Forget Netflix’s Last Airbender remake—Remake The Legend of Korra instead

Netflix’s is remaking Avatar: The Last Airbender, but with the original creators gone, things don’t look good. But ATLA didn’t need a remake to begin with.

Since debuting on Netflix a few months back, Avatar: The Last Airbender has found a new crop of enthusiastic fans, so many that the series has broken records for the streaming service. The show, a three-season animated epic from Nickelodeon, deserves the accolades: it’s well-paced, full of sharply drawn characters, and has a great mix of action, humor and drama that helps viewers digest its occasionally weighty themes. It’s a show made for kids that can be enjoyed by adults. It’s great.

And it was surging at the right time, because Netflix is currently work on a live-action remake of the show. And then: disaster. Original creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, who were signed on as showrunners and executive producers on the remake, walked away, citing creative differences. Suddenly, a ton of enthusiasm went out of The Last Airbender hype bubble. I, at least, am far less interested in seeing a version of this story that doesn’t involve the people who made the original show. M. Night Shyamalan tried to make a movie version without them and it didn’t go well:

No more of that, thank you.

Maybe The Last Airbender remake will be good; it’s too early to tell for sure. But the chances just went down. But there’s another way to look at this: did The Last Airbender need a remake at all? The original animated series was about as close to perfect as a TV show can be; what exactly could be improved by taking it live-action? The very fact that Netflix is trying tacitly supports the idea that live-action shows are inherently superior to animated ones, which I don’t think is true. If the Netflix show bombs, the animated original will still be there, and it will still be awesome, and that’s a pretty good thing to be.

However, there is a show that could benefit from a remake, and may be a better fit for a live-action adaptation anyway: The Legend of Korra, the sequel show DiMartino and Konietzko made for Nickelodeon after The Last Airbender wrapped.

The Legend of Korra: Pros and Cons

The Legend of Korra takes place a few generations after Avatar: The Last Airbender, after lead character Aang has died. Aang was the Avatar, the one person on the planet able to control — or bend — all four elements, charged with maintaining balance between the peoples of the world. His successor is Korra, a hot-headed teenage waterbender who is as brash and defiant as Aang was agreeable and easy-going.

The show was divisive almost from the start, and has a fraught history. Some people loved that Korra was a more aggressive character than Aang, more prone to making mistakes, more challenging for audiences. Others hated her and had no problem saying so. The show’s setting, which was much more modern, came under fire for straying away from the East Asian influences of ATLA and embracing a westernized aesthetic that undermined the anti-colonial bent of the original show.

And the pacing wasn’t what it used to be. ATLA builds for its entire run, with every episode deepening the characters and conflict until everything comes together in a masterpiece of a series finale. Korra was more herky-jerky; its first two seasons, which DiMartino and Konietzko wrote without the aid of a writers’ room, are widely considered to be inferior to its third and fourth, with the second being the nadir.

All that said, The Legend of Korra is a good show…just not as consistently, dependably good as its predecessor. Korra was very ambitious, and had moments that reached further than anything attempted on ATLA. Its villains, notably the anarchist airbender Zahir, were hard to pin down as purely evil; they raised some interesting points and had some viewers wondering if Korra shouldn’t be fighting alongside them rather than against them.

And Korra herself was put through the ringer in ways Aang never was. She spends much of season 4 largely out of commission following a traumatic event, and the show explores her rocky recovery with grace and insight. And the final moments of the show, which confirm that Korra was in a relationship with the character Asami, were widely lauded as a step forward for LGBTQIA representation in children’s entertainment.

Why The Legend of Korra needs a remake more than Avatar: The Last Airbender

So again: Korra is good, but it’s also messy in a way that ATLA never was. If you ask me, Korra could benefit a lot more from a remake that ATLA could. Here would be a chance for the creators to deemphasize stuff that didn’t work, like the network of love triangles and quadrangles that had fans rolling their eyes in the first two seasons. They could trim the fat in season 2, and underline stuff that resonated, like the relationship between Korra and Asami.

They could also explore the show’s more mature themes more directly. However dark Korra got, it was still a kids’ show, so there were only so many angles it could take on Korra’s post-traumatic stress, for example, or her attraction to Asami. Fairly or otherwise, a live-action show would be considered more “mature,” and that freedom could open up the narrative in exciting ways.

It also helps that the characters in Korra are older. I love Aang, Sokka, Katara and Toph, but it’s gonna be tricky to find four child actors who can go the distance with those roles. Not every actor is going to turn out to be Maisie Williams from Game of Thrones, who convincingly played young Arya Stark convincingly for eight straight seasons. You might end up with a Noah Ringer, who played Aang in the M. Night Shyamalan movie to universal jeers.

Not that Ringer deserved any personal attacks, mind you; casting him in the first place was a mistake that goes to prove how difficult it is to find effective child actors. Netflix could always age the characters up, but then you change the tone of the show. But in Korra, you could cast older actors in the roles of Korra, Asami, Bolin and Mako and be more certain of their success. Korra also relies less than ATLA on zany visual humor that works well in animation but can be hard to translate to live-action.

Put this all together, and it’s easy to see how Legend of Korra could benefit from a live-action remake while Avatar: The Last Airbender, which is pretty much perfect the way it is, could stand to be left alone.

Who knows what’ll happen next? Maybe Netflix’s ATLA remake will be a home run and we’ll get Korra eventually anyway. The chances of them abandoning the remake altogether in favor of Korra seem pretty slim, but you never know; mostly I’m just trying to make myself feel better after hearing that the original creators walked away from the new show.

What do you make of all of this? If you’re looking for context, both Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra are now available to watch on Netflix in their entirety.

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