The Legend of Korra: Do the Technological Advancements in Korra’s World Make Sense?

 The gap of decades between Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra is often the reason for discontinuity that is hard for the fans to reconcile. Unfortunately, the events and the character development never happened at a natural pace that creates a very unsatisfying scenario where one can’t relish the show properly. There are many things that have changed in the intervening decades, and one of the most noticeable of them is the impressive technological advancement. 

The times have changed significantly since Aang’s era when they used ships that were powered by coal. The world of Korra is much more technologically advanced in comparison. The days of coal are over as we see enormous robots attacking cities putting Aang’s era to shame. As technological advancements are too significant, arguments can be made that technology’s progression is quite exaggerated and unrealistic. This argument will be entirely credible, but only in real life. In the make-believe world of Avatars where people can bend different elements, it seems perfectly logical. 

In order to make sense of the enormity of the tech progression, it is crucial to recall where the original series started. In Avatar: The Last Airbender, we watch the century-long relentless pursuit of the Fire Nation for technological progress to get an edge over other nations. The Hundred Year War saw a lot of innovation, especially in the Fire Nation under Fire Lord Ozai, who wished to get ahead of all other nations to prove his dominance. The era depicted in Kyoshi novels almost invariably shows most of the innovations that are centered on machine engineering and metallurgy. Much of the breakthroughs were made thanks to steam and coal, which helped power ships and machines. It was time for people with high technological acumen to take center stage, and Mechanist, along with Sokka, turned out to be those crucial geniuses that the Avatar world needed. 

With the end of the Hundred Year War, the progress made by the Fire Nation spread to the rest of the world. This event seven decades ago marked the beginning of widespread betterment in technologies; the development of metalbending also resulted in previously unheard-of changes, which led to the Southern Water Tribe reconstructing itself from scratch while factories sprouted everywhere. Things were made even better by the discovery of lightning bending and its secrets.

Lightning bending was only limited to the royals of Fire Nation in the era of Aang, but with its homogenization, the problem of energy inefficiency was solved. Soon Coal and Steam became the thing of the past as the revolution brought by lightning bending helped technological advancements way more accessible than it once used to be. New factories came up and took advantage of the completely new age of progress. 

The biggest challenge to technological advancement is always the lack of an efficient source of energy. Most great ideas are stalled because of the conundrum of packing enough energy in small enough space to make the wonders of progress work. These were the sort of problems that even Mechanists also faced on the show a generation ago, but with the newly available source of electricity, all of the imagined advancements were achieved. 

The conditions created by lightning bending made Radio communication, armored suits, and electromagnets possible, which would otherwise have been impossible to make. With the harvest of the spirit vines, another energy source was discovered that led to the development of previously unimagined technological progressions. It was this that later resulted in Kuvira’s massive mech and arm cannon. The progress that was made was wholly natural and along the lines of previous scientific endeavors of the people of the Avatar world. 

Most people struggle to make sense of such rapid technological advancement because they often compare Avatar’s world to the real world. From that perspective, there is no doubt that the progress seems unrealistic. It is hard to explain how people who were happy with just their Model T all of a sudden succeeded in making flying suits in a short period. But it is wrong to draw comparisons with the real world. The motivations and challenges for scientific progress are quite different. Even the people differ significantly as far as personal capabilities are concerned, so it is doubly wrong to even think of comparing both worlds. Moreover, Avatar takes us to a dreamlike fantasy world, so, naturally, such a world’s progress won’t be comparable to that of the real world.

The real-world people need an astonishing amount of cooperation and hard work to achieve things that the benders in the world of Avatar can achieve on their own. They can easily do challenging tasks, which might take a person several days, even after using various construction tools and machines. So, drawing comparisons between Avatar and the real-world is in itself unrealistic and naïve. The inhabitants of both worlds are evolving at a different pace with different abilities, so it’s natural that the rate of technological progress varies in one place from another. 

James Walker is a self-professed security expert; he has been making the people aware of the security threats. His passion is to write about Cyber security, cryptography, malware, social engineering, internet and new media. He writes for Norton security products at norton.com/setup.

Source:  The Legend of Korra: Do the Technological Advancements in Korra’s World Make Sense