If you’re interested in hearing what I’m up to regularly, here’s your chance to sign up.

Posts Tagged ‘korra’

In San Diego, Cons are Conning

But up here in La Jolla, I’m sitting in a Peet’s Coffee after a hair-raising game of real life Frogger that involved me passing through a breach in a wire fence, crossing a freeway and a couple of six-lane roads in order to find a CVS and replace my long-suffering travel size can of shaving cream, which chose the worst possible moment to give up the ghost—that being halfway through a shave on the first day of Comic Con.  C’est la guerre.

After five years of living in Boston, Southern California feels increasingly weird to me.  The weather is perfect even at its most horrible, so, of course, you want to walk everywhere.  Right?  Only, good luck with that, unless of course you want to drive somewhere where you can walk.  In Somerville, errands are a great way to spend a Saturday: you walk to one square to go to the spice shop, to another square for groceries, a third square because they have a bookstore you haven’t visited in a while.  Not so, SoCal.

Then again, in late July, when Boston’s peaking in the high 90s with humidity, Los Angeles is mid-seventies, dry, and sunny.  And in February, when Boston temperature plummets down to wickedness, even if it never reaches true depths of Michigan evil—well, in Los Angeles it’s also mid-seventies, dry, and sunny.  So there’s that.

As for the con, well, I haven’t reached the floor yet, though I keep hearing joyful rumors—like that the Legend of Korra Season 2 will premier there on Friday, guys guys guys Season twooooooooooo at last it’s been so loooong.  I can give only smatterings of evidence.  In front of the Peet’s where I sit writing this, a man and two women all wearing black t-shirts and con badge necklaces are negotiating whose turn it is to drive their car.  The guy’s black t-shirt has written in red, “I (snake) COBRA” where the (snake) is the logo of COBRA, the heinously ineffectual terrorist organization from GI JOE, only with a little dimple at the top to warp is silhouette into a heart.

On our drive from the airport last night, we passed the Ghostbusters mobile, like from the movies.  A perfect reconstruction, just driving around the streets of San Diego, back brimming with movie-reconstructed props and plastic ghosts.  What do they do with that the rest of the year, my host asks.  I say, it’s probably like those 1930s trucks people drive occasionally around the waterfront in Boston—most of the year is a process of upkeep and repair, waiting for the weather to change.  And now, here, the emotional weather is right.

Legend of Korra First Impressions

So how do I feel about the sequel series to Avatar: The Last Airbender, one of the best American animated shows ever?

Korra and Tenzin

Yes, it’s that good.  And the first episode is free, so you don’t have an excuse not to watch it.

Highlights: Korra, the new avatar, is brilliant.  The series creators have maintained the moral center of the world, while updating it and deploying a whole new cast.  World design: amazing! (As always with this team.)  Sound: wonderful!  Fight choreography: stunning!

A more subtle take, for those of you familiar with the first show: This series narrows the gap between the protagonist and the adult world.  In the original Avatar series, the main characters were kids, and the gulf between them and the adult world was absolute.  The adults were immutable forces: Iroh has a powerful history, but it’s hard to imagine him as a boy, or how he felt about his father.  He doesn’t feel contingent, or unsettled, though he does have regrets.  Ozai, Bumi, Jeong Jeong, Pakku, etc. have all similarly found their place in the world.  Aang, Katara, and Sokka are trying to figure out what to do with the world they’ve inherited from this older generation.

At 17, Korra is (intentionally, I think) older than any of the main characters in A:TLA, and is as a result closer to the adult world from the beginning.  She’s become strong, but she still has to learn how to be a part of society.  Meanwhile Tenzin, her airbending trainer, and Lin, the chief of police in Republic City, are both in late middle age–Tenzin, despite being set up as the aged Kung Fu Master of the show, is younger by a decade than any of the members of the White Lotus sect in A:TLA.  The first episode shows Korra discovering Republic City and trying to figure out how to be a part of this weird new world–everything she tries in the city turns out wrong somehow.  Meanwhile, we see just enough of Tenzin to tell that he feels the same way: still striving after thirty years to build and uphold the world his father left him.  They’re both uncertain, imperfect characters in moments of transition, and they’re both trying to do their best by the world with which they feel they’ve been entrusted.  I get the sense that each of them will be growing a lot over the next two seasons, and that dynamic feels fresh and full of possibility.  The first show passes down a powerful inheritance; this new setup stands to build upon that inheritance.

Anyone who falls in love with the 1920s gangsterland vibe of the series, by the way, should check out (the considerably bloodier) Baccano!, as well as Samurai Champloo and Cowboy Bebop, which influenced A:TLA.