TV Retrospective - Legend of Korra Book 2 Chapters 7-8 - Beginnings (parts 1 and 2)

Part 3 – Saga of the First Avatar

We’ve got to Avatar Wan’s part of the story

Oh by the way, I've started to call these TV retrospectives, as I'll be doing a lot of these, they deserve a separate segment to mini-film reviews

Chapters 7-8 Beginnings

I still say 10,000 years isn’t long enough for a thousand lifetimes, especially when some lived for hundreds of years (Kyoshi) although it is clever they named him Wan, meaning 10,000

But, minor detail aside. Studio Mir back in the animation seat, and experimenting with an entirely new style for this origin story for the Avatar. Apologies this is a tad late, but I’ve been re-watching the latest Korra ep, and boy will I enjoy talking about it next week.

But, to the actual plot of the episode. Avatar Wan’s origin is a comedic tragedy. A guy down on his luck tries to seize an opportunity and fails, in failure he is banished from his village and forced to live in the wilds, with often unfriendly spirits. And just when it seems like he’s made it good, he is tricked into freeing the spirit of darkness, who later goes on to kill his friends (yeah, they seem to hate the word kill in these shows, so how about annihilate, that’s a much nicer word) He succeeds in helping the spirit of light defeat him, and promises to restore balance to the world, and ultimately dies, knowing that he failed to do so.

Yeah, there some comedic points to it, but it’s almost entirely a tragedy, and not a story you’d expect from a Nickelodeon show. But it adds to the fantastic lore of the Avatar universe, and fits in, with only one minor gripe, which I’ll address later. And better yet, with just a few words from fire-bender nurse, bison-raiser lady, they’ve given Korra an objective that’s unlikely to change in 2 minutes flat.

One of the best written episodes of Korra to date, they really develop Wan as a character, and show pretty quickly that characteristics that would inevitably define the purpose of the Avatar. While you can argue it was a mistake him closing the portals, it’s difficult to argue his reasoning, especially given how spirits and humans interacted then (as in rarely, but aggressively)

As I said before, Studio Mir is back in the animation seat, and the artwork of these episodes is gorgeous. The animation is fluid (although there are some awkwardly still background characters in the first part) but the actual frames could be considered works of art. And the style worked surprisingly well in the spirit water scenes.

The only hole a lot of people have pointed out is the Omashu tale. Where it says the two lovers (Oma and Shu) learned Earthbending from the badger-moles and became the first Earthbenders. I argue they mean Earthbending masters. Wan was not a fire-bending master till he learned from the dragon (may or not be spirit)

This is a turning point in the series, a lot of episodes prior to this are sub-par to Korra standards, but these episodes begin to put Korra back on track, of course there are still hurdles to come, but I’ll be saving that for another review.

Rating: 9.5/10

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Images used in this review are from The Legend of Korra and belong to their respective owners. All images in this review are subject to fair use.