And certainly, Korra and Asami shouldn’t have had to kiss for kissing’s sake. Over at Polygon, Megan Farkhmanesh argues it’s better that both characters’ sexuality is acknowledged but not exploited. On its own, leaving out the kiss a isn’t a bad thing. And the final scene’s animation is dazzling, with music designed to be “tender and romantic.” But to see any actual smooching, fans had to take matters into their own. Having the women face each other holding hands directly recalled two different characters’ nuptial pose earlier in the episode. Instead, the writers had to rely on visual cues and ambiance.
(Nickelodeon did not return a request for comment for this story.) The same, it appears, would have been too much to give Korra and Asami. Korra’s predecessor, the also excellent Avatar: The Last Airbender, ended with a similar shot, one where its (male) hero, Aang, firmly embraced and kissed Katara, his longtime friend, cementing their new romantic relationship. And I didn’t want to look back in 20 years and think, ‘Man, we could have fought harder for that.’ Mike and I talked it over and decided it was important to be unambiguous about the intended relationship.”īut in a sentence that contains untold volumes, Konietzko describes approaching Nickelodeon with the idea of making Korra and Asami's relationship explicit: “While they were supportive,” he writes, “there was a limit to how far we could go with it.” He doesn’t specify where Nickelodeon drew the line exactly, but he probably doesn’t have to. “If we want to see that paradigm evolve, we need to take a stand against it. “It was just another assumption based on a paradigm that marginalizes non-heterosexual people,” he writes.
Thankfully, Konietzko eventually worked up the guts to question the “unwritten rule,” realizing that no one ever explicitly told him not to depict same-sex relationships on the show. And then there was that time a network tried passing off Sailor Moon’s superpowered lesbian couple, Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune, as “cousins” (erasing an entire cast of queer supporting characters along with them.) Ren and Stimpy’s feelings for each other were acknowledged only in a much later, adult-oriented version of the series. Bert and Ernie, as Sesame Street exasperatedly clarified, are not gay. He was right: In 2010, there weren’t any examples of same-sex couples on mainstream children’s TV. At first we didn’t give it much weight, not because we think same-sex relationships are a joke, but because we never assumed it was something we would ever get away with depicting on an animated show for a kids network in this day and age, or at least in 2010.” Konietzko elaborates further: “As we wrote Book 1, before the audience had ever laid eyes on Korra and Asami, it was an idea I would kick around the writers’ room. “The moment where they enter the spirit portal symbolizes their evolution from being friends to being a couple.” “Our intention with the last scene was to make it as clear as possible that yes, Korra and Asami have romantic feelings for each other,” DiMartino wrote in a brief post on his website. There was no kiss, which (I guess) could have allowed viewers to interpret the hand-holding as platonic, but on Monday night, the show’s writers, Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, made it explicit: Korra and Asami are bisexual. In the episode’s final seconds, the two women held hands, turned and gazed at each other lovingly while romantic music played, and walked off together into the bright light of the Spirit World.
AVATAR KORRA KISS SERIES
With its series finale, Korra went even further: It revealed that its main heroine, Korra, and another female character named Asami were in love.
It went places American children’s television typically avoids, with an ethnically diverse cast of characters-including a number of powerful, complicated girls and women-tackling deep issues like social inequality, war, and PTSD. Nickelodeon’s animated hit series The Legend of Korra was always progressive.