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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.
