The Subtle Copaganda of ‘The Legend of Korra’
Source: The Verge
I loved The Legend of Korra when it first aired (2012–2014). The show is the sequel to the hit animated series Avatar The Last Airbender (2005–2008). The series takes place in a world where people can master a form of martial arts that allows them to manipulate one of the four elements (i.e., Earth, Fire, Air, and Water). Only one person, the Avatar, can master all four elements. There is only one Avatar at one time, and when they die, they are reincarnated as someone else in the element cycle, and he and she is the core protagonist in both of these shows
Avatar The Last Airbender focused on the plucky Aang (Zach Tyler) as he traveled the world with his friends. In contrast, The Legend of Korra focuses on the brave and steadfast Korra (Janet Varney) as she spends most of her time in the metropolis known as Republic City. The show’s decision to center a strong woman of color when the Internet was far-less forgiving of such things hooked me right away (note the voice actress, Janet Varney, is white). Korra ended before the Gamergate scandal even happened. Yet swimming within such a toxic Internet culture, it tackled so many important issues: Korra had to recover from PTSD; she combatted figures representing diverse political ideologies; and in the show’s closing moments, she walked into the interdimensional sunset with her romantic partner, Asami Sato (Seychelle Gabriel).
This show has a lot of important firsts in pop culture. Korra’s relationship with Asami is personally very special to me. The love I have for this particular aspect, however, doesn’t mean I am not going to point out other things I find wrong with The Legend of Korra. From its handling of whitewashing to an uneven development schedule, the show had some problems. Its relationship with the police is no exception.
While the series is progressive on many laudable fronts, it’s ultimately regressive in how it views power and policing. It often places the police of its world in an uncritically favorable light, and more than that, it emphasizes the need for order and stability over the fight for social change.
While Aang traveled the world with his friends to stop the evil Fire Lord Ozai (Mark Hamill) from taking over the world, Korra tries to safeguard a mostly “stable” world from arising threats. With a few exceptions, she often ends up as a force protecting the status quo. She spends most of her time with titans of industry, heads of state, and police officers.
The first introduction we have to Republic City’s metal-bending police is telling. It features a series of beautiful shots as the officers descend elegantly onto the street below. Korra actually gushes about how cool they are before they arrest her for vigilantism. This framing of police as “cool metal-benders who dispassionately enforce the law” is the primary way they are portrayed on the show. We only ever see the metal-bending police portrayed negatively when the corrupt councilmember Tarrlok (Dee Bradley Baker) manipulates them for his own nefarious purposes.
In fact, the show doesn’t stop with cool police background characters. Many of Korra’s immediate influences are kickass police officers. The most obvious example is Chief of Police Lin Beifong (Mindy Sterling), a reoccurring character, who first meets Korra in an interrogation room. Korra has been arrested for attacking members of a crime syndicate known as The Triple Threat Triad, and Lin has come to give the Avatar a talking to. She has faith in the system and believes that Korra should have let the police handle the situation:
LIN: Oh, I am well aware of who you are, and your avatar title might impress some people, but not me…You can’t just waltz in here and dole out vigilante justice like you own the place.
Lin believes in the system, even if the Triple Threat Triad members probably would have succeeded if Korra hadn’t intervened in this particular instance. This tension means that it takes episodes for these two characters to develop an actual rapport. Their friendship does build, however, and we are meant to see Lin as redeemed when it happens. She saves Korra from a great fall in the Pro-bending Arena, and then later, heroically sacrifices her bending in a bid to give Tenzin and his family the chance to flee Republic City from a violent separatist movement. Lin may be cold and stubborn, but ultimately the show emphasizes that she cares deeply about the world around her.
Our love for Lin is further accentuated by the fact that she is the daughter of Toph Beifong (Kate Higgins) — a fan favorite from the original series — who single-handedly discovered metal-bending. She was also the original Chief of Police for Republic City, which adds further credence to the entire organization.
The other major police officer character in Korra’s life is her dear friend and former romantic partner, Mako (David Faustino). Partly to atone for his past as a former gang member, he joins the police force as a beat cop in season 2 and remains more or less attached to it for the remainder of the series. His faith in this system is strained at several moments, but never breaks, and sometimes that faith can cause him to unfairly judge people in dire straights. When a teenage petty thief and an orphan named Kai (Skyler Brigmann) joins the cast in season three, Mako cautions him with some pretty harsh words:
“I just want you to know, I’m going to be watching you kid. I know exactly what you’re all about because I’ve been there before. You don’t have me fooled.”
To reiterate, Kai spent his entire life as an orphan. He was then adopted by a rich family, and stole their possessions and went on the run, which is a very realistic response from someone who has never known any security in their life. Why would you trust someone after a lifetime of vulnerability?
Mako looks upon that history, one he should understand as a former poor orphan, and treats it with distrust and disdain. He doesn’t think Kai should be trusted partly because he is ashamed of his own past as a wayward youth, and sadly, that distrust is proven right in the narrative. Kai goes on to do many morally questionable things (e.g., stealing Mako’s wallet, trapping Mako and his brother in the lower ring of Ba Sing Se, etc.). While Mako eventually grows to accept Kai, it’s only because the latter proves himself through heroics on the battlefield and the air nomad lifestyle, not out of any empathy for Kai’s former circumstances. His apology towards the end of season three reflects this:
Mako: Hey, I appreciate you coming back for us. Sorry for ever giving you a hard time.
Kai: That’s okay. I probably deserved it.
Mako: Yeah, you kinda did.
I personally found it frustrating that Mako, as a police officer, learns to like Kai only after the teen proves themselves to be of value. It’s a troubling framing, and while I don’t think the creators intended it this way, it's the message that bleeds through regardless.
Mako may be a little bit of a doofus when it comes to communication, but like with Lin, we aren’t meant to dislike him. He is one of the show’s leads, and he turns out to be another gruff-yet-likable cop. There may be the occasional inefficiency and corruption within this world's police system, but there are always people like Lin and Mako to pick up the slack and make sure that Team Avatar beats the bad guys.
It may be easy to dismiss this world as pure fantasy, but the cops in The Legend of Korra often draw parallels to the cops of our world. Season 2 involves introducing two characters — Lu (Mark Allan Stewart) and Gang (Rick Zieff) — who appear to be direct spoofs from old buddy cop movies. Except for the magical-bending, there is no attempt to institutionally distinguished the police officers of this world from the ones of our world. So the fact that their portrayals are so positive and sympathetic undeniably enters the realm of copaganda.
However, the situation in The Legend of Korra is actually far worse than the police officers in her life. Her character is fundamentally the manifestation of the copaganda trope, and to talk about why we have to dive a little more into the specifics of what copaganda even means.
Korra is not a police officer. She is a kickass bender from the Southern Water Tribe who spends most of her time butting heads against authority figures such as President Raiko (Spencer Garrett), Chief of Police Lin Beifong, and Councilmember Tarrlok. She went against everyone's better judgment and opened the portal to the spirit world, and she has never been shy to assert her voice above her peers.
By Avatar Kyoshi’s war fan, how can this show be anything close to copaganda?
When we talk about copaganda, it’s important to distinguish between the word and the phenomenon it describes. The term is a portmanteau of the words “cop” and “propaganda ” We can find traces of it stretching back over a decade in liberal activist circles. The word generally describes media that favors the police and depicts them as a supreme good in our society. This type of media existed long before the term itself and it’s problematic because it ultimately ends up creating an ideology of “Law and Order” that flattens the nuances surrounding crime and justice.
Cops are good. Criminals are bad. End of story.
We have a widespread belief in America that this simplistic ideology is not only necessary, but that it is the only thing that stands in the way between us and “evil.” When, for example, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, then-Governor Ronald Reagan blamed the assassination on the Civil Rights Movements’ campaign of civil disobedience. He remarked on the day of Martin Luther King Jr’s funeral that it was “…a great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order and people started choosing which laws they’d break.’’
The desire for “Law and Order” is something so baked into our society that it infects nearly every aspect of the zeitgeist. As you are probably well aware, there is a popular crime genre franchise literally called Law & Order (1990–2010) with four spinoffs (Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999 — present), Law & Order: Criminal Intent (2001–2011), Law & Order: Trial by Jury (2005–2006), Law & Order: True Crime (2017; hiatus)) that all total over 1,174 episodes and counting, with two more shows in the works (Law & Order: Organized Crime and Law & Order: Hate Crimes). Nearly every episode of Law & Order involves a hardboiled group of detectives locking up a criminal in 45 minutes or less to avenge a victim who has been wronged, which dovetails very succinctly into our working definition of copaganda — the police catch the bad guys, and that makes everyone safe.
Law & Order is by no means an anomaly in popular culture. Crime shows reached their lowest point in the 2019–2020 television season by making up only one-fifth of all scripted shows on network TV. These shows have historically been told from a white perspective (e.g., they have little or no minority representation on screen or in the writer’s room or directors chair) and that biases their overall construction.
This problem with perspective is a trend dating back over half a century. The NBC show Dragnet (1951–1959), for example, was a widely influential police procedural during the 1950s that began every episode telling its viewers that the story they were about to see was true. The show worked closely with the LAPD to obtain that veneer of authenticity, a partnership that led to police officers' depiction as objective dispensers of justice. As the character Frank Smith says in episode 28, season 7 (The Big War):
“You know Joe, you have to be absolutely factual in your reports: factual, brief, and accurate.”
Even though such a characterization glossed over a more brutal history of racism and corruption within the department, it quickly became the standard for most procedurals. It’s nowadays difficult to find a show that doesn’t try to depict police officers' heroics in the crime-show genre through the lens of authenticity. Law & Order likewise began every episode with a similar theme that told their viewers that they were seeing the stories of investigators and prosecutors. We even see the relatively progressive buddy cop show Brooklyn Nine-Nine (2013 — present) depict most cops as good people inching towards incrementalist reform. As Captain Holt (Andre Braugher) states in episode 3 of season 3 (Boyle’s Hunch):
“All the headlines are about the bad cops, but there are good cops, too.”
This trend of portraying the police as “the good guys” who solve society’s most heinous problems has been going on for a long time, and yet, it doesn’t align with reality. We have seen from multiple reports on policing across the United States that most officers' time is not spent solving “serious” crimes, but more mundane activities such as traffic and noncriminal calls. When officers are involved with solving rape and murder incidents, it doesn’t necessarily lead to the heroics of your favorite crime show. In a recent article in the New York Times, four victims of sexual assault discussed how police downplayed and dismissed their claims. Other reporting has sadly revealed that cops themselves often use their position of privilege to commit sexual assault.
This more complicated reality is why progressives and leftists routinely categorize shows such as Law & Order, Dragnet, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine as copaganda. These shows maintain a fantasy that actively gets in the way of our discussions on justice. There might genuinely be people in police forces who believe they are doing good. Still, they end up enforcing a system that routinely punishes poor people of color for minor offenses. In fact, recent reporting from The Atlantic and NPR indicates that cops who try to hold their fellow officers accountable are disproportionately censured or even fired. Cop shows bury this reality by making people believe in a version of policing that is a lie.
The copaganda label doesn’t stop and end with TV series’ either, and can expansively be applied to any media that uncritically glorifies police officers as heroes. News articles that overemphasize police officers' perspectives are also commonly placed into this category, as well as social media posts that depict police officers positively for the sake of clout.
Again, copaganda is about the false mindset of glorifying our society's watchmen without criticizing their authority. Its impact is far-reaching and has pervaded our very notion of what a hero means.
We exist in a moment in pop culture where a lot of divergent trends (e.g., our ideas of crime, heroics, and nerd culture) have collided together in film and television to say something unique about heroes. Some of the highest-grossing films of all time are superhero films (e.g., Avengers: Endgame, and Avenger’s: Infinity War). A lot of these cultural products are rooted in source material that intersects with or, in some cases, directly embraces copaganda.
Many of us are familiar with the two largest comic book publishers in the United States — DC and Marvel — but what might be lost to history for some fans is that many comic-books originally started in the crime genre. DC is actually short for Detective Comics, and during the comic-book boom of the 1940s and early 1950s, crime stories were some of the highest-selling stories. Popularity in this genre has since wained, in part due to regulation and a reactionary backlash. Children and adults alike are now far more likely to read stories of caped crusaders than grizzled detectives. The DNA of that history, however, remains in the stories that we read.
When we look at Batman and Spiderman, they often have a close working relationship with the police. The game Spiderman (2018) on the PlayStation 4, for example, depicts hero Peter Parker (aka Spiderman) idolizing the police so much that he has a goofy alter ego called “Spider Cop.” Superheroes, in many ways, embody the values copaganda says our cops should possess. They are frequently righteous defenders who defeat bad guys for the betterment of society. This connection caused Eliana Dockterman to write in Time:
…most superhero stories star straight, white men who either function as an extension of a broken U.S. justice system or as vigilantes without any checks on their powers. Usually, they have some sort of tentative relationship with the government…And even when superheroes function outside the justice system, they’re sometimes idolized by police because they are able to skirt the law to “get the job done.”
Many of our most fantastic heroes can sadly fall within the realm of copaganda, including Avatar Korra.
Korra can master the four elements because the spirit of light and peace, Raava (April Stewart), embodies every Avatar reincarnation. The Avatar’s job is explicitly to bring “balance” to the world, but what that balance looks like is highly contingent on her privileged upbringing.
The daughter of the Chief of the Southern Water Tribe, Korra was born into a world built by Aang’s victory against the Fire Lord 70 years earlier. She was isolated at a young age by her father and the Order of the White Lotus to protect her from a rogue anarchist group known as the Red Lotus. This insularity made her independent and headstrong with a desire to rebel against authority figures such as her father, Tonraq (James Remar), or her teacher Tenzin (J.K. Simmons). The show wants us to believe that Korra is balancing out different perspectives on her journey of self-discovery (and she does in part), but she oftentimes ends up reinforcing the power structures she has always known.
Each season has her battling against a foe that represents a distinct political ideology: season one has her fighting against the anti-bender Equalist Amon (Steve Blum) as a cipher for communism; season two is against religious fundamentalist Unalaq (Steve Blum), season three, she fights the radical anarchist Zaheer (Henry Rollins), and season four she wages war against authoritarian dictator Kuvira (Zelda Williams).
These ideologies are never presented in good faith. The villains are frequently power-hungry and, in some cases, are just lying about their intentions. Amon, for example, pretends to carry a scar inflicted upon him by a fight with a fire bender, and Unalaq gaslights Korra for most of the second season. We never seriously see someone besides the villain advocate for their beliefs, and it undercuts their credibility. The closest exception comes in season four by fan-favorite Toph Beifong.
While in the Great Swamp, Toph lectures Korra about the wisdom of her enemies:
“You said you saw your past enemies…you ever consider maybe you could learn something from them?…Listen what did Amon want? Equality for all. Unalaq? He brought back the spirits. And Zaheer believed in Freedom. The problem was that those guys were totally out of balance and they took their ideologies too far.”
Toph argues that all the show’s villains had fair points, but their methods went too far, yet this viewpoint is nonsensical.
The ideas of anarchism, communism, religious fundamentalism, and authoritarianism— although they can overlap in some areas — are widely contradictory. It’s not possible for all these viewpoints to be “correct.” Toph’s and, by extension, the show’s worldview belies an understanding of “progress” that focuses less on the beliefs people are fighting for and more on preserving institutionality.
The major reforms that take place in this world happen because good institutions let them happen. The United Republic Council — an unelected group of representatives appointed from each of the world’s five major polities, that governed the United Republic in the first season— dissolves itself sometime offscreen between the first and second season. The equalist movement “proved” to the council that they were unnecessary, and they then voluntarily choose to dissolve themselves in favor of a democratically elected president.
Likewise, Prince Wu (Sunil Malhotra), who was slated to take over the Earth Kingdom before Kuvira staged a coup, decides at the end of the fourth season that he is going to turn the Earth Kingdom into a democracy. This transition happens suddenly because he just decides it’s the better decision for his people. As he says nonchalantly in the series finale: “I really think the Earth Kingdom would be better off if the states were independent and had elected leaders. Like The United Republic.”
These changes happen because powerful people eventually see the error of their ways, and not because of political movements fighting for power. Change is institutional. The main characters fight to preserve harmony between the nations of the world, and progress sorts itself out.
When that harmony isn’t maintained, such as when Zaheer assassinates the Earth Queen in season three, it leads to general anarchy that places the whole international system into jeopardy. The Earth Kingdom capital of Ba Sing Se, for example, descends into a disorganized riot upon the queen’s death as looters begin to steal possessions from the upper rings. The following years then involve a brutal struggle for control as the Earth Kingdom is thrown into general chaos.
If that description sounds like a bunch of dog whistles, well it’s because the overarching philosophy on The Legend of Korra can at times be strangely conservative.
The idea that a lack of institutionality can lead to dangerous anarchy is itself a political assumption about human nature that is highly contentious. The belief that order is all that stands in the way between us and barbarism is one that has been debated in philosophy for centuries, and directly ties into our current cultural battle over the police. The Defund the Police movement is based on the principle that “mutual aid,” or the voluntary exchange of resources within a community, not order, is what lessons crime. We have seen a myriad of public figures argue recently that if you invest in things such as mental health, housing, food security, education, and so forth, you will actually build a more stable society.
We even see this within the fall of Ba Sing Se. The city was a heavily stratified society with poverty everywhere in the lower rings. The fall of the Earth Queen prompted rioting, not because it was inevitable, but because people were starving and needed the resources to eat. The Earth Kingdom’s government was a threat to its people's standard of living, and so its collapse makes perfectly logical sense. Why would people stay committed to a political organization that does not serve them? That’s not chaos, it’s a natural chain of events in response to a long chain of abuses.
The rise of the dictator Kuvira occurred because the international community, however, assumed that that anarchy was inherently dangerous. They tasked Kuvira with reuniting the Earth Kingdom, and ended up creating a political order that threatened their stability — Kuvira turned her sights on the world. Her dictatorial impulse, however, was not itself the problem. If Prince Wu had returned to his throne at the beginning of season four, it’s doubtful that Korra would have ever butted heads against Kuvira or Wu. The harmony between the Five Kingdoms would have been restored — the citizens of the Earth Kingdom be damned.
It’s only when Kuvira decided to disrupt that institutional balance that she was cast as a villain, and that conception of harmony strikes at the core of why I think this show is copaganda. The Legend of Korra is not just copaganda because of it’s many positive police characters, but because Korra herself is the physical manifestation of the status quo. She is like a living, breathing NATO willing to scorch the world’s enemies with whatever element is required.
I loved this show growing up, and part of me still does love it. I had to rewatch this series several times to make this article and much of what I adore about it is still there. I love the beautiful way this world is rendered, the stunning choreography of the fight scenes, the intergenerational dynamics between Tenzin’s children and his siblings, and the budding, albeit subtle, relationship between Korra and Asami.
When I think of this show’s larger themes, however, I can’t help but cringe. The show undeniably fits some of the worst aspects of copaganda, and it unsettles me. It feels like staring into a time capsule of another life — one where people honestly believed they could solve their problems by just trusting the process. I don’t know if such a belief was ever actually real, but the world I live in now makes it hard to even go through the notions of such a false idea. Bad faith actors have ravished my world, and I don’t have a spirit of light to protect me or the ones I love.
I instead have had to see politics for the reality that it is — one of asserting your beliefs for survival. We don’t have the luxury of having to pretend like all sides are equally valid, and many never did.
Korra wasn’t able to make that distinction because she existed within a privileged worldview — one that made it difficult for her to make hard stands against people. She would have had to declare that people such as Lin or her partner Asami of Future Industries are in the wrong, not simply situationally, but systemically.
She would have had to oppose the systems that some of her cherished friends upheld, and they probably wouldn't have been friends anymore.
Criticism hurts because it’s seeing the harm that has always been there. It can be a painful process because it means you can’t look upon something the same way again. Hard as I might, I am not going to be able to return to The Legend of Korra’s world with enthusiastic eyes. I don’t believe in this show’s foundational principles anymore, and that makes me want to weep for the illusion of progress I thought I had, but that our society never really went through.
The good news about criticizing the things that you love, however, is that it makes space both personally and societally for new things to cherish. We open up the conversation for new cultural products to better tell the truth as we see it, albeit imperfectly, and the cycle joyously begins anew.