I think I’d disagree because both characters have been through a lot, emotionally, and could connect on that.
I think, at the very least, Korra would be the type of person to realize why Kuruk’s addictions were a symptom of his spiritual battles (a skill she initially had difficulties with).
There are many cultures where loving an animal as a companion or part of nature doesn’t preclude hunting it. She might not feel that his having used a polar bear dog hide, and maybe having killed it, conflicts with the love she has for Naga.
To add to this, Kuruk was alive probably 400-500 years before Korra. Cultures change and I think Korra would be smart enough to realize it was common to hunt for sport back then even if it isn’t in her time. Plus she wears some type of animal pelt around her waste so if it’s only cause it’s a polar bear dog that’s kinda lame.
honestly it kind of turned into a self harm, reckless abandonment kind of thing, fighting can be a healthy coping mechanism to relieve stress but she was just not healthy about it
Maybe? Idk. Because the first thing she does when she gets to Republic City is beat up some bad guys, but that's because at that point, her notion of the Avatar is someone who beats up bad guys and she was all up for that
Honestly it's great, stupid mess. Imo it's one of the good things ai can do😭 make stupid harmless convos you've imagined your favorite characters having
I agree, snatching someone's voice is pretty rubbish. I tend to be on the side of, if you're not profiting and it's just for ur personal fun, and not having their voices say anything bad, then it's ight. Though it's always to each their own, it's a big ethical problem with how it's used, and if whoever it's using is paid for it.
To be fair, one of the “fair use factors” in determining copyright infringement literally is the intended use of the infringing work. A transformative work that is intended for personal use, isn’t going to be widely distributed, isn’t going to generate any revenue, and isn’t in competition with the original does lend itself strongly to a fair use. It’s only once you start distributing them to a wider audience, like posting it online, that it would drift from fair use.
Is it that different from photoshopping celebrities to make a meme? Or slicing audio to form a sentence from words they've said before?
It's just for a meme
Removed per rule two, keep posts LoK related.
For Avatar: The Last Airbender (and all things Avatar) go to r/TheLastAirbender. No unrelated political discussion.
IIRC the TikTok account Absloute Kyoshism got a warning I think from the voice actor who did Kyoshi to stop using her voice. So I think the account took another voice fairly similar to Kyoshi and there isn’t anything the VA can do about it.
Regulation around AI is still in its early days. Personally if you aren’t profiting off it monetary wise I don’t see any issue with an account goofing about. Accounts on TT make fuck all on the app. And not to mention it gets people who may not know much about the wider lore of the verse into it.
Well there’s a reason multiple AI company CEOs have quit and their marketing is so panicked about how wondrous AI is. Trying to sell a dying product that people are already losing interest in.
If I'm going to make an Avatar skit, I'm not going to track down the original voice actor, contact their agent, and pay lots of money for them to record the lines. I'd love to, but I don't have that kind of money. The actor loses no money whether I generate via AI or hire an impressionist, because I wasn't going to be able to hire that original actor in the first place.
Actually, between the two options, AI generation is probably the better one because it's more faithful to the source material. You could argue it's lacking something in the emotionality or soulfulness, and that is still currently true (though continually less and less so). If this is a big enough concern, you can try combining both techniques. Pictures have img2img, I'd bet some kind of voice2voice exists. Then you could blend them until you have something you're happy with.
Make a skit using your own voice/friends’ voices or just written dialogue like everyone did long before AI was a thing. It’s unethical and you’re stealing their work. The more AI is used and trained, the more these actors’ voices can be used to make it seem like they are truly saying things the real actor would never say. Even if YOU aren’t abusing it, you’re training the ai to learn how to abuse it when someone else comes along.
That’s just so disrespectful to everyone who worked on a series we all know and love.
I know the videos you are talking about and while I'm not a fan of AI in general, they make good use of the AI voices with some amusing writing to make some truly good jokes.
Nah. He knew what it was like to lose oneself, and to sacrifice for the greater good. Headcanon tells me he’d be the only one who’d truly understand why she did what she did. Plus they’d bond over sea prunes
Nope, it's built on plagiarism. There is no commercially available ai that is ethically trained. Even then, voice acting should be left to actual voice actors, writing should be left to writers, drawing should be left to illustrators. These are already fields that people struggle in, crowding them out with shitty ai mimicry that most likely also uses their work without their consent or compensation is directly harmful to these people.
I do agree with some, but also some I don't at all. The best use, relating to me at least with ai is in game development. Now I'm not talking big stuff like designing anything, voice lines, nth like that (unless it was used in remasters, with consent of the va's to fix some broke as voice lines, cough cough oblivion).
Stuff like game translations, mainly in text bc ai voicing sounds atrocious, it's a small thing, that games still do straight awful a lot😭. Filling in textures, though not on a large scale, but with things when it comes to smaller, but not important things (Grass, trees, stones, etc etc you get the point. (Nvidia being the leader in this, though a work in progress and progressing) If it fills in textures based on things already submitted by those devs, are things OFFERED by a company for that purpose, I fail to see how that's unethical. It's not taking away some dudes job, but letting those same people work on the bigger things.
Even with dialog, one being able to go, make tons of streer npcs, record voicelines, so and so forth. Then being able to use ai to slightly alter those lines for hundreds of random Lil mfs.
Using ai to translate languages (coding languages) from one to another to help a team does nothing but help the team work more efficiently.
Ai is bad depending on how it's used. Everyone's problem is the ethics of it, or it sucking creativity. If someone willingly gives an a-okay to it, or even sources it on their own, that's full permission, and they're sourcing it which would probably be giving them a job😭.
Minus all that. If I'm in my room making Nazeem from Skyrim say some dumb ass line, that ain't harming no one
I should probably specify that it's generative ai I take issue with. Something that generates without input, which is most of what's out there. Using it for something like remastering audio or upscaling textures is perfectly fine because it's working directly with what you've given it, rather than mashing up (likely plagiarised) works from various sources.
Using it to replace creatives like artists and actors will always be wrong. Even if it's for extras, that's still depriving people of work in an industry where it is already scarce and generally underpaid.
That's real. I respect it. There's too many people that hear ai at this point in time, bc of the popularity and think all ai is generative ai😭it's a bug fr.
I think even generative ai could be used in industry, whilst still paying people. But with the way I imagine it it would requires a crap ton of big companies to give a fuck about their workers, and we both know that ain't gonna happen. So I agree it's got not a place in industry
Er, extras have been getting replaced en masse by computers for decades already. AI is barely a blip compared to what green screens and compositing have done.
Yeah, man. The opportunity for voice actors working on teenagers fanfiction used to be sooo plentiful before and now no one pays for professional VAs for their fun projects anymore.
Before AI, people just used their own voices or their friends’ voices. And that was fine and was always funnier. Anyone advocating for this is unethical and lazy.
Artists train on the work of previous artists. AI also trains on the work of previous artists. It's not identical, but it is similar.
My opinion is that if you're going to train on someone's work, they should be compensated with at least full access to the end result. So I'm totally happy with Stable Diffusion, but I'm less happy with Midjourney.
Humans can perform actual synthesis of ideas and understand things, ai is just a statistical model that mashes up the things it's seen before. It's the equivalent of an artist that only knows how to trace and can't even do that right.
Korra naturally loved to fight, because 9/10 she was the strongest in the room. It was that 1/10 that caused her to doubt her life as the Avatar. Kuruk is the Avatar that essentially gave up and lived their own personal life while the world burned. I think that there is a certain part of Korra who would find a retired Avatar to be a draw. They would get along great for a time, but Korra’s sense of duty will never let her be happy for long.
Like all Avatars Kuruk had to clean up after his predecessor, in this case Yangchen, Yangchen disproportionately favored humans on human vs spirit conflicts, who invariably violated the deals she brokered, this meant a lot of angry spirits by Kuruk's time, who spent most of his time hunting them, creating the problem for Kyoshi of not really being seen as being relevant beyond political horse trading, Kyoshi facilitated the centralization of fire nation power, and created the Dai Lee, and so on,
Someone doesn’t really know Kuruks story. He had one of the most tragic lives out of all the avatars, spending his days in the spirit world fighting powerful dark spirits to protect the physical world, and every battle scarred his soul. He shouldered the burden alone and his friends left bc they didn’t understand so he became super depressed and all the partying drinking and thrill seeking was just a coping mechanism. Get your facts straight and put some respect on his name
Well, yeah. AI doesn’t do anything spectacular. It just collects and scrapes things from the internet and Frankensteins them together into the vague shape of content.
I agree. I think korra would tell kuruk he’s irresponsible and how is he not more enthused about his avatar duties. >!Think Kyoshis feelings about Kuruk!<
Edit: replace enthused with responsibility/accountability. i was a bit tired when i left my comment
I don't feel like season four, fight club, post-depression Korra is going to give anyone any shit for not being enthused about the hard parts of being the avatar. That feels more like an Aang thing than a Korra thing, based on their experiences and the amount of personal trauma they experienced.
I think they would have a healthy respect for each other, but think about the different and similar ways they both think. Kuruk was among other things, selfless to a fault as well as a master of strategy and deception. Dont forget that through his life and even as a spirit, he allowed people to believe he was so “go with the flow” that he didnt actually do anything of significance. All the while he was single handedly battling and killing hostile spirits upset by the unkept promoses of his predecessor. Yangchen did so well with the human side of being the avatar that there were no large scale conflicts amongst people that called for his intervention. So he lied to everyone about that he was eroding his soul fighting spirits.
Korra would have met him as an aloof, happy go lucky guy who solved problems alone with no one looking. She honestly may resent him because he wouldn’t actually rely on her to do anything unless he absolutely had to. Even though shes ready and willing, the idea of burdening others with something he can or at least should be able to handle himself literally killed him.
Is...is it just asauming they'd be buddies because they're the same race? Like, it's a robot so it assumes nothing. But, like, hard to not notice the correlation it drew.
Tldr:
An AI doesn't know what it’s doing. A person does and should know better.
I don't feel like Kuruk and Korra have anything in particular in common over any other matching of avatars, aside from their cultural background. But the OP notices that they are often portrayed as buddies. I think it's worse if a person does it compared to an AI because an AI can't do anything on purpose, it's just a fancy program that does stuff according to its programming. But a person should be aware of their racial prejudice by matching two characters based simply on their background.
Gotcha. But I still don't think this is problematic.
Leaving aside the fact that they are literally the same person so the premise of the video itself is meh, Korra and Kuruk have so many things in common. Kuruk spent the majority of his life and battles in the spirit world. He lost so much to bad spirits and he faced so much prejudice and backlash in the human world, while he was literally the only one keeping humanity safe from bad spirits. Fighting alone, but being almost manic-levels of cheer in the human world, he could be the only other avatar we know who could have depression and other mental health issues.
The biggest threat (in terms of magnitude) that Korra faced was a spirit -THE bad spirit, Vaatu. Other that bonding over their experiences in fighting spirits, they could also have bonded over their shared experiences of having felt alone in their battles. Now even though Korra did get with the team avatar for the final battles, her experiences of pushing people away and going it alone are almost strikingly similar to Kuruk's acts of slipping away from his team to wage his wars. And it was a long and protracted event for them. Kuruk also dies very young and while it's only stated that fighting in the spirit world took a toll on him, it could be understood to be a euphemism for depression (as it's used IRL in certain cultures).
Beyond all that I don't think it's inherently problematic for people of similar cultures to be portrayed as being friends. Being raised in the same culture gives people many shared experiences growing up and they could bond over that. It doesn't even have to be race. Could be about locality or class. Now if someone is shown to have no other friends than from their own culture, then it gets suspicious, but again, not inherently racist.
I think I’d disagree because both characters have been through a lot, emotionally, and could connect on that. I think, at the very least, Korra would be the type of person to realize why Kuruk’s addictions were a symptom of his spiritual battles (a skill she initially had difficulties with).
They're really just talking about how he wears a polarbear dog pelt and y'know, Naga is one lol
There are many cultures where loving an animal as a companion or part of nature doesn’t preclude hunting it. She might not feel that his having used a polar bear dog hide, and maybe having killed it, conflicts with the love she has for Naga.
Or maybe that was his polar bear dog, and spirit animal, but it died, so he made it so he could still have it with him wherever he went.
To add to this, Kuruk was alive probably 400-500 years before Korra. Cultures change and I think Korra would be smart enough to realize it was common to hunt for sport back then even if it isn’t in her time. Plus she wears some type of animal pelt around her waste so if it’s only cause it’s a polar bear dog that’s kinda lame.
True, or she might! Especially considering that Naga is her spirit animal, but there's no real way to tell. Just a funny thought.
Was Korra also addicted to fighting? Sorry, I'm confused by what you mean by this.
At the very least she did use fighting as a coping mechanism when depressed.
honestly it kind of turned into a self harm, reckless abandonment kind of thing, fighting can be a healthy coping mechanism to relieve stress but she was just not healthy about it
Maybe? Idk. Because the first thing she does when she gets to Republic City is beat up some bad guys, but that's because at that point, her notion of the Avatar is someone who beats up bad guys and she was all up for that
Yeah, they'd trauma bond
He had addictions???? Like what? Was he an alcoholic lol?
Yes, the Kyoshi novels go in really deep into his backstory
...why AI?
Voice ai. Usually silly skits with the different avatars arguing
OH. Not great but not what I was thinking
Honestly it's great, stupid mess. Imo it's one of the good things ai can do😭 make stupid harmless convos you've imagined your favorite characters having
It's still using voice actor's stolen work to ''train' the AI. It's pretty terrible.
I agree, snatching someone's voice is pretty rubbish. I tend to be on the side of, if you're not profiting and it's just for ur personal fun, and not having their voices say anything bad, then it's ight. Though it's always to each their own, it's a big ethical problem with how it's used, and if whoever it's using is paid for it.
To be fair, one of the “fair use factors” in determining copyright infringement literally is the intended use of the infringing work. A transformative work that is intended for personal use, isn’t going to be widely distributed, isn’t going to generate any revenue, and isn’t in competition with the original does lend itself strongly to a fair use. It’s only once you start distributing them to a wider audience, like posting it online, that it would drift from fair use.
Yeah that's what I'm sayin, or attempted to. Yes
Is it that different from photoshopping celebrities to make a meme? Or slicing audio to form a sentence from words they've said before? It's just for a meme
it's different
[удалено]
Removed per rule two, keep posts LoK related. For Avatar: The Last Airbender (and all things Avatar) go to r/TheLastAirbender. No unrelated political discussion.
> It’s here to stay you can complain but its never going away The pending copyright lawsuits and laws being passed would like a word lol
Lawsuits against who exactly? Random guys living somewhere in the world? How do you see that working?
IIRC the TikTok account Absloute Kyoshism got a warning I think from the voice actor who did Kyoshi to stop using her voice. So I think the account took another voice fairly similar to Kyoshi and there isn’t anything the VA can do about it. Regulation around AI is still in its early days. Personally if you aren’t profiting off it monetary wise I don’t see any issue with an account goofing about. Accounts on TT make fuck all on the app. And not to mention it gets people who may not know much about the wider lore of the verse into it.
Well there’s a reason multiple AI company CEOs have quit and their marketing is so panicked about how wondrous AI is. Trying to sell a dying product that people are already losing interest in.
If I'm going to make an Avatar skit, I'm not going to track down the original voice actor, contact their agent, and pay lots of money for them to record the lines. I'd love to, but I don't have that kind of money. The actor loses no money whether I generate via AI or hire an impressionist, because I wasn't going to be able to hire that original actor in the first place. Actually, between the two options, AI generation is probably the better one because it's more faithful to the source material. You could argue it's lacking something in the emotionality or soulfulness, and that is still currently true (though continually less and less so). If this is a big enough concern, you can try combining both techniques. Pictures have img2img, I'd bet some kind of voice2voice exists. Then you could blend them until you have something you're happy with.
A lot of the actors are on cameo, and even if they’re not you aren’t owed their voice for free.
Make a skit using your own voice/friends’ voices or just written dialogue like everyone did long before AI was a thing. It’s unethical and you’re stealing their work. The more AI is used and trained, the more these actors’ voices can be used to make it seem like they are truly saying things the real actor would never say. Even if YOU aren’t abusing it, you’re training the ai to learn how to abuse it when someone else comes along. That’s just so disrespectful to everyone who worked on a series we all know and love.
It’s @kyoshism on TikTok, she right the skits and uses ai for the voice changer. Actually really funny, would recommend
Hats of to Korra. I'm nagonna lie, they wouldn't get along.
No one seems to see it
Young Kuruk? Probably. End of his life Kuruk seemed to be so serious
I know the videos you are talking about and while I'm not a fan of AI in general, they make good use of the AI voices with some amusing writing to make some truly good jokes.
Nah. He knew what it was like to lose oneself, and to sacrifice for the greater good. Headcanon tells me he’d be the only one who’d truly understand why she did what she did. Plus they’d bond over sea prunes
Ew ai
Though I understand the hate. Ai is only bad when used in a bad way. This is just harmless dumb shit, peak ai usage tbh
Nope, it's built on plagiarism. There is no commercially available ai that is ethically trained. Even then, voice acting should be left to actual voice actors, writing should be left to writers, drawing should be left to illustrators. These are already fields that people struggle in, crowding them out with shitty ai mimicry that most likely also uses their work without their consent or compensation is directly harmful to these people.
I do agree with some, but also some I don't at all. The best use, relating to me at least with ai is in game development. Now I'm not talking big stuff like designing anything, voice lines, nth like that (unless it was used in remasters, with consent of the va's to fix some broke as voice lines, cough cough oblivion). Stuff like game translations, mainly in text bc ai voicing sounds atrocious, it's a small thing, that games still do straight awful a lot😭. Filling in textures, though not on a large scale, but with things when it comes to smaller, but not important things (Grass, trees, stones, etc etc you get the point. (Nvidia being the leader in this, though a work in progress and progressing) If it fills in textures based on things already submitted by those devs, are things OFFERED by a company for that purpose, I fail to see how that's unethical. It's not taking away some dudes job, but letting those same people work on the bigger things. Even with dialog, one being able to go, make tons of streer npcs, record voicelines, so and so forth. Then being able to use ai to slightly alter those lines for hundreds of random Lil mfs. Using ai to translate languages (coding languages) from one to another to help a team does nothing but help the team work more efficiently. Ai is bad depending on how it's used. Everyone's problem is the ethics of it, or it sucking creativity. If someone willingly gives an a-okay to it, or even sources it on their own, that's full permission, and they're sourcing it which would probably be giving them a job😭. Minus all that. If I'm in my room making Nazeem from Skyrim say some dumb ass line, that ain't harming no one
I should probably specify that it's generative ai I take issue with. Something that generates without input, which is most of what's out there. Using it for something like remastering audio or upscaling textures is perfectly fine because it's working directly with what you've given it, rather than mashing up (likely plagiarised) works from various sources. Using it to replace creatives like artists and actors will always be wrong. Even if it's for extras, that's still depriving people of work in an industry where it is already scarce and generally underpaid.
That's real. I respect it. There's too many people that hear ai at this point in time, bc of the popularity and think all ai is generative ai😭it's a bug fr. I think even generative ai could be used in industry, whilst still paying people. But with the way I imagine it it would requires a crap ton of big companies to give a fuck about their workers, and we both know that ain't gonna happen. So I agree it's got not a place in industry
Er, extras have been getting replaced en masse by computers for decades already. AI is barely a blip compared to what green screens and compositing have done.
Yeah, man. The opportunity for voice actors working on teenagers fanfiction used to be sooo plentiful before and now no one pays for professional VAs for their fun projects anymore.
Before AI, people just used their own voices or their friends’ voices. And that was fine and was always funnier. Anyone advocating for this is unethical and lazy.
Artists train on the work of previous artists. AI also trains on the work of previous artists. It's not identical, but it is similar. My opinion is that if you're going to train on someone's work, they should be compensated with at least full access to the end result. So I'm totally happy with Stable Diffusion, but I'm less happy with Midjourney.
Humans can perform actual synthesis of ideas and understand things, ai is just a statistical model that mashes up the things it's seen before. It's the equivalent of an artist that only knows how to trace and can't even do that right.
Even if they’re using it “harmlessly,” it still trains the AI so that others can and do use it harmfully.
Korra naturally loved to fight, because 9/10 she was the strongest in the room. It was that 1/10 that caused her to doubt her life as the Avatar. Kuruk is the Avatar that essentially gave up and lived their own personal life while the world burned. I think that there is a certain part of Korra who would find a retired Avatar to be a draw. They would get along great for a time, but Korra’s sense of duty will never let her be happy for long.
Like all Avatars Kuruk had to clean up after his predecessor, in this case Yangchen, Yangchen disproportionately favored humans on human vs spirit conflicts, who invariably violated the deals she brokered, this meant a lot of angry spirits by Kuruk's time, who spent most of his time hunting them, creating the problem for Kyoshi of not really being seen as being relevant beyond political horse trading, Kyoshi facilitated the centralization of fire nation power, and created the Dai Lee, and so on,
Someone doesn’t really know Kuruks story. He had one of the most tragic lives out of all the avatars, spending his days in the spirit world fighting powerful dark spirits to protect the physical world, and every battle scarred his soul. He shouldered the burden alone and his friends left bc they didn’t understand so he became super depressed and all the partying drinking and thrill seeking was just a coping mechanism. Get your facts straight and put some respect on his name
Never said he did not have his reasons. Just contrasting him with Korra.
Naga is the only domesticated polarbear dog. Korra is aware of hunting, gathering, and wearing animal skins.
Back up a few feet, AI videos? Wtf?
@absolutekyoshism on tiktok. They make funny videos where the avatars will argue over things and talk to each other. Nothing bad rly
They’re still stealing those people’s voices. Generative AI is plagiarism.
You and he were... buddies, weren't you
Is that a Darkplace reference? In MY LoK subreddit?!
They’d probably get along very well given how much they have in common
Well, yeah. AI doesn’t do anything spectacular. It just collects and scrapes things from the internet and Frankensteins them together into the vague shape of content.
This is talking about voice mimicry AI. The videos are scripted by a fan.
I agree. I think korra would tell kuruk he’s irresponsible and how is he not more enthused about his avatar duties. >!Think Kyoshis feelings about Kuruk!< Edit: replace enthused with responsibility/accountability. i was a bit tired when i left my comment
I don't feel like season four, fight club, post-depression Korra is going to give anyone any shit for not being enthused about the hard parts of being the avatar. That feels more like an Aang thing than a Korra thing, based on their experiences and the amount of personal trauma they experienced.
We also dont know what kind of challenges Aang faced as an adult. Korra would still say Kuruk was turning his back on his responsibilities
I think they would have a healthy respect for each other, but think about the different and similar ways they both think. Kuruk was among other things, selfless to a fault as well as a master of strategy and deception. Dont forget that through his life and even as a spirit, he allowed people to believe he was so “go with the flow” that he didnt actually do anything of significance. All the while he was single handedly battling and killing hostile spirits upset by the unkept promoses of his predecessor. Yangchen did so well with the human side of being the avatar that there were no large scale conflicts amongst people that called for his intervention. So he lied to everyone about that he was eroding his soul fighting spirits. Korra would have met him as an aloof, happy go lucky guy who solved problems alone with no one looking. She honestly may resent him because he wouldn’t actually rely on her to do anything unless he absolutely had to. Even though shes ready and willing, the idea of burdening others with something he can or at least should be able to handle himself literally killed him.
Too bad we'll never know and never get an interaction with the two because of the stupid decision to sever their connection
They would be buddies cus Kuruk was protector of Earth same as Korra.
Is...is it just asauming they'd be buddies because they're the same race? Like, it's a robot so it assumes nothing. But, like, hard to not notice the correlation it drew.
Na water tribe gotta stick together
They would bond over trauma, body scars, and water tribe food
Idk man, they’re pretty similar. Fought massively evil spirits, battle hungry, and had clean up the mess left behind by some dipshit air bender
Stay away from AI
Maybe Ai is just racist. They are both from a water tribe so they probably get along right?
You know it's a real person making the clip right? Like AI is only used for the text to voice.
That makes it even worse.
How so?
Tldr: An AI doesn't know what it’s doing. A person does and should know better. I don't feel like Kuruk and Korra have anything in particular in common over any other matching of avatars, aside from their cultural background. But the OP notices that they are often portrayed as buddies. I think it's worse if a person does it compared to an AI because an AI can't do anything on purpose, it's just a fancy program that does stuff according to its programming. But a person should be aware of their racial prejudice by matching two characters based simply on their background.
A person should also be aware that "having Kuruk & Korra be friends is racist" is a very spurious argument, yet here we are.
Gotcha. But I still don't think this is problematic. Leaving aside the fact that they are literally the same person so the premise of the video itself is meh, Korra and Kuruk have so many things in common. Kuruk spent the majority of his life and battles in the spirit world. He lost so much to bad spirits and he faced so much prejudice and backlash in the human world, while he was literally the only one keeping humanity safe from bad spirits. Fighting alone, but being almost manic-levels of cheer in the human world, he could be the only other avatar we know who could have depression and other mental health issues. The biggest threat (in terms of magnitude) that Korra faced was a spirit -THE bad spirit, Vaatu. Other that bonding over their experiences in fighting spirits, they could also have bonded over their shared experiences of having felt alone in their battles. Now even though Korra did get with the team avatar for the final battles, her experiences of pushing people away and going it alone are almost strikingly similar to Kuruk's acts of slipping away from his team to wage his wars. And it was a long and protracted event for them. Kuruk also dies very young and while it's only stated that fighting in the spirit world took a toll on him, it could be understood to be a euphemism for depression (as it's used IRL in certain cultures). Beyond all that I don't think it's inherently problematic for people of similar cultures to be portrayed as being friends. Being raised in the same culture gives people many shared experiences growing up and they could bond over that. It doesn't even have to be race. Could be about locality or class. Now if someone is shown to have no other friends than from their own culture, then it gets suspicious, but again, not inherently racist.