At the stroke of midnight on Dec. 19, 2014, Nickelodeon unceremoniously dumped the final two episodes of Avatar: The Legend of Korra on Nick.com. That night, I gathered on the couch with my roommate to witness the culmination of an epic four-season story. Unfortunately, 2014 streaming technology still had a long ways to go, and after watching Nickelodeon's online video player buffer for about 15 minutes, I gave up and went to bed.
It was Thursday night, and I had work in the morning. The Korra series finale — as later seen in high-definition under normal connection speeds — is still one of my favorite endings (and favorite TV shows) of all time. But it’s hard to ignore the flaws; from a slashed budget that forced the animators to rely on still images for some pivotal scenes instead of fluid animation, to a planned kiss between Korra and Asami that studio executives rejected in favor of some charged hand-holding, the finale leaves a lot to be desired.
A small but vocal contingent of fans who rejected the premise of a rebellious young female Avatar as a replacement for the lovable and exuberant boy wunderkind Aang from Avatar: The Last Airbender cast a dark cloud over the whole enterprise. Even for Korra's biggest fans, the overall experience of Korra was an imperfect one. Now, over a decade (and one very subpar live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender remake) later, the original franchise is back.
The first three episodes of Avatar: Seven Havens are streaming now on Paramount Plus, which thankfully has better tech than mid-2010s Nick.com. There's a lot to love about Seven Havens, from the stunning animation by French studio La Chouette Compagnie to returning franchise creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko's masterful worldbuilding to an intriguing new mystery box at the center of the story. But what I love most about Seven Havens is that it is a brilliant rebuttal of every single angry Avatar fan and meddling studio executive who ever tried to tear down The Legend of Korra.
Seven Havens takes place over 200 years after Legend of Korra. A mysterious calamity has undone the industrial revolution that escalated across the previous two shows. Instead of the gleaming, utopian Republic City in Korra, or even the sprawling, walled kingdom of Ba Sing Se in The Last Airbender, there are seven fortified "havens" spread across this world, with seemingly nothing but inhospitable desert in between.
Some time after the Four Nations invented hoverbikes, everything collapsed. A modern world capped at the knees by nature isn’t a surprising scenario when you consider, uh, the present day in our real world. What is surprising, though, is that according to everyone in the world of Seven Havens, the fall of civilization is entirely Korra's fault.
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