Which The Legend of Korra Character Are You?

Learn More About The Legend of Korra

The Legend of Korra had an almost impossible job. Following Avatar: The Last Airbender — a show that had become a benchmark for what American animation could do — meant every choice would be measured against a nearly flawless predecessor. Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko’s response was to refuse the rematch entirely. Instead of another journey across a pre-industrial world, they jumped forward seventy years and dropped the new Avatar into a city.

Republic City is the whole thesis. It is a 1920s-flavored metropolis of cars, radio broadcasts, electric light and organized crime, built on land Aang and Zuko set aside for a nation where benders and non-benders would live together. By the time Korra arrives, that experiment is straining badly. The show is fundamentally about what happens to a hero built for battlefields when the problem is a political one.

Korra herself is the sharpest departure. Where Aang spent his series reluctant to be the Avatar, Korra announces it on arrival — brash, physical, impatient, and completely unprepared for the one element that requires stillness. She is not an easy protagonist, and the show is unusually willing to let her be wrong, be beaten, and be genuinely damaged by it. Season three ends with an injury she does not simply shake off, and season four opens with her missing, recovering, and unable to access her own power. Very few children’s programs have handled post-traumatic stress with that kind of patience.

The supporting cast grew into something special. Mako and Bolin are orphaned brothers who came up on the streets and through pro-bending, the show’s enormously fun stadium sport. Asami Sato is an industrialist’s daughter whose father turns out to be financing the revolution aimed at her friends. Lin Beifong, Toph’s daughter and Republic City’s chief of police, arrives as an obstacle and becomes one of the series’ most quietly moving characters once her family history surfaces in season three.

Each of the four seasons was built around a distinct antagonist with a genuinely arguable position: Amon and his anti-bending revolution, Unalaq and spiritual reunification, Zaheer’s anarchism, and Kuvira’s authoritarian unification of the Earth Kingdom. Zaheer in particular is often singled out as one of animation’s great villains — principled, articulate, and terrifying precisely because his critique of hereditary power is not nonsense.

The series also made television history in its final seconds. Korra and Asami walking into the spirit portal hand in hand was the first time a Nickelodeon show had ended on a same-sex romantic pairing between its leads, confirmed shortly afterward by both creators and later developed further in the comics. In 2014 that was a genuinely difficult thing to put on screen, and the finale is still cited as a turning point for LGBTQ+ representation in Western animation.

Its production history was rocky — seasons shortened, budgets cut, the final season pushed to online-only release — and the show was underrated for years partly because of it. That has since reversed. Since landing on streaming, Korra has found the audience that first watched The Last Airbender as kids and met Korra as adults, which is arguably who the show was written for all along.

Want more of this world? Take our Teen Titans character quiz for another animated ensemble that grew up with its audience, or branch out with Which Percy Jackson Character Are You?