Assorted Miscellaneous, et cetera.

[silveradept]

• Saw the Book Three Korra premiere. Found it underwhelming, considering the past two seasons. Except where Asami and Korra found out the other was not as concerned about Mako. And where we got to see Fire Lord Zuko's most excellent ride, and where he and the twins commiserated a bit about past attempts to kill the Avatar.
  
  Otherwise, though, I couldn't really accept that both Tenzin and Korra are so phenomenally bad at trying to recruit. For one thing, Tenzin seems unable to figure out that he has the ability to remake the Air Nomad culture into whatever he wants it to be, and to use that to his advantage. Korra, while never particularly good at PR, would never take the same approach Tenzin did after seeing how poorly it worked. Or because it was Tenzin's approach. So the characterization seemed off. And even more so with what Korra does for the Earth Queen. Korra had been down this road before - more specifically, last season and to some degree, the season before that with how Amon positioned himself in relation to benders. At this point, she should be immediately suspicious of these kinds of favors or fetch quests. I'm hoping we get some interplay between Team Avatar and Team Villain Benders where it's not one-dimensional evil.


• jenett has a great icon that reads "Virgo Hufflepuff - Details Managed", and that makes me wonder what sort of phrasings would be used for each of the main HP houses and the primary Western zodiacal sun signs. I don't know enough about the actual sun signs to even hazard a guess, but I would also expect that it's been done somewhere and my searching skills aren't quite up to par enough to find it.


• I'm still continuing the series of deconstructing (or at least trying) the Dragonriders of Pern at The Slacktiverse. I'm just about finished with Dragonflight, which will mean new opportunities to jump in at the beginning of a book when we move on to Dragonquest. There's a lot more wrong going on there than I noticed when I was younger.


• I got to see Catching Fire on a second run tonight. I can't say that I'm wild about the decisions on what content to exclude from the adaptation, because it took away a lot of the development and uncertainty that the novel presented, making it more of a "wha?" when it turned out that Plutarch was with the rebellion. Although I personally always saw Plutarch as a tall black man, so yeah. They also cut out the watching of footage portion, probably so as to not have to hire in more actors, but that part also means neither Katniss nor Peeta got to see the previous Quarter Quell, where they find out that sober Haymitch is freaking scary. The adaptation decision seems to have been that the audience would know no more than Katniss is supposed to, if that. It made the movie much more straightforward than the book was. I'm not sure what they will do with Mockingjay, since it's the most straightforward of the three.


• Oh, so close! Still, I suppose it's progress to have required extra time against Belgium. Next time, Gadget, next time.

Comments

[syntaxofthings]

So, I love Avatar and only saw the first few eps of season 1 of Korra. Should I watch more of it? Or should I keep wasting my time elsewhere?

[silveradept]

Korra suffers mostly from inconsistent writing. When focused on the Equalist storyline, the first season is good. When it wobbles into Unnecessary Love Triangle, it suffers.

Season Two, when it focuses on family, and in the latter half, is outstanding. But the first half is marred with things like Unnecessary Love Triangle and the comedic side story with Bolin.

Season Three, so far, is alternating between Plot that makes no sense yet and a story of family and rebuilding what was lost, which is the infinitely better plot.

So I guess it depends on your tolerance for stretches of mediocre writing in between stretches of really good writing.

[syntaxofthings]

This really helps! The Unnecessary Love Triangle was what turned me off from it to begin with. I would love to watch the focus on family and rebuilding what was lost, but hmm, not sure about my tolerance at the moment. Thank you!

[silveradept]

You're welcome.

[lilacstarprint.livejournal.com]

I've not had much liking for Korra at all. The only reason I bothered with the previous two seasons was because of Tenzin and family.

I did like the interaction between Zuko and the twins. It was just nice to finally see him again. I wonder where he got the dragon from though.

Seeing Bolin and Mako meet their family was good as well.

Korra's main problem is that she never actually learns anything. There's no real character development at all. Every season has her starting off at square one - again.

Last season, Lin's brain cells fell off the chart. This season has sucked out Tenzin's brain. He already learned last season that he didn't need to be Aang or do things as Aang did them. It amazes me that Tenzin would actually think people would just happily give up their lives. He literally looked a man's family in the face and told them to "understand" that their husband/father needed to go away to learn of his new culture and powers. Tenzin nearly flipped over Jinora's "disappearance". And now he wants to break up a family? This is just.... It's not Tenzin.

And Kai..... Ooohh boy. You know a show's on its last legs when the "street smart scam artist orphan child" shows up.

I know Nickelodeon asked the production team to use new villains each season. But that didn't have to mean that all characters got reset buttons along with it.

[silveradept]

Yeah, the characters got bent out of shape for the sake of the jokes, which is not a good way to write anything. And the juxtaposition of good family versus trying to break up families is harsher, now that you've pointed it out.

We could say Tenzin wasn't himself because of the prospect of new airbenders, but it's a poor excuse. Seems like much of the writing team changed and has to re-learn the characters.