Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino drew a lot from Eastern philosophy to construct the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender and Avatar: The Legend of Korra. While the former series played a host of tropes straight, the challenge for the sequel was to more or less what the first iteration of the show did while remaining fresh.
While the creators leveled up the action of the series, they decided to make the villains a little more entrenched in the grey areas of morality, rather than having a clear-cut, mustache-twirling bad guy that was the Fire Nation tyrant Lord Ozai. The creators opened up about their thoughts on the matter, specifically with regards to one villain that the duo crafted that has “messed with” fans.
Zaheer was the kind of villain Bryan Konietzko never saw in Western Animation
Zaheer was one of the most interesting villains to come out of Avatar: The Legend of Korra. The leader of the Red Lotus, a newly minted Airbender who learned at the feet of Tenzin himself and one of the few characters in the show to master the ability to fly, something that had been lost to the air nomads for thousands of years, the character had a lot of gravitas as soon as he was introduced.
The Red Lotus had a very complex motivation, endeavoring to kill the Avatar to bring freedom to the nations. The characters envisioned a world without the four nations and dared to imagine a world free from the White Lotus. It is implied that his status as a nonbender put him through some dark and twisted situations in his past, experiences that matured into a terrorist thought process, that not only would get his companions imprisoned but also killed.
Bryan Konietzko, when asked about the character, said (via Polygon):
“One of the things that resonated with me so deeply about Princess Mononoke was how there weren’t any villains, but rather people with competing interests. That wasn’t a perspective I was seeing in Western animation at that time, but that struck a chord with me and the kinds of stories I wanted to tell.”
Princess Mononoke, a film by Studio Ghibli, looked at a conflict between nature and humanity, but refused to antagonize either, something that struck a chord with Konetzko, which influenced the manner in which Zaheer’s grey morality was interpreted.
Zaheer would also end up helping Korra let go of her past
Zaheer would find himself imprisoned in the United Republic after his revolution failed, which would lead to him being visited by Korra to undo the damage that was done by the Red Lotus, which haunted Korra in the form of a doppelganger that looked like she did when she was almost killed in the Avatar State by Zaheer.
When Korra visits the terrorist in his United Republic cell, he helps her get through her troubles about the world, given that above all else, the character is a believer of his values, and upon knowing that his slaying of the Earth Queen directly contributed to Kuvira’s dictatorship, the anarchist took it upon himself to coach Korra through her trauma, allowing her to reconnect with the Spirit Realm.
Such characters were indeed rare but have hence become more commonplace as Western Animation matures in the wake of the Anime boom.
