Quote Originally Posted by Scowling Dragon View Post

Anyway I am bugged by how season 1 wrapped up. Its so tight. With no loose ends.

Korra should have lost her bending. So since before she had the will, now she needs to learn the way. Or something or whatever. The season blew its load way too quickly.
That's a result of them planning for only one Season.

Which was kind of silly. You're making a sequel to one of the most successful animated shows in recent memory, and you are only thinking about one season?

The resolution could work as-is, all the pieces are there, they just are not put together properly.

Part of what made AtLA so great was that we really, really knew the characters. It was slow-burn character building, we got to know these characters through a thousand moments, some sad, some funny, some just awesome. They felt very Real, and very fleshed out. I fully believe that the LoK characters were just as well thought out, just not as well explored.

The Lion Turtle was a DEM, but the whole sequence worked BECAUSE we knew Aang so well. We knew exactly what was going on in his head. It seems arbitrary because Aang receives an external reward (Energybending) for an Internal Struggle (His duty as the Avatar+ Desire to stop Ozai vs Personal Beliefs about killing), but we fully believe that he DID struggle.

Korra on the Glacier did not work. Theoretically it could have worked in the same way. Korra, faced with losing her bending, and therefore her identity, is undergoing a crisis. She's always been more concerned with how awesome a Bender she is then with being an Avatar, so losing her Awesome Benderness (And with it the main thing that makes her an Avatar) makes sense that it would trigger a crisis. In the end, she decides to stop whining and Be The Avatar, with or without her ability to Bend multiple elements. As a result she is able to connect with her past lives, and then Mako shows up for Makouts.

We can imagine that is happening, and it fits with prior evidence. However, we don't KNOW it's happening. All we See is Korra being sad on a Glacier, and then Aang shows up and is like "I WILL SOLVE ALL YOUR PROBLEMS", and then Mako shows up for Makouts. We KNEW exactly what struggle Aang was going through, both because of what we were shown, and because of what we knew about his character from three seasons of buildup. With Korra, all we got were two moments, her reactions to "I will take your bending, and you will be nothing" and "Half-Baked Avatar", which helps set up her Crisis, but we have no idea what's going on in her head.