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Arsonist's Lullaby: An Azula Timeloop Quest

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[X] The present. Here you stand, before your brother. Here doubt has driven you. Does Zuko doubt, too? Is he still angry at himself? If you were him, you would be. But maybe that's his secret. Maybe he's always angry. Maybe you're angry too. The world isn't what you thought it was—and you think Zuko can relate. What will happen if you let him?
 
[X] The future. The one place you cannot seem to reach, throne or no throne. Has Zuko ever wondered what it'll be like? No, not whether the mantle is heavy enough to cramp the shoulders, or what his first command as Fire Lord could be—just about the shape of the Sun's path through the sky, the day after Sozin's Comet, and what the world will have become in the face of that light. What does he see? What do you?
 
Though as far as it goes, I don't think the Fire Nation actually has the capacity to occupy and control the Earth Kingdom short of just committing genocide and ruling over a lot of empty space as all the farmland dies from lack of cultivation. It's the ultimate culmination of colonialist, genocidal imperialism: the emptying of the world in the name of ruling over its Ashes.
 
The Laurent said:
Though as far as it goes, I don't think the Fire Nation actually has the capacity to occupy and control the Earth Kingdom short of just committing genocide and ruling over a lot of empty space as all the farmland dies from lack of cultivation. It's the ultimate culmination of colonialist, genocidal imperialism: the emptying of the world in the name of ruling over its Ashes.
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I thought the whole Phoneix King ambition of Ozai was basically to wipe out the Earth Kingdom's population so that the continent could be 'reborn' with Fire Nation settlers.
 
Spylobster said:
I thought the whole Phoneix King ambition of Ozai was basically to wipe out the Earth Kingdom's population so that the continent could be 'reborn' with Fire Nation settlers.
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That's just unrealistic genocidal grandeur... which is to say entirely fitting in his character. Have you looked at the Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom on a map at some point? It wouldn't have worked out, but then he never showed any competence except in fighting and child abuse, so again: fitting for Ozai.
 
Well, the option I want to win has a considerable lead now, but, nonetheless:
[X] The present. Here you stand, before your brother. Here doubt has driven you. Does Zuko doubt, too? Is he still angry at himself? If you were him, you would be. But maybe that's his secret. Maybe he's always angry. Maybe you're angry too. The world isn't what you thought it was—and you think Zuko can relate. What will happen if you let him?
 
The Laurent said:
That's just unrealistic genocidal grandeur... which is to say entirely fitting in his character. Have you looked at the Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom on a map at some point? It wouldn't have worked out, but then he never showed any competence except in fighting and child abuse, so again: fitting for Ozai.
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My headcanon is that the Fire Nation's initial plan before Ozai going full planetary pyromaniac was to do something similar to the Third Reich's Lebensraum plans for Eastern Europe: slowly colonizing it with millions of settlers while enslaving and working to death the locals until they became a minority in their own land.
 
The Laurent said:
Though as far as it goes, I don't think the Fire Nation actually has the capacity to occupy and control the Earth Kingdom short of just committing genocide and ruling over a lot of empty space as all the farmland dies from lack of cultivation. It's the ultimate culmination of colonialist, genocidal imperialism: the emptying of the world in the name of ruling over its Ashes.
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By the end of the series the Fire Nation has occupied the majority of what we can guess are the populated lands of the Earth Kingdom, basically all of the western coast inland to East Lake and south to Omashu, Ba Sing Se and the lands to its west(possibly north too, but we never go there in the series). Their grip is tenuous at the edge of that but it seems like the Fire Nation was not actually that far from conquering the Earth Kingdom.
 
DeltaV11.2 said:
By the end of the series the Fire Nation has occupied the majority of what we can guess are the populated lands of the Earth Kingdom, basically all of the western coast inland to East Lake and south to Omashu, Ba Sing Se and the lands to its west(possibly north too, but we never go there in the series). Their grip is tenuous at the edge of that but it seems like the Fire Nation was not actually that far from conquering the Earth Kingdom.
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And as the entire meeting where genocide was proposed indicates, saying it was "tenuous" is an understatement. It was the most fragmentary map painting bullshit imaginable, which wouldn't have stopped them from being able to effectively engage in genocide if they weren't stopped by the combined might of five or six teenagers, but would have made actually running things rather difficult.

E: Being fair there's also the Order of the White Lotus, but I'm honestly not interested in being fair, tbh. :V
 
The Laurent said:
And as the entire meeting where genocide was proposed indicates, saying it was "tenuous" is an understatement. It was the most fragmentary map painting bullshit imaginable, which wouldn't have stopped them from being able to effectively engage in genocide if they weren't stopped by the combined might of five or six teenagers, but would have made actually running things rather difficult.

E: Being fair there's also the Order of the White Lotus, but I'm honestly not interested in being fair, tbh. :V
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This seems more like Ozai wanting a whiz-bang solution to the occupation than it being a failure- the general seems confident that post-invasion they can deploy troops to establish more complete control. He is likely in some measure wrong but I think you can establish on that basis that they're not about to get driven out. From what we see in Book 1 the occupation along the west coast(what would become the United Republic and the lands adjacent to it) is fairly strong, there are rebel groups but they're not able to actually evict the Fire Nation.
 
[X] The present. Here you stand, before your brother. Here doubt has driven you. Does Zuko doubt, too? Is he still angry at himself? If you were him, you would be. But maybe that's his secret. Maybe he's always angry. Maybe you're angry too. The world isn't what you thought it was—and you think Zuko can relate. What will happen if you let him?
 
DeltaV11.2 said:
This seems more like Ozai wanting a whiz-bang solution to the occupation than it being a failure- the general seems confident that post-invasion they can deploy troops to establish more complete control. He is likely in some measure wrong but I think you can establish on that basis that they're not about to get driven out. From what we see in Book 1 the occupation along the west coast(what would become the United Republic and the lands adjacent to it) is fairly strong, there are rebel groups but they're not able to actually evict the Fire Nation.
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Ozai was looking for an excuse to conduct a grand display of Comet enhanced fire bending. It doesn't matter whether or not it bettered there position in the war, who was caught in the flames, or how realistically the blimps shouldn't have been able to cover enough distance to burn even twenty percent of the earth kingdom without willful ignorance on the writers part.

The point is, Ozai wanted to show off his bending during the comet(the culmination of an entire life so dedicated to bending he has no noted none bending accomplishments) so thats what Azula gave him. Honestly all she did was nudge the process into a speedier conclusion. Ozai would have gotten there on his own eventually. The occupation wasn't actually a factor, though the earth kingdom hasn't come close to evicting the fire nation since before Azulon's Reign, easily more than 75 years ago. Hard to imagine their odds of accomplishing anything of the sort improve with the Dai Li subverted into granting their loyalty to Azula.
 
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[X] The future. The one place you cannot seem to reach, throne or no throne. Has Zuko ever wondered what it'll be like? No, not whether the mantle is heavy enough to cramp the shoulders, or what his first command as Fire Lord could be—just about the shape of the Sun's path through the sky, the day after Sozin's Comet, and what the world will have become in the face of that light. What does he see? What do you?
 
[X] The past. It's what has driven you here. It's what you're trapped in. It's what you want to break out of. But it's Zuko's past, too. You've spent the whole of your lives chasing each other's shadows—on your whole family's encouragement. Has he ever realised? Does he even care? And why does it seem so impossible to escape?
 
[X] The present. Here you stand, before your brother. Here doubt has driven you. Does Zuko doubt, too? Is he still angry at himself? If you were him, you would be. But maybe that's his secret. Maybe he's always angry. Maybe you're angry too. The world isn't what you thought it was—and you think Zuko can relate. What will happen if you let him?
 
[X] The present. Here you stand, before your brother. Here doubt has driven you. Does Zuko doubt, too? Is he still angry at himself? If you were him, you would be. But maybe that's his secret. Maybe he's always angry. Maybe you're angry too. The world isn't what you thought it was—and you think Zuko can relate. What will happen if you let him?

Trying to relate to Zuko, (or allowing Zuko to relate to her?) sounds like decent progress.
 
[X] The past. It's what has driven you here. It's what you're trapped in. It's what you want to break out of. But it's Zuko's past, too. You've spent the whole of your lives chasing each other's shadows—on your whole family's encouragement. Has he ever realised? Does he even care? And why does it seem so impossible to escape?
 
[X] The past. It's what has driven you here. It's what you're trapped in. It's what you want to break out of. But it's Zuko's past, too. You've spent the whole of your lives chasing each other's shadows—on your whole family's encouragement. Has he ever realised? Does he even care? And why does it seem so impossible to escape?
 
[X] The present. Here you stand, before your brother. Here doubt has driven you. Does Zuko doubt, too? Is he still angry at himself? If you were him, you would be. But maybe that's his secret. Maybe he's always angry. Maybe you're angry too. The world isn't what you thought it was—and you think Zuko can relate. What will happen if you let him?
 
[X] The present. Here you stand, before your brother. Here doubt has driven you. Does Zuko doubt, too? Is he still angry at himself? If you were him, you would be. But maybe that's his secret. Maybe he's always angry. Maybe you're angry too. The world isn't what you thought it was—and you think Zuko can relate. What will happen if you let him?

Well this quest was a lot more enjoyable than I was expecting.
 
[X] The present. Here you stand, before your brother. Here doubt has driven you. Does Zuko doubt, too? Is he still angry at himself? If you were him, you would be. But maybe that's his secret. Maybe he's always angry. Maybe you're angry too. The world isn't what you thought it was—and you think Zuko can relate. What will happen if you let him?
 
Spylobster said:
I thought the whole Phoneix King ambition of Ozai was basically to wipe out the Earth Kingdom's population so that the continent could be 'reborn' with Fire Nation settlers.
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Even at that point the Fire Nation still had generations-old mixed ethnicity colonies in the Earth Kingdom and even after Iroh and Friends took back the capital they'd have been occupying a lot of their recently occupied land around it. It's not clear but even if Ozai was monstrous enough to kill everyone I'd assume even he'd be setting out to destroy the remaining independent Earth Kingdoms to make a statement about defiance instead of killing his already captured tax base.
 
During the time of the series, the Fire Nation is clearly capable of occupying at least the major population centers (like Omashu and Ba Sing Se), and with most central Earth Kingdom institutions either uprooted or loyal to Azula it will be difficult for the Earth Kingdom populace to effectively resist and recover from an overambitious but still devastating scorched-earth attack.

And prior to the time of the series, the Fire Nation demonstrates the ability to turn occupied Earth Kingdom provinces into relatively peaceful colonies. Combining these two points, if nothing disrupted Phoenix King Ozai's plans, the Fire Nation could probably expect a couple generations of irregular conflict as they pacified the depopulated Earth Kingdom.

If Ozai's overly-ambitious colonialism wasn't stopped before he broke the Earth Kingdom, it probably would have "worked". Historians would frame his stupid plan as a successful stratagem to suppress revolts in the already-conquered Earth Kingdom, and the details would be left as historical trivia for scholars.

If the Fire Nation wasn't in a position where they could slowly but successfully annex the Earth Kingdom without interference from (nonexistent) peer rivals or an uncontrolled protagonist, it wouldn't have gotten as far in its imperial project as it had.
 
GreatWyrmGold said:
If the Fire Nation wasn't in a position where they could slowly but successfully annex the Earth Kingdom without interference from (nonexistent) peer rivals or an uncontrolled protagonist, it wouldn't have gotten as far in its imperial project as it had.
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Not to mention that the Fire Nation was actually capable of sustaining a huge military effort for a hundred years without suffering from significant economic consequences or social instability. Either the Fire Nation has a ridiculously huge population to be able to sustain the inevitable war and occupation casualties or the Fire Nation during the Hundred Year War had the average family produce like... 7 kids or something. Zhao's fleet alone had over a hundred ships and it was annihilated, but that didn't seem to be considered a terrible blow to their efforts. Even not considering the cost of manufacturing, each of those ships would have many hundreds of trained crewmembers. Keep in mind that irl the British Royal Navy around 1850 only numbered 600 or so warships.
 
Nicholas Brooks said:
Not to mention that the Fire Nation was actually capable of sustaining a huge military effort for a hundred years without suffering from significant economic consequences or social instability. Either the Fire Nation has a ridiculously huge population to be able to sustain the inevitable war and occupation casualties or the Fire Nation during the Hundred Year War had the average family produce like... 7 kids or something. Zhao's fleet alone had over a hundred ships and it was annihilated, but that didn't seem to be considered a terrible blow to their efforts. Even not considering the cost of manufacturing, each of those ships would have many hundreds of trained crewmembers. Keep in mind that irl the British Royal Navy around 1850 only numbered 600 or so warships.
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My guess is that part of that was that the navy was growing more obsolete? Perhaps they'd already taken large portions of the coasts?
 
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