Who had better Avatar villains: The Last Airbender or Legend of Korra?
Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra are not the same show. Fans — of both or just either — have long known this to be the case; almost immediately, Korra’s delightful, brash cockiness immediately offset her from Aang’s childish wisdom. Both shows immediately bring in villains who want to snuff out the Avatar once and for all, but they play them totally differently.
[Ed. note: We’re going to start talking spoilers for both Avatar shows, so only read on if you’re fine with that.]
Ultimately,The Legend of Korra opts to not set the world on fire in the same way The Last Airbender did. Rather, Amon, the big bad of season 1 who wanted to end the Avatar line completely, gets revealed to be a fraud and dispatched at the end of the season. From there, Korra goes to bigger places, squaring off against antagonists who each bring something new to her sense of self, as the Avatar and a person.
The effort was an intentional one by series creators Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino, who saw the new villains as a way to always continue to provide shades of gray to the world of Avatar.
“The real world has taught us that no matter how noble a cause is, there will always be individuals who will exploit it,” Konietzko told Polygon in 2020. “But as with all of our villains, we’re very interested in finding out who they are and how they ended up so out of balance.”
Still, the season-long villain arc is a totally different beast from the overarching big bad. So long as we’re here to discuss and debate the world ofAvatar, we may as well take a closer look at how the change in structure changed how we felt about the villains — so which show ended up with better antagonists?
Zosha: I think, to kick us off, it’d be good to define two things really clearly: First, we know that “villainy” isn’t really a straight condemnation in the world of Avatar. Rather, it’s a place in the story that exists opposed to the Avatar, in some way. So when we use that term here, we
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