The Korra Fixfic

Mon drew this!

 

E: Mon drew this mere hours after I posted and I absolutely love it.

People liked the depressing review post well enough that I shall drag its positive counterpart into the light.

I guess I'm Sequelisers now. 

Barely Organized Notes

Three Seasons, TV-14 Rating 

 Don't want to overextend, since the season arcs will not be severed from each other like they were originally, and if we truly want to make the show a little more mature, let's put it right around FMA level. I don't know if you can actually do this on TV, but I am playing by movie rules and permitting myself one (1) "fuck" usage. Korra, Tenzin, or Pema gets it, and I do not know which just yet.

Korra's Arc 

Will remain mostly similar - starts out full of herself, self-centered, spiritually inert, and convinced that punching things solves all problems. Will gradually mature to realize that this is not a good thing.

Cast Changes

Mako, Bolin, and Asami will not appear in this version of the series. Their slots will be filled by the Red Lotus 

Current Status of the Gaang & Descendants

• Aang (Dead) & Katara (Alive)
• Kya - Waterbender. Surgeon for not-Doctors-Without-Borders.
  
• Bumi - Nonbender. Married Izumi. Unemployed eccentric.
  
• Tenzin - Airbender. Current head of the Monastery Island Temple.
  
• Jinora - Eldest, helps Tenzin teach the acolytes. Bookworm.
  
• Ikki - Middle child. Developing an art hobby.
  
• Meelo -Youngest. The weird kid.
  
• Sokka (Dead) & Suki (Dead) 
• [Currently Unnamed Daughter] - Professional wrestler. Introduced by suplexing Tenzin at the family reunion in the first episode.
  
• [Currently Unnamed NB] - Shaman & educator.
• Toph (????, presumed dead)
• Lin - RCPD chief of police.
  
• Suyin - Libertarian gazillionaire and fascist sympathizer. 
  
• Zuko (Alive) & Mai (Alive)
• Izumi - Reigning Fire Lady
  
• Mako - Son of Izumi and Bumi. A civil service worker.
  

Azula, while not appearing, is confirmed alive, and in good enough state that Zuko's occasional visits are cordial. (Man did she go through a lot of therapy and deradicalization).

Antagonists

• Tarlok - Charismatic chairman of the Republic City council. Commits suicide by throwing himself off a building during the Revolution, rather than be taken to stand trial.
  
• Lin Beifong - Chief of Police in Republic City. Infamous for her brutal crackdowns against nonbenders, including those that led to the Equality March of 157. Eventually joined Kuvirate forces alongside her sister Suyin.
  
• Varrick - Industrialist and film mogul. Found to have ordered a string of bombings and vandalism attempting to frame the Equalist movement, so as to profit off of increased militarization of the RCPD. Escaped the city during the revolution and proceeded to supply Kuvira in preparation for and in the aftermath of, her coup.
  
• Kuvira - General in the Earth Kingdom military. Heads a coup of the EK. Has absolutely nothing special or unique or meaningful about her - a dime-store fascist to the bone.
  

Added to these four, we have-

The Lady of Fangs - A new character who will serve as the series' ultimate antagonist.

A spirit local to the region that would become Republic City. Preferred form is a tall woman in a red silk gown, with a tiger-wolf's head. She is a spirit of wild and untamed places - not particularly nice on the best of days, but if you sacrifice a moleboar to her every solstice and don't overhunt on her territory, she and her servants will leave you well enough alone.

The capitalist meatgrinder of Republic City is, in her own words, "a poisoned feast". A perpetual blood offering that is both keeping her alive and killing her. She is changing because of it, lashing out with cruelty. Her servants (what if a tiger was also a spider was also slenderman) and other displaced & desperate once-nature spirits that have flocked to her stalk the back alleys and slums of RC.

The Red Lotus

A band of revolutionary punks sharing a tiny loft apartment on Temple Street. Bender allies of the Equalists.

• Zaheer - An air temple acolyte (having developed airbending when he returns from pilgrimage in Season 2). Incredibly charismatic. Has a boyfriend, who I have not developed at all but rest assured he will be there.
  
• Khazan - Earthbender. The chill comic relief guy. Romantic relationship with Ming-Hua.
  
• P'li - Firebender. The militant believer in the cause. Standoffish at first, but eventually has the closest bond with Korra after backstory revelations yet to be determined.
  
• Ming-Hua - Waterbender. The cynic. Romantic relationship with Khazan.
  

The Equalists

A motley community drawing from Republic City's unions, religious communities, immigrant neighborhoods, senior citizens, youth groups, and the overall working poor.

Amon doesn't exist. The mask and character are that of an ogre from Earth Kingdom folklore, a stock character used to express the anger and indignation that it would not be safe for a normal person to say. The mask is passed around depending on who is available.

The primary actor for Amon (the one who does all the speeches and crowdwork) is a factory worker named Lee. (He admits that even if that wasn't his real name, he would probably go by it anyway. There's a million Lees, etc) He's the sixth member of the Red Lotus after S1, being the direct link to the Equalist Party. Former factory worker, was let go after the industrial accident that fucked up his face and arm. Chronic pain he takes significant medication for. Married, wife works as a maid.

Korra's big revelation in Season 1 is that the Equalists are neither terrorists nor outside agitators, as Tarloc and Lin would claim.

Spirits

Significantly more influence and appearance than in even the original show. Full on weirdass yokai time. In truth there will be a lot more organized religion in the setting (all very appropriately channeling aspects of Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Shinto)

The White Lotus 

After the death of the old masters we knew, the new leadership in the Order of the White Lotus sought to reform the organization into modernity, abandoning the "superstitions" it was rooted in. This is directly responsible for why Korra was kept sequestered at the south pole (instead of traveling the world on her own) and why Katara was banned from being her waterbending teacher.

I don't know where the subplot that deals with this comes in - likely Season 2.

The Airbending Family

It is taking EVERY MICROGRAM OF SELF CONTROL I POSSESS to not just make the kids expies of the gremlins from Eizouken.

I have failed. They are absolutely all expies for the gremlins.

Jinora's arc is of note because it is rooted in her (kid level, but very valid) hatred of Korra just as a person - "I never got to meet grandpa and now I have to babysit this absolute meathead who gets treated like a god when I've been working my ass off at this every day since I was 4." They will eventually come to an understanding but never really a friendship. Sometimes you just don't like people.

Pema gets multiple opportunities to be cool - not because of badass martial arts, but because she is really good at taking command during crisis situations.

Increased Diversity of Cultural Influences

A minor bit of retconning to make the world seem bigger. All four nations will get an influx of cultural influences. Easiest way to reflect this is with the signage, which has diversified considerably.

EK languages: Mandarin Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, Manchu, Avestan, Sumerian, Navajo, Xhosa

FN Languages: Cantonese, Tamil, Nahuatl, Thai, Japanese, Igbo

WT Languages: Inuktitut, Cree, Maori, Tlingit, Ainu

AN Languages: Tibetan, Quechua, Sanskrit

So there might be a scene where Korra hands off something for someone else to read because she still has trouble with Chinese characters, being used to the Canadian Aboriginal Syballics used to signify WT writing.

The Return of Airbending

This version of the series clarifies that bending is spiritual in origin, with no regard for genetics - children of benders are more likely to become benders because of the circumstances of their early childhood (if your parents are X religion, you are likely to be X religion), but there are far more factors in play than just that. Rule of thumb is that people typically demonstrate some bending ability, if they have it, by 5-7 years old. As they age it is increasingly difficult and rare for someone to develop bending, and would require a sudden and drastic shift in lifestyle and beliefs.

This is the long way of saying that there are other airbenders outside of Tenzin and his kids - folks have been living like air nomads for long enough now that they are becoming airbenders all on their own. Spiritual equilibrium is asserting itself.

Most of the current airbenders (I envision about two dozen of them) are young children, with a few older adults who have manifested less pronounced abilities. There's a 70+ year old man who can just barely do the marble trick and he is the happiest, most fulfilled human being in the world.

The First Avatar

A veiled figure in a painted cave in the Spirit World, sitting next to the embers of a fire. They are impossibly ancient - the other Avatars themselves say that, in the few times any of them have heard the First speak, it was in no language that they could understand.  

The avatar first came into being when a human achieved and then rejected enlightenment, choosing instead to use their spiritual insight to maintain peace among people and between humans and spirits. This Seeing the Big Picture is why the avatar can bend all four elements.

Other Notes That Don't Get Categories

• The end of AtLA I proposed in my series rewatch post - the one where Aang visits the court of Surya and Ursa and Zuko reunite at the end - is treated as canon.
• The upper class of Republic City is still predominantly descended from Fire Nation colonial nobility, with an influx of Earth Kingdom nobles.  
• Republic City was founded as a stop-gap measure - the wealthy Fire Nation landowners who ran the colonies in the Earth Kingdom were able to resist Zuko's attempts to strip them of position and make restitution by influencing matters in the newly-founded domestic parliament - Zuko's leadership reforms curtailed much of the Fire Lord's direct power, and he was not able to get the 2/3rds vote in parliament to return all overseas territories to the Earth Kingdom. 
• The establishment of Monastery Island was accepted by the Republic City council only in exchange for the promise that the Avatar would never hold its representative advisory / ambassadorial seat on the council. With his influence in the city minimal and dropping fast, Aang instead devoted himself to rebuilding the Air Nomads. (For this reason, there is a decent population of people in RC who do not care for Aang, feeling that they were abandoned, and they are not wrong to think that.
  
• The RCPD regularly hires from the Dai Li. 
• Early on, first episode, even, Katara asks Korra if she can speak to Aang, and it is incredibly sad. This isn't able to happen until a brief moment in Korra's return to RC, prior to descending to meet the Lady of Fangs.
  
• Ghost Aang is appropriately a goofball. He's definitely channelling a lot of Gyatso in his old age.
  
• Monastery Island is not part of Republic City proper, but an enclave of the Air Nomad Nation. There is, technically, an immigration and border office, which consists of a guest book for visitors to sign that Pema keeps in the kitchen.
• At least one filler episode will be a spirit arriving on Monastery Island and everyone scrambling around to fulfill the correct hospitality rites. (Cue a scene of Pema frantically looking through the library for a reference on what kind of tea that particular variety of spirit likes)
• Everyone thinks Zaheer is super handsome. Korra's infatuation lasts about thirty seconds until Z's boyfriend shows up. 
• First episode is a family reunion where we get to see all the surviving Gaang & descendants, save Toph and her daughters.
  

Series Summary

Season 1: Korra arrives in Republic City, meets with the Red Lotus, uncovers the truth of the Equalist movement and the conspiracy to undermine it, throws her support behind them when the revolution breaks out in full. Season ends with the Equalist party establishing a new government in Republic City. Tarloc commits suicide. Lin Beifong vanishes before she can be captured. Varrick flees to the Earth Kingdom.

Season 2: Zaheer returns to Republic City after his pilgrimage / grassroots organizing. Korra and the Red Lotus focus their efforts on solving the problem of hostile spirits in Republic City. Spirit Detective Adventures ensue. The Lady of Fangs is revealed as the summit of the spiritual issues. Equalist growing pains occur - Korra has her first major personal victory when she is able to prevent the party from devolving into Standard Issue Leftist Infighting (TM) through skillful negotiation.

In the outside world, the Earth Kingdom, long suffering under incompetent rule and economic depression, Kuvira (accompanied by Lin and many veterans of the RCPD, and materially supported by Varrick and Suyin Beifong) executes a coup, assassinating the Earth Queen, framing it as being part of an Equalist scheme, and assuming control by riding the wave of anti-RC sentiment (too rich! too modern! too foreign!) that has been long simmering and now come to boil over. (Also she has the Dai Li. Fuckers did it AGAIN!)

Season 3: Kuvira & the Lady of Fangs are ramping up their associated threats. Earth Kingdom resistance movement, aided by Equalists and the Red Lotus, fights back against the fascist takeover.

Toph, thought dead by even her close friends, emerges from her anchorage to fight Lin and Suyin. She is not happy with the career and political trajectory her daughters have taken. Not happy at all. ("Should have listened to Katara and never let you join the academy.")

Korra, seeing no way to deal with the Lady on her own, makes a journey to deep in the Earth Kingdom to a certain sacred place, where she makes a successful trip to the spirit world and meets the First Avatar. Here she is shown visions of the First's life and how they maintained balance among humans and the spirits.

Learning that Korra is gone, Kuvira invades Republic City. The Lady of Fangs has reached her breaking point. Spirits turned monstrous in their anger lash out against all and sundry. Varrick gets straight-up eaten by an angry spirit. Kuvira's invasion goes terribly - she tries to salvage it by taking the inhabitants of Monastery Island hostage and sending out her demands in an attempt to threaten Korra into servility.

This proves to be her undoing, through Pema's terribly effective overhand application of a sturdy iron wok to the situation.

Korra receives the message returns to find the fascists routed, Kuvira already taken care of and the city in chaos. The Equalists can handle the fascists, but not the spirits.

Korra descends into the underlayers of Republic City, transitioning into a proper underworld, where she finds the Lady of Fangs. She makes an offer.

The relationship between humans and spirits is mutual - if one side acts poorly, they must make restitution to the other. The Lady of Fangs is too far gone for a sacrificed boar and a bit of fasting as apology to set things right.

Korra's offer is a spirit marriage to the Lady - a vow to bind them together, so that if Korra should fail at restoring and maintaining the balance of the Lady's home, it will directly hurt her as well (and likewise, if she does maintain it, she will benefit)

She explicitly says that she has no idea what she is doing, but she's going to do her best and figure things out as she goes (Solving the problem through humility, patience, and nonviolence!)

The Lady accepts. There is a wedding ceremony - short, attended only by spirits - but it is enough.

Series ends with Korra attending the peace accords between RC, the other nations, and the interim EK government. After the day's diplomacy is done, she takes a bicycle a short distance out of the city into the hills where the wind farms are being built, and on a secluded hill raises standing stones, inscribing them in honor of the Lady of Fangs.

Korra sits on the altar and watches the sun go down. The Lady of Fangs, still imposing but no longer terrifying, emerges from the trees to join her.

End credits.

Final Thoughts

I am actually really happy with how this came out - turns out, adding more weird spirits makes things fall into place really easily, just like it did with my little fanfic ending for the original series. It's almost as if powerful entities who have a different set of motivations to humans can be really effective at pushing the plot forward!

Also I'm glad how it didn't take all that much to make things work. Only had to add like, two new main characters and treat some side characters more appropriate to their actions. Cutting out Mako / Bolin / Asami caused exactly 0 issues, which certainly says something about those characters.

I love the Lady of Fangs so much that she's gonna get her own post separate from this. She's rad.

Three Dread Horrors: A Legend of Korra Post

A sequel of sorts, to this post. Brought about by the news that Magpie Games got the RPG license for the series.

God, this was depressing to write. But y'all on Twitter wanted this instead of the happy fixfic post and I seek validation, so here we go.

**

The Legend of Korra horrifies me.

It's not the "I have learned a new fact about wasps" kind of horror, nor the "fucking loud noise as something suddenly appears on screen" kind of horror. It is the horror that lives in oily voice that I have heard in the depths of certain long, dark nights of the soul. A near-guarantee that its presence is unintentional, but intention is outclassed by end result eleven times out of ten.

It took me some time to reach this conclusion. In fact, it took me until I started writing this post, and the revelation was enough to make me want to quit writing it. But, perhaps there might still be use for it. Good critique is rooted in the experience of the thing, and I certainly have an experience to share.

I have not rewatched LoK since it aired. I have no plans on rewatching it. The contents of this post are all just my own memory and some reference to episode transcripts, and might have corroded with time. I accept any corrections that might be made.

(A side note: There is a great deal of critique made in bad faith about LoK, rooted in sexism or queerphobia or the possessive throws of the nostalgia-daemon or good old fashioned kvetching. Fuck those guys and fuck the dissolution of the critique into nitpicking for internet points. But I do enjoy myself a good kvetch now and then (and I certainly have them for this series), and to avoid going down that road I will stay away from the (many, many) issues I have with little things (god fucking damn that stupid fucking platinum mecha with a laser cannon) and focus on three points in particular.)

Three dread horrors.

THE FIRST HORROR

In the second episode of the series - just at the beginning of her airbending schooling - Korra is introduced to a simple device used for footwork training: a series of rotating wooden gates. It's an introductory lesson used to teach footwork to novices.

Korra runs face first into them, repeatedly. Swiftly growing frustrated with her failures, she destroys the device in a fit of rage. To which her mentor Tenzin exclaims:

"That was a two-thousand-year-old historical treasure!"

The scene is meant to illustrate Korra's childishness, her impatience, her uncontrolled angry outbursts. All fine and good, those are character flaws, character flaws are good. We can work with character flaws.

But...

There's really no good way to put this, is there?

Korra just destroyed one of the few remaining artifacts of the Air Nomads right in front of the son of the only survivor of their genocide. Not even out of hate - She destroyed it because martial arts training was going slower than "instant mastery". 

Draw whatever real-life parallels you wish, there are certainly plenty that can fit in, and no matter which one you choose it's going to get really bad really fast when I say that the script forgives her. By the end of the episode Tenzin apologizes for being too impatient and strict. The tantrum is swept under the rug. The incident is never mentioned again.  

In some other story, this would be an inciting incident. The thing that puts Korra on the path to realizing "oh, I'm a huge piece of shit". It's not, here.

The show is, in its way, saying that it doesn't matter. Doesn't matter that Korra throws tantrums like an infant, doesn't matter that apparently Katara wasn't able to get through to her with any sort of meaningful mentorship, doesn't matter that the genocide of the Air Nomads even happened. Tenzin is being unreasonable about some wooden boards and dowels.

Tenzin is being unreasonable.

Doesn't matter that the entire nation is hanging on by the thread of a few surviving artifacts and the memory of a twelve-year-old, or that the man has three kids, a fourth on the way, a position on city council, and is trying to rebuild an entire culture off of next to nothing. 

He and Aang probably went out and found those gates together. 

I wonder, does Tenzin ever catch himself in idle moments thinking "I should give dad a call"?

Fucking hell.

THE SECOND HORROR

LoK's first season finds its antagonists in the Equalists - a movement of Republic city's disenfranchised  non-benders protesting against the gross inequality perpetuated by the bender-dominated government and bender-dominated police force (who, of course, do nothing to stop the bender-dominated criminal triads either) that has built up enough support and momentum that they have begun taking direct action, staring against the triads.

So, obviously and of course, it is revealed later on that the movement was founded and led by an outside agitator (a bender, no less) who was using them purely as a means to his own personal revenge, AND that it was funded and supplied by the local billionaire industrial mogul...

Replace the proper nouns and you have a FOX segment about Black Lives Matter. While BLM was not extant as we know it when the show was being written, it is not like conspiracy as a genre is terribly creative - this idea has been mad-libbed a hundred times over.

I can't tell if this was malice or incompetence. It could be said that the writers were simply not thinking about this when plotting the series. To that, I say, that the things that people do when they are not thinking are often very telling about their ingrained biases and values.While charitable interpretation asks that we consider a work as a piece effected by its time (and thus, when we return to it later, the author's views might have shifted since the time of writing), that is an explanation, not an excuse.

(Also the Equalist moment dissolves and is never featured again after said outside agitator is no longer in the picture. They get a token representative seat on city council and, as far as the greater story is concerned, are a solved problem.)

Special sidetrack segment: The Equalist plot is what I like to call "Antagonist Ideology Sabotage" - this is when the antagonist of a story is in the right. They are more justified in their motivations than the protagonist, and if they accomplish what they are trying to do the world of the story will likely be much better for it.

So, in order to maintain the status quo of the setting (and thus, not rock the boat of the industry they exist within), the writer or writers or producer or the suits sabotage the antagonist by making them so bloodthirsty that they simply must be stopped. Maybe there's some cackhanded moral about they had good intentions but you can't go about seeking change that way.

An excellent other example is in Black Panther. Killmonger is fucking correct, his anger is true and justified, so they decided to make him a murderer who wants to start WW3 and T'challa, who is not so angry, gets to be the hero for opening up a community center and peaceably doing not much of anything at all.

THE THIRD HORROR

At the end of the third season, the chain of reincarnation is partially severed. The Avatar will continue reincarnating forward, but can no longer reach backward - the older incarnations are gone. There is now only Korra, and when the next avatar comes around she will be the only counsel they will receive.

Thousands of years of human experience, millennia of lived history, all the memories of who we are and where we have been - snuffed out. Extinguished. And in the ashes of all those lives, now lost forever, is someone who has fallen in love with the owner of Ford - United Steel.

That's where we leave this series, the final note of the AtLA universe - the union of the world's balance-keeper and the scion of industrial capitalism. And without the elder incarnations to guide future avatars, with only Korra there, I see nothing but a gaping black hole where the future should be.

This is the final horror. The victory of liberal capitalism, gallivanting off into the future suffering no lasting consequences from the horrors it has spawned. Here's Amazon, Google and Tesla dusting off their rainbow flags for a month as they grow ever fatter off the exploitation of their workforce. The course is set, the path is clear, there is no way to avoid the path we here in the real world have tread. Here will be the world stripped barren, its water poisoned, its air polluted, its people devoured. Here is that final monologue of A Machine for Pigs, that desperate cry of "This is your coming century!"

The voice in the dark unfurls its smile, the one with too many teeth, and says "Ah, you fool. Did you expect anything different? Did you really think things would get better?"

And that's the end of it.

** 

There was a post written by Michael DiMartino (now gone but thankfully still archived) when Man of Steel was coming out, wherein he expresses his appreciation of the film's interpretation of Jonathan Kent as follows:

"The father represents any parent, or institution, or religion, or government that wants to prevent you (or me) from coming into our own and expressing who we truly are"

This was the movie, mind you, where Jonathan Kent gets angry at Clark for saving a schoolbus full of children.

You know why Superman is Superman? It's not the super strength or the blue pajamas or the alien thing. It's because Pa Kent was a good man. If Pa Kent is not a good man, then there can be no Superman.

And just like Zach Snyder's pizza cutter, LoK is a thematic betrayal of its source material. A complete one-eighty. Total negation. Where there was empathy, there is now the dismissal of suffering. Where there was hope, there is now only the mocking laughter of nothing ever changing. There is now only the halls of power now, and their Principle Act. (See, I knew you were waiting for me to drop M-L-CH in this essay but HA I have subverted your expectations by doing exactly that, only at a different time!)

No wonder Tenzin got done dirty. Hell, they did everyone dirty. Aang, Katara, Sokka, Toph, Zuko, Suki, Pema, Lin...shit they just did the entire adult cast dirty like that.

(God Pema got a perfect chance to shine and it got wasted on making her the butt of a joke. Come on the woman has four children, two of whom are ADD and three of whom know magic kung fu she knows how to handle high-stress situations.)

All for what, for the sterling and memorable characters like Mako, who was so boring that he inspired a bisexual awakening for two successive girlfriends and also became a cop, and that is his entire character? Or Bolin, the man who joined the fascists because we needed him to do something this season?

Honestly that summarizes the show pretty well. Korra and her friends the cop, the industrialist, and the idiot.

Sigh.

That's enough of this nonsense. Back to work on something less miserable.

Untitled Avatar Post

 

Mikku Sushi

I was twelve when Avatar: The Last Airbender aired. I watched it on an old Magnavox TV, on a cold Friday evening in February when the world outside the living room windows was black as the bottom of the ocean. I was sitting in my dad's rocking chair, and the rug was the old red one we had before the cats forced its replacement, and the light from the dining room was bright incandescent-bulb gold. We wouldn't get internet in the house for nearly four more years.

I wasn't even that enthused at first: the advertisements had instilled in me a certain degree of hesitation, as western television that tried to be anime had a batting average of 0 in my experience at the time. I had actually missed the first few minutes of that first episode, flipping through channels to see if anything else was on. That didn't matter, in the end.

That night was over half a lifetime ago.

*

I've been rewatching Avatar. The world is falling apart outside. The lightning crackles and dances in its bottle as I take it down from the mantelpiece. 

*

It was the agni kai between Zuko and Zhao that really got the hooks in, back then. Certainly in terms of TV at the time I had no experience of "large chunks of episode time given to the antagonist dealing with things that aren't interacting with the protagonist. I don't think I was expecting there to be that much care given.

*

The average Fire Nation footsoldier will be involved in some kind of joke. Slapstick or comedic misinterpretations, usually.

*

Poverty is not abstracted here. It happens to people, and those people have faces and names and lives that the Gaang directly intersect with, because they're poor too. The only ones who ever really had any money are Toph and Zuko, and neither of them hold on to it for very long.

*

War is not abstracted here. Everyone we meet has lost someone to it, or knows someone who has lost someone. No life has gone untouched, whether by open wounds or old scars. Even the safest and most distant enclave can look to the horizon and see the smoke.

*

We are immersed in a reality that invites us to empathy. Why is it even important that Aang saves the world? Because the world is not abstract. It's right there. It's those people.We've been with them the entire time.

*

This is a cartoon on Nickelodeon and it contains

• Militarist hypernationalism.
  
• Genocide.
  
• Prison camps.
• Child soldiers.
• Deliberate strikes against soft targets.
  
• Public disfigurement of a child. 
• The casual disregard of military leadership for the lives of their own soldiers.
• Assorted additional war crimes.
• Patricide.
• Animal cruelty.
  
• Secret police.
  
• Fascist indoctrination of schoolchildren.
  
• Industry-induced ecological collapse.
• The abuses of the carceral system.

 *

Elizabeth Welch Ehasz carried a whole lot of this show - she was lead writer for both "Zuko Alone" and "Appa's Lost Days", among others, and those are probably the two best episodes in the entire series.

*

I still polish my service medals from the Kataang Grande Armee off for parade days, but I cannot deny that the entire subplot has the feel of...something that was considered a given. I think there would have been some value if they had sorted out their feelings early-to-mid season 3. Buck the typical "relationship only after accomplishment" of these sorts of hero stories, go into the end strong.

*

Guru Pathik meant well, but living atop a mountain in solitude did not prepare him to teach a teenager whose entire life consists of the clothes on his back, his handful of friends, and the crushing weight of his responsibilities. He presumed that the student already understood what was meant, that Aang understood the difference between love and attachment. That a kid could sit and let the death of one of his only friends pass by like water over a stone.

*

There might well be places in the Earth Kingdom that have never heard of the Earth King and his impenetrable city, nor ever seen an imperial tax collector.

*

The Fire Nation uses shitty iron. Stone hastily earthbent for combat is often less dense and easily broken.

*

I don't think it sank in the first time, that Lu Ten was 18-20 when he died. I always supposed he was older. Was it in the field? Was it in some medic's tent? What orders had he received that morning - would he have lived if they had been any different? Had he knowingly put his life in danger, or had it been simple happenstance, a lucky shot? Was the body recovered? Did he even have the time to realize it, or did he simply cease?

No answers. Just the space where a man used to be.

*

I like to think that there are more unique communities that we simply never got to see: bending traditions that grew up in other nations and were influenced by other styles. Influences from India, Persia, the Andes, subsaharan Africa, the Asian steppe, the Pacific coast, the southwest, the Great Plains.

*

Ozai is a punk-ass loser. The kind of fascist who wears polo shirts and khakis and talks big talk about the weakness of other men and the decadence of society while eating an entire drawer of silver cutlery. He's a fucking nobody. All his talk of strength, all his love of power and domination, and what has he actually done? Disfigured a child and blackmailed his wife into doing regipatricide for him. He sits in his gloomy throne room in ecstatic adoration of his idea of himself but won't lift a finger unless it's against someone who is powerless to defend themselves against him. Characters offering even the least resistance reveal him as the oaf that he is.

He's a spineless, vapid piece of shit. A blunt-force trauma of a human being. The perfect villain for this show - utterly banal, completely without nuance, in cold and unflinching opposition to the protagonists.

*

The world invites engagement. It motions to its blank spaces and says "here, you already have the tools", and the gaps are filled in by your own hands. There has been a long tradition of fanon here, and contrary to my typical dismissal of fandom as a toxic swamp of sadness and badness, there's actually some quite clever places you can go. A few of my own personal favored theories:

• The Ember Island Players are wildly popular and have been for a long while, despite being absolutely awful. So that must be the point, you go to see the players to watch a farce on stage. Ursa dragged the family to see the Players butcher Love Amongst the Dragons every year, and I can't help but picture it as this world's variant of live showings of The Room or Rocky Horror Picture Show.
• On the same note, the Players are able to put on these farces prominently featuring the royal family, which would indicate that Ozai either doesn't care or gives tacit approval.
  
• Zhao was promoted to commander in the back ass-end of nowhere. Perhaps he had enemies in the navy - it'd make sense considering his age and ambition - but, being commander of the ass-end of nowhere then gave him the ships and the spare time to pursue Aang.
  
• Katara and Sokka have a grandfather with a gigantic white walrus mustache, who, given the tone he is referenced in, is still alive. So he's probably Hakoda's father, rather than Kya's. But since he's never seen, we can then assume he lives in a different village.
• I refuse to believe that Suki and the other Kyoshi warriors don't have a rotating schedule of who gets to make a fool of the dumb out-of-towner, because they absolutely have to do that regularly.
  

These are aspects of characters that have no actual textual support, but enrich the experience all the same because they make enough sense to fit where they ought.

*

There is no way Toph became a cop. Katara would have stopped her.

*

Suki does not get a whole lot of screen time, but by the time she joins the Gaang in the last quarter of season 3 it feels like there had been a place for her there all along. We have seen enough of her own arc from afar by that time.

*

I remember finding out that Mako had died the day before "Tales of Ba Sing Se" aired.

*

What would have happened, I thought to myself, had Aang not run away from home and had gone instead to the eastern temple to train as the abbot had decided?

He would not have been ready when Sozin's forces arrived a few months later, certainly, though perhaps he could have been spirited out in the chaos, to learn the other elements in secret. Maybe with a few other companions, likely novices themselves. It would have been a very different story, then.

*

This part is the Katara appreciation section of the essay.

"The Painted Lady" is a much better episode than folks, now or then, give it credit for, precisely for how well it establishes the person Katara has become at this point in the series: when presented with the scope of the Fire Nation's destruction of its own territory - strip-mining its islands bare to fuel its war machine while its citizens dredge up stunted, mutated fish from polluted waterways - she doesn't hesitate to put her beliefs into action. Even Aang - the pacifist, the vegetarian, the one supposed to right the world's wrongs - says they should be on their way.

Katara, stone-cold comrade that she is, says "fuck that, fuck this, fuck you, fuck the military-industrial complex, I'm going to commit an ecoterrorism"

Which she then proceeds to do. 0 to industrial sabotage in 10 seconds flat.

She began this series saddled with the responsibilities of adulthood while still a child - complaining about having to do all the chores while her jerkass brother goofs off, barely able to keep a fish aloft with her bending, teased for being the worrywart team mom, the nebby-nose moralizer, the preachy crybaby who can't resist giving overemotional speeches about hope all the time.

And then she goes and ends it wondering if her inability to kill the man who murdered her mother was a moment of weakness or a sign of strength.

She's always possessed great empathy and great anger, but here in the final season we see that she has unified these traits with the ability and willingness to act directly upon both towards accomplishing greater goals.

I don't know how you would write "all cops are bastards" in Inuktitut, but I feel it would be appropriate here.

*

Potential alternatives to energybending:

• Aang uses his trickery and guile to goad Ozai into overexerting himself - what would normally just exhaust him now burns him out like a cheap light bulb due to the influence of the comet.
• Ozai is imprisoned in such a way to make escape impossible (cave on a mountain far out at sea, surrounded by watchful spirits?)
  
• Ozai surrenders. Spineless, vapid piece of shit, right? The fight immediately goes utterly one-sided as soon as Aang enters the Avatar State anyway.
• Ozai is injured in such a way to make firebending either impossible or nearly so. (Granted "let's break your spine" is hardly much better than killing him outright.)
  

The fifth is my favorite (Mon helped me brainstorm this).

Aang, desperate for some way to defeat Ozai without, makes a journey to the Spirit World. Maybe the turtle is the catalyst still, doesn't matter. He convenes with the other Avatars there (not just the previous 4, but a vast parliament of them, and after hearing their arguments (which would include everything listed above, plus that given in the show), he's still not convinced. But the seed of an idea starts blooming.

He is going to petition the Sun Spirit to strip Ozai's bending from him. The other Avatars and most of the attendant spirits there are thrown into chaos - Surya does not give a shit. Of all the spirits, he's the one that doesn't even pretend to recognize the Avatar's authority as an intermediary. Reaching the Solar Court is next to impossible even for other primal spirits.

But, Aang has an in: his crush's brother's ex is the moon. Yue appears to him as the council of Avatars dissipates, telling him that, as the Moon Spirit (and thus, Surya's queen), she has access to both the court and Surya's ear.

Travel transition to the Solar Court (possibly on giant spirit rabbit with a mallet), it's practically a dyson-sphere palace, very impressive, blah blah. Throne room, etc. Very impressive.

Surya looks like a character pulled from Asura's Wrath. Absolutely fucking gigantic (Aang and Yue don't even crest the top of his feet), looks simultaneously immensely bored and perpetually pissed off. He demands to know why Yue brought a mortal into the presence of the eternal sun, and Yue (showing a side of herself that is not "mild princess" or "sad princess") manages to argue him into hearing the request.

Aang's request is met with derisive laughter. He had already failed at the eclipse, and how he's attempting to seek the Sun's favor again? Yue moves to argue again, but Aang asks her to stand down and pleads his own case.

Whether he is actually persuaded or just wants Aang to leave, we don't know, but Surya agrees, on one condition - Ozai must be defeated, completely and without question.

Yue returns Aang to the physical world, leaving him with a "good luck" and some message of comedic gold for Sokka.

The rest of the climactic battle goes according to how it is in the show, until the end.

Ozai has gotten the shit beaten out of him, but dime-store fascist that he is, he refuses to surrender. Aang appeals to the Sun to strip him of his bending as agreed - Ozai is beaten, and if the Sun itself will not keep its word, then all creation falls apart.

Nothing seems to happen. Ozai manages to spit out a "I don't think the sun is listening, Avatar" and attempts a point-blank fireblast.

He collapses back to the ground, with no fire. Surya upheld his part of the bargain, but didn't give enough of a shit to even be theatrical about it.

Ending proceeds as normal, except for the final scene in the Jasmine Dragon. Rather than Sokka's inept painting gag, we watch a confused-looking peasant woman clutching a piece of paper in one hand, and the hand of a young girl (~6 years old) in the other. A plain-looking man, clearly a laborer of some kind is there with her.

She tells Katara or Suki that she received this invitation to the Jasmine Dragon out of nowhere, with a passport and money for the trip to the capitol. They assure her she's in the right place, show her to a table, and call in an order for three cups of tea from the kitchen.

Which are delivered to the table by Zuko, of course, because of course it would be. It couldn't be any other way. There's a moment of hesitation (for Ursa never saw him with the scar, and hasn't seen him for eight years plus by this point), and then a moment of realization, and then there is a tearful and joyous reunion.

Sometime later, Aang and Katara share a kiss on the patio, pan up to the sky, roll credits, fin.

*

I put the bottle of lightning back up on the mantle. The world outside spins towards its apparent ruin, but I find a small peace of comfort here. It is a pin's point upon which to balance amidst the maelstrom, for a moment.

It doesn't matter what the flaws are, in the end. Not really. Perfection is impossible. Overrated, even. 

More important is that it was there; in that time, in that place.

It will never, in all the universe, happen again.

Minuiko

 (PS; here is the class I made for elemental benders.)