You ever think about how in The Headband, we're introduced to a side of the Fire Nation that's had its culture whittled away by a hundred years of imperial wartime propaganda. And how perhaps the most damning expression of this is that students are forbidden from dancing. And so Aang, maybe the only person on the planet who still truly remembers the Fire Nation of old, from before the war, brings it back to them.
And then we get to The Firebending Masters. Zuko's entire young adulthood has been spent using his anger towards the Fire Nation's enemies, his drive to capture the Avatar, as a crutch. And now he doesn't have that crutch anymore. So he and Aang set out on a pilgrimage, going to the birthplace of firebending itself, in search of answers. In search of a way to express the power of fire that isn't fueled by rage or smothered by fear. And they find a dance.
I think about it often, OP, and I love you for pointing it out.
I also think about the horror story Katara tells in The Puppetmaster. She swears her mom says it happened to her friend, but it feels like an urban legend. The kind of story that always happened to “a friend” of someone you know.
The story claims a little girl disappeared and her ghost lingers, and that you can even see the smoke still rising from her home.
One has to wonder… in an isolated culture that was repeatedly raided by an invading force that killed and kidnapped their people… an invading force with ships powered by fire whose arrival is signaled by smoke and ash…
If maybe this became a way for Gran Gran’s generation to explain to Kya’s generation why some people of their time went missing.
And if the ghost story was just a way to warn kids to stay away from smoke in the distance.
Lest you become the ghost.
FUCK
I’ve got another one for you, if you’re feeling it.
We know the play “Love Amongst the Dragons” is a favorite in the Fire Nation. Ursa dragged Zuko and Azula to watch it every summer and the kids used to recreate it. Even the Ember Island Players performed it very often (despite Zuko’s claims they butchered it).
We know from The Search that there are at least three characters: The Dragon Emperor, his lover, and the evil River Spirit.
But we also know that the Fire Nation censored and buried a lot of their own culture in favor of propaganda. So is this version of “Love Against The Dragons” even accurate? I imagine the Fire Family isn’t taking their kids to see something subversive and we already know The Ember Island Players engage in propaganda pieces.
Or is it possible that once the River Spirit wasn’t always evil? That the version we hear about and see snippets of is a propaganda version drafted to encourage negative sentiment towards the Water Tribe, just as The Headband shows textbooks have been changed to rewrite the Air Nomads as monsters that needed to be brought down?
And if that’s the case, what was the original version?
Has it been lost? Or is a copy waiting somewhere in the Dragonbone Catacombs? What happens when Zuko discovers it and realizes his fondest memories with his family, watching this play and recreating it with Azula on the beach, is based on an insidious lie?
Even worse, what if no copy exists, and he never finds out?
If so then I hope Aang had a good enough memory of the play to help them recreate it. Or at least remember where a copy would be.
