When people told me that Season 2 of Korra was the worst season of the series (and maybe the nadir of the franchise, since there is no movie in Ba Sing Se), I expected it to be -bad-. And so I was surprised when it wasn’t. In fact, it’s pretty freaking good! Mostly. For maybe 2/3s of its run. And for Korra, not so much for...everyone else. And yet, at its high points it is Avatar at its best and most beautiful and most imaginative. It’s a mess, but a glorious mess, and so I kind of love it - then again I love glorious, fun messes - The White Album might be my favorite Beatles album, and New Adventures in Hi Fi is definitely my favorite REM album, for instance.

First, the good. Korra continues to be an amazing, dynamic, fun heroine. She’s impulsive, and bro-y, and has maybe a third of the emotional intelligence at 17 as Aang had at 12 and she’s great. They did a good job of making an Avatar that was a bit of an antiheroine and who wasn’t a crappy person (in a very different way from what FC Yee did more recently with Kyoshi - Kyoshi is a shy, pensive girl whose two modes are adorkable and terrifying - Korra is a jock and a bro and only the kids show content restrictions are keeping her from crushing beer cans on her forehead and doing bong hits with Bolin. Kyoshi's use of violence is cold blooded and strategic, while Korra's is impulsive, stemming from her lack of introspection and forethought and also out of...homegirl just likes fighting). I didn’t mind the love triangles of Season 1 nearly as much as most fans, and the 'nice' thing about their reprise in season 2 is that Korra’s mostly not around for that, so it doesn’t take away from her arc. And it’s one hell of an arc - Korra discovering what it means to be Avatar and what it means to be herself, and how those aren’t necessarily the same thing. In a way this is a continuation of how Amon played on her deepest fears in Season 1, but here the creators actually have the guts to take everything away from her and force her to find a sense of herself beyond ‘being the Avatar’. This is where Korra’s jockiness is really key to her character - like a lot of elite athletes, Korra conflates her talents, what she can do, with who she is, and losing them is a loss of her sense of self. Finding herself at the end is really powerful. Visually, everything in this journey into the spirit world is the show at its most gorgeous - especially the art style in Beginnings, but the final episodes are also just gorgeous in a way that this utterly beautiful franchise hasn’t been before. The last fight - Kaiju Miyazaki is probably the only way I can describe it - is insane and gorgeous.

I must confess I am indifferent to many fan complaints about the main plot. I don’t think Korra acts in a way that is particularly dumb - her main mistake is going into the spirit world with Jinora, and offering any support to Unalaq at all, but this is explainable by the information she has. And, moreover, Aang made mistakes too. I think some fan complaints are not because Korra makes mistakes but because she suffers irreversible consequences from them. As to ideas that LoK is changing the origin of bending or whatever with ‘Beginnings’ I don’t really care. I love the introduction of Raava since it helps explain why all the Avatars is good people - we’ve had ineffectual Avatars (Kuruk), we’ve had badass antiheroines who get shit done and you know, kill people (Kyoshi), we’ve had hotheaded jerks with hearts of gold (Korra) but all of them have been good, at a deep and fundamental level. Knowing that they contain the spirit of all that is harmonious and just within them makes a lot of sense.