Arsonist's Lullaby: An Azula Timeloop Quest
- Thread starter Magery
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Nicholas Brooks
Redeemer and Destroyer
- Location
- United States
It's actually not that big of a gap even in the regular map.
[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?
This seems like the best option atm. Talks about the past will most likely end up in a scrap, and Zuko doesn't have a clue about the future, so present it is.
By the way, I'm a big fan of this quest @Magery. Less stressful than others I've followed in the past, and a generally interesting premise to boot.
This seems like the best option atm. Talks about the past will most likely end up in a scrap, and Zuko doesn't have a clue about the future, so present it is.
By the way, I'm a big fan of this quest @Magery. Less stressful than others I've followed in the past, and a generally interesting premise to boot.
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- Location
- Moscow
- Pronouns
- He
[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?
Large portions of the Earth Kingdom seem to be deserts and mountains and deadly canyons and such, which can't do great things for their population density either.It's actually not that big of a gap even in the regular map.
Definitely smaller than the Earth Kingdom, but if you consider their superior technology and (presumably) the fertility of their farmlands thanks to the nearby volcanoes, they probably have a population not too far off from that of the Earth Kingdom.
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I've got a couple of headcanons for that, which mostly boil down to the invasion not being 100 years of all-out warfare or social structures that rotate soldiers in and out of service. The simplest answer would be to gesture at the Roman Empire (and the late Republic), which was at war with some neighbor or another for most of its existence.
infinityDivided
Prince Of Doom
- Location
- USA
Okay, that's the first time I've seen a map of the Avatar world. Is Ba Sing Se really about two thirds of the size of the Fire Nation? Because wow.It's actually not that big of a gap even in the regular map.
Definitely smaller than the Earth Kingdom, but if you consider their superior technology and (presumably) the fertility of their farmlands thanks to the nearby volcanoes, they probably have a population not too far off from that of the Earth Kingdom.
Yes, Ba Sing Se is more like an entire walled country of its own with farmlands behind the outer walls and a central city. I do think that the inner city is depicted far too big on maps, it's hard to imagine how it would feed itself with relatively little farmland. But from what we see in the show the actual city is huge, credibly many millions of people.
Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
Yeah, because Avatar was mixing messages. They wanted to make a comment about the United States during the Iraq War while simultaneously doing China v. Japan, but Japanese commitments in China were much more tenuous and strenuous, and their progress much less inexorable, than the Fire Nation's was. The country doesn't even seem to have conscription. I think it's weak writing and pulls season 3 down because ending the war seems the objectively bad choice for the Fire Nation materially.
Also, it seems to me there were large periods of downtime. The hundred year war is more like the historical French v. English one - it had defined phases and local ceasefires and truces. The North doesn't seem to have any hostilities for 85 years. It's possible there were basically decades where regions only suffered low-level raiding and chevauchee without major campaigns, and then years where provinces fell. General Iroh probably made his reputation in shaping operations that helped make the siege of Ba Sing Se logistically possible.
- Location
- France
The biggest reason is probably that the showrunners wanted the Fire Nation to be this big global threat to have an epic story without thinking of the minutiae of logistics behind them having such an immense army.
But even with that, a big factor that helped the Fire Nation in their conquest of the Earth Kingdom was that it was a united kingdom only on paper, when in reality it's more of a collection of small kingdoms and city-states that only officially bend the knew to the Earth King, while the government on Ba Sing Se did not care (or even knew with the latest king) of what was happening to Omashu, who couldn't do more than protect its own land and so couldn't really do anything if the Fire Nation attacked Gaoling, who couldn't do anything (or even cared) about villages in the Si Wong desert... so the Fire Nation patiently salami sliced the Earth Kingdom, invading and annexing the neighboring kingdoms and installing colonies, then waiting a generation to draft the new generations for the invasion of the next slice, rinse and repeat.
It's a recurring theme that if the people of the free world united, they would be able to defeat the Fire Nation (and indeed, just the remnants of the Earth Kingdom and Water Tribes armies almost managed to do a decapitation strike against the Fire Nation, had Azula not known of their plan in advance), but that never happened, leaving the Fire Nation to run rampant for one century.
I think it's implied that the planet where the story of Avatar takes place is much smaller than Earth, so the scale can be deceiving.
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Damian45
Only Sane Man
[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?
Speaking of the scale of the setting and the Fire Nation's Empire has it ever been established whether they settled the Air Nomad's islands?
It is hard to say. We never saw any settlements in cartoon or comics.
After some diging the only related mention I could find is from Avatar TTRPG where it was stated that "Fire Nation siezed emptied Air Nomad lands".
If I were to speculate I would guess that with limited amount of available population taken into account Fire Nation focused most of their colonization efforts on Earth Kingdom since taking control of the enemy territories takes precedence over populating empty lands.
So I expect them to have some millitary bases in Air Nomad lands and possibly few small coastal settlements but not much more.
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- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- He/Him
If we were discussing a real-world society with limited historical documentation and no archaeological record, I'd guess that someone moved into those lands.
Literal free real estate is appealing to a wide variety of people, from landed aristocrats seeking greater wealth to outlaws on the run, and it's pretty much impossible to keep people out without sending someone to live there. And if you're gonna send soldiers to stop trespassers, you might as well send some koalshepherds to graze the hills or something.
...what would you call a pastoralist herding koala-sheep?
Literal free real estate is appealing to a wide variety of people, from landed aristocrats seeking greater wealth to outlaws on the run, and it's pretty much impossible to keep people out without sending someone to live there. And if you're gonna send soldiers to stop trespassers, you might as well send some koalshepherds to graze the hills or something.
...what would you call a pastoralist herding koala-sheep?
Still shepherds I think. They could herd more than one kind of sheep after all. Koalasheep, Iguanasheep, Goosesheep... hell, if they work for a really rich noble with a taste for the exotic, they might even have a Sheep or two!
I looked it up, and the best thing I could find about it is this old fan theory that their world is about 1/3 the size of the Earth.
Geography of Avatar the Last Airbender: Size of the planet [x-post from r/thelastairbender]
So one thing that's always bothered/interested me in Avatar is the size of the planet they're on. Obviously it's not our Earth so the size could...
old.reddit.com
[x] The present.
- Location
- Who knows?
Honestly I cosign the idea that the "Earth Kingdom" as shown really is not a united polity at all. I would say Bumi's title as "King" while the earth King also only calls himself a "King" is pretty indicative of high levels of autonomy. Vassal chain gets a little muddled when you have a fellow king swearing to another king.
I'd say the version of the conquest that makes the most sense to me is that the coastal areas that were taken over first had a long history of trade ties, which grew to general cultural and social ones, between them and the Fire Nation. This combined with general isolation from Ba Sing Se meant the takeover went fairly smoothly since no one felt that passionate about fighting to stay under the Earth King and several of the noble/influential families in this region likely legitimately had more/closer relations to Fire Nation nobility than other Earth Kingdom polities. Its when they started pushing further inwards military force on a large scale was required.
Nicholas Brooks
Redeemer and Destroyer
- Location
- United States
Judging by how all the Air Temples we see in the show are totally abandoned, I figure that these just weren't places worth living in for non-Air Nomads. I mean, the Western Air Temple is damn near impossible to enter without Airbending, and the Southern Air Temple is on a freaking mountain. Not exactly the sort of places people would want to go to if they had a choice.
Plus, they're called the Air Nomads. They don't really do stuff like sedentary farming, so good land isn't anything they would be concerned about claiming.
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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?
Actually, the Air Nomads did practice some farming around the temples (albeit in small amounts) to allow for their vegetarianism. Still, due to the general small scale of resources and land needed to sustain themselves, I agree their land didn't really need to be that good to meet their needs.
You know, I wonder if the decline of spiritualism in the setting has as much to do with the deaths of the Nomads as it does the war in general consuming everyone's focus and driving off spirits? We never hear a lot about what the Air Nomads really *did* before they died, but if Aang is any indication, they travelled a lot throughout the other 4 nations, and being universally monks and benders, I imagine they were often on hand to deal with spiritual issues and serve as an example of how to live in harmony with the spirits. It'd be kind of funny if the other nations had sort of outsourced much of the role of priesthood onto the nomads and then were left floundering without their own when they died out.
- Location
- Who knows?
Sadly kinda yeah? The Kiyoshi novels show that the air nomads has roles as general outside mediators and social stress valves, in the way them being around let people let go of a lot of the more rigid social conventions
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- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The impression I get is that the Air Temples are located on the peaks of mountains, but the foothills and valleys and any flat areas on those islands were also inhabited.
Maybe by the pre-genocide equivalent of LoK-era Air Acolytes, maybe by farmers or shepherds or whatever that consider themselves to culturally/politically aligned with the Air Nomads despite not being able to bend (or being nomads), maybe tenants like some medieval European monasteries had, maybe pilgrims from the other nations, probably in communities with a few air monks and nuns too old to soar around the temples like they used.
But you know, someone. The temples don't take up that much space.