Interview with Mike and Bryan! part 1 of 2

If you did not see the end of Book 2 don't read this!
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‘Legend of Korra’ Creators Talk About Book 2 ‘Spirits’ Finale and Book 3 ‘Change’

blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2013/1…

The “Spirits” finale ends with a battle between a giant Dark Avatar and a giant version of Avatar Korra. The big-scale battle evokes movies such as “Clash of the Titans,” “Godzilla” and “Pacific Rim.”

In an email after our phone conversation, DiMartino went into detail about the inspiration behind the finale’s climatic struggle. “Since this whole season was about Korra becoming more and more tapped into her spiritual side, we thought the ultimate manifestation of that was a giant sprit version of herself,” he said. “We thought about ‘The Guru’ episode of ‘A:TLA’ and the giant cosmic version of Aang that he saw in his vision.  We talked about what would happen if an Avatar actually connected with that cosmic version of his or herself, and ‘Cosmic Korra’ was born.  Since Unalaq and Korra had a personal, one-on-one battle in ‘Darkness Falls’ we wanted to raise the stakes and the scale for the final showdown.”

 One thing I noticed in your work, and especially in Book 2 “Spirits,” is you seem to have a theme of sibling rivalry, with Tonraq facing off against Unalaq. Where does that comes from?

Michael DiMartino: I didn’t have a brother, I had a sister. I think whenever you can infuse the story with some personal conflict in there, I find that more engaging than just two guys. Even a brotherly bond is stronger than a friendship bond. And this season two is all about family struggles and the whole civil war thing, so it tied in nicely with the theme of that.

   The whole idea of the civil war, what sparked that creatively?

Bryan Konietzko: That was an idea we had very early in the development for “Korra.” We had just come off the 100 year war, with the Fire Nation trying to conquer the world, so we didn’t just want to roll the dice and pick another nation for that, we wanted a different dynamic. And the idea of–Aang was part of this lost culture, now we had a story where the Avatar is actually associated with a specific nation, and what would happen if that nation was torn in two by a civil war. We thought the Avatar would have a real hard time not picking sides. It was just a very interesting dynamic for us, and a different kind of a world-wide conflict.

   How did you hatch the idea for Wan, the first Avatar? And will we see more of him in the future?

DiMartino: The Wan story was kind of an idea we had back in the original series, the origin of the Avatar and what that would that look like, the idea of people living on these lion turtles and a trickster hero who was kind of bopping between the lion turtles, kind of causing trouble and mayhem. So that was the germ of the idea, and we never knew exactly how or when we would get to tell that story but when we were coming up with the “Spirits” book it ended up organically weaving into the theme of the story, as far as the Harmonic Convergence and the cycle of the Avatars and all that stuff.

   The lion turtles story suggests that there are more forms of bending beyond the basic four. Will we see other forms of bending in the future?

Konietzko: I don’t think it raised those questions for us. But maybe it did for the fans. We weren’t like, now there’s one stop shopping for bending you go to the lion turtles. It was just digging deeper into the story.

DiMartino: I was going to add that whenever we do do new types of bending, it’s usually an extension of one of the four main ones. Metal bending came out of earth bending. So even though it’s a new form, it’s still based on the earth element.

   Tell me about the decision to show the finale first online and then on TV.

Konietzko: The first thing is, don’t assume that we decided that. We don’t get to decide those types of things. It’s all up to the network. We have no control over how they roll anything out. But it all worked out really well. Since the first announcement of “Korra” a few years ago, our fan presence online has just been huge and it’s really active online. And as TV distribution evolves, even between Book 1 and Book 2, it’s evolved even more, our audience is increasingly online. The network is obviously aware of this and they recognize all this so they just decided to reward the fans for all of their online activity and make it available early. It caught us by surprise too, but we knew the fans would be excited by it.

   What can you tell me about the next book and what’s the name of it?

Konietzko: Go for it Mike.

DiMartino: The title of Book 3 is going to be called “Change.” It’s all about Korra dealing with the change of the world in this point in time. At the end of Book 2 she says it’s a new era. And it really is and we’re going to show how Harmonic Convergence and her battle with Unalaq and Vaatu kind of shifted the world a bit.

   Will it be set in a future time period right after the events in “Spirits”?

DiMartino: It comes pretty close in the time period, a few weeks after Book 2 ends.

Part 2 of this interview will be released tomorrow so make sure you come back and I will be posting that then!

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