Week 6: SPOILER ALERT

1. Week 6: SPOILER ALERT

2. Don’t talk to the reader, let them into your head. • Why doesn’t a lot of “I” work? • A reader doesn’t really know who you are. • They want to know about the subject.

3. Knowing what the reader does and doesn’t need to know. • Spoilers… should be helpful for other situations. You’ve seen the movie, they haven’t. Need to walk them through it. • Proportion • Transitions • Check the website for linkages.

4. Another one of the positives of Avatar: The Legend of Korra is that the show forces the viewers to ride an emotional rollercoaster. […] This up and down effect keeps the viewers engaged. Like Avatar Aang says, "When we hit our lowest point, we are open to the greatest change." • Music is one of the most important things in our lives. It provides us with hope, motivation, happiness, and thousands of more emotions. Music is seen in film frequently because it is used to transition, set moods, or dramatize an event. In Avatar: The Legend of Korra, music successfully plays all of these roles, and more.

5. Reading the Reader

6. Crystal Ball • Knowing what people want to hear, what they don’t want to hear and what they need to hear. • Keith and his directions. • What are people interested in? • What’s worth talking about? • Reaching for big picture stuff. • I should be able to get something out of a review, even if I’ll never read the book in question. • The plot density of Twilight v. Harry Potter

7. Mining for Ideas

8. Don’t get too absorbed in your specific interest. Find the general. • Try to answer uncloseable questions. • Philosophy • What is truth? • What is right? • What matters? • What is beauty?

9. LAME. • Nobody talks about this stuff. • How many philosophers do you know?

10. Well… • Use this stuff as a scaffolding. Helpful for making your structure, but it shouldn’t be visible when you finish.

11. Some practice • Give me a big question or idea about: • “There will come soft rains” • Korra • The Avengers • Spiderman • NCIS • Warcraft 3 • Harry Potter • Dress codes in school

12. Albert and his mystery family • Only his immediate family lives in the US. • He’s met his cousin once. • His uncle stares through him. • Doesn’t know his grandparent’s names. • Not a “full” family member because he doesn’t speak Chinese very well.

13. ManohlaDargis’s TDKR review 2 paragraphs, anyway

14. After seven years and two films that have pushed Batman ever deeper into the dark, the director Christopher Nolan has completed his postmodern, post-Sept. 11 epic of ambivalent good versus multidimensional evil with a burst of light. As the title promises, day breaks in “The Dark Knight Rises,” the grave and satisfying finish to Mr. Nolan’s operatic bat-trilogy. His timing couldn’t be better. As the country enters its latest electoral brawl off screen, Batman (Christian Bale) hurtles into a parallel battle that booms with puppet-master anarchy, anti-government rhetoric and soundtrack drums of doom, entering the fray as another lone avenger and emerging as a defender of, well, what?

15. Truth, justice and the American way? No — and not only because that doctrine belongs to Superman, who was bequeathed that weighty motto on the radio in August 1942, eight months after the United States entered World War II and three years after Batman, Bob Kane’s comic creation, hit. Times change; superheroes and villains too. The enemy is now elusive and the home front as divided as the face of Harvey Dent, a vanquished Batman foe. The politics of partisanship rule and grass-roots movements have sprung up on the right and the left to occupy streets and legislative seats. It can look ugly, but as they like to say — and as Dent says in “The Dark Knight,” the second part of the trilogy — the night is darkest before the dawn.

16. Scott Thill, on Korra

17. Quick! Make a list of action-packed cartoons for kids that still manage to scratch the spiritual and sociopolitical itches of older viewers caught between perpetual war and Occupy populism.

18. Now put The Legend of Korra, the stunning sequel to Avatar: The Last Airbender, at the top of that list.

19. In the animated show’s fantastic first season, which ends Saturday morning on Nickelodeon with back-to-back episodes “Skeletons in the Closest” and “Endgame,” Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konieztko’s tough new heroine Avatar Korra has navigated a refreshing bildungsroman during a full-blown war between the haves and the have-nots. That is, the Benders who have the elemental power to bend earth, air, fire and water to their will, and the Equalists who have not.

20. “It’s a really strong series because it presents important messages and lessons that are relevant to personal and social relationships and challenges today,” actor P.J. Byrne, who voices comic-relief earthbender Bolin, told Wired. “Its core message is not about trying to exploit power differences between the haves and have-nots. It says that real power is what you have between your ears and how you choose to use it, that your life is defined by the richness you create in the world you choose to live in.”

21. DiMartino and Konietzko‘s acclaimed Avatar: The Last Airbender was one of the smartest, sweetest cartoons ever made. And the first season of The Legend of Korra has lived up to its progenitor’s pedigree, taking us on an alternately riveting and hilarious ride packed with fantasy naturalism, steampunk grandeur, kinetic conflicts, sci-fi weaponry and self-aware comedy. The velocity has only increased with each new episode.

22. But with the determined rise of mysterious supervillain Amon, The Legend of Korra has achieved a powerful technopathic upgrade of The Last Airbender’s rich mythology.

23. Though she is the most powerful being in DiMartino and Konietzko’s elemental universe, Korra has spent her first season realizing it takes much more than power to achieve a utopia free of charismatic totalitarians like Amon. It takes friendship — watch Korra and the firebenderMako share a quiet moment before the storm in the clip above — and stewardship as well. Especially when it comes to the environment that provides us all with the resources we’re sadly too quick to abuse alongside our power.

24. “The power of The Legend of Korra‘s natural world is dealt with in a way that demonstrates respect for the enormity of its elements,” said Byrne. “It’s similar to the challenges we face today in managing the resources of our own planet. And just so you know, Bolin intends to run for president in Season 33.”

25. Now that The Legend of Korra‘s impressive Book One has ended, DiMartino and Konietzko are feverishly at work on preparing the second season for its much-anticipated 2013 return to the airwaves.

26. All ages are welcome, and all minds will be wiped — thankfully not by Amon.

27. “The biggest surprise to me has been its appeal to such a hugely diverse demographic,” Byrne said. “The writers have developed at least a dozen intricate characters with broad appeal across multiple ages, allowing fans to dial into the dialog, metaphors and messages at different levels of sophistication.”

28. The usually energetic Byrne is predictably quiet on the forthcoming Book Two’s finer details, while DiMartino and Konietzko are openly inquisitive about a possible Book Three. “Those aren’t really the decisions that we make,” Konietzko told The Wall Street Journal, passing the buck to Nickelodeon. The network had better not fumble unless it wants to unleash the wrath of a cross-demographic fan base spoiled by that priceless rarity known as intelligent television.

29. Homework: Transitioning between paragraphs, a few more big ideas. • See the website.