Raising The Avatar: How My Daughter and I Fell In Love With Korra

On a lazy weekend, one of those where the couch is both your launch pad and your destination, I sat with my wife and (at the time) two year old daughter watching TV and trying to figure out what we were getting for all the money I had just spent on Amazon Prime. The streaming service, as we deduced, was home to a good amount of TV shows and movies, but also serves as the digital carrier for Nickelodeon. My daughter would see us scroll past Bubble Guppies and Dora Explorer ready tap me out like a chi-blocker for not stopping on them. Having reached whatever my weekly allotment and tolerance of cartoons that ask questions and then stare at me for 30 seconds waiting for my answer, I figured, “You want to watch a cartoon? Fine, we’ll compromise.” I found Book One of Legend of Korra streaming for free and gambled that my daughter’s filibuster for more Dora would concede. It did. At the time, Book Three of Korra had just began (and was still being aired on TV), so I was in full Korra fandom. But something changed after that weekend. Over the course of 10 days, the three of us watched the entirety of both Book One and Two (my wife seeing Book Two for the first time, but was a fan of the first one). I probably would’ve stopped after however far into the catalog we travelled on that first day, but suddenly, my daughter’s typical requests for Doc McStuffins or Pocoyo (excellent animation if you’re not hip) we’re replaced with, “Daddy, I want to watch Korra. Daddy, what happened to K…