>>99762485The highs are high, the lows are low, and it's pretty good on average. The one thing it was sorely lacking that ATLA benefited so much from was planning.
ATLA is a series that was very, VERY well planned out. I remember reading Bryke spent the better part of three years working on pre-production for the series, which means every little detail was meticulously thought out and refined over that time - the art designs, the thematic motifs, the plot and character arc outlines went through redesign after redesign and rewrite after rewrite before anything on the show was ever animated or recorded. And that effort and planning shows in how tightly paced the story is, how satisfying and cathartic the character arcs are, and how memorable the look of the show was.
LOK didn't have that. There was no guaranteed season orders during pre-production, so everything had to be done on the assumption that they wouldn't get greenlit for followups, which means when they did get greenlit for Season Two it was a mad rush to try and get all the same people back and get production up and running again (hence jumping back and forth between animation studios, the clusterfuck of different writers between seasons, etc). Seasons Three and Four are objectively the strongest seasons of the show and it's no coincidence that they were the ones that got the most planning and forethought.
I love the series, but I can't help but be a little miffed at how much missed potential was here. You can argue how much of that was Bryke and how much of that was Nickelodeon, but at the end of the day it doesn't really matter because it's over - the show was good, but it wasn't as good as it should have been.
