'The Legend of Korra' helped me accept my bisexuality when I was still a closeted teen. It also ushered in a new era for queer cartoons.
"The Legend of Korra" hit Netflix on August 14. It helped me understand my bisexuality, and set a precedent for LGBTQ representation in cartoons.
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On December 19, 2014, "The Legend of Korra" made history. As I like to joke, it also made me bisexual.
The final shot of the "Avatar: The Last Airbender" sequel showed the series' heroines, Korra and Asami, facing each other, holding hands as they gazed into each other's eyes. Even without a kiss, the sequence felt decidedly non-platonic, and seemed to clearly parallel "Avatar's" romantic conclusion.
Days later, the series' creators confirmed that "Korrasami," as fans dubbed the relationship, was canon, and that both characters were bisexual.
As a fan, I was thrilled to see my two favorite characters end up with each other — a possibility I hadn't even dared to entertain given the dearth of LGBTQ characters in cartoons at that point. I was a 17-year-old queer woman who had barely come to terms with her sexuality, and "Korra's" finale struck me deep to my core.
"[The] Legend of Korra has ruined me," I tweeted on the night of the finale.
Now, as the series arrives on Netflix on Friday, it's worth remembering just how groundbreaking the moment was. "Korra" was one of the earliest dominos to fall in a wave of queer characters making their way into cartoons like "Steven Universe" and "She-Ra and the Princesses of Power." It had a major impact on me as a closeted teen, and in many ways, my own queer coming of age paralled the significant increase in LGBTQ representation in cartoons across the latter half of the 2010s.
As a teenager, I had a hard time wrapping my head around bisexuality — "Korra" helped change that
If you watch "The Legend of Korra" now, with knowledge of its finale, you'd be hard-pressed to miss Korra and Asami's love story, even if you didn't notice the signs the first time around. That kind of obliviousness is familiar to me. While it was easy to write off any instance of queer sentiment at the time, my crushes on female classmates or habit of searching out "am I gay?" quizzes online made things pretty obvious.
My attraction to multiple genders wasn't something I knew how to grapple with. I knew precious few bisexual people in real life, and much of what I had heard about bisexuality suggested that it was little more than a pit stop before coming out as gay (a harmful and false stereotype).
As a result, I felt like my attraction to different genders was contradictory, rather than complementary, and that being bisexual meant that I'd be faced with scrutiny at every turn. Suspicious of my own feelings, I didn't think I'd be able to weather the pressure.
"Korra" was the first piece of media to change that for me by virtue of simple validation. Up until that point, I had never seen a bisexual character on television before, and showrunner Bryan Konietzko's note after the finale — "Despite what you might have heard, bisexual people are real!" — struck a chord with me.
Crucial to my connection was the fact that the two women had fallen in love after each had her own relationship with Mako, the series' initial leading man. While Korra and Asami didn't get the on-screen kiss that each woman got with Mako earlier in the series, it still felt like the series weighed all of these partnerships equally.
"Korra" was far from the end all be all when it came to fully embracing my bisexual identity, but it planted an essential seed in my head. If two characters that I loved so dearly could fall in love even after meaningful relationships with men, maybe my attraction to men, women, and nonbinary people wasn't wholly incompatible at all.
Both cartoon representation and I made big progress in the years after the "Korra" finale, but I still had some anxieties about how people perceived me
It took a full year of college — and another full rewatch of "Korra" alongside my roommate, to boot — for me to come to terms with the fact that I wasn't straight. My coming out happened in staggered waves over the course of the following year, as I came out to friends with embarrassing PowerPoints and my family with an even more embarrassing cake. It felt euphoric.
It also mirrored a larger transformation. Shows like "Steven Universe," which premiered in 2013, pushed major advancements in LGBTQ representation through earnest, empathetic storytelling. It centered characters like Garnet, the literal embodiment of the love between Ruby and Sapphire — two female-coded characters who get married in one of the series' most notable episodes — and Stevonnie, who is both nonbinary and intersex. Other shows, like Cartoon Network's "Adventure Time," made it clear that members of its main cast were queer.
While finally coming out to those close to me was the biggest step, I was still terrified that people wouldn't see me as queer enough. Outwardly, I enthusiastically embraced my queer identity, trying to fulfill every possible stereotype I was aware of by chopping most of my hair off, keeping my nails short, wearing more flannel, and talking a lot about how much I loved Hayley Kiyoko.
As I threw myself into LGBTQ media advocacy, "The Legend of Korra" was my rallying cry as I continuously preached, and joked, about the impact that it had on me.
Queer representation in cartoons continued to improve as I became more assured in my own identity
After being very publicly out for two years, I finally internalized the messages that I was preaching. Graduating college, I had a clearer grasp on who I was. My bisexuality started to feel like just another rote facet of my identity: one that I cherished, but not one that I felt like I needed to constantly defend to myself or others.
At 22, I started to grow out my hair. Part of this was because I was floating from internship to contract job to freelance assignments in New York, and didn't want to spend the money to keep it short. But it also felt less intrinsically tied to my identity as a queer woman. It was a marker of how my own relationship to my queer identity had shifted — I was no longer craving the same kinds of external validation that I had as a teen.
In 2020, it's clear that queer characters — particularly those whose queerness is integral to the story at hand — are starting to become more common in cartoons, largely due to the efforts of showrunners and storytellers committed to telling their stories on screen.
Dreamworks and Netflix's "She-Ra and the Princesses of Power," which concluded in May, told a sweeping love story between two women that was so interwoven with the fabric of the show itself that, as showrunner Noelle Stevenson told GLAAD, there was no other way for the show to end.
Disney Channel's "The Owl House"recently revealed that Amity, one of the show's main characters, was planning on on asking its protagonist, Luz, to the show's equivalent of prom. Creator Dana Terrace tweeted after the episode, "I'm bi! I want to write a bi character, dammit!"
It's nothing short of thrilling to watch characters like "She-Ra's" Catra and Adora or "Steven Universe's" Ruby and Sapphire get their due diligence on screen and know that another young, queer person's "Legend of Korra" moment is happening in real time.
While progress is fluid, and the work is never completely done, the leaps that have been made since 2014 are astounding: "Korra's" finale wouldn't be nearly as groundbreaking today as it was back then, and that's a good thing.
Now 23, I'm far from the defensive woman I was at age 20, and the scared teen I was at 17. To this day, though, "The Legend of Korra" is still the most important queer story for me. It came at a time when I needed it most, with two characters who I already felt a kind of kinship with.
To date, I still regularly crack tongue-in-cheek jokes that "Korra" made me bisexual, and I don't think the contact high of watching its finale for the first time will ever truly fade.
I'll be spending the weekend rewatching it. I can't pass up the chance to relive my own queer awakening.
Healthy relationship, I'm sure. By the end, she was just a doormat with a cool character design.
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