of it is on Prime anymore. Not for free, anyway, so I don't know if I just didn't realize that when I saw it while flipping through Prime, or if something changed in the meantime.
Whatever! The full collection was pretty cheap on Amazon so it's back to DVDs for me. Figured it would be a couple months until it actually arrived, but apparently that only applies to items like hand sanitizer. I've now finished rewatching the first three seasons, and I just started on the fourth.
Toph just showed up, so between that twist and all the baby sky bison, the show has at least justified its existence. Kidding, of course there's a whole lot to love about it, but I'm already thinking it's gone on too long, and the way it's structured by one arc per season isn't helping. TLA felt so epic because everything was one cohesive vision, Aang's story from beginning to victory. Korra's got rotating Big Bads, and for the last one, they apparently couldn't come up with anything better than a gang of anarchists. Not expecting the next one to be much better, but maybe some of the subplots will make up for it.
See the thing is, Katara should have married Zuko, and now it's not even just because they made such a great match romantically. It would have been politically beneficial, and in a setting with monarchies, that should get taken into account! The Fire Nation needed to forge new alliances and reconnect with the rest of the world, and what better way to do that than to have a Fire Lady (Fire Queen? I dunno) from one of the cultures historically oppressed by them? Katara would have been brilliant in the role, both as a ruler in her own right and as Zuko's support system. It's not that I don't like Mai, but there are plenty of ways she could have had a happy ending without marrying her teenage crush.
FURTHERMORE. Aang's marriage to Katara created less than ideal circumstances for both of them, and their children. He needed to devote himself fully to rebuilding the Air Nation, and she had her own culture that she didn't want put aside and shouldn't have had to. I don't really know how genetics work in this show, but it seems likely that an airbender and a non-bender would have had a higher ratio of airbender offspring than an airbender and a waterbender. Tenzin's family should have been Aang's family - I used to think Aang/Toph was a great idea, but now it seems the best move would have been to introduce an Air-affiliated girl near the end of the series and leave it with the implication that she and Aang fall in love. Then they have a bunch of airbender children like Tenzin did in canon, and everything gets kicked off sooner and we don't need to have brand new airbenders appearing out of nowhere in the sequel show.
.....Just don't even get me started on the relationships in Frozen 2, 'kay?
