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

[amyraine]

Okay, I agree with all this.

But this seems to be more of a problem with how Bryke wrote LoK than how Gene Yang is writing those scenes of the Search, you know what I'm saying? The GaAng had to come up with an immediate solution to end a second potential war so the fact that the government they set up isn't a drastic shift from the one that was already there, just more multicultural, actually seems like a pretty mature choice. After all, that government was working as least from the perspective that it was stable and profitable - classist and racist as hell, sure, but stable and everyone had enough to eat. With the radical changes and rampant uncertainty the colonists underwent during the year after the first war was officially ended keeping the government more or less the same, changed just enough to help the severe class divide between EK natives and the FN oppressors, makes a lot of sense to me. It doesn't seem childish. I'm guessing that the problem is the emphasis on making something new and then not actually doing it, yeah?

Now, keeping that same government eighty years later when it is clearly NOT working is the part that seems immature to me. I agree 100% that in the thirty-forty years between the Search and the Korra flashbacks someone could think that maybe a court system separate from the legislature might be a good idea, even if the council still holds the ultimate authority they could designate some power to magistrates or whatever. But then we wouldn't see adult!Toph being snarky and adult!Sokka being funny! *sigh* This is doubly tragic because adult!Toph and adult!Sokka weren't actually that funny, to me, and I don't know if that's because neither Bryan or Mike was responsible for their humor in AtLA or if it's because what was funny in a 12 year old and a 15 year old isn't funny in 40 year olds and no one could have helped that. I dunno.

This is not to say that I don't agree that the version of the Promise we got still sucked, cause it totally did. I'm completely on board with the idea that there was a different version that we didn't see that the Search is drawing from. I'll just tell myself that the Promise Comics are the Ember Island version.

Edit: since I didn't comment on it previously, I'm so glad to hear that Azula is being Azula. I was worried from the leaked stills that she was going to be too generic babbly crazy that we wouldn't get any of her cold calculations. The idea that she's just as rational and calculating, just her premises are screwed up because she's perceiving a different reality, is awesome.

Since I refuse to believe that Zuko is not Ozai's son, to hear that the particular scene and phrase used is not what fandom reactions had led me to believe is gratifying. If it turns out, however, that the whole wolf thing means that Zuko is somehow Ikem's son after all I just...well I can't quit the franchise since I was already supposed to do that...um...I'll just be even louder in my annoyance?

[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.

As for Zuko's parentage, I think the fandom is basically falling right into the trap set up by the cliffhanger. I reason that if what's being implied by the letter is true, then the evidence would be airtight; the fact that it's slightly ambiguous and completely unexplained leads me to think it's a fake-out. (Unless our storytellers intend to use the exact same cliffhanger, this time with better proof, for the next volume. But I like to think that they're better than that.)