Searching for Love

[loopy777]

At this point, Avatar: The Last Airbender is only gaining steam, but it’s not yet running with the power of a locomotive. With The Legend of Korra's second season a faraway dot on a vast horizon, the ongoing comic book adventures of Avatar Aang and Friends (or Fire Lord Zuko and Friends, as is increasingly the case here) are the only new story that

Comments

[loopy777]

Yeah, it's not a bad form of government for the right situation, it's just that it's so... straightforward? If the lesson of The Promise is that you can't run the world like a group of little kids anymore, and Aang's reaction to a boring lecture is to come up with a form of government that nothing more than a small group of people who have all the powers of a single governor... then isn't that just running the world like a group of kids?

But like I said, The Search makes a lot more sense if whatever version of The Promise that happened wasn't completely goofballs. So Aang's gut instincts are still reliable, at least in terms of the contemporary situation.

The Promise was just Azula's version of actual events, interpreting what Zuko told her through her own screwball worldview. The Search, meanwhile, will end with that mysterious conversation at the start of the trilogy being Azula talking to a snow globe.I speculated on ASN that Azula is telling it all to Honora, so you're more generous to her than I am. In your version she's just

[amyraine]

"If the lesson of The Promise is that you can't run the world like a group of little kids anymore, and Aang's reaction to a boring lecture is to come up with a form of government that nothing more than a small group of people who have all the powers of a single governor... then isn't that just running the world like a group of kids

[amyraine]

"There was also the NWT. Arnook was a monarch by another name, but he didn't have the comparative power of Kuei or the Fire Lords. Pakku could tell Aang to piss off and there wasn't anything Arnook could do to countermand the dismissal

[loopy777]

I think perhaps I'm not communicating my real critique, here

[amyraine]

Okay, I agree with all this

[loopy777]

No, the problem is from Gene Yang, and reading the comic makes it clear. He's the one who specifically chose a lecture of different styles of government, instead of something like Diplomacy Lessons or Multiculturalism in Ancient History or something that better supports the end result in LoK (the Diplomacy Lessons one especially would have set up Zuko's arc more logically); he's also the one who several times had the characters drop lines that they need something NEW and SPECIAL in the colonies. Since it's his script, I'm giving him the blame (and credit) for the specific dialogue that connects the story beats