Sword Art Appreciation - Anime Thread

[Kriven]

Technically not anime, but whatever.

I've been going through The Legend of Korra since I picked up the first two seasons on Black Friday... and discovered the last two seasons weren't that much more expensive on Amazon. I just finished season three ("Change") Thursday night, and I'm pretty happy with everything. When the show was first announced and they got about four episodes into season one, I watched them and coming right off a binge of The Last Airbender, I wasn't that impressed... first of all was the extensive use of CGI for environmental elements, and that's something that always pulls me out... And then there was the whole Pro-Bending thing, and I just wasn't appreciating it as much as the original series and I let it fall out of mind.

I was wrong. When taken one episode at a time, I can see why I wasn't that excited about it... The early episodes just set the show up as something else entirely that looked like it was trying to play to the Twilight and Teen Romance crowd with all the tension between Mako and Korra, and I'm so glad that isn't the route the show actually went. Going into the final season, I'm actually catching myself liking some aspects of this series more than the original Avatar show. The characters and situations are older, more complex, and the world feels a lot more cohesive (which makes sense, given the changes brought about by Aang's accomplishments as Avatar. He's kind of brought order to a world which was chaotic and disjointed, and now we get to see that. I like that we get the world evolving). I think it was a good idea moving the series into a loose adaptation of the real-world 30s-50s era of technological development. It's also neat to see some of the previous protagonists showing up and how they've changed... like, we don't just get to see "Zuko but Older", but actually Zuko as a man who has seen ninety years of the world. So we don't end up with just this rash angry old guy, but a character who has been believably developed throughout the course of his life. It's just a very cool series all around.