Avatar, the Last Airbender: Rise of Kyoshi (part two)

Last time, babby Kyoshi stole a sacred artifact from the sages and, on account of having learned not to trust overly friendly adults, ran away with it before they could finish testing her. We now jump ahead nine years, to a chapter appropriately titled...

2. Nine Years Later​

We pick up with quite a lot of stuff having happened, even for a nine year timeskip following a child protagonist. Apparently, the sages Jianzhu and Kelsang managed to find Kyoshi again. And the two of them now live in a big mansion they've built near that shithole fishing village, for some reason. And Kyoshi is living with them, but like...as a servant, rather than as an Avatar-in-training (at least as far as the neighbors have been told).

Why the hell did we skip passed all this stuff?

Shouldn't this have been, like, the entire first arc of the story?

The hell was the point of showing their initial meeting and the irrelevant shit leading up to it, but then NOT showing how she built these connections with the sages and learned to trust some people sometimes again and so forth?

I'm really thrown here. It's the exact worst of both worlds in terms of showing her childhood versus not showing it.

-___-

Well, anyway. Kyoshi has been sent to buy up the last jar of spicy kelp preserve that the village will see for the rest of the season and bring it to the sage's random mansion that they put here for some reason. Some other teenagers from the shithole village (including the little hellion who stomped on the toys) are understandably annoyed about this, and less understandably are taking it out on Kyoshi. In particular, an earthbender named Aoma - historically the biggest bitch of the lot to Kyoshi - has snatched the jar and earthbent it up into the air out of reach atop on earthen spire.

Aoma and the others are all taking the opportunity to bully Kyoshi for getting a cushy house-servant job instead of having to farm or fish like they do, and for being an orphan. While ignoring the fact that their society gives absolutely no "in" for orphans to participate in those industries, since everything already belongs to one family or another.

I'd normally wonder why a big, strong kid like Kyoshi would have trouble getting herself adopted, in such a scenario. Farmers want kids who can do hard work, and they usually want a decent number of them. But, with so many orphans fleeing the wars that wrack the nearby lands, I can see how adoption might be very much a buyer's marker at the moment.

Granted, I'm also really looking askance at those sages for deciding to both a) keep Kyoshi here and b) make a habit of buying out the village's scant supply of luxury goods.

Kyoshi tries to just tune it all out and wait in a meditative state she's learned until they get bored, but then she slips up and insults them. Things look like they're about to get physical, and Kyoshi seems...actually afraid.

...is she ACTUALLY just a servant girl? Did they somehow fail to identify her as the Avatar, but also just coincidentally hire her as a maid? Huh?

Before Kyoshi can get beat up and her jar of kelp can get smashed or whatever, she's rescued by the timely arrival of Rangi the security lady. She's only a few years older than Kyoshi and her antagonists, but she acts with unquestionable authority. And, as a loan to the sages from the Fire Nation army, well...this is a few centuries before the conflict that defined Roku and Aang's eras, but we can definitely see hints of what will become their ethos by the time of the show.

On one hand, welcome intervention.

On the other hand, the fact that the sages have a bodyguard who is just constantly chomping at the bit hoping for someone to give her an excuse to incinerate them, right next to this unfriendly village that they had no good reason to stick around in, is yet another point in an uncomfortable pattern.

Anyway, Aoma the bitchy earthbender kid actually tries to hold her ground and stand up to Rangi even as her friends run away. And, she asks Ranji why "the Avatar's bodyguard" (apparently Rangi's official position) is so far away from the Avatar. Shouldn't she be at his side at all times, instead of chasing the housemaids around?

The Avatar is a "he," apparently? Something really weird is going on. Either this is some deep cover shit using a boy as a fake Avatar while Kyoshi pretends to be a mild mannered maid except for her secret training sessions, or there's spirit shit going on and Kyoshi will end up absorbing this other guy in some weird way.

The former is much more likely, but who knows.

Aoma tries to convince Rangi that she was just using her earthbending to give Kyoshi a hand carrying that big ceramic kelp jar. While also...hmm. Aoma is a bit more fucked in the head than it initially appeared.

You'd think Kyoshi would be able to have SOME kind of recourse, considering her employers and how few shits they give about the locals, but if she is doing a secret undercover Avatar thing then maybe they're just treating this as part of her training. Seems risky though. Aoma is waving too many red flags for just your typical friendly neighbourhood bully.

Kyoshi doesn't need to say or do anything for Rangi to tell Aoma is full of shit, though. She tells her to gtfo or burn. Aoma - who Kyoshi can tell was hoping to actually bullshit her way into the Avatar Estate by bullying Kyoshi into playing along with her "needing help" - storms away. Though not before launching the kelp jar dozens of feet in the air and turning her back, forcing Kyoshi and Rangi to do something to prevent it hitting the ground and shattering.

I'm surprised Rangi doesn't retaliate for that, given everything she's said and done up to this point. But nope, she just lets the bitch walk away with the big pythos full of expensive stuff still rising through the air. Rangi tells Kyoshi to grab it, since earthbending is a lot more useful for this kind of thing than firebending. Kyoshi...can't. She is an earthbender, according to the staff registry, but she can't use her bending to save this situation because of a "problem" that the text won't go into detail on and Kyoshi seems ashamed of. I'd assume that she's afraid that if she bends she'll accidentally reveal that she's the true Avatar somehow, but in this same passage Kyoshi seems to be legitimately scared she might be fired for letting the jar break, so I don't think the undercover hypothesis bears out. Yeah, not sure what's going on then.

The best Kyoshi can do, for whatever reason, is to try and tackle Ranji out of the way before the pythos can fall back down right on her head and kill her. This proves unnecessary, though, as someone else bends the jar to a halt before it can hit any people and/or planetary surfaces. That someone then arranges some pebbles to spell out a greeting, and an explanation that this is Avatar Yun doing the help a solid. From very far away, apparently, but special Avatar bullshit is special Avatar bullshit.

He made a typo with his earthbending. Somehow.

Anyway, some guy named "Yun" is apparently the Avatar. Or is just a really good earthbender who either everyone (including Actual Avatar Kyoshi) thinks is the Avatar, or who the sages are conspiring to make other people think is.

It seems like Kyoshi might have a crush on Yun, also.

They thank Yun (who can apparently hear them, from wherever he is) and then continue bringing the jar back home. Rangi tries to coach Kyoshi into having more of a backbone (good advice) and also to have more pride and decorum and realize that an attendant to the Avatar should never be shown up by mere peasants (not so good advice). Kyoshi just sort of teasingly points out that she doesn't need to learn to fight, she has Rangi to do that for her. Rangi growls. End chapter.

That was much weaker than the previous chapter, for a long list of reasons. Granted, with this timeskip I'm not sure why the previous chapter even existed at all even if it was more enjoyable on its own.

Still, it was a short read that didn't give me much to talk about, so I can fit the third fast lane'd chapter into this post. Let's see if it gets better again.

4. The Boy From Makapu​

This chapter is from Avatar(?) Yun's point of view. He's apparently up on the roof of the stupid palace the sages decided they needed to build for him right here for whatever reason, watching Kyoshi and Rangi from a distance. He thinks they're "cute together," but it's not clear if he means that in the shipping sense or in some other way. Also, he can't actually hear them from that distance; their body language just makes what they're saying back to his captions really obvious.

He slides down from the roof and finds his firebending instructor, Hei-Ran, glaring at him. Hei-Ran is a former headmistress from a Fire Nation military academy, and also Rangi's mother. Interesting little community the sages have built here. Why here, again? Seriously, why here. Anyway, it turns out that Rangi actually has fewer anger issues than one might expect given how she was likely raised, because Hei-Ran is like...imagine every harsh Chinese mom stereotype and every harsh German mom stereotype got together and abused a little girl together, and the girl grew up wanting to be just like them. She never says anything positive or even neutral to any kid no matter what, and if she sees them doing anything other than working themselves to exhaustion at any time she flips her shit at them.

Also, she has some. Erm. Peculiar ideas about the purpose of education.

Yun suspects that the "results of your training are less important than your attitude toward your training" line is emblazoned on the wall of the academy she used to teach at. And it's also a sentence whose utter batshittery was completely obvious to every person who ever went to that school - including Hei-Ran - but that by the time they completed their times there they all agreed that two plus two equals five provided Big Brother says as much.

Not gonna lie, I'm starting to be disappointed with this story's portrayal of the Fire Nation's military culture. On one hand, I like that the author is acknowledging that the Fire Nation had these very nasty parts to its society long before the war broke out, and that Firelord Sozin didn't just wave his scepter and turn his people into genocidal imperialists out of nowhere. On the other though, this portrayal is just "series era, but watered down and without a war going on at the moment." This is supposed to be about two hundred and fifty years before Sozin started doing the colonialism, right? To look at the Fire Nation's most obvious historical inspiration, compare Japan circa 1675 and Japan circa 1925. You can definitely see how one became the other (heck, the soldiers of that second era outright fetishized those of the first), but you could also never confuse them.

Ah well.

She continues trying to get under his skin, accusing him of being lazy and trying to coast on his innate powers alone just like his waste-of-space predecessor. She doesn't seem to care that what Yun does when he's alone, for the most part, is "study." History. Geopolitics. Cultural nuances of the four nations and subgroups within them. Either to make up for his previous self's greatest deficiencies or just out of personal interest, Yun is really sinking himself into the diplomatic side of the Avatar's duties. He knows the name of every major officer in the Fire Nation military, every important member of each noble house in the Earth Kingdom, every chieftain of the Air and Water tribes as well as their habitual migration routes and fishing territories, you name it. Hei-Ran doesn't care. She doesn't seem to understand or care about anything besides firebending, and Yun has been having a very difficult time learning that, so any moment she sees him resting is proof that he's a bad Avatar because he's not using it to try and firebend.

This may just be a hardass persona she's putting on as a kind of character test, but from what we've seen of her daughter I don't think so.

Also, it occurs to me that the only type of bending we've seen Yun perform so far is that of his native earth element, and we've been told that at least one other element has so far eluded him completely. How is he doing with air and water, I wonder? It may just be that he has some kind of rare spiritual connection that makes him able to mimic some of the Avatar's non-bending-related characteristics closely enough for the sages to mistake him for them. How they could have possibly failed to notice Kyoshi when she was literally living in the same house as both him and them all these years, of course, is a question that begs answering.

The other possibility is still that Yun actually is the Avatar, but he and Kyoshi are going to have their souls fused or some weird shit like that.

The first one would definitely pose a bigger challenge to my suspension of disbelief, but it could make for a more interesting story after that point. Yun being the person who learned all the stuff that the Avatar was supposed to learn would definitely make him an invaluable ally to Kyoshi, and her replacing him would make their friendship a complicated one. Whatever else he is, he's also an incredibly powerful earthbender too, so he could give her a hand learning that as well.

We'll see which it is by chapter's end, most likely.

Hei-Ran keeps antagonizing him, until he finally decides to fuck with her a little by earthbending a dust cloud into a blatantly fake fire blast and then turning to her with a performatively dumb expression and acting proud of himself. Hei-Ran tells him that back in her day teachers would permanently scar students who openly mocked them. Yun replies that the modern era is pretty cool ngl. Before things can escalate further, the sage Jianzhu - the earthbending member of the duo from chapter one - walks in and wisely pulls the maybe-Avatar away for some private discussion.

So far, the sages really don't seem to be managing this project very well. And it's not like their Avatar project even has X-Com constantly sabotaging it or anything, this is all on their bad judgement calls regarding staff, location, and process. The world's appointed spiritual leader is going to be raised and educated in a house full of people who hate each other, in a town full of people who hate them. For no good reason that I can see.

Jianzhu brings Yun to one of the empty training courts and sits down for tea and pai-sho (in case of the unlikely event that there's anyone reading this who hasn't seen Avatar, pai-sho is a board game similar to Go). Yun and Jianzhu used to play a lot of pai-sho when he was first discovered, but its been years since they've played now on account of how little free time Yun has had from his training and Jianzhu has had from his sage business. Speaking of the latter, Jianzhu has just gotten word that Tagaka - that up-and-coming pirate queen who was teased as a major baddy earlier - has suddenly offered to stop raiding anywhere around the entire subcontinent in exchange for official Earth Kingdom recognition of her hitherto illegal logging operations on some island nearby. The Earth Kingdom has never really cared overmuch about the logging anyway, so this is pretty clearly down to her learning that the Avatar has been found and not wanting her fleet to be anywhere near his place of residence. The empty concessions she's demanding in exchange are a face-saving gesture, nothing more.

Okay, I like that. It reframes the entire concept of the Avatar, looking at them from the perspective of those who defy the world order. They're like some kind of eldritch abomination that you just need to pack up and relocate to avoid when the stars are right, and avoid drawing attention to yourself until the stars are wrong again. Looking at the kind of mass casualty events a raging Avatar can singlehandedly inflict (Aang's rampage at the end of season one being a great example of what that can mean specifically for a fleet of ships), it's really not too far off.

On one hand, this is a great reprieve for the region and its people. On the other, Tagaka's fleet is pretty obviously going to just go find some other sealanes to terrorize, and any progress made toward hunting it down will basically be reset to square one. Jianzhu himself has mixed feelings about this, and asks Yun to weigh in.

Yun is also pretty torn. In one of his recent trips on Kelsang's flying bison, Yun was taken to the site of one of the pirate raids. They'd been told it was a "massacre," but that wasn't really the right word. The village was just empty. No dead bodies or blood. No obvious damage to the buildings. Some of the tables still had food on them. The people were just all missing, along with all the weapons, warning devices like watchtowers and gongs, and of course the valuables. No signs of a struggle.

No one knows how the pirates are doing this. Or what they're doing with the missing people. If this world has a slave trade, it's not very prominent or well known. I guess they might be putting the captives to work themselves at those logging camps of theirs, but would they really need so many people for that?

I wonder if the means and the motive might be closely linked? Tagaka made a pact with a particularly nasty spirit that lets her conjure blinding mists or hypnotize people to sleep or whatever, in exchange for hundreds of human sacrifices? My first thought was actually bloodbending (Takaga and her father were both heavily implied to be waterbenders), but I'm pretty sure that only works on one person at a time so you couldn't use it to abduct an entire village. So yeah. Either spirit magic, or some really whacky mundane trick.

...oh wait, actually no, there's another easier option that occurs to me. If the pirates could somehow lure most of the able-bodied people onto a relatively small patch of beach near the tide line, any decently powerful waterbender could sweep them all out to sea with a single move. Any local benders among the villagers will be earthbenders, so if you can get them off the ground and far enough out in the water before they can react their powers are useless. After that, you can just pull all the slaves you want out of the surf and send some thugs ashore to grab any children or old people who got left inside the houses etc without a struggle. Not sure what kind of stunt would bring all the able-bodied people to one spot, but if I had enough time and a bunch of experienced pirates to talk it over with I could probably come up with something.

Anyway. Yun is hesitant to led these "Fifth Nation" pirates slip away, but he also muses that there will at least be a brief period during their migration when they're not raiding anyone. It's also likely that wherever they go next will be at least marginally more important to people who matter, so they'll have more military pushback to deal with that could reduce the harm. And heck, maybe they'll be lucky and Tagaka will run right into the Fire Nation or Northern Water Tribe navies. So, overall, he thinks that accepting the deal and then hoping Tagaka makes a reckless decision or has bad luck before she can start doing as much damage again is the least bad option.

Yun isn't proud of himself for thinking in this way, wagering lives against other lives and thinking of the nations and their peoples as game pieces rather than human beings. However, Jianzhu praises him, saying that this kind of longterm thinking and cool-headed harm reduction is exactly what the previous Avatar kept fucking up. He was an enormously talented bender even compared to other Avatars, but that's because he cared about martial arts and magic more than he cared about politics and diplomacy, and right now what the world really needs is leadership.

Well, I can't say that Jianzhu has made the best leadership decisions himself up until now, but I do agree with him about Yun's thought process, so that's something.

This sort of makes Yun feel better, but also sort of doesn't. He stares across the grounds at the still-scowling Hei-Ran, and wonders if she wouldn't get under his skin so badly if she didn't look so much like her daughter who he's crushing on something fierce. Heh, him too? Rangi is in high demand, it appears!

Anyway, Jianzhu tells Yun that Hei-Ran really does love him, she's just being a typical Fire Nation parent about it. Erm. If you say so. Also, he calls her over and says that the treaty they're going to make with the pirates will be taken more seriously if the Avatar himself is there for it, and firebending is a good way to intimidate people who rely on wooden ships and who might not be willing to meet on solid ground. So, they need Yun to start figuring out at least the very basics of firebending before that fast-approaching date. And, Jianzhu thinks that what might be holding him back with firebending is him being too in-touch with his environment. Unlike the other three elements, firebending mostly involves drawing on the element from within the body, not manipulating a preexisting external mass of it. The mentality behind firebending is one of self-reliance and self-centeredness, and Jianzhu is just too in touch with the earth. Even making him wear shoes or practice aboard boats isn't enough to stop him from mentally seeking out the earth for comfort.

So, they're going to make him practice firebending on a field of tiny stone caltrops that will punch his feet full of little holes whenever they're in contact with the ground. That'll break that mental impulse of his nice and clean.

Fucking hell. And he probably isn't even the actual Avatar at all. Has he even demonstrated ANY air or water bending, yet? I don't think he has, going by some earlier mental narration. Well, if nothing else, I'm becoming more confident that the text doesn't expect me to LIKE these people, so that helps with some of my earlier issues.

That's chapters 1-3. The rest of the novel will eventually come up in the main queue.

It has some rocky bits and questionable storytelling decisions, but there are also enough good ideas and interesting (if mostly unpleasant) characters to keep my investment.

The biggest mistake was definitely the nine year timeskip. The first chapter has no reason to exist at all in light of it.

So far, Yun is a more interesting protagonist than Kyoshi, but that's at least partly because she's holding so much back from both the other characters and from the reader. When that changes, she might start being more fun to read about.

Anyway, overall this is okay so far. Not great, but okay.