Reasons I Love Avatar 4: Politics (Part 2 of 3)

[ljlee]

Part 1 of this essay on Avatar as a political story talked mainly about the Earth Kingdom and its political attempts to end the war, and the root causes of that failure. Here in Part 2 I will discuss another effort to end the war unilaterally from the outside, specifically the coalition invasion in "The Day of Black Sun." Then I will discuss the

Comments

[amanda_violet]

I think it was necessary not just from a political point of view, but from a story point of view as well for the invasion to fail. If it had all gone well and Aang had successfully defeated the Firelord and everything was wrapped up all nicely ten episodes in... then what? Don't tell me the season ends there!

Also, the first thing that Avatar Roku told Aang was that he needed to face the Firelord before the Comet came. Okay, so this is kind of important. He's racing against the clock, now; he has to become a fully-realized Avatar in less than a year. He spends the rest of the series obsessing over it. But wait! Here's a shortcut--the Eclipse. Aang can now take advantage of the Firelord when he's powerless (and when the world is severely unbalanced) in order to win. I detect serious thematic inconsistencies here.

Plus, it would have been super anticlimactic for Aang to defeat Ozai during the Eclipse, when Roku explicitly said that the Comet would make Ozai nigh-invincible. Of course it would be necessary for Aang to face Ozai when he's at his most powerful, in order to show how far he's come as a person and as a bender. And to have a friggin' awesome fight scene. Not to mention that every single viewer would be wondering, "What about that Comet? Isn't that supposed to be kind of important? Why didn't we see anything about it?"

Re: everything else, yeah, pretty much. Zuko has always been a good guy, it just took him a while to find out a) what that really means, b) what he's going to do about it. I like that Avatar touches a lot on the dispute between fate and free will; everyone is put into a certain situation and given certain strengths and weaknesses, but it's up to them to decide how they're going to use what they've been given.

[ljlee]

You're absolutely right, that the failure of the invasion was necessary for story and character reasons as well. The brilliance of the writing is that the story reasons and the in-world reasons were all integrated with each other. So from a political point of view, it was a good thing politically that it didn't work out, and it was a good writing decision (more like inevitable, really) from a story and character point of view, as you point out.

I think Zuko and Aang are parallel to each other in their relationship to their situation and free will, as their juxtaposition in "The Storm" shows. Zuko was born a Fire Nation prince but could never quite conform to the mold, while Aang was born the Avatar but didn't want to be one. For Aang it was pretty clear from the start what he was supposed to choose, but not so for Zuko. He labored for most of the show under the illusion that conforming to the external (his father's) ideal was the "good." It took him a while to realize his true path was something entirely different.