There are a lot of reasons to really
love Legend of Korra. Compared to the anime it takes so much of its
inspiration from, its fight sequences are really nicely handled, with
a balletic wuxia film style that few Japanese anime have ever even
attempted to match. Its avoidance of moé character tropes in favour
of a female lead who is strong, muscular, independent and beautiful,
with a female supporting cast who are all treated as human beings
rather than doll-like objects of male fantasy, is also a refreshing
change after a lot of time spent in the otaku hell of most anime of
the past 10-15 (20?) years. Legend of Korra, like Avatar: The Last
Airbender before it, is also refreshing compared to a lot of American
TV for its basis in non-European culture and ethnicity.
And yet is it really?
There are a lot of visual signifiers of
Asian culture, and the show obviously has a lot of fun with them in
its pagoda skyscrapers and junk battleships, but in those things what
we're really seeing is the familiar trappings of Western (in this
case American) civilisation done up in the exotic embroidery of the
Orient. Where it comes across most strikingly, however, is in the
characters themselves. Yes, Korra, Mako, Bolin etc. appear Asian, but
they speak and behave just like contemporary American teenagers.
The world of Legend of Korra also
adheres to a very American sense of history's march. There are
monarchies and empires, but the show expects us to understand that a
presidential republican democracy in the American model is the only
natural and just progression. Other models of governance exist to be
taught that they are wrong.
Even the problems with democracy
reflect the common straw-man complaints Americans have of the system
in that it is sometimes subject to the capricious whims of the crowd
– in essence that democracy is too responsive to the wishes of its
people, a bit like going into a job interview and saying, “My main
fault is that I sometimes work too hard.”
Now I'm being a bit unfair here, I
know. That the show even deals with the issues of governance and
flaws in democracy at all is a sign of its thoughtfulness, and it's
ridiculous to expect a kids' show to suddenly turn into The Thick of
It or Veep, but it's worth recognising just how limited a range of
views it expects from its viewers. At heart, Legend of Korra isn't
really doing much more than reflecting back at its audience the core
values their own society professes.
Of course given my earlier comments on
Legend of Korra's representation of women, in a way I'm praising it
out of one corner of my mouth and criticising its broadly American
political ideology out of the other, despite both being reflections
of the same thing: the show's adherence to Western, broadly liberal values. Look at international gender equality rankings and China's
lingering ideological remnants of Communist equality mean that it
tends to do OK (but not brilliantly), while patriarchal capitalist
oligarchies like Korea and Japan prop up the bottom of the table
alongside places like Qatar and Kuwait. Would we really want a kids'
show that accurately reflected the gender inequality that's rife in
so much of Asia?
I think there are two points here.
Firstly, that such social constructs needn't be a barrier to creating
strong, believable characters. Characters can live in a very
conservative society and by good writing that shows them as rounded
human beings in their interactions with those rules, we can still
sympathise with them and root for them. The problem is when we simply
assume a set of values in our viewers and lazily broadcast those
values back at them.
Inherent in this is the misconceived
idea that in making narrative art, it should always be “relatable”.
Why should we as the audience expect to be able to relate everything
back to our own lives? The human capacity for empathy and imagination
is an incredibly powerful tool that allows us to step into the shoes
of people with quite different lives to us and understand them and
their struggles. This is also an idea at the core of the fantasy
genre, which exists to do precisely that. Legend of Korra is a fantasy
drama and by cleaving so closely to behaviour, language and values
familiar to American teens, it fails to credit its audience with the
imagination to empathise with anything more than an Orientalised
version of themselves.
Once again, Legend of Korra is in the
fantasy genre. It doesn't need to painstakingly recreate the Asian
cultures that it draws its aesthetic influence from any more than it
should be simply recycling contemporary American culture. It has a
free rein to pick and mix from all over the place or just simply
invent stuff of its own out of the ether. Fantasy can employ satire
to reflect back elements of its reader's own culture, but it is never
a straight reflection: rather it is a funfair hall-of-mirrors
distortion that in its very absurdity shows up the foibles and
pretensions of its target.
Yeah, I get it, there are commercial
reasons why anything more complex than what it already is would have
difficulty getting made, and audiences are trained these days to
expect their TV sets to behave like little more than a mirror. Sure.
You're right. But on a literary level, what Legend of Korra does is
still limited and fails to fulfil the fantasy genre's remit of taking
its audience to a truly different place, denying us the joy of
exploring a new world with its own rules by simply transplanting our
own.
It's still an enjoyable show, and well
worth watching. Similarly, Japanese anime is often every bit as
ideological in its own, often rather more unpleasant and disturbing
way. Just read this as a plaintive, selfish cry from a fan and an
admirer for a greater degree of anthropological rigour in my animated
TV fantasy drama.
