“…world-shattering disaster…”
A nuke. It’s totally a nuke.
So, the creators are taking one of the actually good and interesting pieces of world-building I actually liked, the technology, and just said, “Nope, gone!” and dropped a bomb on everything as a near reset for a back-to-basics approach.
As much as I’m looking forward to this, knowing how their last venture into this world ended up makes me a little cautious. I liked LoK season one up until near the end, pretty much disliked season two save for the Avatar Wan episodes, sort of liked of season three, started watching season four and then just gave up after the first episode. I went from sort of enjoying it to mostly just watching out of obligation to see if it would get better, but, for me, it never really did. Most of the characters were just not that very interesting or underdeveloped, the title character really rubbed me the wrong way, the quality of the writing and plotting is very inconsistent, it just didn’t grip me as much as the original series and they cannot write romance to save their life. I realize that it’s not completely the creators fault and that Nickelodeon did a lot of meddling, but even a good creator can roll with the punches and still make something good out of it. LoK was fine but it did not live up to the expectations set by the original series. It felt like they wanted to re-create the magic they had with ATLA (Similar character archetypes, romance, fan-service, etc.) on a superficial level, but kind of missed the point of why those things worked in the original show to begin with.
Also, while I like Korrasami as a concept, it’s very apparent that it wasn’t originally planned and if they had done more building and setting up from the get-go, I would’ve liked it a whole lot more, but it just kind of comes out of nowhere.
The one thing I will give praise to is the animation. Studio Mir really stepped and put 110% into everything that they did on that show. All of the fights are easily an upgrade and improvement in every way over the original series, and the more detailed and fluid animation really does allow for a lot of really cool, dynamic choreography. Also has some of the most creative uses of bending in either of the shows (metal bending rules and is frickin’ cool!). I would probably not enjoy the show nearly as much if it weren’t for them, and it’s a trend I hope continues into the next series.
Despite how this post reads, I’m still excited and rooting for this to succeed. I’m just tempering my expectations a bit this time around if the worst should happen.
