![]() The result was a firestorm of a girl with no sense of patience. My parents had proudly raised a fighter, strengthened my moral compass, and indulged my every passion. I left a mix of teachers in my wake some who’d encouraged me and some who had hated my insistence on taking up space, and made it their mission to make me shrink. ![]() I felt the eyes of the younger students in my International Baccalaureate program on me as I blazed my way out of the city. I was the girl who would make it out, armed with the support of my parents, and a sharp mind and tongue. In Suffolk-at home-I was a former salutatorian, debutante, city harvest festival Queen, ten time National Piano Guild participant and Ivy League acceptee. While Korra excitedly set off from her secluded home in the South Pole to join the action in Republic City at the beginning of season one, I was hurrying to escape my suffocating small town life in Suffolk, Virginia and begin my new life at my father’s alma mater. Where I saw a show about learning your strengths in Avatar: The Last Airbender, in The Legend of Korra, a sequel of sorts to ATLA, I saw a story about becoming aware of your own weakness and fault lines-and what happens when they are tapped in just the wrong way. The promise of Korra was initially what drew me into the Avatar: The Last Airbender world. Korra, a teenage Water Tribe Avatar with a particular gift for firebending, is competitive, opinionated, abrasive, headstrong and wonderfully optimistic. Perhaps I lack the ability to manipulate the elements and didn’t carry the weight of the world on my shoulders, but the core of our personalities are strikingly similar. I knew them not from memory, but from photographs and videos that had captured my essence: side eyes, wrinkled nose, and tiny hands on little hips. Korra’s stance and fierce acceptance of her role as keeper of peace between the four fictive nations and bridge between humanity and the spirit world at such an early age conjured up images of myself as a child that I knew intimately. “I’m the Avatar and you’ve gotta deal with it !” the animated toddler declared, already able to bend, or manipulate, three of the four elements-earth, fire, and water. It was charged with the electric thought of how, after years of visiting Grounds for summer camps and my father’s work visits, I was finally headed for the University of Virginia for college. ![]() I grinned with satisfaction the very first moment toddler Avatar Korra burst onto my TV screen, around when the Virginia air began to warm after winter, the breeze that year accompanied by college acceptance letters and school visits.
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