Avatar Cycle Problems

Waitangi Day approaches!

Throat is feeling much better, though still not at 100%. I have a couple of reviews on the way, though my computer has been acting up more than usual lately, so who knows! We will see.

Not sure what I’m watching now; I finished A Man on the Inside. I tried out an episode of Loudermilk, but I don’t think it’s for me. So for now, I guess it’s re-watching season three of Elementary.

Avatar Cycle Problems

So I recently read the duology of novels on Avatar Kyoshi.

You know what’s fascinating about the Avatar? Very often, the problem that an Avatar faces are the results, directly or indirectly, of the decisions a previous Avatar made. The Avatars are not just connected by the cycle of reincarnation, but by the messes they leave behind.

This is part of the text even in the original series. The best example is probably “Avatar Day”, where Kyoshi is accused of killing Chin the Conqueror, and Aang is blamed for it. There’s also the example of Roku and Sozin, which Roku clearly blames himself for: if he’d killed Sozin when he expressed imperialist desires, the war wouldn’t have started. Personally, I don’t pin that one on him, because that’s obviously Sozin’s fault, and I can hardly blame Roku for not killing his childhood best friend. Either way, the notion is there.

[Is it explained in that series that the Dai Li were founded by Kyoshi? If not, keep that in mind, too.]

Legend of Korra continues the trend. Many of the problems Korra faces are because of the state of the world that Aang helped build. And let us not forget! That she herself makes a big decision on the state of the world–opening the spirit world to the physical one–that is definitely bound to make huge changes for future generations.

One of the things that come up in the Kyoshi novels very often is that Kyoshi has to make up for the ground lost by her predecessor, Kuruk. Kuruk was widely seen as a subpar Avatar, given he died young and had a reputation as a hedonist. This is especially noteworthy as his immediate predecessor, Yangchen, is widely regarded as being an incredible Avatar. Except as we find out, Kuruk was a hedonist because that was his coping mechanism for his deteriorating health/sanity from cleaning up Yangchen’s messes in the Spirit World. His tenure was defined by the problems Yangchen helped to cause.

Which isn’t to say that Yangchen was terrible at all–but in conflicts between mortals and spirits, she always sided with mortals (despite being born an Air Nomad, known for their spirituality). This led to a ton of restless spirits that Kuruk had to fight, and kill, damaging his own soul and neglecting the physical world. When Kyoshi inherits several crises, she has to deal with it her own way. One of those crises is the weakened central government of the Earth Kingdom, which she fixes by founding and training a specialized earthbender police force, the Dai Li, who eventually become the Secret Police of Ba Sing Se that both Aang and Korra tangled with.

It’s also sort of alluded to in the novels that the Fire Nation Avatar before Yangchen, Szeto, made an accidental mess of things. Yes, he help quell the chaos in the Fire Nation, but by doing it within the government system, he gave the impression that Fire Nation Avatars should be loyal to their home above the world, while also strengthening the central government that eventually led to a nationalist imperialist state that threatened the world.

I really, really like this. Because it shows that while the Avatar has godlike power, he or she is still human, which comes with human mistakes and short sightedness. The problem, of course, is that a person with godlike power making decisions comes with much bigger consequences. Many of the consequences that arise aren’t even directly their faults! We shouldn’t necessarily blame Kyoshi for her fighting force becoming corrupted, yet at the same time, we can question if making it in the first place was really that great of an idea.

Given the cycle of reincarnation, there’s another angle: the Avatar is making mistakes, and then has to fix them. It’s the same person, through the cycle of reincarnation, going through and living with their actions across the course of human history. “You made this decision, and now you have to live with it. And so will your reincarnation.”

[Although I’m a bit fuzzy on how that all works, given that each incarnation has an apparent distinct personality/soul that can be conversed with in the Spirit World?]

I really hope that any future stories in the world of Avatar continue this theme. It’s a great way to build continuity without really cheap shout-outs to past events, which is what a lot of long-running stories do now. It also helps make the Avatars of the past remain human in the eyes of the audience, as it depicts them as making mistakes or indirectly causing problems, albeit ones that make sense given what they could do at the time.

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