With the upcoming Legend of Aang movie later this year, we thought it best to revisit a classic series to help handle the anticipation. The series in question is the Legend of Korra, its original run going from 2012 to 2014, running for four seasons. One of the recurring themes throughout the show is mental health and how the ever shifting world takes its toll on our protagonists. In this post, we will be analyzing the mental health of Korra and what her first severe run in with depression looks like. We’ll be analyzing symptoms and their manifestation, techniques that work to help her heal, and what it looks like for her when she comes out the other side. Spoilers ahead.
At the end of season 3, antagonists Zaheer and his friends have kidnapped Korra with the intent of killing her and ending the Avatar cycle (this universe’s version of reincarnation). Despite her and her friends ultimately being able to defeat and imprison Zaheer, the effects of this confrontation last for years afterward. At the beginning of season 4, three years have passed and Korra is still dealing with the ramifications of the conflict. While the world continues to move on and her friends manage to find new paths in life, Korra struggles.
One of the first symptoms Korra has to contend with is feelings of despair. Zaheer’s fight and poison ultimately leave her unable to walk, limiting her ability to do most of what she used to. It takes her the better part of two years to regain the ability to walk normally and in that time she expresses doubt that she will ever be able to walk again. She questions how she can be the Avatar if she can’t stand or even cook a simple meal. Despite the encouragement from her friends and family, there is a period of months where Korra genuinely believes that she will never walk again.
Another symptom is loss of identity and having a real purpose. Korra feels like she can no longer be the Avatar, that she is letting the world down while she is in recovery. Now that she is not helping the world and can’t travel without assistance, she loses who she believed herself to be. She no longer sees herself as a force to be reckoned with. Instead, she sees herself as weak and broken, completely at odds with who she was up until this point. To add salt to the wound, an Earthbender named Kuvira has been uniting the Earth Kingdom territories and essentially doing her job. Her friends all have a purpose that sticks with their identities and their ideals. Korra doesn’t get that same luxury.
A big symptom that is common with depression is the person’s need to pull away and isolate from the people around them. During her 3 year recovery stint, she gets numerous letters from her friends across the world. Mako, Bolin, Asami, and others all write their well wishes to Korra, checking in to make sure her recovery is going well. Korra refuses to write back for the better part of two years, before finally deciding to respond to Asami. Mako, Bolin, and the others never received any letters during the 3 year separation. This isolation hurts Korra, but she is also envious of what her friends are doing and feels guilt that she can no longer do the same. While it is reasonable for Korra to want to pull away, the isolation ends up pushing her closer to the brink.
This next one might lean a little more into the PTSD side of events, but Korra does have nightmares about what transpired in the previous season. She sees herself almost dying and witnesses flashbacks of her friends being hurt. She experiences hallucinations of herself chained while inside the Avatar State (the same state she was in when Zaheer poisoned her), a glowing spectre that haunts her wherever her travels take her. These hallucinations cause Korra severe distress, with her even going so far as to attack them. To outsiders, she looks crazy, but to Korra the visions present a very real threat. Eventually she starts following these visions and while some of them help take her further on her journey, others tend to cause more pain and suffering.
Apathy is a huge issue when it comes to depression and is another one of the most baseline symptoms when it comes to a diagnosis. Korra displays this very early on when she refuses to see the best healer in the village, Katara, for several weeks after the incident. She doesn’t want to eat, forms irregular sleep patterns, and mostly ignores her parents when they offer her advice on how to help herself. Her apathy becomes her biggest barrier at first and that gets in the way of her receiving the help she needs until much later. This apathy later comes back after Korra is able to walk again and she lies to her parents about her location, taking a year sabbatical across the world without any care to how the people around her might feel about it. While this tour around the world ends up helping her in the end, the lack of care towards her relationships is textbook depression.
Looking at these symptoms, another factor that is similar between Korra and other mental health patients is an expectation that progress should be linear. Throughout the final season, Korra believes that she is not advancing nearly as much as she should be. She figures that after 3 years, she should be back to full fighting strength and be able to resume her duties as the Avatar. While she is able to step to the plate eventually, she has a lot of backslides and ultimately only succeeds because of her friends. She regains her ability to stand, but the ability to fight as proficiently as she did before doesn’t return. This is a limitation that Korra struggles with throughout her final confrontations with Kuvira and having to acknowledge that while she is the Avatar, her basic bending prowess isn’t what it used to be. These backslides and realizations overwhelm her and she struggles to handle them with grace. She explodes easily, pushes people away, and can’t find healthy ways to express herself and her pain.
Coping skills are essential when it comes to helping handle depressive symptoms. One of the first that Korra does is narrowing down what exactly her triggers are. In this case it is flashbacks of Zaheer, visions of her Avatar ghost, bending training, letters from her friends, and isolation. Korra also naturally processes the next step, which is looking at why each of these bother her. Zaheer is trauma, the visions are trauma. The training reinforces that she isn’t as strong a bender as she used to be and she interprets that as weakness. Her letters from her friends reinforce that they are off helping and the world and she is stuck in recovery, robbing her of her purpose. Lastly, the isolation is hard because she misses her friends and wants to be with them, but also doesn’t want to be reminded of her feelings of uselessness.
A big coping skill is Korra processing her feelings of uselessness and acknowledging that her recovery was vital for her to help the world. A few years of absence is not the same as being thrown out of the game forever. This is reinforced when she reunites with her friends and bands together to help defeat Kuvira. They may have been able to move on a lot quicker than her, but that doesn’t mean that their time was better spent. She challenges these unhelpful thoughts and eventually realizes that they were unhelpful and a side effect of the depression. At the end of the show, Korra enters a relationship with Asami and vows to make her friendships more of a priority.
The Legend of Korra, especially the last couple of seasons, really delves into the mental health of its characters and explores them through a lens that is inspirational. Korra ended up working through the problem on her own, even if it took her a few years to do so. Her connection to the world and the people in it is strengthened through her ordeal. She is human and humans struggle to cope with the world as it constantly changes. This is not unlike real life. The only difference is, the world of Korra doesn’t have trained therapists. Ours does. If you or someone you know is experiencing depression, please reach out to BHC either over the phone at (855) 607-8242 or over email at appointments@bhclinic.com.
