Avatar is back.

[21:42:28] <opaltiger> it's okay this just gives Lin the opportunity to be badass in new and exciting ways

also I don't think voices are quite that heritable

FUCKING LIN oh my god. and jinora is just my favourite ever. i just want to platonically kiss her all over the face. ;__;

on a lighter note, i loved the touch with korra being unable to drive/park the car properly lmao. and the fire nation chairperson!! screams. her husband. her. wweh. and tenzin's SUCH a badass that his beard twitches when there's danger.

also boring mako problems. i haven't liked mako the entire time and i still don't urgh. u_u he's so irritating. but i looove asami, she's so cool!!! ugh i am just not prepared for this finale!!!!

I mean, considering they only had twelve episodes to work with, I think it was pretty great! I'm bothered by the lack of solid explanation as to why Yakone could bloodbend without the full moon in the first bloomin' place, but you know. the finale was intriguing and surprising and I genuinely enjoyed myself watching it, which is really the important part of it for me.

I don't think I'm really bothered by all the complaints that ~wah Korra doesn't do anything really cool compared to Aang~. well, duh. it's a different time and a different situation, and most of Aang's awesome adventures were supplemented by the fact that a) he needed to learn to bend the other three elements and b) there was a frickin' hundred-year war still going on. the equalists are pretty durn shifty and dangerous but it's just. not the same thing. Korra lives in a world that's pretty different than the one we were introduced to in AtLA, so I guess I expected it to have a less 'epic adventure' feel. especially since it's set mostly in one location whereas the original series had a LOT of travelling involved for plot reasons.

I guess I would have liked seeing Republic City being fleshed out more, although that sounds weird. like it would have been a three-dimensional setting, where we could map it out and everything had its place and it felt really real and awesome *w*

anyway. I don't even like Makorra like, at all, but idk -- Mako was slightly less irritating in the finale? to me, at least. he did some cool stuff that didn't involve pining after Korra, so that was nice. I enjoyed the Amon reveal too; I didn't see it coming but it actually made sense! mostly. I think we could have had a little more foreshadowing, but hey, it wasn't completely ridiculous!

I'm still disappointed and frustrated with the avoidance of taking on the actual issues at hand. It's just oh, here are people who think everyone should be equal, but they're also evil so you don't have to consider whether they have a point. And their leader is a bender, too, so that obviously invalidates everything he said about equality, right?

Amon's real motives were not really explored. As it is it's just, "He got obsessed with power and decided being able to take other people's bending away was the greatest power, so he magically and inexplicably picked up the skill and then went to take over the world." His identity also wasn't set up properly - we didn't know that Tarrlok had a brother or that bloodbending could simulate spiritbending, so the reveal came out of nowhere. And why would he make sure to wear that makeup under his mask? Just in case somebody managed to get close to him and take off the mask? Why did he bother with the mask in the first place? Wasn't just his family being killed by a firebender sympathetic enough?

I liked Tarrlok's decision to actively commit suicide and take his brother down with him, doubly so because that's a pretty gutsy thing to put in a kids' show these days. It was probably my favorite moment of the finale.

(I still wanted Amon to be Mako and Bolin's dad SOMEHOW. Like, he thought they were dead and they thought he was dead, so that they were both talking about the same firebender and it wasn't just some massive coincidence that both of them had a murderous firebender in their backstory. But oh well.)

The Makorra just felt pretty tacked on. I'm perfectly down with the pairing in theory, but it could only have worked if developed differently. As it was, the viable storytelling options would have been a) the Casablanca ending, where telling Mako to go away and get over her is a character development moment for Korra and he goes back to Asami, or b) Mako dying, allowing Korra and Asami to bond without him getting in the way. Having them get together just meant Asami got royally screwed over, Mako was a dick, and Korra learned she can get whatever she wants by being passive-aggressive. (Of course, if you flipped the genders on this whole storyline, it would be a pretty typical action movie romantic B-plot, really... which says something about typical action movie romantic B-plots.)

I really wanted it to be significant that Korra can't airbend or communicate with the spirit world. I wanted her to need to do something like Aang with the chakras - grow up, get over Mako - to unlock her airbending abilities and be able to do spirit stuff. As it was, there was a disappointing lack of character development for Korra; she was set up as a flawed character who needed to develop to realize her full potential, but in the end losing her connection to the other elements just freed up bandwidth for the air and spirit parts, and ta-da, she could get all her bending back and be the avatar and give all the other benders their bending back too (conveniently undoing everything Amon did). She didn't learn anything because she didn't need to. I don't even know what the second series is going to do with her. At least if she went on something of a spiritual journey before Aang gave her her bending back it would have been more following up on how she was set up as a character, but since he just gave it back to her the moment she was moping about it, she just kind of got everything for free.

It would have been cool to see Korra come to terms with not being able to bend the elements she actually liked anymore, but it also seemed like an unconventional thing to do so I wasn't really expecting them to do that and it didn't come as a surprise when she ended up getting it back. Lin getting her bending back, meanwhile, is cool and all, but it would have been even cooler if she'd gone on being a badass normal, showing that what Amon did wasn't crippling. That would be the real way to win against him, wouldn't it? Show that for all he's obsessed with power, rendering other people unable to bend doesn't make them powerless?