kaberett | critical appreciation, or something

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At the point I first watched Legend of Korra I had not seen any of the MCU; nor had I read your blue-eyed boys.

I have recently rewatched (most of) LoK with A. This means that I have noticed, which I hadn't previously, that what they think that they're doing with Varrick and Zhu Li is... Tony and Pepper.

And they're really not.

And I now like Varrick even less.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

recessional

...oh gods that'd be such an easy dynamic to get horribly wrong, too.

(I tried A:TLOK but everything about it rubbed me the wrong way in ways I can't quite articulate, so I didn't watch much of it.)

From:

kaberett

yeah they've gone for "off-the-wall genius inventor with zero attention span who suddenly discovers a single solitary scruple at the point that it actually matters (having been more interested in clean energy than superweapons honest guv) and treats his assistant like shit" and then HAD THEM GET MARRIED and just... missed... all the bits... that... make Tony at all likeable? As far as I can tell? Like MAYBE we're supposed to intuit Off-Screen Tragic Backstory for Varrick, but also he seems to have basically no awareness at all that he's behaving in suboptimal ways and DEFINITELY is all "lol Zhu Li 100% deserves going down in history as The Reason I Died to the tune of becoming a byword for [gendered] ~betrayal~" and just... nO? NO? AND THEN THEY GET MARRIED.

I saw somewhere? on tumblr probably? lo these many years ago? that two writers who joined the A:tLA team quite late on in the process and were responsible for e.g. the Dangerous Ladies and Toph not being the dude from the title sequence weren't brought back on board for Korra, which might... explain a lot? I can't lay my hands on a source for that at the moment, irritatingly, but it's... A:tLoK is not a great show. I have a bit of a soft spot for Korra herself and a lot of a soft spot for Lin Beifong The Trope Incarnate, but I'm mostly rewatching it because A wanted to knooooooooooow.

From:

recessional

Yeeeeah I mean it's a very difficult dynamic to do well; even WITH Tony and Pepper it's frequent that people also miss what makes their specific relationship even prior to romance not just Hideously Unhealthy (and how much that straight up has to do with the fact that he does not expect her to be NICE to him, just to make his life work, to the point where she has an immediate pushback to "I don't like it when you have plans" with "I'm allowed to have plans on my birthday" - ie how much the power involved ISN'T thoughtlessly wielded and just how much of it she has and they are both aware of), and how much . . . just, yeah. That he's her manic pixie dream boy disaster area who brings exasperated delight to her life.

Yeah it felt like . . . like I wasn't happy with how they did the bridging comics, to start with. It wasn't that the characterization directions they went in/historical directions they went in weren't supported, it's just they were all the ones that BORED ME, that I didn't enjoy, and that moved hardline away from the reason I liked the original series in the first place. And TLoK just seemed to . . . increase that six-fold, following the same patterns: it wasn't that it wasn't a reasonable extrapolation of events, it's just that it's the extrapolation of events I had the least interest IN.

And it happened to coincide with my decision that the last thing I needed to spend my brainpoints on was fiction that wasn't going to end with me being happier at the end of it than when I started (for various values of happy), so.