This week’s episode of The Legend of Korra was a special one hour event that told the story of the very first Avatar. Korra washes up on a remote island, bereft of her memory, and needs to connect with her past lives in order to heal herself. She ends up in a deep dream state, seeing visions of past Avatars telling her that she must find Raava. She next sees a young boy who tells her that he is not Raava, but that he is Wan, and that he will tell her about how he became the first Avatar.This two-part episode uses a different kind of animation style, one evocative of ancient Asian art. Its a nice fit for a story that feels so much like a creation myth for Korra’s world.Wan (voiced by Steven Yeun from The Walking Dead) turns out to be a peasant boy and good-natured thief living in a city on the back of a great lion-turtle. The city is ruled by and elder name Chu who hoards food for his family leaving the powerless to starve. Wan decides to find power of his own by joining a hunt for food in the spirit wilds. The great lion-turtle gives him the power of the element of fire for the purpose of the hunt, but Wan does not give it back as he is supposed to. Instead he uses it to try to overthrow Chu. When this fails, Chu banishes Wan from the city, but Wan manages to convince the lion-turtle to allow him to keep the power of fire.Wan wanders the spirit wilds, barely surviving, for some time before he finds an oasis where many spirits come to bathe and relax. The spirits march into the oasis much like the spirits entering the bathhouse in Spirited Away. Unable to sneak in, Wan decides to move on, but is granted access to the oasis after defending a captured lion-deer from hunters. Seeing a kind of selflessness in Wan that he hadn’t seen in humans before, the spirit takes Wan into the oasis so that he may heal. Wan stays there for some time, learning the ways of the spirits.Eventually, Wan decides to move on and find the other lion-turtle cities that he has heard about. He journeys with the lion-deer he saved and travels far before ending up in a valley where two great spirits are fighting, one bright and the other dark. The battle is destroying the valley around them and so Wan steps in to try to end the struggle. The dark spirit asks Wan to free him and end the 10,000 years of suffering that he has been forced to endure at the hands of the bright spirit. Wan does so, unknowingly releasing Vaatu, the spirit of darkness, corruption and chaos, from the control of Raava, the spirit of light, balance, and peace. Raava scolds Wan for his actions, telling him that he may have just doomed the world to destruction, before leaving to try to track Vaatu down.
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