u/Invite-Healthy

In the spirit world Zaheer tells Korra that Wan made a ”mistake” by closing the spirit portals… but why? Based on what?

1. In Beginnings it’s shown to be objectively a good decision by Wan, as it drastically reduced human-spirit conflict, made the world safer for humans, and the spirits themselves aren’t evenshown to be unhappy about it either.

2. Zaheer just says “we have to go back” as if that state before the avatar was the original state. The spirit portals, if I recall correctly, were created by Vaatu. That suggests that the state of the world we are shown in Wan’s lifetime is not even the original state, as the portals didn’t exist at some point before.

3. Zaheer provides no other reasoning for calling Wan’s decision a mistake other than “humans and spirits should coexist”. Again, why? Vaatu mentioning that he created the spirit portals suggests that spirits and humans likely didn’t coexist sometime in the distant past either. Also, the fact that every avatar after Wan, even the ones immediately after who probably knew or the portals, decided it was a better idea to keep them closed. He never provided a real argument for why humans and spirits, being with completely different morals, levels of consciousness, understanding, goals, etc. should coexist.

4. Nothing about the state of the world in Wan’s era suggests that it was “balanced“ in any way, shape, or form. If anything, it was especially unbalanced with how spirits dominated much of the world and humans were limited to small pockets to survive.

Question: if it’s possible for the universe to just airdrop people airbending in LoK, does that imply that the origins of bending may not even BE the Lion turtles? Like the universe coulda just spawned bending into existence?

It was a big misstep by the writers to not explore this character further, especially once they had the idea for her to be in a relationship with Korra.

Outside of surface level traits, we aren’t shown much of, if at all, how her childhood affected her outlook on the world. How did she cope with losing her mom at a young age? How did that shape her worldview growing up? Were there any aspects of growing up super rich that her childhood experience? They only scratched the surface with the character work they could have done with Asami.

I’m rewatching Book 3 right now and I never realized just how little characterization Ghazan, Ming-Hua, and P’Li have. Outside of P’Li‘s relationship with Zaheer, they don’t have any conversations that aren’t directly some form of “where is the avatar” “get her”.

None or them have any clearly identifiable personality traits and the show doesn’t do much to explore what each member contributes to the Red Lotus apart from their bending. They are powerful benders who look cool but that’s it.