(no subject)
Jul. 27th, 2023 10:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kradeelavi'm cleaning up my inspo image/animation hoard and fondly reminiscing about early s1 korra fandom ...
... and how batshit insane it was lol.
first, an opinion that might have me executed on some corners of the internet (including here lol): I actually prefer korra (the series) to avatar overall.
i saw both around the same time, (maybe avatar slightly later?). i get why avatar's considered a peerless classic. compared to the kiddie animation going on at the time, it was like a bolt of lightning - that was, i think, during the dark ages where anime was still rare and passed around as shitty bootleg tapes. i cannot reiterate how limited seeing cool international art was back then. if you weren't connected with the right people in college city campuses, you might see like ... one, truly good anime, or show totally by accident, maybe even just a trailer and shit would live in your head until you saw a 240p rip version on youtube over dialup across 6 parts. it totally inspired the current crop of animation/art directors leading stuff these days.
so korra was always going to have that nolstagia bias to overcome. you know homestuck's reputation of being a hot mess of a fandom, or genshin impact for the younger folks? pre-mid S1 korra was a uniquely ... unhealthy ... hype juggernaut of 'avatar is absolute perfection and we 100% expect that same perfection', plus the specific weird sort of proto-social justice tumblr where everyone had not yet gotten jaded with the shadow side of how badly it could go. (like say, the whole site hyping up a creative kickstarter promising the epitome of tasteful but cool diversity and then the whole thing imploding into a massive 50k dollar scam and/or badly handled campaign). imagine like, every single opinionated quasi-fandom-harasser-type laser focused on expecting this as like the absolute pinnacle of tumblr taste united, absolute diamond of everything ever that everyone creative and hot-shit had been working towards. both the elder folks were expecting that (with a side of avatar elite smugness), and the younger folks (with a side of tumblr poisoned very specific way of doing stories right). you criticize anything, you got blasted to the shadow realm. you liked anything that was deemed problematic about it, you got blasted to a different shadow realm.
it went roughly about how you'd expect.
what's even funnier is i saw s1 korra fandom from a distance and decided okay, no way in fuck am i touching that hot mess with a ten foot pole. there was a whole set of shipping drama with the one slimy sports bender guy. then another about a badly handled love triangle with the lead. i'm not doing it justice as it basically sent tumblr into a meltdown every week. time passed. things exploded more with the finale of everyone feeling let down. s2 of korra was just ...bad ... really bad, animation wise (they outsourced to a different animation studio for that one season and it shows), story wise, etc, so i think all the rabid (toxic) avatar fans dumped it at that time, and moved on elsewhere. (which was actually rare, man, it was not often that people moved on in less than a year. these were the days where one or two fandoms stayed in the cultural eye of the storm for 5-10 years. superwholock, anyone?)
what's funny is that makani was drawing a bunch of joke doodles early s3, and that's when i started to pick it up for the lulz.
s3 was amazing.
you had lin beifong's arc (probably one of the only animation arcs that focused on older women as siblings and messy family relationships and both of them having some incredibly badass moves) (in hindsight, lin beifong + ana amari was my 'older women r hot' awakening moment), a quartet of villains that were just fleshed out enough to be threatening and cool but without the tendency of american animation to remove their fangs. sakuga animation that lives in my mind rent free to this day. korra actually having a nuanced recovery arc. makani firing on all cylindars with some genuinely moving strips. a laid back shitpost friendly fandom that expected 0% and got like, 200% the quality. the story just slapped in all respects. it was like the perfect cultural storm of being there at the right time, all of my personal favorite tropes, an honestly good show with actual funding and marketing, and all of the actual toxic elements of the fandom still disowning the whole thing. man, the memories of delighted grabbing the pirated subtitled eps a few days after they came out was always a fun evening in college.
by the time s4 rolled around, some of the unhealthy sides of the fandom started to slither back, but thankfully it way toned down in comparison to s1. you could at least ignore it for the most part, except for like the finale - honestly i started drifting away again by then. wasn't quite as good as s3, and y'all know how allergic i am to ""popular"" shows. plus there was a weird undercurrent of like ... the "old avatar guard" still snootily looking down their noses at how it was never going to match up anyway. and then the younger toxic guard still fighting over how it should have been done THIS way in a way that feels very twitter-dunky-ish.
animation still slapped tho, and the villain chick was hot.
anyway going through these animation clips brings back some memories.
... and how batshit insane it was lol.
first, an opinion that might have me executed on some corners of the internet (including here lol): I actually prefer korra (the series) to avatar overall.
i saw both around the same time, (maybe avatar slightly later?). i get why avatar's considered a peerless classic. compared to the kiddie animation going on at the time, it was like a bolt of lightning - that was, i think, during the dark ages where anime was still rare and passed around as shitty bootleg tapes. i cannot reiterate how limited seeing cool international art was back then. if you weren't connected with the right people in college city campuses, you might see like ... one, truly good anime, or show totally by accident, maybe even just a trailer and shit would live in your head until you saw a 240p rip version on youtube over dialup across 6 parts. it totally inspired the current crop of animation/art directors leading stuff these days.
so korra was always going to have that nolstagia bias to overcome. you know homestuck's reputation of being a hot mess of a fandom, or genshin impact for the younger folks? pre-mid S1 korra was a uniquely ... unhealthy ... hype juggernaut of 'avatar is absolute perfection and we 100% expect that same perfection', plus the specific weird sort of proto-social justice tumblr where everyone had not yet gotten jaded with the shadow side of how badly it could go. (like say, the whole site hyping up a creative kickstarter promising the epitome of tasteful but cool diversity and then the whole thing imploding into a massive 50k dollar scam and/or badly handled campaign). imagine like, every single opinionated quasi-fandom-harasser-type laser focused on expecting this as like the absolute pinnacle of tumblr taste united, absolute diamond of everything ever that everyone creative and hot-shit had been working towards. both the elder folks were expecting that (with a side of avatar elite smugness), and the younger folks (with a side of tumblr poisoned very specific way of doing stories right). you criticize anything, you got blasted to the shadow realm. you liked anything that was deemed problematic about it, you got blasted to a different shadow realm.
it went roughly about how you'd expect.
what's even funnier is i saw s1 korra fandom from a distance and decided okay, no way in fuck am i touching that hot mess with a ten foot pole. there was a whole set of shipping drama with the one slimy sports bender guy. then another about a badly handled love triangle with the lead. i'm not doing it justice as it basically sent tumblr into a meltdown every week. time passed. things exploded more with the finale of everyone feeling let down. s2 of korra was just ...bad ... really bad, animation wise (they outsourced to a different animation studio for that one season and it shows), story wise, etc, so i think all the rabid (toxic) avatar fans dumped it at that time, and moved on elsewhere. (which was actually rare, man, it was not often that people moved on in less than a year. these were the days where one or two fandoms stayed in the cultural eye of the storm for 5-10 years. superwholock, anyone?)
what's funny is that makani was drawing a bunch of joke doodles early s3, and that's when i started to pick it up for the lulz.
s3 was amazing.
you had lin beifong's arc (probably one of the only animation arcs that focused on older women as siblings and messy family relationships and both of them having some incredibly badass moves) (in hindsight, lin beifong + ana amari was my 'older women r hot' awakening moment), a quartet of villains that were just fleshed out enough to be threatening and cool but without the tendency of american animation to remove their fangs. sakuga animation that lives in my mind rent free to this day. korra actually having a nuanced recovery arc. makani firing on all cylindars with some genuinely moving strips. a laid back shitpost friendly fandom that expected 0% and got like, 200% the quality. the story just slapped in all respects. it was like the perfect cultural storm of being there at the right time, all of my personal favorite tropes, an honestly good show with actual funding and marketing, and all of the actual toxic elements of the fandom still disowning the whole thing. man, the memories of delighted grabbing the pirated subtitled eps a few days after they came out was always a fun evening in college.
by the time s4 rolled around, some of the unhealthy sides of the fandom started to slither back, but thankfully it way toned down in comparison to s1. you could at least ignore it for the most part, except for like the finale - honestly i started drifting away again by then. wasn't quite as good as s3, and y'all know how allergic i am to ""popular"" shows. plus there was a weird undercurrent of like ... the "old avatar guard" still snootily looking down their noses at how it was never going to match up anyway. and then the younger toxic guard still fighting over how it should have been done THIS way in a way that feels very twitter-dunky-ish.
animation still slapped tho, and the villain chick was hot.
anyway going through these animation clips brings back some memories.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-07-28 12:54 pm (UTC)But I do very vividly remember that expectation of Korra being "just as perfect as Atla is". That I did see tons of, because that was inescapable no matter where I was online. Even when I really kept to myself at the time and was still deep into my "lurker era" as I call it. That unhealthy hype juggernaut was everywhere at the time s1 aired. As well as the snootiness from some atla fans about how Korra would never live up to it from s1 onwards.
I never actually finished Korra. Only got to the second to last episode of season 2. But the reason I never finished it was because I just straight up forgot to... XD Not the fault of the show there. (Even though that season was a mess.) I remember really wanting to get around to catching up when s3 and s4 happened but never did. My brain hopping around like that is something that happened a lot when I was younger, and still now too at times.
But even back then I didn't get the expectation for Korra to be as "perfect as atla" that certain other atla fans had, even as someone who saw it as it aired myself. (It truly was a bolt of lightning at the time as you described. And I still respect how the show respected its child audience's intelligence.) ...And then there was me, who was just happy that a source material I really loved and meant a lot to me came back. XD I really wanted to see the world get explored more back then and was happy a earlier childhood wish came true.
I still intend to finish Korra one of these days since I really do love the world it takes place in.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-14 02:33 am (UTC)but this is so cool to hear similar thoughts from you re: how interestingly unique the discussion was with korra as a series. it had a particular tinge to it that was real different than most other shows with the expectations -- and honestly, that isn't even wholly bad (heck the people may have even pushed themselves even harder than otherwise), but it sure flavored that area of fandom for a while.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-07-28 09:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-13 02:44 pm (UTC)Toootally get that feeling with being slightly dissapointed with the OG series as an adult; i feel like most saturday morning cartoons have that vibe, even if the fanworks are mind bogglingly good.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-07-29 07:17 am (UTC)I have... not gotten around to it yet, whops. I've even watched the original ATLA for the first time in the intervening hiatus, and yet--
I'd hazard a guess that stories like mine are really not rare, and that it's a relatively understated cause for how much smaller and quieter the fanbase got at that time -- lost between more dramatically entertaining hypotheses such as "it lost fans because it got crappy" or "it lost fans because the discourse candle burned itself to the ground". this was still at a time when fanbases were less transient, yes, but Peak Fandom it was not; after all, within the aforementioned Superwholock, all three series were seeing constant regular updates, the former two had firmed up their fanbases long ago, and the latter notoriously underwent a brutal and immediate fanbase wipeout when it ended. all of which is to say, established fandoms were eating well at that time, but newer ones weren't always finding it so easy to take root -- and a year-long schedule slip was already a great way to lose topsoil! (hell, if I dare recite the ancient magic, Homestuck is a great example of this; an unprecedentedly massive and loyal fanbase that survived roughly every wrong thing that a creator can do, and the thing that finally convinced most people to move on was that the inconsistent update schedule got bad beyond all forbearance, bad to the point that even what had otherwise been a remarkably self-sustaining fandom just up and got sick of sustaining itself.)
(anyway, I'd also hazard a guess that any strong opinions on Korra either way are probably grounds for execution for a significant faction of people on any place. just the other day, in a conversation with a friend kvetching about a good first impression on twitch souring in one sentence, we concluded, "it's fair enough to like ATLA more than Korra, but if you're the kind of guy who must point it out whenever Korra is brought up, you're on thin ice at best")
anyway, we're popping the biggest bottles when makorra goes canon tomorrow, amirite fellas--
(no subject)
Date: 2024-03-03 09:09 pm (UTC)great point with the simple passage of time being the biggest culprit for shrinking fandoms. there's definitely a super different feeling of a fandom in peak hype stage versus slightly plateu-ing even a year later. i did lol at your bit about homestuck surviving everything *but* the inconsistent update schedule, haha.