The Problem with Spirits in Legend of Korra script

Intro:

The spirits of Avatar: The Last Airbender were iconic. Evangelion-style pandas, face-stealing giant centipedes, and nerdy owl dragon things that were simply beyond human understanding. They often served as narrative extensions to the natural world, and had mysterious, compelling motivations outside the boundaries of good and evil. Truly, they were a breath of fresh air compared to the usual western understanding of good versus evil.

Which is why it’s so frustrating that Legend of Korra, despite wanting to tell more stories about the spirits, doesn’t seem to understand why the spirits in the original series worked to begin with. Instead of being complex, nuanced, totally amoral entities, they’re watered down to a rather juvenile moral framework that doesn’t actually explore the many facets of spirituality; ones even tackled by the original series, such as the environmental devastation wrought by industrialization, or even the idea of spiritual growth through personal development.

So today, we’re gonna talk about why the spirits of Avatar: The Last Airbender worked so well, and how Legend of Korra understood none of it.

Spirits in ATLA:

In Avatar, spirits are inherently linked to the natural world. Be they embodiments of different aspects of nature, or guardians of a specific forest or town, they’re often directly involved whenever the natural world around them has been disrespected or threatened. They’re not fully understood entities from another dimension. Rather, they’re a sort of metaphorical vessel for the world of Avatar itself.

Spirituality is also seen as a way to understand oneself in relation to the rest of the world. General Iroh’s enlightenment, his spiritual aptitude, is an extension of his ability to understand both himself and the ways of others, and the invisible connections between them. When Aang undergoes the process of unlocking his chakras, each one involves him confronting some kind of mental or emotional block. The trauma of having lost his people, his fear of hurting someone with firebending, and the love he has for others. His spiritual growth is his personal growth. It’s more than just, “Oooh, spooky ghost thingies must be respected.”

Likewise, spirits are not concerned with the concept of good and evil, or light and dark. They’re beyond any kind of manmade construct. Spirits instead have specific motivations and causes. They have relationships with each other, and the land they’re part of. As such, they act directly in response to those things being jeopardized. In order to calm them, you must understand what caused them to wreak havoc, if they can be calmed at all.

Take Hei Bai, for instance. When the forest his statue is in is razed by the Fire Nation, he goes on a rampage, attacking any humans in the nearby village as retribution. He doesn’t care that they’re Earth Kingdom citizens, because to spirits, the lines between nations are imaginary ones useful only to humans. Likewise, we don’t see where those he takes are whisked off to. They aren’t killed, or thrown in some spirit prison, but simply vanish from existence.

To appease Hei Bai, Aang has to understand why he’s rampaging to begin with. Once he discovers the link between Hei Bai and the destroyed forest, he realizes that the Fire Nation’s actions have ruined the spirit’s home. To appease Hei Bai, Aang shows it the acorn Katara showed him earlier, using it as a symbol of hope that the forest will one day grow back. This does in fact appease Hei Bai. He returns to his pacified form, then leaves, releasing his captives through a bamboo thicket that grows in his place as he disappears into the night.

Then there’s the Painted Lady, the spirit of the Jang Hui River in the Fire Nation. She was believed to once watch over a small fishing village on the river. However, the industrialization of the Fire Nation has led to pollution of its own environment, with one of its factories heavily contaminating the Jang Hui River and bringing illness upon the village. It’s believed this drove the Painted Lady away as well. Rather than seek retribution, she’s seemingly vacated altogether.

But when Katara masquerades as the Painted Lady to protect the village, heal its people, destroy the factory, and inspire the locals to clean the river, the Painted Lady directly visits and thanks her. She doesn’t act the same way Hei Bai did at all. As such, we can assume each spirit will act according to its own nature and personality.

Tui and La, the Moon and Ocean Spirits respectively, came to the human world long ago in the form of black and white koi fish. They swim in the spirit oasis of the Northern Water Tribe Palace, the original Water Tribe where we can assume the first waterbenders built their home. Tui and La taught them how to push and pull the tides in order to waterbend. When Zhao kills the Moon Spirit, the Ocean Spirit joins with Aang in his Avatar State to seek vengeance upon the Fire Nation army.

They assume a terrifying form, which the waterbenders immediately recognize and bow to while the Ocean Spirit decks the Fire Nation invaders. It’s only when Princess Yue assumes the role of the new Moon Spirit that the Ocean Spirit ends its rampage and returns to the koi pond. Through all of this, neither spirit speaks at all, save for Yue as the Moon Spirit. Instead, we understand their motivations through what we’re told by Koh, and by the clear connection between the two as a stand-in for yin and yang. (remember that bit for later)

Then we have the freakier spirits. Firstly, Koh the Face Stealer, who lives within his own domain in the spirit world. A spooky, gnarled tree surrounded by a thick fog and petrified forest. We don’t know exactly why or how, but Koh isn’t very fond of humans. When he encounters one, or any living thing, he waits for them to express even the slightest emotion. Once they do, he steals their face to wear for himself, leaving his victim a faceless husk.

He’s rather mysterious. Again, we don’t know why exactly he does this, though we do know that he wasn’t fond of Avatar Kuruk in particular, stealing the face of his lover. It gets further explained in the comics, but it’s honestly much more interesting leaving so much of Koh’s nature a mystery. It adds to the frightening power of his presence. Even his form, as this giant centipede lurking within the darkness of a hollowed tree, inspires sheer terror as he coils around Aang.

He does provide useful information that helps Aang, giving insight into the nature of the Moon and Ocean Spirits, and their corporeal forms. He could’ve easily lied if he were indeed truly evil. But he doesn’t. He tells the truth, and though he does try to seize an opportunity to steal Aang’s face when he expresses excitement, he accepts when Aang manages to go back to a neutral expression and leaves. If anything, Koh is more mischievous than he is outright evil.

Wan Shi Tong, he who knows ten-thousand things, has an insatiable curiosity. He longs to collect all the knowledge of the universe, and gather it within his library. He believes in knowledge for knowledge’s sake. He’s also not very fond of humans, because in his experience, humans abuse that knowledge to outwit and destroy each other. It is a corruption of what Wan Shi Tong loves. He doesn’t care about the different sides in a human war, seeing it as little more than another repetition in humankind’s long and fraught history.

Throughout the entire show, spirits aren’t really depicted as light or dark, good or evil. They simply are. Some may be more cruel than others, but they don’t quite adhere to a human understanding of morality, and how could they? Even the constructs of morality are young compared to the timelessness of spirits. It’s like trying to ask whether a hurricane or a blizzard is good or evil. The weather is not good or evil, it simply is, and spirits are very much the same… except with a bit more attitude.

I’ll delve into this a bit later, but it basically boils down to the difference between immoral and amoral. Human morality is a construct that varies wildly between regions, cultures, time periods, and even individual people. What is considered good or evil, or even good or bad, depends on all of these different factors. To be evil would be going against morality, and thus immoral. Amorality, however, is the objection of this system altogether. To be amoral is not to be evil or bad, but rather to not operate within this framework to begin with. Spirits are not either good or evil, but rather amoral, acting outside of any kind of moral framework.

But Legend of Korra… it doesn’t quite view spirits this way.

Spirits in Korra:

I really appreciate that Legend of Korra wanted to explore spirits more in-depth. They were such a fascinating part of Avatar’s world, it makes sense that its sequel series would want to do a bit more with them. However, it does so without understanding what made the spirits of Avatar unique or interesting, and instead tries to explain spirits, the rules around them, and their world logically and according to human understanding. By doing so, they rob the spirits of their air of mystery, their inherent connection to the natural world, and their indifference to human ideas of morality.

Spirits first begin appearing, naturally, in Book 2: Spirits. In the original series, spirits were incredibly distinct largely due to their rarity. They could appear as humans, as animals, as unique, chimeric creatures based on different animals, or as something different altogether. But because spirits are so ubiquitous in Korra, it resulted in a need to simplify the design of the “average spirit,” so to speak. They needed common ones that could just easily be thrown into a scene without the need to give them unique designs. And thus, you get colored paint blobs flying around everywhere.

There’s no real character or personality to these globs. They’re more akin to generic energy monsters or Studio Ghibli extras than the otherworldly entities or characters of the original series. The closest you get are the gophers Korra and Jinora encounter when they first enter the spirit world, angered by Korra inadvertently disturbing their home and then trying to bend at them. Some are interesting, like the sun bird Korra befriends, but without any clear motivation like Hei Bai, these spirits feel incredibly superfluous.

With the world of Korra becoming heavily industrialized, it should be easy to see why the spirits would’ve become so irate. As their homes are destroyed, turned into human cities and stripped of their resources, they’d naturally become infuriated and lash out. And that metaphorically speaks to the spiritual decay of a rapidly industrializing world. Even the very concept of modernity is informed by, in our world, colonialist attitudes, and it’s the same in the Avatar world. The Fire Nation’s industrialization both allowed and prompted them to invade and colonize the other nations. To impose their idea of progress on the rest of the world, and eradicate other cultures and ways of life seen as primitive and inferior.

But none of that is really part of Book 2’s conversation about spirituality. For more about this topic regarding colonialism’s lasting effects, I recommend Kay and Skittles’ video about the Politics of Legend of Korra’s Book 2. But through all of Book 2, the story only pays lip service to this idea of industrialization and, by extension, colonization leading to spiritual decay. It’s instead boiled down to a very black-and-white battle of tradition versus progress, and even worse, a battle between… good and evil.

What I honestly hate most about the spirits in Korra is the introduction of light and dark spirits. As per usual, light equals good, and dark equals bad. When spirits are “out of balance,” the darkness takes over, literally giving them a very obviously evil form and forcing them to go on a rampage. Instead of spirits being amoral, existing outside of a moral framework of any kind, Legend of Korra tries to shoehorn spirits into a very basic, western good-and-evil framework with this light and dark system.

Take Hei Bai, for instance. When he was rampaging, it wasn’t because he became a “dark spirit.” The destruction of the forest didn’t turn him evil. Instead, he was genuinely in pain, and lashed out at any humans in his path. He was amoral. If this happened in Korra, Hei Bai’s design and writing would’ve made him come off as immoral, turned dark because he was “out of balance.” And instead of appeasing him by giving him hope of the forest growing back through the acorn, Korra would’ve simply waterbended the evil out of him.

Nope. No longer do spirits need a specific reason or motivation to be upset, nor do they need a unique response to the situation. And no longer do you need to understand their pain and ameliorate it to help them. Instead, you can clearly identify them as a dark, corrupted spirit, then waterbend some swirlies around them to make them go take a nap. Who needs compassion and an honest effort to bridge divides when you can hit the “purify” button?

Perhaps the worst example of this show’s need to force spirits into a moral framework is the classic good and evil duo: Raava and Vaatu, a.k.a. God Kite and Satan Kite. Aesthetically, they do resemble the yin and yang symbol (something Tui and La already fulfilled, grumble grumble). But philosophically, they’re a complete misunderstanding of the concept. Yin and yang are a relation between two opposing forces which exist in perpetuity. The symbol is meant to represent how the two constantly flow around one another, always coexisting. In fact, when one overpowers the other, the imbalance always causes problems.

Raava and Vaatu, by stark contrast, do not coexist in a harmonious way. Instead of dancing around each other, they battle constantly for control. One always seeks to dominate the other. That’s about as far away from yin and yang as you can get, and yes, Raava (or in this case, yin) having dominance is as much a bad thing as Vaatu being loose. But instead, Raava is portrayed as light and good, meaning we’re supposed to want her to overpower Vaatu’s darkness and evil. It’s a projection of western moral frameworks on a completely amoral concept.

Legend of Korra isn’t alone here. Most western media takes this framework of good and evil for granted, given it’s the system we’ve all lived in and had ingrained in us since birth. But what makes it sting especially is how it completely fails the amoral spectacle of the original series. Not to mention I’m just annoyed by, once again, the lip service to balance. Raava says, “One cannot exist without the other.” But then the goal isn’t to have Raava and Vaatu coexisting in the Avatar in harmony, which would actually embody the concept of yin and yang. Instead, the goal is to lock yang inside a tree for 10,000 years, because apparently yang is Satan. Yin dominates the world, and apparently that imbalance is a good thing, because the right side won.

This robs the world of the rich complexity and mystery of spirits. Not to mention, it also takes away the complexity of Unalaq as an antagonist. Legend of Korra loves to paint its villains as having a point, but just “going too far” in their ambitions, and in Unalaq’s case, it’s… well, it’s kinda hard to decipher. He claims to want to give the world back to the spirits, and return to a world which had more reverence for spirits. In the original series, that would’ve likely made him want to disrupt industrialization, but again, Legend of Korra doesn’t really seem interested in the connection between spirituality, industrialization, and colonization.

So we’re already starting on shaky ground. That’s made worse by the fact Unalaq himself is a deceitful, manipulative character who seems to derive pleasure in tormenting his enemies, and even disregards the wellbeing of his own children. He’s a cartoonish villain, amplified by his loyalty to Satan Kite. Because Vaatu is depicted as inherently evil, it makes any attempt to liberate him come across as evil for the sake of evil. It robs the story of any nuance, devolving it into a conflict not about the clashing motivations of characters and their opposing values, but the literal forces of good and evil shooting light and dark energy beams at each other.

It’s not like the evil of human characters like Sozin, Azulon, and Ozai. Each of them were imperialist tyrants with their own motivations: Sozin deluded himself into wanting to spread his idea of prosperity, and was partially drive by spite towards Roku; Azulon, from what we’ve seen, appeared largely cold and detached; and Ozai was a cruel, sadistic bastard fueled by ego. The throughline for all of them was the Fire Nation ethos of self-righteous superiority. A belief that might makes right, and even a desire to conquer the natural world. Why else would they oppose the Avatar and the spirits themselves?

Unalaq and Vaatu, by comparison, are… evil for evil’s sake. Not fueled by human desires or delusions of grandeurs, or at least, Vaatu definitely isn’t, and his very involvement and existence cloud any kind of insight into Unalaq’s goal. And even when the spirit portals are opened, the idea of spirits coexisting with humans isn’t really explored sufficiently. We don’t see people become more spiritually developed, in tune with the natural world.

Instead, we get commercialized vines that we organize tour groups around, and also… new airbenders??? Literally, nothing even changed aside from having a few ghosties floating around. People don’t become more appreciative or respectful towards the natural world. They don’t become more in tune with themselves or spiritually balanced, instead going about their industrialized, modernized lives as usual, but with a greenwashed filter.

Oh, also wanna say that I hate the introduction of literal spirit portals. This literalization takes away any metaphorical strength of the spirits, instead making them seem like ordinary creatures who happen to be from another dimension. It misses the understanding of spirits as an extension of the natural world. It feels less like an attempt to build upon the metaphors of spirits, and more like the creators wanted to take away the mystery factor of spirits for the sake of substituting story and theme with lore. Lore is not a story. You can communicate lore as a story Lord of the Rings style, but lore in and of itself is not a story, even if you can put it on a goddamn wiki page.

Conclusion & Outro:

Legend of Korra really dropped the ball when it comes to spirituality. It had every chance to interrogate the fraught relationship between spirituality and an ever-modernizing world, exploring the nuance of how a world scarred by war and colonization could spiritually heal. What we got instead was a basic, run-of-the-mill good versus evil story projected onto the world of Avatar, losing everything that made both spirits and the concept of spirituality in the original series so compelling and mature.

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I’m the Unicorn of War, and the Era of Raava is a shit show.