How Legend of Korra Gave a Big Black Girl Permission to Be Broken

I grinned with satisfaction the very first moment toddler Avatar Korra burst onto my TV screen, around when the Virginia air began to warm after winter, the breeze that year accompanied by college acceptance letters and school visits. It was charged with the electric thought of how, after years of visiting Grounds for summer camps and my father’s work visits, I was finally headed for the University of Virginia for college.

“I’m the Avatar and you’ve gotta deal with it!” the animated toddler declared, already able to bend, or manipulate, three of the four elements—earth, fire, and water. Korra’s stance and fierce acceptance of her role as keeper of peace between the four fictive nations and bridge between humanity and the spirit world at such an early age conjured up images of myself as a child that I knew intimately. I knew them not from memory, but from photographs and videos that had captured my essence: side eyes, wrinkled nose, and tiny hands on little hips.

Perhaps I lack the ability to manipulate the elements and didn’t carry the weight of the world on my shoulders, but the core of our personalities are strikingly similar. Korra, a teenage Water Tribe Avatar with a particular gift for firebending, is competitive, opinionated, abrasive, headstrong and wonderfully optimistic. But Korra is also hopelessly flawed.

The promise of Korra was initially what drew me into the Avatar: The Last Airbender world. Where I saw a show about learning your strengths in Avatar: The Last Airbender, in The Legend of Korra, a sequel of sorts to ATLA, I saw a story about becoming aware of your own weakness and fault lines—and what happens when they are tapped in just the wrong way.

*

While Korra excitedly set off from her secluded home in the South Pole to join the action in Republic City at the beginning of season one, I was hurrying to escape my suffocating small town life in Suffolk, Virginia and begin my new life at my father’s alma mater.

In Suffolk—at home—I was a former salutatorian, debutante, city harvest festival Queen, ten time National Piano Guild participant and Ivy League acceptee. I believed in my own power. I was the girl who would make it out, armed with the support of my parents, and a sharp mind and tongue. I felt the eyes of the younger students in my International Baccalaureate program on me as I blazed my way out of the city. I left a mix of teachers in my wake; some who’d encouraged me and some who had hated my insistence on taking up space, and made it their mission to make me shrink. I got larger out of spite.

My parents had proudly raised a fighter, strengthened my moral compass, and indulged my every passion. The result was a firestorm of a girl with no sense of patience.

Like Korra.

In Korra, I saw a brown girl, long hair flying as she fought with fire, who was the closest person I’d seen who looked and acted like me in animation, ready to take on the world. Weighed down with responsibility and the high expectations of many, Korra felt like more of a mirror in which I could see myself than any of the characters and stories I had loved as a child.

*

In my hurried quest to find the space to set my energy loose, away from the gaze of those who watched my every move, I began to miss steps, as if stumbling down the stairs. I spent my first weekend of college in the hospital, falling victim to a deadly mixture of pollen and asthma. Shakily, I returned to classes, realizing that after all the intensive International Baccalaureate classes I’d taken, this level of work was beyond my capability. The academic excellence which had earned me both scholarships and the praise of many in my hometown, as well as my ticket out, was now in question. My expectation of myself was no longer perfection, straight A’s and Dean’s list. My goal quickly became to just pass instead.

I left a mix of teachers in my wake; some who’d encouraged me and some who had hated my insistence on taking up space.

Outside of class was no better. Over the summer, I had excitedly combed through the database of the university’s student organizations and made an extensive list of clubs and activities I wanted to join in preparation for my first semester—from archery club to University Democrats to the Black Student Alliance. I discovered, when I finally arrived on Grounds, however, that most required applications and often multiple rounds of interviews, held in student rooms and pavilions on the hallowed Lawn. It was a level of exclusivity and competition I had never experienced.

Over the course of a few weeks, I was turned away from everything I applied to that semester while I watched my white hallmates glide into everything from sororities to Student Council. For a school that touted the family-like bonds students formed, I was finding it very difficult to access any space at all, let alone belong.

Sensing control slipping from my carefully curated life at an alarming rate, I clung to any sense of familiarity—my high school boyfriend, in particular. But shortly after our one year anniversary, during midterms, we broke up, and even though I danced to “We Are Never Getting Together” with my hallmates in my room that night, whatever had been holding the two halves of myself together finally cracked.

When I crawled into bed that night, I felt the chasm in my chest open up. I wrapped my arms around myself tight in the hopes that it would keep me from falling apart.

*

I watched seasons two and three of LoK during my first and second years of college as Korra’s resolve was tested and I began to sink deeper into quicksand-like depression. I struggled in my politics classes and discussion sections, run by white male graduate students whose gazes assured me they thought very little of my contributions. Those classes made me too tired to stand up to the men who dismissed or talked over me in Black Student Alliance meetings. I went home most evenings and cried, to make room for the stress I would accrue the next day.

Despite successfully completing those years, I returned home, more fatigued than I had been the summer before. Similarly, Korra had successfully defeated season one’s Big Bad, Amon, who furthered his goal of “equality” between benders and non-benders by stripping the former of their abilities, but not without some loss: Amon had taken Korra’s bending in their final confrontation.

For a moment, before the trauma manages to unlock her ability to bend air, the element she struggles with all season, Korra is rendered powerless. Eventually, she is able to restore her bending, but it’s the first missed step that sends her tumbling.

Then, in season two, Korra and the new Team Avatar win again against Unalaq, Korra’s devious uncle, and Vaatu, a formerly imprisoned evil spirit who seeks to throw the world into ten thousand years of chaos where he reigns. This time, the cost is higher: Once Unalaq and Vaatu fuse to become a Dark Avatar, together they sever Korra’s connection to her past lives by destroying the light spirit that lives within the Avatar, Raava.

No longer able to seek advice and guidance from former Avatars, like Aang, Roku, and Kyoshi, Korra is at a disadvantage as she goes up against Zaheer and members of the Red Lotus, who seek freedom from governments that fail their citizens—by any means necessary.

By the time viewers realize just how dangerous Zaheer is—carefully executing prison breaks and assassinating the Queen of the Earth Kingdom—the stress begins to bubble up in the form of nightmares for Korra. And when Zaheer manages to capture Korra, he fills her with a metallic poison and begins to suffocate her by bending the air out of her lungs. Though she lives, some part of Korra—the flame-throwing hothead, insistent on taking up space—does not survive.

*

The war my mind was waging against me during those two years intensified to the point where my dean, therapist, and psychiatrist strongly encouraged me to take a medical leave. No one thought I could do this anymore. I had gone from being a force of nature to having “fragile” stamped all over my body.

It was as if, overnight, this place that I had so long coveted to reach stole everything that I prized about myself. As my thoughts started to race and my heart rate began to rise, I would frantically question if this place would strip me of my whole identity.

When the panic attacks came for me, I was unable to speak, unable to breathe, unable to think. I would call my dad, wordlessly gasping for air and somehow, he understood. But in those moments, all I understood was that my mind had shattered, my body was rebelling, and I desperately needed a way out.

Korra felt like more of a mirror in which I could see myself than any of the characters I had loved as a child. 

Though I went home to my parents’ often, I never left the house. Even the briefest trips outside triggered the fear that I would see an old classmate or a family friend, that they would ask about college, and that I, sagging under the weight of my community’s, and my own, expectations for my performance, my own power, would have to lie. The fear was so intense that even pulling up in the Walmart parking lot would turn my stomach. I stopped answering my phone and detached myself from my high school friends, one by one, until finally, the calls stopped.

Depression wanted sleep, but anxiety fueled my mind, spinning out my deepest fears every night as I closed my eyes, resulting in an insomnia that would take years to undo. When I finally did manage to fall asleep, my mind did not rest, but instead concocted the most terrifying visions as I floated somewhere in the space between sleep and wakefulness. My body remained physically bound by sleep, unmovable, while my eyes roamed my room, suddenly full of dark specters who floated in the periphery of my sight. The sound of an old music box in the wrong key often accompanied the visions, and try as I might to move or scream or whimper, sleep paralysis would only loosen its grip when it was done with me and I could move my limbs again.

Though I would not, could not, leave my room for days at a time, I stubbornly finished the semester and produced some of the best academic work I had made in my entire time at school—out of spite. Spite, and pride, were, in fact, the only things that brought me back for the third year.

*

Season four of The Legend of Korra aired the fall that I returned, battle-worn, to Charlottesville for my third year. The usual panic set in as my parents and I approached the Blue Ridge Mountain range which appeared in the distance as we drove up I-64. My demented sleep had been torturous at home, but I feared being its victim hours from any familiar comfort, worried that the stress of a high-intensity environment would worsen the condition.

The solution became to find things that would comfort me. A couple of my trusted housemates helped me develop a “Wellness Box” full of small trinkets meant to lift my mood: a vanilla candle, a box of Crayola crayons, a puzzle, a list of things I liked about myself and a list of things to do if I was feeling bad, which included watching The Legend of Korra.

One evening, I set my list aside to play the premiere of The Legend of Korra’s final season. I managed to register the surprising jump ahead three years in the story, Korra’s total disconnect from her support system, and her new short haircut. My own hair, previously long and thick, had become broken and brittle over the course of my years in college. No longer able to hide the damage, I had my hairstylist chop what was left into a pixie cut. The memory was with me as I took in the new changes in Korra. She moved carefully, as if with every movement, she was holding herself together so she wouldn’t break; the slightest unanticipated pressure on the emotional fault lines over her body might release something ugly.

The events of season three began to flood back to Korra, recalled by a mix of memory and flashbacks that showed what Korra had experienced in the three years in between villain Zaheer’s near fatal attack and the present. I began to see myself in the mix of frustration and rage she felt; the pitying, worried looks from parents; the unreturned messages from friends; the never ending isolation. I didn’t know how it felt to have to relearn and reteach my own body, as Korra did; but I did know what it was to be locked in a battle with your own mind.

Shadow Korra, the ghost of herself that tasted death at the hands of Zaheer, appears to her throughout the season, most often and most notably when Korra is attempting to fight or feeling more than she thinks she can handle. Her presence is mentally disarming, causing Korra to lose her season four fights against villain, Kuvira, that she might have otherwise won—and to break down in rage.

And I, seeing Korra’s exposed weaknesses, finally had the words to explain what had happened to me.

*

When the pandemic hit earlier this year in full force, I felt the familiar tendrils of anxiety beginning to wrap around my chest and pull. I began to look for anything that would bring me some sense of comfort. Through Twitter, I found a small group of friends with whom I re-watched Avatar: The Last Airbender on weeknights in the spring. When Avatar was released on Netflix, shortly followed by The Legend of Korra in August, we planned to watch the sequel together, added more people to our group and used the hashtag #KorraKickback to communicate as we watched.

My usual pride at seeing so many aspects of myself reflected on screen in a big, brown girl quickly returned; but with it came insecurities. It feels personal when fans attack her character; to dislike Korra’s headstrong nature, her smart mouth, her strength, her ability to take up space unapologetically, is to dismiss Black and brown girls who exist in similar ways.

So seeing a male #KorraKickback viewer joke about not wanting to date Avatar Korra stung.

While most viewers find the love triangle between Mako, Korra, and Asami insufferable, secondhand embarrassment always creeps its way into my mind as I watch, seeing the dynamics of past relationships I’ve had play out in much the same way on screen. The ghosts of the words “bossy” and “abrasive” echoed in my head as Korra clumsily handles her feelings for season one and two love interest, Mako, not quite understanding yet that she can’t approach love in a firebender’s attack stance—in the same timbre of my college crush’s voice.

The echo folded space and time, and suddenly I was twenty, and then sixteen, and then thirteen, always being told some variation of “you’re too much.”

The pressure Korra constantly feels to be a great Avatar, with all eyes on her, would be enough. Add the explosiveness of Korra’s personality and messiness of her decisions, and you get a pit in your stomach that many Black women know with great familiarity. The pressure to perform—to be perfect, but to also make yourself small so that everyone else is comfortable. To save everyone while constantly being reminded that you are difficult to love. Being refused the right to make mistakes, to be human.

It’s no surprise she breaks.

It’s also no surprise that the frustration she feels toward herself for breaking makes it worse.

Few people in Korra’s life on screen or in the Avatar fan base extend her the courtesy of receiving her exactly as she is: flawed and struggling. And that is a direct result of the way we as a society view powerful women of color, particularly Black women. Korra is not Black—Water Tribe members are based in part on Intuit cultures—but Black women can see so much of their struggle in how she moves through the world.

To save everyone while constantly being reminded that you are difficult to love—It’s no surprise she breaks.

That she internalizes this pressure is what makes her break even more tragic. Over the course of her series, there’s so much focus on her limitations that it makes her strengths feel irrelevant. The public expects so much from their Avatar and gives her nothing but spite in return. Rather than ask for help, Korra isolates herself for three years. She can’t ask—Asking has never been as rewarding as forging ahead and doing for Korra. The fear of disappointing people who have come to expect perfection makes reaching out so much more difficult. Korra is aware that some of those people both demand her excellence while also harboring a seed of hope that she will fail.

It is not simply about weakness, or appearing weak. It is about the appearance of failure when we feel the pressure to constantly over-perform while those who watch on secretly, and more often than not, explicitly, desire to see us fail.

This is where the gap appears between Black women and women of color, who watch Korra and see themselves—and everyone else, who can’t. The promise of Korra is not her power as a bender or an Avatar or her physical strength; the promise of Korra is in her humanization. It takes time, as we see, to break free of the weight we bear at the bequest of others. But this is her journey towards freedom; and it scares those who would prefer us, and our depictions, bound.

Korra is neither broken nor bound; she is free.

“And you’ve gotta deal with it.”

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