Having just watched the final season of Legend of Korra for the first time, one of the things I think the series did best was how it advanced the world of bending into a new age. I also recognize that that’s exactly what bugged some people about it, since it made those advancements so quickly it felt like a bit of a stretch. But ignoring the timeline for a second, I want to argue that it deepens the worldbuilding in a way we don’t get to see super often.
Part of that is just because most stories take place in a singular era. Take The Lord of the Rings. Leaving aside the incredible lore included in The Silmarillion and other works like Unfinished Tales (mostly because I’m a bad nerd who hasn’tactuallyreadthemyet), the events of The Hobbit and the trilogy take place in a relatively short time span. Things are changing, the elves are leaving, the Age of Men is about to begin, but we don’t see a significantly different world between the two works.
And most other fantasy series that come to mind don’t even get that close. The stories are focused on a specific chain of events with no need for the narrative to reach far into the past or the future. In fact, the only other example I can think of is Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn books with the second series taking place in a world that is so different that it’s fully a different genre. Unsurprisingly, I really liked those, too.
In both cases (Korra and Mistborn Era 2), I think the thing I find most interesting is that the writers create worlds that feel substantially different not by changing the rules of their systems of magic, but by digging in even deeper. Allomancy and bending both work (roughly) the same way as they did before, but they’re applied differently, and that’s what changes the world. And overall, I think it works really well. It certainly makes both worlds feel that much deeper, that much more alive.
F.A. Hakimian 