The Legend of Korra - Turf Wars

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"Avatar: The Last Airbender" and it's sequel "The Legend of Korra" featured some of the best worldbuilding of any cartoon series I've ever seen. The various societies were rich, and complex, and they included their resident elemental powers with creativity and practicality.



One area the cartoon did not expand on was how certain social matters were addressed, and the Korra finale, which showed Korra joining hands with Asami Sato, the woman she loves, as they step into the Spirit World, was positively subversive in showing a blossoming same sex relationship.

So it's good news that Turf Wats, the graphic novel continuation of the series, and which is written by Michael Dante DiMartino (one of the series co-creators), with line art by Irene Koh and colouring by Jane Bak and Vivian Ng, and which is considered canon with the cartoon (the series other creator Bryan Konietzko, is a consultant on the series), is addressing this;

So Korra and Asami have returned from the Spirit World and are ealing with matters arising from the the end of the series, during which the meet up with Kya, the daughter Aang and Katara, who reveals a bit more about her own life than we already knew.









So in four short pages, we have Kya outing herself to our lesbian bizexual heroes, discussion of the Air Nomad, Water Tribe and Fire Nation attitude towards differing orientations, and the reveal that Kyoshi, a previous Avatar, was most likley bisexual. Now that's concsise storytelling!

Comments

[lieut_kettch]

The Fire Nation reason seems pretty straightforward. Sozin probably intended to outbreed all the other nations so that Firebenders were a majority. Any union incapable of procreation was therefore taboo.

And lack of religion has never been an impediment to homophobia. Case in point: the reeducation camps in the former Soviet Union.

[full_metal_ox]

There's also an exquisite (and possibly relevant) irony in the fact that the Sozin Dynasty themselves seem to have a track record of breeding like pandas: we know of one child in Azulon's generation; two (at an interval that amounts to a generation) in Iroh and Ozai's; three in Lu Ten's, Zuko's, and Azula's (and Iroh's line extinct with the loss of Lu Ten); one in Izumi's, and two in Iroh II's (he has a sister as yet unnamed.)