ooh the bolin ask got me thinking and i’m curious as to how you’d rewrite/edit asami’s character and specifically korra and asami’s relationship if you had full creative autonomy. obviously we would have to retread some familiar points here (like, lok’s entire unfortunate politic and the often shoddy secondary character work) but i’m always interested in hearing what you think on the korrasami front!

this is such a good question to ask me specifically (the ghost of tumblr user bloodbenderz pointed out in my bolin post that i was the wrong person to ask abt his character bc he’s been the bolin champion since day one whereas i. do not care for him, but i have been asami’s champion since day one so YES HELLO) i have thought extensively about asami like truly so much, especially post finale wherein i reevaluated my entire weltanschauung because korrasami simply broke my brain. asami’s position within the narrative is almost paradoxical in the sense that she is established as a primary player but her inner life itself is afforded very little room for exploration. atla does such a great job of fleshing out characters and giving them these truly human dimensions, which is probably why it’s had such a chokehold on me for well over a decade, but lok fails abysmally at this with pretty much every character except korra herself (my baby my angel light of my life etc etc).

but asami is interesting, at least conceptually. obviously id give her more narrative space to figure out her shit, but also it’s a matter of understand what kind of narrative space is the right space to afford her. as ive gestured to in other recent posts, the most interesting facets of asami’s character are her relationship to her father (ie patriarchy, the nuclear family structure, systems of interpersonal abuse), her wealth (ie the guilt that stems from possessing capital built on exploitation and violence and how she reconciles with that as a deeply principled & ethical person), and her latent feelings for korra (ie actually going further into the implications of homoeroticism in a way that doesn’t veer straight into the mawkish heavyhandedness of the comics but also doesn’t leave it entirely subtextual until the last minute).

I think korra and asami’s relationship is actually one of the strongest aspects of the show, and i like that it’s largely lowkey instead of employing the shallow trappings of heteronormative romantic troping that turned me off other relationships in avatar (eg aang and katara, korra and mako, mai and zuko). there’s a poignant subtlety to their development that i appreciate, even as i also recognize that it was largely due to network restraints. i think that korra and asami kinda have a utenanthy thing going on but like. obviously not as profound. (also korra is utena and asami is anthy dont be racist.) so a lot of what rgu does with their largely unspoken, hidden feelings that are nonetheless evident to any viewer with a brain is what i would also employ to make korrasami more powerful. obviously lok (and atla, yes i voted rgu in those polls) pale in comparison to the masterpiece that is utena, but you get it.

that said, if i really wanted to improve asami’s character, i would focalize her relationship to her father. at no point in the show does lok ever state that hiroshi was abusive, despite concrete evidence that he tried to kill his own daughter. asami loves him unconditionally despite his role in funding a terrorist movement (let’s not get into that rn ok) and attempting filicide. we’re told that asami and hiroshi fostered a sort of codependent relationship after yasuko’s death. hiroshi retreated into his grief, and asami, an isolated heiress further isolated from her peers by her staggering genius (again, her being a genius is largely only implied but like. heavily), was left to depend on him financially, physically, and emotionally, while also sort of playing his pseudowife/caretaker as he failed to take care of her and himself (and of course it’s no coincidence that she’s the spitting image of yasuko). so in some ways, asami has been very independent from a young age, and in other ways, she is completely dependent on her father in every way. the subtext simultaneously goes unaddressed and is also thoroughly evident to anyone who bothers to tease it out. asami was, in some ambiguous configuration, abused by her father, and it culminates in him trying to kill her once she asserts her independence. her taking him down with the glove is literally a direct parallel to zuko redirecting ozai’s lightning, it’s not even subtle! it’s just. ignored!!!

moreover, asami’s struggle as she inherits the company in book 2 is handled so poorly it’s almost crazy. i have a post where i compare asami to azula and shiv roy (love seeing tags on these posts that are like “who the hell is shiv roy?” shiv my best friend shiv) and talk about each of their relationships to their fathers and how it informs their relationships to power. obviously lok refuses to acknowledge that asami was abused and operates on a psychological platform of paternal abuse in any real way, but it’s honestly one of the more logical readings of her character considering her actions. so again, if i had the power to write her well this time, i’d tease that out more, exacerbate those implications in a similar way to how azula, zuko, or even toph and sokka operate psychologically. and of course, that also would inform her relationship to her wealth and position as ceo, as both a great burden and a responsibility she feels she must adopt (it’s her biological destiny lol). and of course doing a better job to illustrate how that crisis of identity parallels korra’s, because, you know, it’s like the whole point? also (and this is tangential) but asami needed to hire zhu li and then they should’ve both killed varrick with hammers. but in general asami’s character needed to better serve as a critique of capitalism and patriarchy through her unique role in the system. like, it was really so close to achieving that anyway, but they continually dropped the ball so that the implications of her character were always fascinating, but her character itself was simply. there.

in summary, if mako’s character should function as an interrogation of intertwined structures of family and class within the society lok establishes, asami should have a similar function through different means. mako implicates the role of the impoverished orphan in a neoliberal patriarchy (and bolin, ideally, further complicates the dynamic by being more visibly earth kingdom than fire nation), whereas asami implicates the role of the abused yet wealthy girl in the same neoliberal patriarchy. in a good show, each character supplements the broader critiques being made by the narrative. but while mako, bolin, and asami all have the right pieces set in place to do so, they never quite stick the landing. because liberalism, or nickelodeon, or obama, or girlboss feminism, or whatever.