The city ain't a single block: the problem of place in Legend of Korra S1

Look. I know the first season of Avatar: The Legend of Korra was kind of a train wreck. This is old news. A slew of pacing problems compounded with a perfectly misplaced love triangle, and the result was an incoherent mess that didn't address its own central theme of class-based oppression and retribution. That's old news, but it's still there, like a scab that never quite got clean.

So let's pick at it.

Avatar: The Last Airbender was, among other things, a show about travel. Every episode had us in a different part of the world, with new and magnificent sights to see and explore, and that wonder of exploration suffused the show right until the end. A new episode of Avatar promised to take us somewhere fresh and new, or later on, to return to an old, familiar place changed by war.

The first few episodes of Legend of Korra seemed to follow up on that promise. The first few episodes introduce us to Republic City, a booming industrial metropolis dripping with 1880s New York nostalgia. Though everything was much closer together than before, the feeling was the same. There were places to explore! People to meet! Adventures to be had!

And then it stopped.

There were still adventures going on, still new people to meet, but what had happened to that sense of wonder? Why did it suddenly feel like the city was just one big sandbox where one little building might as well be any other?

Because the show started treating it like that.

In real life, large cities are not monoliths. From neighborhood to neighborhood, block to block, architecture varies, income varies, culture varies. In its own way a city is as diverse as the wilderness of the original Avatar, just more compact. And, more to the point of Korra's central conflict, stratified by class.

By flattening out Republic City, making one neighborhood the same as the next, the first season of Korra fails to depict the unstable and stratified society on which its conflict rests. It's not the show's biggest fault, but with it comes the loss of that sense of exploration and wonder I miss so much from the original Avatar.