Thinking About Tarrlok's Character Arc - The Fox's Den - Tumblr

I’m only going to reply to part of this, because I think you make a lot of good points about the backstory being more Noatak’s than Tarrlok’s (which… it kind of is, given that Tarrlok is telling the story to explain Noatak to Korra, rather than to explain himself!) and the consequences thereof.

I’m not going to argue that there’s anything specific provided in the story as to how Tarrlok made the change that he did, because there wasn’t, but I would like to provide another potential explanation stemming from the situation in which Tarrlok found himself:

Given that Yakone ended up just wilting away and Tarrlok’s mother is said to have never been the same, it’s quite possible that, at eleven years old, little Tarrlok found himself the only vaguely psychologically functional person in an isolated household near the North Pole with two mentally-unstable adults to support. It’s not that hard to imagine that such conditions could require lying to and manipulating the neighbors and/or his parents to try to keep his broken family alive, and instill in him the need to carve out a sense of stability in his life.

Not to mention, even if Yakone did give up on life, one would think that his disillusionment might not necessarily be harmless to those around him. He wasn’t training Tarrlok anymore, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t making awful backhanded remarks about how useless Tarrlok was and how he wished Tarrlok was the one who died in the storm instead of Noatak every time he got the chance. (“Don’t worry, we’re not going on another hunting trip. It isn’t worth it without your brother around anyway.”) I could even imagine him passively-aggressively implicating Tarrlok’s inadequacy in his own death, moaning about how he had nothing worthwhile to live for anyway given that his sons are either dead or a failure.

Heck, he might not even have to say anything for Tarrlok to pick up on those vibes. If Yakone wasted away because Noatak was gone, it’d be pretty obvious to Tarrlok what that implied about his own value in his father’s eyes.

What we do know about Tarrlok’s motivation is that he wants, more than anything, to step out of his father’s shadow and be someone worthwhile. And, given that, the sort of treatment that he’d receive from a dying-because-you’re-not-good-enough Yakone might be exactly the sort of thing to instill a need for control in him.

There’s the same issue with his arc as an adult, too. For instance, he and Korra seem on very good terms after he rescues her during the task force. It’s ominous—oh no, Korra is falling under his malign influence! Are we going to have battling mentors or what? (OMG, so cool.) No, the Korra-Tarrlok alliance will never come up again, and their next significant interactions are downright antagonistic.

The gloating is strong in his family.

And, in fact, it makes perfect sense for Korra and Tarrlok to end up clashing. That’s not the problem. Give us as thin a justification as you want, it’ll make sense because of their personalities. Nothing about this is out of character for them. The problem is that we are not given any reason for it to have happened. It’s like, all the dominos are lined up in a neat row, and one push would be enough to send them all toppling down, but there’s no push. They just start falling out of nowhere.

The missing push, I think, is psychological in nature: both Korra and Tarrlok (and, on a somewhat related note, Noatak) have narcissistic rage issues resulting from a need for total control over the environment to protect their fragile self-images and defend against a sense of overwhelming shame at perceived failures.

Korra attacks Tarrlok in When Extremes Meet because of that rage. That neither of them were on particularly bad terms beforehand is besides the point; Korra feels like a failure because her actions led to Lin’s resignation, she feels out of control because she no longer has any choice about who to work with, and every bit of that shame and anger and fear gets projected onto Tarrlok, who’s up on stage looking exceedingly smug about the political victory that reminds her of all of that. Hurting Tarrlok seems like the best way to make herself feel better, so she makes a blatant power-play against him to try to cut him down (which, of course, makes no sense anywhere but in Korra’s head).

Tarrlok, obviously, takes that as a threat, and responds with an even nastier power-play, and things spiral out of control from there.

We don’t need any more explanation to figure out what went on there. But in “Skeletons in the Closet,” we get another unexplained swerve in characterization, and this one is much more significant. Apart from his snappish greeting, he is completely unrecognizable. During Tarrlok’s last stage, his already-established (for adult!Tarrlok) ruthlessness and aggression were escalating as things got worse for him.

This man might turn desperate. News at eleven!

He disappeared when Amon captured him, and now he’s thoroughly remorseful, trying to atone for his multitude of wrongs (if in a rather apathetic way), reflective, oddly resigned.

Again, it’s not difficult to imagine how he would end up in this mental space. There’s a striking resemblance to young Tarrlok too (and perhaps this is the reason there’s no real attempt made to link young Tarrlok’s personality to politician Tarrlok’s, even in potential—structurally, young Tarrlok leads straight to penitent de-bended Tarrlok, even though skeevy politician Tarrlok comes next chronologically: I still think it could have worked, though). I can easily believe that he’d revert back to his basic personality in the circumstances.

Tarrlok has lost his bending, which is consistently devastating. He’s realized his archenemy is his beloved older brother. It’s quite possible he’s interacted with Noatak, since it’s been at least a couple of days and Noatak—out of concern for his safety or fear of his knowledge getting out or some combination of both—is clearly keeping him hidden from everyone. If so, those interactions were clearly not pleasant. He’s been comprehensively humbled. He’s had time to wallow in misery, to realize what he’s become, to fall into self-loathing. My complaint is not that he’s transitioned to something that’s inherently difficult to accept. It’s not! It’s that we don’t get any transition at all.

Tarrlok’s rage issues (and their parallel with Korra’s) come into play here as well, and are actually quite useful for explaining how he can go so quickly from rapid-downward-spiral to guilty and repentant.

Tarrlok’s actions in When Extremes Meet and Out of the Past are all done in response to the loss of control and shame he feels, first from Korra’s rage-fueled attacks against his legitimacy and worth as a politician, and then from his own terrible response to her final attack. His own rage gives him an intense case of tunnel-vision – all he can see is how to punish the jerk that made him feel bad and how to save himself, not the consequences of what he’s doing to everyone around him.

This rage is not, however, constant, and it can burn itself out if rendered impotent. We see this with Korra in When Extremes Meet and Out of the Past. Her downward spiral is contained entirely within When Extremes Meet as opposed to extended over two episodes, but she had likewise fallen far enough to gloat over her power to render her enemies helpless before attempting to murder a bloodbender without realizing what she was up against; when she’s stuck in Tarrlok’s box, she screams, threatens Tarrlok, beats her fists against the box, and acts generally violent and irrational until she realizes that it’s pointless, at which point she calms down and starts to actually consider her options. Tarrlok’s behavior after Amon caught him was likely quite similar. Even though there was no way for us to see it, the parallel with Korra can serve to fill in the blanks somewhat.

Okay, so Noatak shows up. Tarrlok is initially guarded—no surprise, as he just betrayed him to the Avatar (their mutual enemy, the last time we saw them together). As soon as Noatak lowers his guard—which is pretty much the first thing he does—Tarrlok seems conciliatory. He outright blames himself for their separation, even though Noatak doesn’t seem to be holding a grudge at all. He blames Tarrlok less than Tarrlok himself does.

This too makes sense for Tarrlok’s character! It’s just, the last time we saw him was telling Korra to take out Noatak for the good of everybody and now it’s “gosh, I’m sorry I didn’t abandon our mother with you :( :(” And then he has this look of … tentative hope, maybe? They’ve both apologized (Tarrlok somewhat more articulately, but that fits their personalities and the situations they’re apologizing for), and he seems encouraged by Noatak’s very evident affection. Encouraged enough that he does end up leaving with him.

And then he kills them both.

Unlike the others, the murder-suicide doesn’t come out of nowhere (although it doesn’t seem that he planned it—but it is foreshadowed). Tarrlok’s despair, resignation, and his sense of powerlessness were established already. Powerlessness, particularly, is the note he hits over and over again: he tried to define himself against his father but was inevitably shaped by him, his and Noatak’s paths were set by their father, fate brought them together. He wants the tragedy that is their lives to be over. He sics Korra on Noatak and refuses to be released from his cell. This stuff was established a whole episode before, which is a long time in the world of the finale.

However, the hints of hope and reconciliation came after all that. So, in the end, adult Tarrlok’s arc isn’t just morally ambiguous tragic past guy—>despair—>suicide. It’s down with the Equalists!—>teaming up with the Avatar!—>wait enemies now?—>creepy-ass bloodbender—>muahahahahahaha—>I’m so sorry—>despair—>maybe it’s going to be okay?—>wait nope, there’s no hope for either of us, I’m going to rid the world of us for its own good—>BOOM.

Well, I think there’s a rather large difference between recognizing that someone needs to take down a man you only intellectually know to be your brother (even if he treated you more like a prisoner) and holding to that judgement when said brother is right in front of you, acting for all the world like he really would love nothing more than a second chance.

Tarrlok still loves Noatak, even when he kills him. He wants desperately for Noatak’s desire for redemption to be legitimate, because maybe neither of them have to die after all. But then he gets on the boat, hears Noatak’s delusional belief that everything’s going to be great, sees the weapons Noatak had taken with him, realizes Noatak is doing exactly what Yakone did and exactly what he had tried to do with Korra, and comes to the conclusion that neither of them could ever escape Yakone’s influence other than in death. The setup is still there from earlier in the finale; it just take an extra push to cause him to follow through on it when face to face with his brother.

In the end, I do like pretty much everything that’s there. Not the murder-suicide, admittedly. The scene is immensely powerful in itself, but it feels awfully like the narrative is agreeing with him, which is not cool in so many ways, and it seems rather a waste, not just of WATERBENDER MAJOR VILLAINS FINALLY <3 <3 <3, but hello, sixty episodes with one-note Ozai as the main villain, and TWELVE with these mines of dramatic potential?

I’m not sure I’d say that the narrative agrees with Tarrlok; the impression I get is that Noatak is too far gone to be saved, but Tarrlok has enough empathy and capacity for moral reflection that he could have dealt with his own issues under different circumstances if he had the right people to help him.

The reasoning behind Tarrlok’s decision certainly seems complicated and heavily, heavily messed up, as opposed to heroic and necessary. What we see on screen is a man who is deeply depressed and in pain, ending two lives because he sees no other way out for either of them. That’s tragic and horrifying whether things could have ended differently or not, and the bleakness of the scene as put on screen would seem to suggest, to me at least, that the show itself doesn’t really condone it.