Korra's Design is Bold

Okay, maybe Bold is a strong word, but it got you to click on this journal, didn't it?

Anyhow, I can't remember why, but I found myself searching for concept art from the Avatar Korra series, and then I found this strange woman who was posing as Korra... img.photobucket.com/albums/v39… Who the hell is that? Do you know? It's not Korra, that's for sure...

So basically, the creators of the show originally had Korra with a pretty typical female build, aside from a little shoulder muscle. Now, this would've been the safer character design to stick with, she looks a lot more like Aang then the Korra we know from the show, and giving her a more muscular, tall build reinforces her personality and character.

Look at this one of the Canon version of Korra img.photobucket.com/albums/v39… her shoulders are broader, she definitely looks taller then the drawings of her I've seen from early concept, even her hair is tied back in a different way, I don't know what it is about her current hairdoo but it works well with the rest of her design. Even her facial structure is less smooth and feminine, and now it has personality and gives her character more depth, at least it does for me, but maybe I'm just a creepy pervert who's looking into this way too deeply.

To get to the point, what I love about Korra is that she's so different from Aang, she's not one for diplomacy, she's far too competitive for someone who's job it is to be a peacekeeper, which makes me excited to see her grow and progress. But she's still plagued with many typical problems that Aang also went through, such as balancing her social life with her professional lifestyle as the Avatar, but it still doesn't feel the same when it's put through Korra's own specific problems, because she's such a radically different person. Sure she's having a shy teen romance with one of the boys, but she's not dealing with issues of being too reserved with her feelings like Aang was with Katara, in fact she has a problem with expressing her feelings too much and being too forward with her approach.

I mainly thought about this because there was this really big ordeal around the toy company that made Avatar action figures, Mattel I think, where they made figures of all the major male characters, but Katara was far too busy knitting and trying on different aprons to pose as an action figure, Touph was probably too fussy about her makeup to pose long enough for the toy makers, not to mention her constant gossip about the latest celebrity break ups bugged all the manly man toys who don't know how to feel feelings cuz they're MEN!

Okay, enough digression, my point is they didn't make any female characters into toys because they thought since mostly boys bought their action figures, that they wouldn't buy toys modeled after women. Now, I'm no business man and for all I know they're totally right, BUT that's still amazingly sexist and I don't buy that for a second. Who knows, maybe I'm wrong and when boys see that their action figures have boobs on them, they freak out and start asking embarrassing questions in front of Mom and Dad's dinner guests.

So now we have Korra as the main character, a strong, complex and very compelling female character. You think boys are gonna give a damn if she's a woman? Hell no! Little boys just wanna see evil getting its BUTT KICKED, and the fact it's being done by someone as badass as her make it all the more awesome. So, maybe Mattel should think twice before shooting their dumb mouths and leaving the female cast out of the Happy Meals and that maybe their marketing techniques are stuck in the 50's. Hell, this is the era where My Little Pony is more popular with boys then girls! Explain THAT Mattel, are those guys at Hasbro just banging rocks together, or have they embraced the times and profited from it?

I'm just very happy they went with Korra's current design, and didn't play it safe with a generic, skinny female body type, which wouldn't have reinforced her character nearly as well as her current athletic appearance does.