Nicholas Brooks said:
I didn't mean it in the sense of "this is critical information." I literally find it unfortunate because it's something interesting and I'd like to see Azula's reaction to it, but the present circumstances don't make that possible. Academically I think it's pretty well known that by this point most people have has one or more Avatars somewhere in their ancestry.
Ahh, thanks for the clarification.
pucflek said:
Then we would learn if it was, maybe, provided the sisters have insight into that.
Maybe? But I don't think the possibility of that would tip Azula's decision here.
(And personally, I'm also more interested in the other two. Ursa left, years ago even before the loops started. I don't think Azula moving on well actually requires her to recognize her mother did love her, if that was even the case; for Azula personally, her mother is
still well out of her life, and for ruling, Azula seems to already have enough of an understanding to not make policy on the assumption that her experience with her mother was a representative sample of normal family dynamics.)
@Ghoul King:
Good point about the
actively fire-adapted plants; I've encountered information on such before, both for IRL specimens and in at least one other Avatar fanfic, but I hadn't thought of them when reading that myself, just the general fertility of ash.
So I'm left deeply unsure how to take this.
Possibly Azula thought that challenging the literal truth of the statement would merely get something along the lines of a knowing look and a statement that she doesn't understand the metaphor, which challenging the presence of the proverb itself does not.
...Oh. Actually, also: you're right that the crowd of Fire Nation citizens gathered there probably would recognize the literal untruth of the proverb -- and Azula called that proverb a typical one from him, potentially implying that
all his supposed wisdom is so flawed.
Also, it seems like it might be a foreign proverb, from somewhere
less used to fire ecologies?
Wiggy said:
I agree with you almost entirely except I still want Azula to end up Fire Lord in the end lol. Sure, have the war end, since the Avatar wants it so bad and is powerful enough to force it though, but have Azula use her brilliance to win the peace and leverage the Fire Nation's technological supremacy to economically dominate the post war era instead of sharing it around to republic city and the rest and turning the fire nation into a puppet of the white lotus.
Perhaps we could even resolve the question of the long-settled colonies by
generously donating them to the Air Nation, which after all needs resources to rebuild, on the condition that none of the people born there be expelled. Aang would then have to either turn them down, giving up useful resources for rebuilding his people and airbenders in general while also landing right back in the ongoing dispute, or accept them... in which case the Air Nation currently comprised of a single overworked child monk would be nominally in charge of rather a lot of people loyal to the Fire Nation. Much delegation would presumably ensue, and either the de jure Air Nation government would respect the wishes of the people, and thus have close ties to the Fire Nation, or oppress them, which if done enough would give us cause to intervene. Or Aang could just break his work and expel the colonists anyway, massively hurting his own position and making himself look bad compared to us.
Of course, all of that assumes there
is a dispute. An even more peaceful solution would be for the Fire Lord and the Earth Queen to be quite easily able to come to a mutually satisfactory solution by virtue of them being the same person, if we can pull
that off somehow.
(There is, after all, rather a shortage of good leadership candidates shown in the Fire Nation
or the Earth Kingdom. End-of-canon Azula very much doesn't break from that... but the Azula who finally manages to move past these loops?)
Wootius said:
In doing so it gets us one less reason to blindly hate Zuko.
I don't think we
do blindly hate Zuko, though? We have, after all, been trying to
not kill him; my interpretation is that we'd be fine with him explicitly and publicly renouncing his and his descendants' claim to the throne and then going off to do... basically whatever so long as it wasn't in our way.
No7sHere said:
It really doesn't feel like Azula hates Zuko here. She is extremely angry at him but she explicitly doesn't actually want to hurt/kill him.
Right.
