Having politics does not automatically make it more mature, and Korra hardly fully embraces it when it's so in the background and one sided.
Of course it doesn't, how it's consistently presented in Korra does. It's akin to the Plinkett review of StarWars Episode I when talking about how slow burn politics and political discourse made for poor childrens entertainment, and LoK has that in spades over AtlA.
There's nothing in the background about politics in LoK, Politics is to LoK as the 100 year war is to AtlA, it's the reason for everything that happens. Amon and his brother are entirely political, where as the Firelord is not. Amon is a political terrorist and his brother is a council member and all of the events of the show are because of their political maneuverings. Korra wouldn't be in Republic city if it wasn't for Amon fermenting the equalizer movement.
And I cannot agree that controlling people with their blood is somehow more dark than the entire genocide of a people, or the backstabbing, betrayal and general drama with Sozin's bloodline.
Again this comes down to portrayal. Blood bending is portrayed as even more disturbing in LoK than it was in AtlA and has a greater emphasis in the story than Blood Bending did after its introduction in AtlA. They never would have shown a human being contorting in AtlA the way Aang was when he confronted Amon's father. The intended effect was to make it seem like Aang was seconds away from being torn apart, which is why he entered the Avatar state. We never see blood bending pushed that far in AtlA.
This obviously does not show the contortions but it's the closest I could get. Even how Toff is blood bent, the way her head is (or rather isn't) manipulated as she hands over the keys is pretty unsettling.
Also when you mention genocide, it's coming from a line from the most 2 dimensional villain evil mc badguy in the series. Amon has more to him than the Firelord ever did and we actually see Amon carryign trough on his own genocide, where as it's only mentioned in AtlA once or twice amid other things. So again how things are presented is important. And yeah I like the bloodline plot, but it was one of many focuses of the show, and I wasn't arguing that AtlA didn't end up having a lot of political threads in it.
Begging, screaming and electrocution were all things present in ATLA and aren't impressively darker in Korra
We can agree to disagree in terms of presentation, but beyond that it is much more frequent in Korra.
Again, the core cast being older does not automatically make the show more mature, especially when the characters are all so immature in comparison to the ATLA cast.
How do you define maturity beyond 'I like these characters more, ergo'?
Because I'm struggling to see it. AtlA relied on the tired trope of having a character acting out like a child for the most immature of reasons (not that we can blame them completely, they were like 12). Then of course the rest of the group would ostracize them for a completely obvious misunderstanding and there would be a forced and predictable reconciliation.
This was like, at least, -a third- of the entire series and it got really old by the end. I certainly wouldn't call that maturity.
And how refreshing was it to see Asami Sato
not wring her hands or
monologue or spend episodes being
excessive moody over her father? It was great when she simply said 'I love you dad' and defied the trope all the way through despite her problems with Mako (that were likewise not over emphasized). That's maturity. Bolin and the group quickly getting over their love triangle and coming together as a team? That's maturity.
Korra 'getting what she wants all the time' isn't a lack of maturity, it just denies her another moment to demonstrate maturity. Yes, Korra did act immature with the whole Mako thing, but she backed off and it wasn't until the end when it came up again. Considering she spent her entire life being trained as the Avatar under lock and key, I think she turned out pretty ok.
Yes, so what? The goal the creators constantly spouted about Korra was for her to grow and become a more spiritual person than being a hothead who gets everything that she wants. That didn't happen.
I'm making a point (that you agree with I guess) that characters, even central ones, don't have to undergo large transformations over the course of a story. Sometimes the narrative is the story as much as the characters in it.
It did happen though, at least the first part. She started heeding her masters advice for patience and strategy instead of just charging in all the time. She managed to start connecting to the spirit world because of everything she went through before that point, and finally being able to open up to other people and admit weakness was a part of that. Being able to actually sit down and meditate is something she refused to take seriously at the star of the series; it took everything that happened prior and getting locked in a box for her honestly try, but she did.
Now in terms of 'getting what she wants, I agree and I wish they hadn't done 'I love you', but this doesn't make her a bad character, just a lucky one. I would have loved it have Mako chosen Asami and have Korra come to terms with that and be happy for them.
It would have been a much stronger ending!
Aang is not the same character he is in the beginning of the series. He's bubbly, airheaded, immature, lacks actual wisdom while pushing his on others and is just a childish character in the beginning. Contrast that with what he is at the end, calm, collected, confident, has a more serious demeanor and is willing to sacrifice his life to stop Ozai but also keep his own spiritual purity.
Yet he continues to be immature and act out for completely selfish reasons all the way to the end of the series. By the end of it the people I was watching it with consistently chastised Aang for being a twit. Aang is arguable at his most selfish at the end as the stakes continued to rise and that's not solely because he was struggling with the idea of killing the Firelord. A magic Sea Turtle saved the world, not Aang, and Aang got everything he wanted too.
So... eh?
Maybe LoK should not have introduced so many characters if they wanted them to have decent character arcs in a 12 episode limit.
LoK is pretty similar to AtlA in that the majority of characters don't get a lot of development relative to the running time for each, 12 episode run or not. And further more I'd argue that it's not always necessary.
While it's true that the end of AtLA was very deus ex machinas and even a bit lazy, I disagree strongly that Aang was the same person at the end as at the beginning. In a story like this the important idea is that the character is, in the end, deserving of channelling the power he wields. Think Frodo being saved by the fact that he nor Bilbo killed Gollum. If it had been Frodo alone in the end all would have been lost, but he was set a test and he passed.
Deserving doesn't mean that they're different characters at the end; Zukko is, Aang isn't in my opinion. Honestly Aang and Korra are about on par for personal growth in terms of overall maturity.
