Korra thoughts
Dec. 31st, 2014 11:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
soc_puppetI haven't posted about Korra here for a while, and that's mostly been because I haven't been keeping up with it really well. There's been various reasons for that, my schedule among them, but possibly chief among them is that I didn't feel that excited about it after the first season.
Then, everything changed whenthe Fire Nation attacked I found out about the endgame ship.
How ecstatic can one person even be? I'd stopped hoping for my ships to be canon shortly after I started shipping slash in its various forms, clinging to hints and maybes to the point where I even stopped expecting my het ships to come to fruition. (Though the het ship thing also has something to do with how I mostly watch cartoons and anime, and a lot of US cartoons don't have definitive endings, or even a lot of continuity. Even with live action, UST sells better than resolved tension, so waiting and hoping became par for the course.) Kataang was exciting to me for that very reason. Then Rose/Kanaya happened, which blew me out of the water, because it's a queer ship, and even on webcomcis I never truly expect it to happen. When one of my ships becomes canon, I truly celebrate it.
That said, I've been thinking for some years now that, if we (viewers, queer people) were to get a real, canon queer main character, not a background character (Clarence), or something that's hinted at and then denied (Bubblegum/Marcelene after the What Was Missing incident), or another Dumbledore, it would happen in the Avatar-verse. Mike and Bryan have been pushing the envelope of what's considered socially acceptable in televised cartoon series since the first episode of ATLA, with an all POC cast and feminist themes, acknowledgement and inclusion of disability, dealing with traumatic experiences and events like genocide, etc. I didn't know for sure, but I hoped deep in my fangirl heart that Mike and Bryan were queer-friendly and that we might someday see a secondary character who was queer.
And then Korrasami happened and the internet exploded - and so did my heart. Two bisexual WOC main characters in a children's TV show who end up together! I could cry. I probably did, at least a little; I'm still getting a little teary-eyed just thinking about it. It was, again, more than I ever expected (though again, inasmuch as I expected anything, I expected it from this franchise), and while it was perhaps not as much as I may have hoped for, Bryan and Mike BOTH confirmed that they'd fought to make it as overt as they could. Sometimes, you really do get to have heroes :')
What do I expect next for inclusion? A same-sex parent couple on Sesame Street, and/or a completely horrible, stereotype-ridden, perpetual-butt-of-the-joke character on the Total Drama franchise (or similar). More background and side characters. Maybe a Very Special Episode or two, possibly even with a trans character. Well-developed, celebrated main characters will be longer in coming. Slowly, representation will start creeping in. Probably a lot of it will be bad and/or problematic to start with, will probably continue to be bad and/or problematic for a good while yet, but I will never forget the hope that Korrasami has given me.
Then, everything changed when
How ecstatic can one person even be? I'd stopped hoping for my ships to be canon shortly after I started shipping slash in its various forms, clinging to hints and maybes to the point where I even stopped expecting my het ships to come to fruition. (Though the het ship thing also has something to do with how I mostly watch cartoons and anime, and a lot of US cartoons don't have definitive endings, or even a lot of continuity. Even with live action, UST sells better than resolved tension, so waiting and hoping became par for the course.) Kataang was exciting to me for that very reason. Then Rose/Kanaya happened, which blew me out of the water, because it's a queer ship, and even on webcomcis I never truly expect it to happen. When one of my ships becomes canon, I truly celebrate it.
That said, I've been thinking for some years now that, if we (viewers, queer people) were to get a real, canon queer main character, not a background character (Clarence), or something that's hinted at and then denied (Bubblegum/Marcelene after the What Was Missing incident), or another Dumbledore, it would happen in the Avatar-verse. Mike and Bryan have been pushing the envelope of what's considered socially acceptable in televised cartoon series since the first episode of ATLA, with an all POC cast and feminist themes, acknowledgement and inclusion of disability, dealing with traumatic experiences and events like genocide, etc. I didn't know for sure, but I hoped deep in my fangirl heart that Mike and Bryan were queer-friendly and that we might someday see a secondary character who was queer.
And then Korrasami happened and the internet exploded - and so did my heart. Two bisexual WOC main characters in a children's TV show who end up together! I could cry. I probably did, at least a little; I'm still getting a little teary-eyed just thinking about it. It was, again, more than I ever expected (though again, inasmuch as I expected anything, I expected it from this franchise), and while it was perhaps not as much as I may have hoped for, Bryan and Mike BOTH confirmed that they'd fought to make it as overt as they could. Sometimes, you really do get to have heroes :')
What do I expect next for inclusion? A same-sex parent couple on Sesame Street, and/or a completely horrible, stereotype-ridden, perpetual-butt-of-the-joke character on the Total Drama franchise (or similar). More background and side characters. Maybe a Very Special Episode or two, possibly even with a trans character. Well-developed, celebrated main characters will be longer in coming. Slowly, representation will start creeping in. Probably a lot of it will be bad and/or problematic to start with, will probably continue to be bad and/or problematic for a good while yet, but I will never forget the hope that Korrasami has given me.
