Avatar, the Last Airbender: Rise of Kyoshi

This review was fast lane comissioned by @toxinvictory.

Everybody knows about Avatar: the Last Airbender. Even if you were too young to see it when it first came out, and you haven't seen it since then, you've still heard about it. You might have also been unfortunate enough to see the multiple attempts at recapturing lightning after the fact. Well, much more recently, a series of prose novels have started to come out detailing some of the past lives of the reincarnating Avatar throughout the setting's history. Supposedly, these are actually pretty good.

This month I'm going to be reading the first three chapters of "Rise of Kyoshi," the first book in this Avatar Legends series, which came out in 2019.

Successful urban fantasy author F.C. Yee is the actual writer, as best I can tell. Avatar Original Co-Creator Michael DiMartino was only involved as a consultant for setting lore.

Speaking of DiMartino, there's a preface written by him. It basically is just him putting his stamp of approval on the book, but like...it's kind of lol. The whole tone of it is "don't worry, Avatar fans, I promise that this book does it right," which is a bit eyeroll-worthy considering DiMartino and Co's own handling of the franchise since 2008.

Turns out sequels are kinda hard too, aren't they Mike? :V

Honestly, failure to read the room aside, this preface actually gave me a surprising amount of insight into why the Avatar creators flailed around so much with their continuations to the original show. Like, take this checklist of what an instalment in the Avatar franchise apparently needs to do:

Looking at this from an artist's perspective, I'm puzzled. Every story set in this rich, detailed fantasy world you've created needs to be a rehash of the same story beats? Why?

Looking at this from the perspective of someone who watched Legend of Korra, I'm like "oh, they think that every story set in the rich, detailed fantasy world they created needs to be a rehash of the same story beats. That explains it."

This doesn't hurt my expectations for this book too badly, to be clear. The historical Avatar Kyoshi who this book is about was described in-universe as having had a very traditional hero's journey career, which is why she - moreso than any other previous Avatar - was framed as a role model for Aang with his similar arc. So, I'd have assumed Kyoshi's story would be more or less like this on my own. Trying to force EVERY story into that mold, though, well. Like I said, it explains a lot of the problems in their other work.

Anyway, time for the actual book now. Chapter one!

1. The Test​

We open on the town of Yokoya Port, a small fishing community located between Earth Kingdom, Southern Water Tribe, and Air Nomad territories. It could have been a major restocking port for trade ships, if only the winds moving through the straits weren't so fast and reliable and the nearest major city being so close. Few ships have need to stop at Yokoya when they know a real harbor is such a short, easy distance away, so a poor fishing village it remains.

To the mixed fascination and contempt of our point of view character, the visiting Earth Nation mystic Jianzhu, the villagers are also apathetic-bordering-on-ignorant about the major uprising causing chaos across the continent, and too poor and pathetic to have any reason to notice the pirates that have been terrorizing everyone else in this region while the Earth Navy is busy elsewhere. He finds these townsfolk sort of bland, indolent, and wooden in general, which...on one hand, there's definitely some classism and elitism showing here. On the other hand, though, passages like this make Jianzhu's assessment a little harder to argue with:

Not bothering to decorate your temple? Come on, rural fishing village, your type is normally really good at this kind of thing!

Anyway, Jianzhu is here to meet up with his colleague-in-spiritualism Kelsang, who has already arrived in Yokoya Port and (easily) bought out what passes for the town hall for their purposes. Kelsang and Jianzhu are here to perform a kind of magical experiment. One that most of the world's sages and priests would call heretical. Jianzhu trudges over to the empty wooden building and finds Kelsang setting everything up for their experiment. The setup apparently requires arranging a million little wooden toys and knick-knacks around the room in a very precise arrangement, which Kelsang's airbending skills make him well suited for. After exchanging some tired, frustrated greetings, Jianzhu stands back and waits for Kelsang to finish his work. As he waits, he muses over the long, desperate chain of unfortunate events that led the two of them to this place.

Seven years ago, Avatar Kuruk died young and ignobly. His short career was defined by flightiness and negligence, which hasn't been good for the state of the world. Worse than that, though, is the fact that it normally takes the sages only a couple of years at most to find the Avatar's reincarnation after the previous one's death. It's been seven at this point, and no one has any idea where the Avatar is. In fact, some are beginning to fear that the Soul of the Avatar has - as a consequence of some spiritual calamity - abandoned the mortal world entirely. So far, the holymen and sages have kept a lid on these anxieties, but as the years grind on and no one hears any anecdotes about the childhood and training of the new Avatar, common folk are beginning to wonder. Worse, aspiring conquerors and tyrants who would normally be deterred from following their ambitions by the threat of the Avatar's intervention are starting to dream big. If the Avatar's return is this badly delayed, well, that gives them a lot of time to work with, doesn't it? The political strife that began during Kuruk's inattentive mantleship is getting worse and worse as bad actors test the boundaries and push slowly further.

...

This narrative framing paints an interesting picture of just how different the geopolitics of this world are from our own, and why. Everyone relying on the Avatar to act as a stabilizing influence and solve problems before they can get too bad is an incredibly brittle, complacent paradigm. At the same time though, the Avatar is so powerful that you can't afford to *not* plan around their intervention in anything important, and I'm not sure how you could ever prevent that from turning into a kind of dependence.

At least most of the time, when the Avatars are adult, interventionist, and wise, it does make for a much better and more peaceful world overall than just about any point in real life history. The outcomes are most often good, but it's just...fragile.

...

So, the reason why they're arranging little toys and nick-nacks around an empty room. The method of finding the child Avatar in each generation varies from nation to nation. With the current seven-year-old Avatar having been born somewhere in the Earth Kingdom, the sages are supposed to use a series of geomantic rituals to locate the child. You get some earthbender mystics in the center of the Earth Kingdom and have them test the magic vibes or whatever in the ground, which eliminates half of the territory. Then, they move to the middle of the remaining half, and do it again, letting the vibes narrow down their target to within one quarter of the kingdom. And so on, and so on, until they narrow it down to a small enough area that finding the right kid is easy. For some reason though, this process has gone totally haywire. It's sending them to a different location every time they try to reiterate it, with some of those locations being in the middle of the ocean or on desolate mountaintops. No one is sure why, but the traditional method is clearly not going to work.

Hmm. It occurs to me that the Earth Kingdom's method is going to really fuck up badly if the Avatar is born into, say, an itinerant merchant family. Maybe that's actually what went wrong this time? Seven-year-old Kyoshi is being moved all over the place, and that's causing their earth vibe readings to glitch out and make random spots light up around the world? The Earth Kingdom has a big sedentary population even proportionately to most premodern societies, and as I recall they also have some stigma against merchant types. Those factors could combine to make it so that an earth-cycle Avatar has just never happened to be born into the kingdom's tiny nomadic subsection, and no one expects one ever to in the future. Yeah, this definitely seems like it could be the problem.

...although actually, hang on. What happens if Babby Avatar dies before being found? They'd reincarnate in the next nation in the cycle, and no one would know about it. They'd just keep on looking in the wrong place using the wrong method for year after year. Surely, this must happen sometimes. The Avatarverse does have healing magic, but it's not readily available at least in most places, and its tech level at least during this era is basically medieval. Infant mortality rates are going to be significant just as a fact of life. Maybe the Avatar's spirit bullshit protects them from disease, at least to an extent? Maybe? If not, then just statistically a lot of Avatars have probably died in infancy. What do they do then?

It could also be that the whole "shamanism actually works" thing makes people in general less afflicted by things like plague and famine and the like than in real world history. Like, maybe historical premodern infant death rates, little ice ages, droughts, etc only happen if the spirits get really pissed off, and most of the time the people do a good job of avoiding that. I don't know, just spitballing here.

Big tangent, I know. But the problem the story is presenting is forcing me to ask some questions about the Avatarverse that never would have occurred to me otherwise, but now that my attention is drawn to them I can't really let them go. Maybe I'm supposed to be asking these questions, and the early chapters of this book will be about answering them. Maybe I'm not supposed to be asking these questions, in which case it was a very bad idea of the author's to put the narrative focus where he did.

Well. We'll see, I guess.

Jianzhu and Kelsang were acquainted of the previous Avatar, and two of the frustrated sages who have been chasing geomantic sensor ghosts for years. So, they're doing a borderline heretical experiment and trying to use the Air Nomad method to search for the Avatar within the Earth Kingdom's population. That doesn't sound especially transgressive, but a person from this world might well feel otherwise; sometimes religious taboos just be weird like that, I can buy it. Anyway, the Air Nomad method is...

erm.

Okay, I think the text must be leaving a few steps out.

Okay, so. First things first, the Air Nomad process seems to be based on the real life Tibetan Buddhist method of finding the reincarnated Dalai Lama (heck, the Avatar's entire concept was probably inspired by this, at least in part). The thing is, for the Tibetans the "choose the toys" test is only the final stage of a much bigger process. There's a whole system of signs and oracles and rituals that they go through to narrow it down to a manageably small group of candidates before doing this part.

Now, the Air Nomads are nomads, which means that they probably have a pretty small population. Assuming each group of them is easy-ish to get ahold of when you need to, and that their nomadism makes them just as able to come to you as the reverse, I can see how this might actually be plausible for them. Each of their wandering tribes or clans or whatever are summoned in turn to the monastery where the toys are kept, they test all their kids of around the right age in just a couple of days, and then send them off and receive the next. These guys travel very quickly and easily, since they can fly and all, and if we assume that there are only a couple hundred or so different nomadic groups making up the nation then it should never take more than a year or so for them to find the Avatar. Okay, sure.

The Earth Nation is fucking huge.

Huge geographically, and huge demographically.

And, unlike the Air Nomads, most of their population is as sedentary as their element implies. This includes both the immense urban capital, and the farming towns spread out all across the continent.

Without other steps like the ones the real life Tibetan practice includes, how the hell are you ever going to make this work?

And...according to the text, they're going to propose that they start implementing the test throughout the Earth Kingdom (somehow) if Yokoya goes smoothly. How do you assess whether or not the test is going smoothly? How can you tell it's working until it works?

I'm going to assume for the sake of my ability to stay invested in this story that they didn't just pick Yokoya out of a hat, and there was some kind of omen or spiritual guidance that led them to try it here first.

So, they try it out. And...it does not go "smoothly" regardless of whether or not it has any chance of working on an earth-born Avatar. Air Nomad children have this test ingrained in their culture, so historically they aren't too hard to test by this method. Earth Kingdom children haven't, and so a great many of them just throw screaming tantrums when told that they have to put their four favorite toys out of the bunch back again. That by itself wouldn't be so bad, if only the parents were a bit more cooperative. The residents of this village continue to make themselves unlikeable in their reactions to learning how special each of their children aren't.

Yes, these two sages are having to deal with Earth Karens.

These dirt-poor premodern fishermen are coming across as like...American suburbanite stereotypes. It's weird.

We slide back into the narrative present with Jianzhu struggling to reason with some farmer who's demanding money in exchange for letting his daughter be tested. An annual salary, in fact, including a smaller stipend even if his kid doesn't turn out to be the Avatar just because she could have been. Things seem to be getting better when, despite her father's attempts at extortion, the girl slips passed him and selects two of the correct toys out of the hundreds on display...only to get worse again when she abruptly stomps on another toy and grinds it apart with her foot, destroying an irreplaceable cultural artifact. She and her father need to be tossed out before she can break anything else.

Heh, that was definitely true to form and feel for Avatar. I totally imagined that scene animated in the show's style and scored with its music.

As the model citizen father-daughter pair leave, the sages spy another child watching the proceedings. They thought they'd finished going through all the town's children, but she - though quite tall for her age - does appear to be a child of around six or seven. The text also makes note of her having unusually big feet even for her unusually big body, which is a trait that Kyoshi was known for in the show (it was actually a minor plot point of one episode), so either this is her or the book is doing another fakeout. Anyway, the probably-Kyoshi girl's height and frame are made more impressive by the fact that she's also skinny and malnourished-looking. Joanzhu infers that she's probably a refugee from further inland, where wartime banditry has created both a large population of orphans and a deficit of food. She probably only just came to the village in the last day or two, Jianzhu reasons, as they never spotted her before. In any case, either the villagers have refused to provide for the starving refugee, or she just hasn't worked up the courage to ask anyone for help.

What is the deal with this town, seriously?

Well, she is a kid of around the right age, so Jianzhu and Kelsang invite her into the hall and test her. The girl names herself, nervously, as Kyoshi. Okay, not another fakeout then. She takes a toy, and gets one of the correct ones; in this case, one that didn't catch any of the other children's eyes. When Kelsang tells the orphan that she can choose three more, we get some annoying head-hopping.

Yeah. That sudden POV shift into Kyoshi, followed just as suddenly by a jump back to the sages at the start of the following page, definitely threw me off.

Anyway though, Kyoshi has been offered candy by too many men in windowless vans to trust this situation. She takes the one toy she already chose, and bolts. In another very Nickelodeon-esque sequence, she bolts away from them, darts away downhill from the town hall, and vanishes between a couple of houses before either of these experienced benders can do anything to impede her.

I guess it's possible that neither of the sages have ever fought, per se. If they've only ever practiced bending for peaceful purposes, I can see them having shit reflexes and no ingrained instincts about how to use it to stop a fugitive. The fighty-bending emphasized by the show(s) might be an exception to the rule, historically speaking.

Anyway, Kyoshi gets away with one of the four toys that they need to identify any future air-born Avatars. Nice going, guys.

The next morning, the two morose sages prepare to leave this village and return the artifacts that haven't been stolen or stomped apart to their sacred vault. Kelsang has a better attitude about this, despite it being his people's sacred relic collection they just damaged. Jianzhu is just thinking about the rising tide of conflicts and corruption all around the world, including some very nasty situations he's had to interact with in person, and how it's just going to keep getting worse without the Avatar. Of particular note is his failed attempt to parlay with the leader of a pirate fleet calling itself "the Fifth Nation." This pirate lord is described as being terminally ill, with his even-more-bloodthirsty daughter who gave Jianzhu the creeps just from sharing a room with poised to take over from him any year now.

I like this detail a lot; it's clearly setting this lady up as a major antagonist for later, and doing so in a way that fits very naturally into the narrative without calling too much attention to itself. I've probably already spent more words on it than the book itself has, but the ones the author chose ensure that the reader WILL remember it.

The chapter ends with Jianzhu asking Kelsang if he's really sure they shouldn't try and find that orphan girl to get the toy back. Kelsang insists that he's not going to take the one toy a starving homeless girl possesses away from her. It's sacred, and needed for future tests, sure, but by that same token - he insists, despite not seeming quite as confident about it as he wants to be - the spirits will ensure it finds its way back home. Eventually.

The next chapter is titled "Nine Years Later." Lol.

So, that's the first chapter. It's got hits and it's got misses, but mostly hits. Not a bad start at all.

I have some more thoughts about the underlying assumptions of this world's sociology and politics as portrayed both in this book and in the animated shows that this chapter reframed for me, but...hmm. I'll wait until I've read the next two chapters in the commission before I go into them.