Last week the official trailer for the next Avatar series debuted and I was surprised to be filled with confidence.

Now, I am not some Korra hater. I actually quite like the show, the character, and sympathize with the creative team's struggles as Nickelodeon bungled the entire show. I even wrote about the show for my history of animation class at UCF in November 2015. While I have found the Pages document, I have decided to spare you all from publishing it.

Seven Havens is leaning into the Korra hate by making her the destroyer of the world? Kinda cool and on the nose in a cheeky manner. I like the idea of Earthbender twins and one being the Avatar. I like the global hunt for the Avatar, although it sort of is an amplified version of the Fire Nation hunting down the Avatar.

I was reading an interview on Polygon and picked up some tidbits I hadn't heard before. For example, this show takes place 225 years after The Legend of Korra. So, did Korra live for 218 or however many years? Did she freeze herself in the South Pole? What were the consequences of merging the spirit and non-spirit realms? Why is it post-apocalyptic? It seems this natural bubbling up of questions was intentional. Here is series co-creator Michael Dante DiMartino:

"Early on, we also decided we wanted this to be more of a mystery show than the last two series, so that a viewer would enter the story with a lot of questions: How did the world get so bad? Why does everyone hate the Avatar? How did Pavi lose her leg? We want the audience to always hunger to know more."

There was a sentence just before that quote that I wanted to isolate, emphasis my own:

"The choice to make her such an underdog gave us a lot of potential drama that could sustain a series."

If you had to list one overarching issue for The Legend of Korra it was a through line that was able to sustain the series. Book Two: Spirits was a problematic season in the sense of following up and building the future seasons. Friend of the blog Razbuten made a video re-writing Book Two specifically. We don't need to get into the semantics of production, but Korra had a turbulent production, to say the least. My hope with Seven Havens, inspired by this quote, was that Avatar Studios has been given the space to design a show with longevity in mind.1

There were other cool tidbits, like a focus on the "Havens" being cities that provide an Outer Haven from the harsh elements. It gives me a very Ba Sing Se vibe. I never noticed Pavi was missing a leg. I am curious why the twins were separated. I like hover skateboards. The world appears to have been reverted back to a more Last Airbender style world without cars, trains, and giant mechs. I always thought Korra's 70 year jump was too much tech in too little time. I do wonder how Cabbage Corp is doing though...

Color me excited for this new series. I'll be seated October 9th.

Footnotes

  1. I am reminded of a story that I first read in the art book for Avatar: The Last Airbender. The series original order was for thirteen episodes and the crew didn't know if they'd get more. So they wrote "The Blue Spirit" with the angle of being the last episode. The left it where Zuko and Aang could have become friends/allies. And man, did they work that plot line into perfection by series end. ↩