In the Nickelodeon animated series The Legend of Korra, bending is the art of manipulating one of the four elements: earth, fire, air, or water. Within this world, there is a person called the avatar, who is capable of bending all four elements and is tasked with the responsibility to bring and maintain balance in the world. Throughout the series women are shown in various positions of power. These women maintain their positions with no resistance coming from the fact that they are female. The show maintains a feminist outlook on having females in power by showing them equaling and surpassing their male counterparts as well as placing them in positions where they can do as they please and make their own decisions without other’s influence.
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Asami is one of the most intelligent characters in the city by displaying engineering prowess, ingenuity, business savviness, and a myriad of skills that allow her to stand on equal ground with the rest of the cast despite lacking the ability to bend one of the four elements. In addition to this Asami is also the daughter to the benefactor and second-in-command to the first season’s main antagonist, Amon. In Lindsey Averall’s paper she references Lawrence Kohlberg and his philosophy on moral development. This philosophy states that there are two major points of moral development divided into the preconventional stage and the postconventional stage. The preconventional stage is where “our most important “moral consideration” is pleasing authority figures like our parents” (166) while postconventional is “the mature adult who is guided by universal, abstract principle of just behavior” (166). When this theory was put to the test men typically scored higher than women in regards to moral development leading to the perception that women are more focused on pleasing others instead of doing what they believe to be morally right. In a pivotal scene where Asami is forced to choose between her father and her friends she turns on her father showing that she had fully reached a postconventional morality by doing what she believed to be right rather than attempting to simply please her father. She shows later that she stands behind this decision as in the season finale when she is offered a chance to rejoin her father and the main antagonist after they had achieved control of Republic City she once again rejects him and is forced to defeat and arrest her own father in order to defend what she believes to be
Asami is one of the most intelligent characters in the city by displaying engineering prowess, ingenuity, business savviness, and a myriad of skills that allow her to stand on equal ground with the rest of the cast despite lacking the ability to bend one of the four elements. In addition to this Asami is also the daughter to the benefactor and second-in-command to the first season’s main antagonist, Amon. In Lindsey Averall’s paper she references Lawrence Kohlberg and his philosophy on moral development. This philosophy states that there are two major points of moral development divided into the preconventional stage and the postconventional stage. The preconventional stage is where “our most important “moral consideration” is pleasing authority figures like our parents” (166) while postconventional is “the mature adult who is guided by universal, abstract principle of just behavior” (166). When this theory was put to the test men typically scored higher than women in regards to moral development leading to the perception that women are more focused on pleasing others instead of doing what they believe to be morally right. In a pivotal scene where Asami is forced to choose between her father and her friends she turns on her father showing that she had fully reached a postconventional morality by doing what she believed to be right rather than attempting to simply please her father. She shows later that she stands behind this decision as in the season finale when she is offered a chance to rejoin her father and the main antagonist after they had achieved control of Republic City she once again rejects him and is forced to defeat and arrest her own father in order to defend what she believes to be