
I love Legend of Korra. It’s a pretty flawed show and definitely not as good as The Last Airbender, but I love it anyway. My favorite moments in LOK so far, though, have mostly been the ones that flash back to moments in the past that feature the characters from The Last Airbender as adults. These scenes always got me a little emotional, but none of them hit me as hard as when Aang, the Avatar from the first show, showed up in the spiritual world to talk to Korra, the Avatar in the new show, at the end of the LOK season one finale. Like, I wept. I just went, “omg, it’s Aang,” and then… waterworks.
Which is strange, because honestly Aang wasn’t even my favorite character in TLA. But seeing him grown up in flashbacks and there at the end, it finally hit me that he’s… dead, in this world. He had to die for this show to happen, since the whole thing with this show is that the Avatar gets reincarnated into the next generation when one dies, and they’re the only one who can master all four elements and blah blah blah. So Avatar Aang was always going to be dead, because he had to be for Avatar Korra to exist as a character. But I finally faced that this character I spent so much time caring about has died in this world I’m watching now. And I cried.
And on top of everything, on top of me caring so much about this fictional person who has had a fictional death, he’s a drawing. These shows are animated. There isn’t even an actor portraying him on screen. He is a moving picture. He’s not really dead, they just stopped drawing him. I am emotionally invested in the life and death of a bunch of lines and colors moving around on a computer screen.
I don’t want to argue the merits of an animated story versus a “real” one, because that isn’t what I care about. Anyone who has seen a Pixar movie, or even just the first five or so minutes of Up, knows that animated stories can be just as meaningful as non-animated ones. But it is interesting to me that stories can mean so much to people, regardless of how anchored they may or may not be to our own reality. Like, Doctor Who (and particularly Rose Tyler. I will defend her to the death. THE DEATH) affected me so much I ended up getting a tattoo of the TARDIS on my ankle. (No, I will not be posting a picture. Sorry nerds.) I wanted that reminder of adventure, of being bigger on the inside, to be with me for the rest of my life.
There are just so many amazing stories and people inside those stories that become real to us somehow. I don’t have any particularly deep insights about this… I guess I just wanted to throw this out there and see what people think, because I’m curious. What fictional characters are you emotionally invested in? And why them? How does your emotional investment manifest itself (tattoos, blog posts, Comic Con costumes, etc)? What fictional story last made you cry? Which one makes you cry the hardest?
In the meantime, I wrote a post for Elizabeth’s blog about the history of our friendship a couple days ago, so if you feel like reading it, there it is.