Burn for My Belief: The Fire Nation and the Courage of Conviction (2 of 2)
Previously in Part 1, I have discussed how strong beliefs are the cornerstone of Fire Nation cultural traits. In this part I will discuss the other, darker side of that dedication: The sacrifice that such passion entails.
Fuel for the Fire: The Role of Sacrifice in Fire Nation Culture
I recently saw this great motivational poster on unjapanologist's journal asking about all life's quandaries: "Exactly how bad do you want it?" It struck me as a profound question because that really is what much of life's problems boil down to. How much are we willing to give for a job, a relationship, and more of the many, many objects of desire that pass us by? How will you prioritize the use of your limited resources in the face of infinite wants?
Economics and common sense tell us that everything you want and everything you do is a function of what you don't have and don't do. I am giving up something this very moment by writing this essay. You are giving something up by reading it. Every cent spent, time passed, or attention given on some object, pursuit, or person could have been given somewhere else, for better or for worse. Choice is simply the other side of sacrifice.
For a culture that is all about lunging into choices headfirst, then, one can guess that the counterbalance of the cost that every choice demands would be a strong cultural motif. This holds true when you look at fire as a symbol again. According to this neat graphic, fire requires heat, oxygen, fuel, and a chain reaction to burn. We can see the strength of beliefs as the symbolic counterpart to the heat, but what about the fuel, another mystery of firebending? What does a firebender's fire burn?
Villages: Best fuel ever.
This is where the theme of sacrifice comes in, the things one is willing to feed the flames of conviction. Along with the examples of strong passion that come into play in the previous part of this essay, one can name corresponding sacrifices. Sozin may have had grand visions for a new world, but he gave his best friend's life for that cause, not to mention thrusting the world into a century of warfare. Roku was willing to do anything to stop him, even give up their friendship and Sozin's life, if it came to that. Zhao's destructive ambition demanded the obliteration of an entire culture, the moon itself, and anyone who got in his way. Ozai scarred and exiled his son in pursuit of power, and was also willing to kill him as a child. Azula killed Aang at one point, and in a way she gave up the basis of her own sanity in her quest for total control. Iroh gave up the life of royalty to follow Zuko into exile, and also the throne when it was freely offered him. We know about the terrible price Ursa paid for her son's life, and this was on top of having to go into exile as a traitor. Zuko forfeited his true self in pursuit of the Avatar and for the sake of pleasing his father. When he had his epiphany and chose to follow his conscience, it was at the cost of his royal station and, most painfully according to him in "The Boiling Rock, Part 1," the girl he cared for. Ty Lee left behind her life of comfort and privilege to follow her passion, and of course Mai lay down her life in her Crowning Moment of Awesome. In this context, fire is the sacrificial fire, the consumption of the material by the heat of the abstract.
Ruling the Unruly: Fire Nation Society and Governance
Given the importance, indeed the inevitability of sacrifices in Fire Nation life, it shouldn't be surprising that Fire Nation politics are a cutthroat affair. If everyone is strong in their conviction and is willing to give anything for the sake of those beliefs, it's easy to see that compromise would be difficult at best and clashes would be common, often with extreme consequences. The Fire Nation tradition of Agni Kai is this dynamic compressed into ritual form, especially given the symbolic role of firebending in the national psyche. It also seems to play the role of a pressure valve in resolving these unyielding clash of convictions one way or the other. The contestants put their looks and possibly lives on the line, and even if that doesn't happen the shame of losing can be a severe price to pay.*
* Compare and contrast examples from other cultures. the Earth Rumble from the Gaoling region of the Earth Kingdom and Katara and Pakku's water-duel. The Earth Rumble is about celebrating colorful individual characters rather than championing an idea (unless that idea is I RULE!!!), and the duel on the North Pole, as I have discussed, was basically a water Agni Kai. But even there the duel had a stronger community element than a fire-duel, where the two combatants and their beliefs take center stage.
One interesting thing about the Agni Kai is that it seems to cut across class lines despite the seemingly rigid hierarchy of Fire Nation society. After the disastrous war meeting in "The Storm," it was taken for granted that Zuko and the general he insulted would duke it out despite the class and age difference between the two. Theoretically even the Firelord could be the opponent, though Zuko refused to fight him. Zuko is challenged more than once by theoretical subordinates like Zhao and Jee, though it may be that the paradox in his status as both prince and exile brings him outside the usual class divisions. loopy777 and I were recently talking about this contradiction in FN society, that on the one hand things seemed stable with the Firelord firmly on top of the pyramid, but in reality the balance was very dynamic and fluid.
In fact, it is my belief that the rigid social limits including hierarchy were put in place to control what is at heart an uncontrollable people. Much like Mai's refusal so show emotion was a reaction to the depths of feeling and the brainwashing of the Nation's youth in "The Headband" (discussed in the politics essay) was done in the shadow of resistance, I can see Fire Nation society living it fear of itself, reflecting Jeong Jeong's horror of fire that unless they are rigorously contained they will go out of control and burn and burn and burn until there is nothing left. And even with these restraints they keep bursting their bonds, fluid and destructive as fire itself, yearning, wanting, burning.
Yeah, burst those pesky bonds, kid. And maybe some clothes while you're at... did I say that out loud?
Uniting a Nation, and the Future of the Fire Nation
What could unite a nation of such strong-willed people? Unlike the Earth Kingdom and their difficulties uniting, the Fire Nation, despite the lively and deadly nature of its strong personalities and beliefs, appears to hold together quite well. If the Earth Kingdom couldn't unite against an invader, what was the force that held the invaders together as a coherent whole?
Of course there must be differences in history and politics that led to this outcome, but to give a cultural explanation, I believe it is the nation itself that unifies this unruly people. Specifically the idea of the nation. The social organizations of the cultures surveyed so far--Nomads, Tribes, Kingdom, and Nation--are roughly in order of technological development and organizational complexity. (Note that I am not saying one is better than the other. There are qualitative and quantitative differences that arise from higher levels of technology and organization, but these are differences, not superiorities.) Knowing nothing of Air Nomad life outside the temples, I'll posit that they organized themselves into groups of family and acquaintances, or traveled alone. The Water Tribes had a more formal structure, especially the city of the Northern Water Tribe, but tribes still depend on family ties and tradition. Kingdoms are usually larger than tribes and have a more complex ruling structure, but are regional affairs established on the basis of common history and group homogeneity. The Earth Kingdom was unable to unite their fractious provinces across such regional lines, as discussed in the Earth Kingdom culture essay.
A nation, on the other hand, is in many ways more an idea than a reality. The people in your nation are not your family, nor necessarily the people who share your language and region. United across a much broader spectrum, a nation enables free or freer movement across regions and subcultures, based on the abstract idea that everyone and everything is part of a larger grouping. Modern nations did not truly emerge in Europe until around the seventeenth century, when technology and commerce started to break down the locality-bound structures of feudalism. Countries like China and Korea have much longer histories as united nations, since about third century B.C. and seventh century A.D. respectively (though when it comes to historical China we're mostly talking the eastern Han-majority regions, not the entire area that modern China claims for itself), and some of the first things the uniting kingdoms of Qin and Silla did was to build roads and bureaucracies so the central governments could reach every corner of their new nations. And also they killed, subjugated, and married local elites to consolidate power, but let's not get into that or this essay won't end.
The point is, there is nothing natural or organic about a nation. It is a construct of ideas, imposed upon the physical world with strict planning and often use of force to make it a reality. Such an undertaking requires imagination and creativity, not to mention the technological advancement to support complex and far-reaching structures. Fire is, after all, a symbol of civilization itself, a secret stolen from the gods themselves from the Greek myth of Prometheus to Native American myths starring animal fire-bringers such as Coyote. Fire is the force of change, both creation and destruction, a taming of nature for good and evil. The Fire Nation is accordingly the most highly organized and technologically advanced people in the Avatar world.
Obviously, ingenuity is not a trait unique to the Fire Nation. As a matter of fact many of their crucial advances were extorted or stolen from foreign innovators such as the Mechanist in the Earth Kingdom. What is unique to the Fire Nation, however, is the sheer scale of production: A national organization of manufacturing, transportation, and administration that can mass-produce and improve technological innovations and keep up the level of general production to fuel a worldwide war. Other nations might produce great minds and breathtaking inventions, but the Fire Nation had the production capacity to bring them to the war at large.
Because seriously guys, airships. AIRSHIPS.
So now you can see the genius of Sozin and his line. The successive Firelords united their unruly people behind a belief they could give their lives for, forging them into a nation, and harnessed their creative fire into technological and social change. As if that weren't enough (and perhaps it wasn't), Sozin gave his subjects another idea to rally around: The idea that they are superior to all other peoples and must help them see the light, up to and including obliterating and decimating these other cultures. If the cost seemed high, it could be written off as inevitable sacrifices in pursuit of the ideal. In the end, the people of fire could only be ruled by the strength of their own belief, and Sozin turned that strength of conviction to a war of world domination.
If Sozin's descendant Zuko is to rule that nation and lead it down a peaceful path, he needs to give them a new idea to unite around. Unless he can find a creative outlet for the intensity of his subjects' wants, he will soon find out just how ungovernable they are when his nation falls to squabbling pieces and strife breaks out at home and abroad. Worst of all, his dad will be there to laugh at him and dance to the tune of "I told you so." (Thanks, Aang!)
Finding that common goal to aspire to will, in many ways, be the test of Zuko's reign. If he can give them that vision and win them over to it, his people will achieve it with single-minded focus no matter what it takes. Fail to lead them with ideas, and they will turn on him and become a destructive force for the world like fire itself. Whether creative spark, destructive inferno, or sacrificial flame, the fire of conviction that burns within this passionate people will leave an indelible mark on the world of Avatar.
One thing the Fire Nation can contribute to the world is the aforementioned technological prowess, such as mass production and organization. Another is social progress, reflected in the status of Fire Nation women as soldiers and guards. ("The Day of Black Sun," "The Boiling Rock, Parts 1 and 2") I have in the past speculated that this was part of the reason Pakku was so adamantly against the idea of women fighters because he saw them as part of Fire Nation decadence. I think he was wrong because correlation does not equal causation. That is, the status of women in the Fire Nation was due to the national prosperity that made the war possible, but the relative freedom of women certainly didn't cause the war. In fact, after all the harm the Fire Nation has done to the world, its technological and social progress is something it can give back.
Then there are other areas where social progress lags behind. Given the close identification of fire with cultural values, and the abstract and almost spiritual nature of firebending as previously discussed, perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that the Fire Nation seems to attach more status to bending than any other nation. Most of the major political leaders of the other existing cultures appear to be non-benders, or at least don't feel the need to flaunt their powers. Notable exception being Bumi, but his is a city built on earthbending. The Fire Nation is the only major political entity where the leader constantly reminds his subjects that he is a firebender, and where non-benders are excluded from major parts of culture like the Agni Kai. I'm interested in how this might have affected, or will be affected by, the events of the non-bender rebellion in Korra, and whether Zuko's marriage to a non-bender could have consequences. I will have more to say about bender and non-bender relations in a future essay, though I might want to check out more of the continuity material such as The Promise first.
This concludes the essay on Fire Nation culture, and the four major cultures of Avatar. Next and final essay in the culture series will be about the smaller cultures including the swamp-dwellers, sandbenders, and the Sun Warriors, and will wrap up the series with some final words about the relationship between cultures and how they relate to the larger theme of balance.
Fuel for the Fire: The Role of Sacrifice in Fire Nation Culture
I recently saw this great motivational poster on unjapanologist's journal asking about all life's quandaries: "Exactly how bad do you want it?" It struck me as a profound question because that really is what much of life's problems boil down to. How much are we willing to give for a job, a relationship, and more of the many, many objects of desire that pass us by? How will you prioritize the use of your limited resources in the face of infinite wants?
Economics and common sense tell us that everything you want and everything you do is a function of what you don't have and don't do. I am giving up something this very moment by writing this essay. You are giving something up by reading it. Every cent spent, time passed, or attention given on some object, pursuit, or person could have been given somewhere else, for better or for worse. Choice is simply the other side of sacrifice.
For a culture that is all about lunging into choices headfirst, then, one can guess that the counterbalance of the cost that every choice demands would be a strong cultural motif. This holds true when you look at fire as a symbol again. According to this neat graphic, fire requires heat, oxygen, fuel, and a chain reaction to burn. We can see the strength of beliefs as the symbolic counterpart to the heat, but what about the fuel, another mystery of firebending? What does a firebender's fire burn?
Villages: Best fuel ever.
This is where the theme of sacrifice comes in, the things one is willing to feed the flames of conviction. Along with the examples of strong passion that come into play in the previous part of this essay, one can name corresponding sacrifices. Sozin may have had grand visions for a new world, but he gave his best friend's life for that cause, not to mention thrusting the world into a century of warfare. Roku was willing to do anything to stop him, even give up their friendship and Sozin's life, if it came to that. Zhao's destructive ambition demanded the obliteration of an entire culture, the moon itself, and anyone who got in his way. Ozai scarred and exiled his son in pursuit of power, and was also willing to kill him as a child. Azula killed Aang at one point, and in a way she gave up the basis of her own sanity in her quest for total control. Iroh gave up the life of royalty to follow Zuko into exile, and also the throne when it was freely offered him. We know about the terrible price Ursa paid for her son's life, and this was on top of having to go into exile as a traitor. Zuko forfeited his true self in pursuit of the Avatar and for the sake of pleasing his father. When he had his epiphany and chose to follow his conscience, it was at the cost of his royal station and, most painfully according to him in "The Boiling Rock, Part 1," the girl he cared for. Ty Lee left behind her life of comfort and privilege to follow her passion, and of course Mai lay down her life in her Crowning Moment of Awesome. In this context, fire is the sacrificial fire, the consumption of the material by the heat of the abstract.
Ruling the Unruly: Fire Nation Society and Governance
Given the importance, indeed the inevitability of sacrifices in Fire Nation life, it shouldn't be surprising that Fire Nation politics are a cutthroat affair. If everyone is strong in their conviction and is willing to give anything for the sake of those beliefs, it's easy to see that compromise would be difficult at best and clashes would be common, often with extreme consequences. The Fire Nation tradition of Agni Kai is this dynamic compressed into ritual form, especially given the symbolic role of firebending in the national psyche. It also seems to play the role of a pressure valve in resolving these unyielding clash of convictions one way or the other. The contestants put their looks and possibly lives on the line, and even if that doesn't happen the shame of losing can be a severe price to pay.*
* Compare and contrast examples from other cultures. the Earth Rumble from the Gaoling region of the Earth Kingdom and Katara and Pakku's water-duel. The Earth Rumble is about celebrating colorful individual characters rather than championing an idea (unless that idea is I RULE!!!), and the duel on the North Pole, as I have discussed, was basically a water Agni Kai. But even there the duel had a stronger community element than a fire-duel, where the two combatants and their beliefs take center stage.
One interesting thing about the Agni Kai is that it seems to cut across class lines despite the seemingly rigid hierarchy of Fire Nation society. After the disastrous war meeting in "The Storm," it was taken for granted that Zuko and the general he insulted would duke it out despite the class and age difference between the two. Theoretically even the Firelord could be the opponent, though Zuko refused to fight him. Zuko is challenged more than once by theoretical subordinates like Zhao and Jee, though it may be that the paradox in his status as both prince and exile brings him outside the usual class divisions. loopy777 and I were recently talking about this contradiction in FN society, that on the one hand things seemed stable with the Firelord firmly on top of the pyramid, but in reality the balance was very dynamic and fluid.
In fact, it is my belief that the rigid social limits including hierarchy were put in place to control what is at heart an uncontrollable people. Much like Mai's refusal so show emotion was a reaction to the depths of feeling and the brainwashing of the Nation's youth in "The Headband" (discussed in the politics essay) was done in the shadow of resistance, I can see Fire Nation society living it fear of itself, reflecting Jeong Jeong's horror of fire that unless they are rigorously contained they will go out of control and burn and burn and burn until there is nothing left. And even with these restraints they keep bursting their bonds, fluid and destructive as fire itself, yearning, wanting, burning.
Yeah, burst those pesky bonds, kid. And maybe some clothes while you're at... did I say that out loud?
Uniting a Nation, and the Future of the Fire Nation
What could unite a nation of such strong-willed people? Unlike the Earth Kingdom and their difficulties uniting, the Fire Nation, despite the lively and deadly nature of its strong personalities and beliefs, appears to hold together quite well. If the Earth Kingdom couldn't unite against an invader, what was the force that held the invaders together as a coherent whole?
Of course there must be differences in history and politics that led to this outcome, but to give a cultural explanation, I believe it is the nation itself that unifies this unruly people. Specifically the idea of the nation. The social organizations of the cultures surveyed so far--Nomads, Tribes, Kingdom, and Nation--are roughly in order of technological development and organizational complexity. (Note that I am not saying one is better than the other. There are qualitative and quantitative differences that arise from higher levels of technology and organization, but these are differences, not superiorities.) Knowing nothing of Air Nomad life outside the temples, I'll posit that they organized themselves into groups of family and acquaintances, or traveled alone. The Water Tribes had a more formal structure, especially the city of the Northern Water Tribe, but tribes still depend on family ties and tradition. Kingdoms are usually larger than tribes and have a more complex ruling structure, but are regional affairs established on the basis of common history and group homogeneity. The Earth Kingdom was unable to unite their fractious provinces across such regional lines, as discussed in the Earth Kingdom culture essay.
A nation, on the other hand, is in many ways more an idea than a reality. The people in your nation are not your family, nor necessarily the people who share your language and region. United across a much broader spectrum, a nation enables free or freer movement across regions and subcultures, based on the abstract idea that everyone and everything is part of a larger grouping. Modern nations did not truly emerge in Europe until around the seventeenth century, when technology and commerce started to break down the locality-bound structures of feudalism. Countries like China and Korea have much longer histories as united nations, since about third century B.C. and seventh century A.D. respectively (though when it comes to historical China we're mostly talking the eastern Han-majority regions, not the entire area that modern China claims for itself), and some of the first things the uniting kingdoms of Qin and Silla did was to build roads and bureaucracies so the central governments could reach every corner of their new nations. And also they killed, subjugated, and married local elites to consolidate power, but let's not get into that or this essay won't end.
The point is, there is nothing natural or organic about a nation. It is a construct of ideas, imposed upon the physical world with strict planning and often use of force to make it a reality. Such an undertaking requires imagination and creativity, not to mention the technological advancement to support complex and far-reaching structures. Fire is, after all, a symbol of civilization itself, a secret stolen from the gods themselves from the Greek myth of Prometheus to Native American myths starring animal fire-bringers such as Coyote. Fire is the force of change, both creation and destruction, a taming of nature for good and evil. The Fire Nation is accordingly the most highly organized and technologically advanced people in the Avatar world.
Obviously, ingenuity is not a trait unique to the Fire Nation. As a matter of fact many of their crucial advances were extorted or stolen from foreign innovators such as the Mechanist in the Earth Kingdom. What is unique to the Fire Nation, however, is the sheer scale of production: A national organization of manufacturing, transportation, and administration that can mass-produce and improve technological innovations and keep up the level of general production to fuel a worldwide war. Other nations might produce great minds and breathtaking inventions, but the Fire Nation had the production capacity to bring them to the war at large.
Because seriously guys, airships. AIRSHIPS.
So now you can see the genius of Sozin and his line. The successive Firelords united their unruly people behind a belief they could give their lives for, forging them into a nation, and harnessed their creative fire into technological and social change. As if that weren't enough (and perhaps it wasn't), Sozin gave his subjects another idea to rally around: The idea that they are superior to all other peoples and must help them see the light, up to and including obliterating and decimating these other cultures. If the cost seemed high, it could be written off as inevitable sacrifices in pursuit of the ideal. In the end, the people of fire could only be ruled by the strength of their own belief, and Sozin turned that strength of conviction to a war of world domination.
If Sozin's descendant Zuko is to rule that nation and lead it down a peaceful path, he needs to give them a new idea to unite around. Unless he can find a creative outlet for the intensity of his subjects' wants, he will soon find out just how ungovernable they are when his nation falls to squabbling pieces and strife breaks out at home and abroad. Worst of all, his dad will be there to laugh at him and dance to the tune of "I told you so." (Thanks, Aang!)
Finding that common goal to aspire to will, in many ways, be the test of Zuko's reign. If he can give them that vision and win them over to it, his people will achieve it with single-minded focus no matter what it takes. Fail to lead them with ideas, and they will turn on him and become a destructive force for the world like fire itself. Whether creative spark, destructive inferno, or sacrificial flame, the fire of conviction that burns within this passionate people will leave an indelible mark on the world of Avatar.
One thing the Fire Nation can contribute to the world is the aforementioned technological prowess, such as mass production and organization. Another is social progress, reflected in the status of Fire Nation women as soldiers and guards. ("The Day of Black Sun," "The Boiling Rock, Parts 1 and 2") I have in the past speculated that this was part of the reason Pakku was so adamantly against the idea of women fighters because he saw them as part of Fire Nation decadence. I think he was wrong because correlation does not equal causation. That is, the status of women in the Fire Nation was due to the national prosperity that made the war possible, but the relative freedom of women certainly didn't cause the war. In fact, after all the harm the Fire Nation has done to the world, its technological and social progress is something it can give back.
Then there are other areas where social progress lags behind. Given the close identification of fire with cultural values, and the abstract and almost spiritual nature of firebending as previously discussed, perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that the Fire Nation seems to attach more status to bending than any other nation. Most of the major political leaders of the other existing cultures appear to be non-benders, or at least don't feel the need to flaunt their powers. Notable exception being Bumi, but his is a city built on earthbending. The Fire Nation is the only major political entity where the leader constantly reminds his subjects that he is a firebender, and where non-benders are excluded from major parts of culture like the Agni Kai. I'm interested in how this might have affected, or will be affected by, the events of the non-bender rebellion in Korra, and whether Zuko's marriage to a non-bender could have consequences. I will have more to say about bender and non-bender relations in a future essay, though I might want to check out more of the continuity material such as The Promise first.
This concludes the essay on Fire Nation culture, and the four major cultures of Avatar. Next and final essay in the culture series will be about the smaller cultures including the swamp-dwellers, sandbenders, and the Sun Warriors, and will wrap up the series with some final words about the relationship between cultures and how they relate to the larger theme of balance.