iroh:
nooooo
ideas I didn’t end up writing but really wanted to:
(1) The revolution is successful, and Hiroshi and Amon move Asami and Tarrlok to a gilded cage luxurious private rooms. Tarrlok and Asami are initially hostile but are driven to band together against their infinitely more objectionable relations and split ends; Hiroshi is as shitty a father as might be expected, which unsurprisingly alienates Noatak, who despite his many failings as a brother retains intense if twisted affection and absolutely zero inclination towards resolving Tarrlok’s recalcitrance with fratricide.
(2) Korra stays on the task force, is torn between “accomplishing things and beating people up” and “personal loyalty and ethics” as personified in Tarrlok and Tenzin.
(3) Unalaq and his family die when Korra is very young, before she’s revealed as the Avatar. Tonraq becomes Chief of the Northern Water Tribe and Korra, princess and his heir.
(4) Koirë is a very young Elf of the House of Finwë, largely unaware of the rising tensions between the Númenóreans and the Elves. She sneaks off Tol Eressëa and sails to Númenor to find her fortune with her distant cousins, the Elf-friendly lords of Andúnië. Amandil accepts her into his household against his own better judgment (passing her off, in the dangerous atmosphere of the time, as an orphaned cousin), and before long, she’s up to her ears in the Byzantine politics of Tar-Míriel’s Númenor.
(5) more of the burning, where Tarrlok doesn’t bloodbend Korra, she burns him, and immediately horrified, runs to tell Tenzin what she’s done. As Tarrlok recovers, there’s an uneasy detente between Tarrlok/Saikhan and Korra/Tenzin in the interests of fighting Equalists, the Equalists are using the attack to rally support (if he’s not safe WHO IS), and Amon himself is barely containing his rage.
(6) Korra is one of the bloodbending kids - the oldest, at twenty minutes Noatak’s senior. For whatever reason, she doesn’t manifest her other elements until the usual age, and is simply a waterbending prodigy like her twin, pulled out of healing lessons to be trained as a bloodbender with him. Her power and will easily make her the second-favourite. THIS CAN ONLY END WELL.
Q: How could Aang be the best avatar when instead of facing his destiny he took off and left all of the airbenders to die and let the war go on for a hundred years?
Fair question. But unfortunately you’re using historical hindsight to level charges that aren’t actually valid.
Aang didn’t know the Fire Nation were planning a genocidal attack on his people. Aang didn’t know Gyasto was planning on keeping him safe. Aang had no idea that flying out of that window would mean the death of all his people. He didn’t know that a storm would keep him from the world for 100 years.
He was the youngest person ever to be told he was the Avatar. An event that ostracized him from all his friends. He was an outcast, and the only person in the world that stayed closed to him, Gyasto, was going to be torn away from him. So he ran. That’s his character weakness. Aang runs from his problems. And it has disastrous consequenes. But you can’t blame Aang for the Fire Nation committing genocide. Those soldiers are the ones that murdered all the children and peaceful Air Nomads, not Aang.
What makes Aang a great Avatar is he overcame his weakeness. Throughout the series he comes to accept his destiny. This 12 year old guy accepts the fate of the world on his shoulders and faces the embodiment of the ideology that murdered his people and deals with him justly. Aang is a great Avatar because of the circumstances he was presented with. Not only was he unprepared, out of touch the morality of the modern world and dealing with problems 100 years in the making, he did this all at the age of 12. He fucked up back in the past, but that tiny mistake which had huge unimaginable consequences, he was able to get past it and literally save the world. If that doesn’t make a great Avatar, I don’t know what will.
