Thunder sings her name across the battle field.

Book One establishes that the Northern Water Tribe looted some Fire Nation uniforms decades ago, confirming that there was military contact. However, as Sokka has to explain to them that the design is hopelessly outdated, that engagement happened very long ago. Additionally, Yue has no idea that black smoke announces inbound Fire Nation attacks, further indicating that the Fire Nation mostly left the Northern Water Tribe be. How come if the Fire Nation optimized for warfare against them?

The Fire Nation unleashed a few severe attacks on the Northern Water Tribe to demonstrate what they learned from the raids and the kidnapped waterbenders, and that they are a serious threat despite the environmental disadvantages. However, direct military strikes are just one way the Fire Nation applies pressure to the Northern Water Tribe.

In Book Three we learn, that the Fire Nation flourished under unprecedented prosperity due to industrilization and modernization (I decided) and after Roku's death, twelve more years passed (because that's Aang's age). The Fire Nation had plenty of time to notice that heavy industry and mass production of armory has consequences for the environment. After all, the Fire Nation is an archipelago, so they can observe at home that polluted water, soot, mining runoff, chemical waste, and disrupted fisheries weaken populations. The Fire Nation can absorb these harms: A fishing village whose shore is contaminated might lose its traditional livelihood, but the state can exploit the depencency and funnel the fishers into factories, mines, dockyards, or military service. Thus, the ecological injury becomes part of proletarianization and militarization of Fire Nation citizens.

The Fire Nation has learned that certain mining tailings or industrial wastes kill fish stocks near its own smelting ports. So they start collecting those byproducts rather than dumping them locally because naval planners suggest they can release them into currents upstream of Northern fishing and hunting grounds. The threat should do, actually.

So, the military strikes put the leadership of the Northern Water Tribe under serious duress. The Fire Nation needs them to understand that geographical protection is no longer absolute. Once that point has been made, continuing to throw ships and soldiers against ice fortifications would be strategically stupid since the duress forces the Northern Water Tribe to the table, where coercive diplomacy achieves the objective at much lower cost. Fire Nation diplomats just have to reveal that they won't need battles to destroy the North Pole and its people: "Why would we fight you and risk losses when we can wound the water that gives you life?"

The Fire Nation offers a non-aggression pact and continued sovereignty for the North Pole in exchange for a tax: the Fire Nation needs healers for the campaigns in the Earth Kingdom. If the Northern Water Tribe agrees to supply them, they'll have a treaty.

See, empires rarely keep control for long stretches of time through sadism and cruelty alone. When we were 10-12, that simplification was good enough, but since viewers of the original run(s) are 20 years older now, I think we can upgrade the model of empire in the worldbuilding: A hundred-year war cannot remain a sequence of raids and battles indefinitely because you'll run out of soldiers. If we calculate with 14 (because that's Azula's age when Ozai deployed her, so let's take this as the age for military service), it'll take 14 years to replace a soldier fallen in battle. I checked the map; the Fire Nation is barely bigger than the Si Wong Desert in the Earth Kingdom. The war has to become sustainable through economics, diplomacy, collaboration, treaty systems, propaganda, and generational habit. Through treaties and occasional strategic restraint early in the war, the Fire Nation can keep the war raging because people are born into arrangements their grandparents considered temporary.

The Southern Water Tribe is nearly annihilated because it was the easier target to accumulate the knowledge to subjugate the Northern Water Tribe, while also securing critical medical personnel long-term and beating the Earth Kingdom to forge an Alliance with the Water Tribes. It's canon that the Northern Water Tribe got barely involved in the war at all. I think I actually give them more grace than canon because in this version, their disenagement from the world suffering under Fire Nation domination has a price, and was coerced under existential threat and only minimally through conventional warfare.

The structure of ATLA is very much a savior story, where Aang's return is a reason for hope. However, in this Arcane-ified ATLA, I think it's more compelling that it also breaks an equilibrium. Once the Avatar's return is confirmed, the Fire Nation is well aware where he's heading, and where he can still learn waterbending. So, they mobilize against the North Pole, as they have learned in the years since the treaty how to end waterbending entirely. Not only will this considerably weaken the present incarnation of the Avatar, but it will also end the cycle: without waterbending, there are no waterbenders, and without waterbenders, there won't be a Water Avatar. If there's no Water Avatar who can die, there's no Earth Avatar who can be born. It's a nuclear option, and the Fire Nation hasn't deployed it so far because they rely on the healers from the North. Now the return of the Avatar rearranges priorities and urgency.

This nation would basically live through migration, taking in novices, adoption, or initiation into the monastic life, maybe not even necessarily as a baby. So far, the lore and worldbuilding are consistent. The disappearance of airbenders could be understood less as "everyone with the airbender gene was killed," and more as the culturing that cultivated airbending, inter alia but certainly not exclusively, stopped because practitioners were killed and no one could pass the knowledge on or keep cultivating the practices.

In other words, we don't even need the contrivance of "underground airbending society where the airbending gene pool survived." It would make the spiritual focus of the Air Nomads more than an aesthetic, because part of Air Nomad culturing would emerge from transcending the attachment to inherent categories like "bender" or "non-bender." So far, so great....

However, the post-War and LOK material nullifies all of that because it definitely commits to bio-essentialism with an intensity that erases all ambiguity. If airbending was truly a spiritual practice, at least some of the Air Acolytes should've been able to learn airbending to some degree. I think that had potential since the war likely made a lot of orphans, too, and one could've written the story that the orphaned culture and the orphaned children (independent of age) give each other a home and future reciprocally. Not in a quid pro quo economic-transactional way, but becoming-with/becoming-together. That would be MY IDEA to handle airbending post-war. I would not have locked in on making bending an absolute bio-essentialist binary where some people have the essence (for simplicity, you'll see me refer to "airbending gene" throughout the rest of this impromptu essay; that's a shorthand because the whole reproduction drama in Aang's family invites treating bending as genetically determined and strongly biologically because if it was truly determined by practice and spiritual dsicipline, at least one of the Air Acolytes should've been able to learn it; or maybe it means that they're all, including Bumi and Kya, spiritually deficient, I guess. But even if it's, like, a "spiritual" essence, if it can only be "transmitted" through biological lineage, it's quasi-/de facto biological)

Alas, no. Aang's sperm is apparently some magical elixir that can preserve airbending. Bending is inherently hereditary. Therefore, selective breeding is the only way to mitigate the bottleneck.... Under these conditions, it gets so dark and so disturbing so fast.... Like, is it even ethical for Aang to expect Katara (or any singular woman, really) to carry so much reproductive pressure? Think about it. They have three children; only one of them has the airbender gene, and it's the youngest son. It's not ever really addressed, I think, but if Katara had wanted only two children or if one of the pregnancies was already demanding or a health risk, could they have stopped? What if the third one hadn't been an airbender? Would they have continued until their sex produced the correct heir? After all, IF the worldbuilding insists on bio-essentialism not as confused ideology, but an ontological fact, Katara herself is under immense reproductive pressure as the last person of the Southern Waterbender lineage (sort of, after all, her paternal grandmother is already Northern, which shouldn't matter at all, but in a bio-essentialist ontology, it would: as I said, it gets dark and disturbing very, very fast). Or should Aang make babies with as many mothers as possible? I'm not advocating for that, but if Aang is the only way to preserve airbending through genetics, the stakes are civilizational and potentially spiritual if the distribution of benders across all four nations is indeed essential for the metaphysical balance; this question would arise, along with a lot of legal, political, and social questions: would Aang be considered the Father or Head of State? Do only the aribending children matter? What happens with those who didn't inherit whatever trait makes them airbenders? What status do the mothers "have?" Do they sign a waiver: if the baby is an airbender, Aang has all the custody rights; if they aren't, the mother does? Are the children themselves already partly airbender breeding stock? Will they have to contribute one child when they're adults?

LOK sort of "solves" this bottleneck with a pretty much literal deus ex machina, but I don't think that solves the actual problems bio-essentialism conditions. Okay, now you have a miraculously broadened gene pool, I guess. But at this point it's already established that bending is hereditary. So, I guess, the cosmos rewrote the genetics of a random set of populations....? And if not, so if airbending isn't a biological trait now programmed into the DNA, the "solution" is temporary, because even if there were now millions of airbenders, they all die eventually. The situation for these airbenders, if their airbending gene can sexually reproduce, seems alright because they can arrange their culture accordingly.

However, if airbending is a biological gene-essence, the logistics for the pre-war airbenders become retrospectively very disturbing. As I outlined in detail, if airbending didn't rely on biological reproduction, the organizing of the Air Nomads as a nation is perfectly fine and coherent, even logical. BUT if, and the idea that Aang's sperm is the only way to preserve the genes, as well as the cosmic intervention to solve the bottleneck, couldn't commit harder to it, airbending is a bio-essentialist trait, a lot of Air Nomad lore comes with caveats.

First, every Air Nomad is an airbender. There are no non-benders among the Air Nomads. However, in this bio-essentialist worldbuilding, passing on a certain bending gene (or any bending gene at all) is probabilistic: Only one of Aang's and Katara's three children was born as an airbender. Does this mean that children born without the airbending trait are categorically not recognized as citizens/members of the Air Nomads? Exiled by biology? To where? Where do the non-airbending children grow up? Who takes care of them? Was there a caste system?

Would two airbending parents increase the probability that the child inherits the trait? Maybe, probably. But, you see, this is eugenics!!!!! That is selective breeding!!!! If you start to organize reproduction around certain outcomes like "100% airbender rate." Especially if the granting of nationality/citizenship would depend on a certain hereditary "airbending" trait.

Remember, Air Nomads live monastically and are separated by gender from childhood on. They don't seem to know who their biological parents are. Again, think logistics. If airbending bio-essentialism is as severe as canon insists through Aang's reproductive history, nuns and monks still have to make babies to sustain their people (a problem that wouldn't arise if the lore just committed to the spirituality explanation, but, I guess, then you wouldn't have had the reproductive drama and bottleneck and how can you tell a good story without some eugenics, am I right?/SAR!!!!) Of course, that might mean there are fertility festivals where the usually separated male and female members of the Air Nomads do the deed and nine months later, all the babies are distributed among the four temples. However, some registry would need to keep track of genealogy, of who made a baby with whom, to avoid accidental incest because the Air Nomad community seems to be quite small, and when the children are raised communally, but also separated by gender, they may not know who's their brother, their sister, their cousins, their parents, their grandparents, their uncle, their aunts, etc. Which means the pairings cannot purely rely on chemistry or who you would want to have sex with. You'd first have to check if you are related and how closely. Do you see how unsustainable the Air Nomads would be as a society if you make airbending as bio-essentialist as TOK did?

And don't get me started on how unequal the reproductive labor of the Air Nomads would've been! Monks show up for the conception, then everyone returns to their gender-isolated home Temple. Air Nomad boys would be entirely sheltered from witnessing pregnancy, childbirth, recovery, nursing, etc. Once in a while, new baby novices arrive, I guess, while Air Nomad girls would grow up in an entirely different reality where they see older sisters pregnant, giving birth, recovering, miscarrying, nursing (because without some form of baby formula, keeping newborns and infants alive is very hard) and eventually parting with the babies they carried, birthed and nursed because boys grow up in other temples and even girls might be transported to the South/North sister temple under circumstances. Every younger novice/brother Aang ever witnessed being welcomed in his home temple is a baby: an Air Nomad girl bid farewell to and witnessed how the woman who birthed and nursed the boy had to let him go and perform all the emotional labor of that separation. A monk would just not be subjected to any of that emotional and physical labor.

Individual claims about the Air Nomads and airbending remain underdetermined enough, but if they are all true simultaneously, they form a network of constraints that logically exclude alternatives because those alternatives violate another stated fact. If “all Air Nomads are airbenders” stood alone, we can explain airbending as a cultural or spiritual practice. If “Air Nomads live communally in gender-separated temples” stands next to "all Air Nomads are airbenders," these two statements reinforce each other. All good. If “bending is hereditary and a bio-essentialist binary like an on/off switch, so there are ontologically separate categories of human-beings" stands next to the first two statements, and the setting insists on all of them simultaneously, the remaining demographic possibilities become increasingly ugly. If bending wasn't a bio-essentialist binary inside the world, none of the plotlines in LOK make any sense.

The earlier unwanted advances establish his sexual interest and her lack of reciprocation. The intimate touch (this is a kid’s show; cradling June’s body on top of him is about as explicit as the show can get. So, I wouldn’t brush it away as harmless contact, just because it isn’t more sexually explicit because it physically can’t depict more) is a deliberate escalation and violation of June’s boundaries and consent.

Considering how much condemnation Ozai’s domestic abuse is drawing, I think the show shouldn’t give Iroh a pass just because he’s the nice uncle. Mind you, this happens years after his alleged moral awakening!

I mean, sure, the presence and comedic treatment of non-consensual sexualized body contact can be explained historically. A lot of media a few decades ago was much more comfortable with misogyny and disciplining, borderline punishing, abrasive, confident, conventionally attractive but inconveniently uninterested women as a punchline, but that doesn’t change what occurs diegetically. The joke is that he’s getting away with touching/holding a woman who’s not consenting and would stop him if she could move. The joke is that he knows she doesn’t want it but does it anyway with a smirk. Her humiliation is part of the joke!

That is tailor-made anti-Zuko propaganda material. You don't even have to lie; just strategically omit a few details.

Ozai's faction (they don't even have to want Ozai back; the most dangerous opponents are those who think Ozai was disastrous but also think Zuko is unacceptable) can spread the narrative that Prince Zuko abandoned his people during wartime, joined the enemy coalition, trained and assisted the Avatar, fed them the classified battle plan for the Comet (at least I remember that Team Avatar briefly decided to not rush it and defeat Ozai on the day of the Comet but after when he's more vulnerable and that's when Zuko told them what his father was going to do), returned to the capital alongside a Water Tribe operative, helped overthrow the legitimate royal government, and then accepted the crown after foreign fighters neutralized both other members of the immediate ruling family. That's a lot. Especially since you can reasonably make the point that Zuko ensured the defeat of his own people. How would that inspire loyalty and admiration among soldiers or their families? The audience loves Zuko; his people have no reason to. They weren't there for the character development! Fire Nation citizens do not have privileged access to Zuko's character arc. They just know they lost the war because of Zuko. He's not their hero.

The Agni Kai itself is politically extremely awkward. Like, I assume the broader political function of the final Agni Kai inside the story is that Zuko intended to settle the succession according to a recognizable Fire Nation institution. If he challenges Azula and defeats her directly in sacred ritual combat, that's incredibly useful for Team Avatar. Whatever people may think about his treason, he could at least say, “I faced the sitting Fire Lord according to our own martial tradition and won.” It would be a lawful way to dethrone Azula.

It's just not what happened, and it's enough to challenge his right to the throne.

Azula broke the terms by attacking Katara, certainly, and that is the detail the propagandist would have to omit and downplay, but since Katara's the one who subdued Azula while Zuko wouldn't even have survived the duel without her healing, Zuko's right to claim the throne depends on the Avatar's preference and makes the claim plausible that Zuko is merely a powerless puppet, an opportunist who betrayed the Fire Nation's victory to profit personally. Even internationally, it can raise significant concerns over sovereignty: if you allow the Avatar to remove and install rulers in this life, what precedent are you creating for future incarnations?

His personal relationship with Katara could be weaponized spectacularly, independently of its actual nature. He was willing to die protecting the daughter of a foreign military leader from his own sister during the struggle for the throne.

Both technologies hijack the body, and both bypass will and consent to invade and control another's body. I would argue that energybending is much more ethically explosive because the intervention is permanent and irreversible (at least as far as anyone can reasonably assume at this point in-universe history). Additionally, as the Hama episode itself demonstrates, a bloodbender can stop another bloodbender if the technology is abused. Countering bloodbending is teachable. If you interrupt the bloodbending, you are interrupting the assault and harm. For all we know, Hama's bloodbending itself doesn't leave bodies permanently altered or incapacitated beyond the immediate bending event. That doesn't apply to energybending. As I said, at this point in the franchise and in-universe history, everyone has to assume the consequences of energybending are permanent and irreversible, and I don't think anyone could stop Aang's energybending if he abused the power.

I would also want to point out that Aang didn't learn energybending, like Hama developed bloodbending under conditions of ongoing abuse, torture, and existential threat. Aang didn't even learn energybending like he himself learned airbending, waterbending, earthbending, and firebending. A de facto deus ex machina equipped him with a weapon that gave him an "ethical" alternative to execute Ozai. Although I think the ethics are a technicality. At this point, the show itself repeatedly made the argument that bending is spiritually significant, and by the show's own logic, "taking someone's bending" and "taking away someone's life" are almost treated interchangeably. Taking bending is de facto killing/eliminating a part of what makes this person human. Not everyone is born with bending capacity in this universe (because it's essentialist as fuck), but for those who are, bending isn't an extra. It's their way of being-human in this world. To sever bending from a bender is severing them from how they are humans, by the internal logic of the show, because the show over and over and over again shows that the Fire Nations' oppression of other bending technologies is dehumanizing against benders, while non-benders just aren't vulnerable to this kind of violence and alteration. I don't know if anyone noticed, but we never learn what energybending could do to a non-bender. But Ty Lee, for example, can incapacitate benders and non-benders by attacking the energy flow in bodies. So, it's reasonable that a non-bender can be harmed by energybending, too. Ty Lee's attacks might give us an idea of what is potentially possible. In my books, if you find energybending in principle acceptable, you should find bloodbending acceptable in principle, too. If you find bloodbending in principle unacceptable, you should also find energybending unacceptable in principle, too, because energybending is far more severe. We need to be consistent if we insist on comparing.

However, note how violently the storytelling and characterizations around bloodbending and energybending diverge. Bloodbending, for one, is introduced as identity-threatening against Katara, whom I deem a main character since ATAL is very much an ensemble piece (much more so than LOK); energybending is introduced as identity-protecting because it allows Aang to remain "someone who doesn't take lives; he doesn't even eat meat." (I mean, I get why you can't really show one of the main characters executing someone on screen in s show for 12-year olds. I'm not really objecting to this writing decision; I just find it a little ridiculous that meta should treat energybending as inherently and exclusively just and bloodbending as inherently and exclusively invasive, as, mechanically, energybending is MORE invasive!!!)

All arguments that can be raised for Aang in relation to energybending and against Hama in relation to bloodbending are different writing decisions. The most glaring difference is letting Hama attack civilians and harm and coerce Katara (for which they don't give us any reason whatsoever; the writing just expects us to accept it and provide the cognitive and emotional labor to explain the decision of one genocide survivor violating another with the very tool that was developed to protect from the genocider), while Aang is not written to make any ambiguous use of energybending. If it's admirable that Aang uses a dehumanizing technology against his oppressor, why is it not admirable for Hama to use it against hers (because the entire motivation to invent bloodbending is protection against the oppression killing her in slow-motion)? Why is it not admirable for Katara to use it against the murderer who proudly and gleefully completes the genocide against the waterbenders of the Southern Water Tribe? The burden of proof to justify Aang as worthy of admiration and Hama as unworthy is on the one making that claim.

If the concern is genuinely "positive examples," investigating "negative examples" is the same operation because the analysis is just incomplete without examining and revising the "negative" examples, especially if all the cognitive labor is "attacking civilians is bad." Yes, congratulations! I mean, it's not an achievement to identify that. However, I wouldn't even accept the premise that "positive" and "negative" examples are a relevant analytical cut to begin with. Why start there? Why end there? What obligations emerge for the analyst if they ask this question? What other questions and approaches does this exclude and avoid? The instruction “admire positive examples of genocide survivors like Aang” depends on assumptions that should themselves be treated as objects of analysis rather than premises everyone is required to accept.

Why not ask instead if Hama's actions, like attacking civilians, or her other genocide survivors (e.g., Katara, Sokka, Aang), make sense for the character within the story (spoiler: they don't at all, as I demonstrate in detail) as written? Why not examine alternative arcs and writing decisions that reconfigure Hama (as is easily possible with Example A for the scope of a single episode arc and Example B for a more extensive arc)? Why not instead take her and the episode as a prompt to explore, for example, solidarity?