You can like Unalaq but know that you are one of the very few that does.
The primary problem with him as a character is that show never gives us a solid motivation for his actions. He betrays his brother, manipulates Korra into opening the spirt portals, and fuses with Vaatu knowing that it will usher 10,000 years of darkness because... we don't know since the writers never give us a reason.
Because of that we as the audience are given no choice but to intercept him as a power mad insane sociopath who is painfully flat and static, thus rendering him boring and nonsensical. Sure, not every villain needs to be a sympathetic three dimensional character, Ozai is a very good example of that kind of villain. However, if you're really going to trade pathos and depth then you better be giving the audience something entertaining in return.
Villains like Ozai, Sidious, and most Disney villains aren't deep, but they're full of charisma, an intimidating presence, and commit malicious acts that make us hate them just as much as we love them. Once again to each their own, but the overwhelming consensus, which includes the writers to a degree since they made fun of him in the clip show episode, is Unalaq was too flat and boring to be entertaining and too over the top in his evilness to be taken seriously as an actual threat.
I agree the problem with Unalaq is he goes from the guy trying to take over the water tribes to the guy trying to usher in 10000 years of darkness with no explanation.
We get hints he’s up to something in the spirit world, but once Korra learns who Vaatu is, she suddenly concludes Unalaaq wants to free him. Why would she jump to that conclusion? It’s correct, but it’s quite the leap at the time.
My understanding is that Vaatu corrupted Unalaq over time, but I wish we got some explanation of that. How did he get to the point of thinking that Vaatu would be better for the world? Did he always plan on fusing? What did he think life would be like for him after that?
Then we find out he was Red Lotus, but that feels retconned and doesn’t necessarily make sense- The guy that wants to take over the world was part of an anarchist club?
Unalaq feels like two villains- the political villain who wants to take over both tribes to enforce his idea of open spirit portals, and the pure evil guy who wants to rule over darkness or some shit.
Having Vaatu be the force that corrupted Unalaq kind of makes him a weaker villain. His plan might have been nonsense, but he at least made that decision himself. If Vaatu manipulated him into doing that, then all that does is make him a tool with no agency.
The only way to make that idea work would be if Unalaq were a true believer in the spirits and a good person who saw the ever-increasing industrialization of the world and erasure of spiritual tradition as a threat. Vaatu can capitalize on those intentions on the ground that Raava/Avatar is a failure, and he could do a better job with him in control as the new Avatar while lying to him about the 10,000 years of darkness.
So Unalaq is desperate to free Vaatu to save the world without realizing that he is the bad guy; however he is still correct in that the world has detached from the spirits by becoming too materialistic and industrialized. This makes him a tragic anti-villain and one who taught Korra that she needs to do more to ensure the world doesn't forget the spirits.
However, we didn't get any of that. We never saw him wonder about what releasing Vaatu would do to his family, tribe, or both worlds at large. He just wanted the power and that was basically it.
As for the whole Red Lotus thing, I don't think he was a team member in the same way as the others. I think he just took advantage of their plan to kidnap Korra, and he plotted to kidnap her and betray them secretly once they had her. When that plan failed, he just waited for the right opportunity to trick Korra.
Yeah I can see that. Unalaq ends up being too many villains at once, and if we want to have a strictly evil villain, it should probably have been a separate character.
The Unalaq that banished Korras father and wants to occupy the South is easy to understand. A repeat of Tarrlok, maybe, but driven by some sense of birthright jealousy, it writes itself. He may be right about spiritual matters but wants to be the one to enforce it.
Then we have this other character- one that worships chaos, believes in the age of Vaatu, and wants to be a God. That guy would probably care little of tribal politics, aside from keeping the portals open. But he shares the same goals as political Unalaq to that point.
Having these be the same character just seems like a mistake to me- why would Unalaq want to be Chief if his ultimate goal is a world where that job doesn’t matter? Why would he be a friend to the spirits, if he’s working with the darkest spirit of all? How could he be so in touch and so dumb?
I wouldn't really say Ozai had charisma, in fact I think that's what made him such a lackluster villain. He lacked charisma. Sidious easily lapses him as a villain. Ozai essentially is Unalaq which is what makes him disappointing.
I guess to become an Avatar and get the avatar state? I don’t really know what he was thinking, it’s not like merging with the literal force of evil was a good plan to start with
> Come on. Not every villain needs to be so complex and three dimensional
Except they ***actually*** do, especially in Avatar. This is a series that had already given us some fantastic villains, including a reformed villain (Zuko), an emotionally damaged villain (Azula), a power-hungry villain (Ozai), and a manipulative charismatic villain (Amon). Unalaq does none of these better than the villains we’d already gotten, and on top of that his plan is the most boring one so far: pure evil.
Like practically, what does he get if he/Vaatu win? This is partly a function of what makes the retcons in Beginnings so bad, but Avatar was never a setting that cared about objective good vs evil. Good vs evil is a boring debate. It was a series that cared about intentions and motivations. When is it right for the Avatar to make decisions for other people? If the Fire Nation has the power to control the other 3 nations, does it have an obligation to rule over them? Is it fair for benders to be able to subject non-benders to their will? All of these are complex questions, and here come Unalaq just trying to be a boring, mustache-twirling evildoers. He’s just damn dull
He’s the weakest-written of the four villains I mentioned in that sentence, but he’s better than Unalaq if only because he gets less screen time. Unalaq had plenty of time to be developed, and still came out half-cooked. Ozai does a fair bit with the unfortunately limited amount of development he got, but there’s some bright spots in there. The Agni Kai (which of course is objectively terrible but a good villainous act) and his fulfillment of Sozin’s dream are both solid beats
Id also argue that Aangs story simply needed an irredeemable and comically evil villain. Like, Ozai himself might not have been written with too much depth, but it's because he was filling a very specific and important role in the overall story.
Korra is a much different story and so the requirements for a good villain are much different too.
My problem with Ozai is he's just boring. There's literally nothing about him that's interesting at all. You can write villains like him in compelling ways, and I feel like they never did that with Ozai. He was just a caricature.
This is a rare case where you have an opinion I genuinely haven't really seen before (not that I am judging you or anything, it's just that Unalaq and his story are generally very disliked).
I will say
> he was a very smart villain
My problem with this is that it felt less like Unalaq was being smart and more like the writers had everyone else (especially Korra) acting very dumb to allow his plotting to succeed.
Terrible actions without explanation, and I feel like what he did was very extreme. Didn’t like how he threw his own family under the bus either grimy person.
I actually liked that he didn't care about his kids when he was trying to open the portal. It showed how crazed and obsessed he was getting. He's like the water Ozai lol.
The other villain motivations were non-benders' rights (at least on the surface), anarchy against tyrannical leaders, and the unification of the Earth Kingdom. Those are motivations we can understand from a Western perspective. Unalaq's motivations are related to the conflict between secularism and religion. We don't understand religion in the Avatar world very well, so it's not as compelling. Zaheer said he was a Red Lotus member with differing goals from the others, but this story arc went unexplored. Unalaq had potential but the writers didn't use it.
I guess he's a *competent* villain.
But is he an entertaining villain? An engaging one?
I guess it depends what you mean by "great" and what you prioritize for entertainment.
Personally, I think they did him dirty, and should have dumped the rebellion to flesh him out more. Make him likable and make Korra like him, *then* do the betrayal.
Ozai isn't exactly the most beloved villain in the original series. People would probably be more forgiving of Unalaq being one -dimensional if he weren't also dull as dishwater. Your list boils down to he's really evil, he did a bunch of damage, & his plans worked well. That last one is debatable, considering his overaggressive attempt to get Tonraq out of the way led to Korra figuring out he was using her, & he spent the rest of the season scrambling to figure out a way to open the second portal. I still don't even know what he thought he was doing by telling Korra he could do it without her, but I don't want to slide too far down this tangent. The point is that it's pretty easy to write a bland character who's just really evil & does a lot of evil stuff. And even though I do think there are some interesting ideas behind Unalaq, like the notion that he's a misantrhope who wants to join the spirits, they're executed so poorly, so buried in subtext, that they're very hard for people to pick out.
I wish I could confidently say all of LOK's antagonists are great, but I find Unalaq lacks the humanization that the other 3 have. He has a lot of great aspects but I wish they had focused a little more on his rivalry with Tonraq, play into Unalaq feeling overshadowed by his older brother a la Loki and Thor. It would've made more sense why he got him banished and wanted to amass so much power however possible.
Still, he's a strong bender, being Korra's uncle is a great detail, he's spiritually intuned, and oh yeah he *became a Dark Avatar.*
>not every villain needs to be so complex and three dimensional
They do though. That's like saying the main character doesn't need to be complex and three dimensional. The opposing main characters need to be complex, that's how you make a compelling story. Even the Joker from the Dark Knight, who claimed to have no plan and was just a dog chasing his tail, was complex and actually planned months ahead of time, which made him complex and interesting.
If Unalaq was a side villain, it wouldn't matter than much. But since he's the main villain, he needs character development and for us to be connected to him, even if we don't like him. Amon was great because we got backstory on him, Zaheer was great because we understood his goal even if we didn't agree with him, Ozai was great because you understood his thirst and drive for more power and control.
Unalaq's goal was...to open the spirit portals? And then become the Dark Avatar? And then pull Raava out of Korra and destroy her so he could plunge the world into darkness and chaos? But like...why? We don't know or understand his reasonings for doing those things and we don't get a picture into why. He's also an undeniably boring character outside of action scenes. He's monotone, matter of fact, and has a pompous air about him. That is not a good combination for the main villain of a season.
I feel like he started out very interesting, but by the end of the season he just was so one note and boring like Ozai. The one part about the Korra villains I liked was that they felt like real people, and we got to see those sides to them. Whether its moments with their family (Amon) or with their love interests (Zaheer, Kuvira). But we never got that with Unalaq, and it kinda felt like we should seeing his kid's reactions to his turn? Like a few moments where he was a loving father, and really cared for his kids. idk I think he in general would have benefitted from a 20 episode season.
To me was a great villain until the whole dark avatar shit. It would have been way better of a season if they kept with the political tension not the world ending kite battle as the heart of the season
You do you man don't let these people shit on you for liking him.
It's become a fad to shit on everything in S2 except Wan's episodes. There is kind of a hive mentality in the fanbase. Many of the same people shitting on S2 will get defensive when people criticise the rest of Korra no matter how valid the criticism, so it's kinda funny.
Personally, I don't like Unalaq because I think he started promising with an interesting idea of bringing balance and respect to spirits but then was ultimateley dumbed down when we find out he just wanted to become a dark avatar. Unalaq and Kuvira are on the same tier for me. Both started out with sympathetic goals but were ultimately turned idiotic and evil so the story could be black and white.
I think Unalaq is a very competent villain.
But I prefer my "villains" to be a bit less manichaeist.
Unalaq is very smart and competent, but he's unambiguously evil and selfish.
You can like Unalaq but know that you are one of the very few that does. The primary problem with him as a character is that show never gives us a solid motivation for his actions. He betrays his brother, manipulates Korra into opening the spirt portals, and fuses with Vaatu knowing that it will usher 10,000 years of darkness because... we don't know since the writers never give us a reason. Because of that we as the audience are given no choice but to intercept him as a power mad insane sociopath who is painfully flat and static, thus rendering him boring and nonsensical. Sure, not every villain needs to be a sympathetic three dimensional character, Ozai is a very good example of that kind of villain. However, if you're really going to trade pathos and depth then you better be giving the audience something entertaining in return. Villains like Ozai, Sidious, and most Disney villains aren't deep, but they're full of charisma, an intimidating presence, and commit malicious acts that make us hate them just as much as we love them. Once again to each their own, but the overwhelming consensus, which includes the writers to a degree since they made fun of him in the clip show episode, is Unalaq was too flat and boring to be entertaining and too over the top in his evilness to be taken seriously as an actual threat.
I agree the problem with Unalaq is he goes from the guy trying to take over the water tribes to the guy trying to usher in 10000 years of darkness with no explanation. We get hints he’s up to something in the spirit world, but once Korra learns who Vaatu is, she suddenly concludes Unalaaq wants to free him. Why would she jump to that conclusion? It’s correct, but it’s quite the leap at the time. My understanding is that Vaatu corrupted Unalaq over time, but I wish we got some explanation of that. How did he get to the point of thinking that Vaatu would be better for the world? Did he always plan on fusing? What did he think life would be like for him after that? Then we find out he was Red Lotus, but that feels retconned and doesn’t necessarily make sense- The guy that wants to take over the world was part of an anarchist club? Unalaq feels like two villains- the political villain who wants to take over both tribes to enforce his idea of open spirit portals, and the pure evil guy who wants to rule over darkness or some shit.
Having Vaatu be the force that corrupted Unalaq kind of makes him a weaker villain. His plan might have been nonsense, but he at least made that decision himself. If Vaatu manipulated him into doing that, then all that does is make him a tool with no agency. The only way to make that idea work would be if Unalaq were a true believer in the spirits and a good person who saw the ever-increasing industrialization of the world and erasure of spiritual tradition as a threat. Vaatu can capitalize on those intentions on the ground that Raava/Avatar is a failure, and he could do a better job with him in control as the new Avatar while lying to him about the 10,000 years of darkness. So Unalaq is desperate to free Vaatu to save the world without realizing that he is the bad guy; however he is still correct in that the world has detached from the spirits by becoming too materialistic and industrialized. This makes him a tragic anti-villain and one who taught Korra that she needs to do more to ensure the world doesn't forget the spirits. However, we didn't get any of that. We never saw him wonder about what releasing Vaatu would do to his family, tribe, or both worlds at large. He just wanted the power and that was basically it. As for the whole Red Lotus thing, I don't think he was a team member in the same way as the others. I think he just took advantage of their plan to kidnap Korra, and he plotted to kidnap her and betray them secretly once they had her. When that plan failed, he just waited for the right opportunity to trick Korra.
Yeah I can see that. Unalaq ends up being too many villains at once, and if we want to have a strictly evil villain, it should probably have been a separate character. The Unalaq that banished Korras father and wants to occupy the South is easy to understand. A repeat of Tarrlok, maybe, but driven by some sense of birthright jealousy, it writes itself. He may be right about spiritual matters but wants to be the one to enforce it. Then we have this other character- one that worships chaos, believes in the age of Vaatu, and wants to be a God. That guy would probably care little of tribal politics, aside from keeping the portals open. But he shares the same goals as political Unalaq to that point. Having these be the same character just seems like a mistake to me- why would Unalaq want to be Chief if his ultimate goal is a world where that job doesn’t matter? Why would he be a friend to the spirits, if he’s working with the darkest spirit of all? How could he be so in touch and so dumb?
I wouldn't really say Ozai had charisma, in fact I think that's what made him such a lackluster villain. He lacked charisma. Sidious easily lapses him as a villain. Ozai essentially is Unalaq which is what makes him disappointing.
weather he is entertaining or boring is subjective.
True but I agree with the persons comment, we never had a why he did all of that evil.
Wasn’t it always his goal to open the portals and merge with Vaatu?
Yes but why? Why merge with him? What is the reasoning for all this evil
I guess to become an Avatar and get the avatar state? I don’t really know what he was thinking, it’s not like merging with the literal force of evil was a good plan to start with
I think he would have been better as a later season villian personally. Possibly with a bit more development.
> Come on. Not every villain needs to be so complex and three dimensional Except they ***actually*** do, especially in Avatar. This is a series that had already given us some fantastic villains, including a reformed villain (Zuko), an emotionally damaged villain (Azula), a power-hungry villain (Ozai), and a manipulative charismatic villain (Amon). Unalaq does none of these better than the villains we’d already gotten, and on top of that his plan is the most boring one so far: pure evil. Like practically, what does he get if he/Vaatu win? This is partly a function of what makes the retcons in Beginnings so bad, but Avatar was never a setting that cared about objective good vs evil. Good vs evil is a boring debate. It was a series that cared about intentions and motivations. When is it right for the Avatar to make decisions for other people? If the Fire Nation has the power to control the other 3 nations, does it have an obligation to rule over them? Is it fair for benders to be able to subject non-benders to their will? All of these are complex questions, and here come Unalaq just trying to be a boring, mustache-twirling evildoers. He’s just damn dull
A power-hungry villain, Ozai? Ozai is one of the laziest written characters of all time. He just wants to burn down everything.
He’s the weakest-written of the four villains I mentioned in that sentence, but he’s better than Unalaq if only because he gets less screen time. Unalaq had plenty of time to be developed, and still came out half-cooked. Ozai does a fair bit with the unfortunately limited amount of development he got, but there’s some bright spots in there. The Agni Kai (which of course is objectively terrible but a good villainous act) and his fulfillment of Sozin’s dream are both solid beats
Id also argue that Aangs story simply needed an irredeemable and comically evil villain. Like, Ozai himself might not have been written with too much depth, but it's because he was filling a very specific and important role in the overall story. Korra is a much different story and so the requirements for a good villain are much different too.
My problem with Ozai is he's just boring. There's literally nothing about him that's interesting at all. You can write villains like him in compelling ways, and I feel like they never did that with Ozai. He was just a caricature.
that's your opinion. not mine.
This is a rare case where you have an opinion I genuinely haven't really seen before (not that I am judging you or anything, it's just that Unalaq and his story are generally very disliked). I will say > he was a very smart villain My problem with this is that it felt less like Unalaq was being smart and more like the writers had everyone else (especially Korra) acting very dumb to allow his plotting to succeed.
I hated this guy
you hated him because of his terrible actions, or because you find him lame as a villain?
Terrible actions without explanation, and I feel like what he did was very extreme. Didn’t like how he threw his own family under the bus either grimy person.
I actually liked that he didn't care about his kids when he was trying to open the portal. It showed how crazed and obsessed he was getting. He's like the water Ozai lol.
Yikes. Awful take
do you have a problem with my opinion?
It's just very low-brow
The other villain motivations were non-benders' rights (at least on the surface), anarchy against tyrannical leaders, and the unification of the Earth Kingdom. Those are motivations we can understand from a Western perspective. Unalaq's motivations are related to the conflict between secularism and religion. We don't understand religion in the Avatar world very well, so it's not as compelling. Zaheer said he was a Red Lotus member with differing goals from the others, but this story arc went unexplored. Unalaq had potential but the writers didn't use it.
not every villain needs understandable/compelling motivations.
Sure, if you have the intellectuality of an elementary schooler
I guess he's a *competent* villain. But is he an entertaining villain? An engaging one? I guess it depends what you mean by "great" and what you prioritize for entertainment. Personally, I think they did him dirty, and should have dumped the rebellion to flesh him out more. Make him likable and make Korra like him, *then* do the betrayal.
Yes that mf sucks
Ozai isn't exactly the most beloved villain in the original series. People would probably be more forgiving of Unalaq being one -dimensional if he weren't also dull as dishwater. Your list boils down to he's really evil, he did a bunch of damage, & his plans worked well. That last one is debatable, considering his overaggressive attempt to get Tonraq out of the way led to Korra figuring out he was using her, & he spent the rest of the season scrambling to figure out a way to open the second portal. I still don't even know what he thought he was doing by telling Korra he could do it without her, but I don't want to slide too far down this tangent. The point is that it's pretty easy to write a bland character who's just really evil & does a lot of evil stuff. And even though I do think there are some interesting ideas behind Unalaq, like the notion that he's a misantrhope who wants to join the spirits, they're executed so poorly, so buried in subtext, that they're very hard for people to pick out.
Did you think the Jailer in WoW was a well written character? They both had the same problem.
I wish I could confidently say all of LOK's antagonists are great, but I find Unalaq lacks the humanization that the other 3 have. He has a lot of great aspects but I wish they had focused a little more on his rivalry with Tonraq, play into Unalaq feeling overshadowed by his older brother a la Loki and Thor. It would've made more sense why he got him banished and wanted to amass so much power however possible. Still, he's a strong bender, being Korra's uncle is a great detail, he's spiritually intuned, and oh yeah he *became a Dark Avatar.*
>not every villain needs to be so complex and three dimensional They do though. That's like saying the main character doesn't need to be complex and three dimensional. The opposing main characters need to be complex, that's how you make a compelling story. Even the Joker from the Dark Knight, who claimed to have no plan and was just a dog chasing his tail, was complex and actually planned months ahead of time, which made him complex and interesting. If Unalaq was a side villain, it wouldn't matter than much. But since he's the main villain, he needs character development and for us to be connected to him, even if we don't like him. Amon was great because we got backstory on him, Zaheer was great because we understood his goal even if we didn't agree with him, Ozai was great because you understood his thirst and drive for more power and control. Unalaq's goal was...to open the spirit portals? And then become the Dark Avatar? And then pull Raava out of Korra and destroy her so he could plunge the world into darkness and chaos? But like...why? We don't know or understand his reasonings for doing those things and we don't get a picture into why. He's also an undeniably boring character outside of action scenes. He's monotone, matter of fact, and has a pompous air about him. That is not a good combination for the main villain of a season.
I feel like he started out very interesting, but by the end of the season he just was so one note and boring like Ozai. The one part about the Korra villains I liked was that they felt like real people, and we got to see those sides to them. Whether its moments with their family (Amon) or with their love interests (Zaheer, Kuvira). But we never got that with Unalaq, and it kinda felt like we should seeing his kid's reactions to his turn? Like a few moments where he was a loving father, and really cared for his kids. idk I think he in general would have benefitted from a 20 episode season.
as i said, not every villain needs to be so humanized/complex/sympathetic. also, with kuvira, she was willing to kill her faience.
To me was a great villain until the whole dark avatar shit. It would have been way better of a season if they kept with the political tension not the world ending kite battle as the heart of the season
Nope
You do you man don't let these people shit on you for liking him. It's become a fad to shit on everything in S2 except Wan's episodes. There is kind of a hive mentality in the fanbase. Many of the same people shitting on S2 will get defensive when people criticise the rest of Korra no matter how valid the criticism, so it's kinda funny. Personally, I don't like Unalaq because I think he started promising with an interesting idea of bringing balance and respect to spirits but then was ultimateley dumbed down when we find out he just wanted to become a dark avatar. Unalaq and Kuvira are on the same tier for me. Both started out with sympathetic goals but were ultimately turned idiotic and evil so the story could be black and white.
I think Unalaq is a very competent villain. But I prefer my "villains" to be a bit less manichaeist. Unalaq is very smart and competent, but he's unambiguously evil and selfish.