Ocean Spirit: "Fire calm down-"

Like yeah Zuko has spent enough comfortable time with Iroh to feel that Iroh is overreacting on some things and underreacting to others, so sure! Lets cosplay as a spirit and break out the avatar! There are no consequences that could come from this. Right?

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Overhated and underrated. A lot of people dislike the owl spirit for his aggression. I physically can't.

As we know, the spirits in ATLA are deeply tied to their purpose.

Hei Bai, the forest spirit, became enraged when his forest burned down, for example.

The Painted Lady could not show herself until the river became a river oncemore.

La had panicked when Zhao caught and killed Tui. And, when merged with the Avatar spirit, had set out to eliminate the Fire Nation threat, sparing the Water Tribe citizens.

Wan Shi Tong is an ancient spirit, he's seen so many visitors. Knowledge seekers, coming into his domain, and leaving, so often, to use that knowledge for destruction.

We also know the spirit world and the spirits suffered too, due to the Hundred Year War. The balance of everything was thrown off coarse, and each spirit became more bitter toward humanity.

Wan Shi Tong had explicitly told the Gaang about his distain for human discord and selfishness. He'd warned them against it. And, from his perspective, they only came here to take, take, take. Take advantage of him.

And in my typical fashion, I forgot who was who again

I had a conversation with @deriroga recently about the spirits of Order and Chaos that were introduced in LoK, and it basically came around to the idea that they were misrepresented. I’ve seen this in other places too, and since it’s relevant to my slowly-assembling spirit lore I’m going to explain it here, or at least list what I’ve figured out.

First of all, the way the show represented Raava as the “good guy” and Vaatu as the “big bad” really rubbed me the wrong way, because in reality both spirits in their pure forms are not good at all. If pure order actually existed then the world would be warped into something completely unrecognizable and that result would be just as bad as whatever pure chaos would accomplish. So for humans the ideal outcome would either be to have Raava and Vaatu slugging it out and ignoring everything else (as they had been for time immemorial before one man got involved), or for them both to be sequestered somewhere they couldn’t do any harm.

Well, when Wan became the first Avatar they got the second option - except not really, because now the most powerful entity in the world was being directly influenced by Raava. In practice, this worked out not nearly as badly as one would expect, because humans are naturally pretty well balanced between order and chaos, so the Avatar was mostly normal and reasonable with only the slightest bent towards being more orderly. (Which kind of shakes out to explaining the lack of technological progress and national upheaval throughout most of ATLA’s history - we saw it with Roku believing in separation of the four nations which sounds like a whole lot more isolationism than is a good thing for humanity.) And of course, order and chaos in human society persisted anyway, because that’s how humans work, and also because you can’t contain the literal embodiments of Order and Chaos in a tree or an ape with anxiety. They’re concepts-made-into-eldritch-entities that are far too large for that, and they leak out and spread and do other messy things.

Also - and this is even more weird, but I think it makes sense - Raava and Vaatu aren’t the most powerful spirits out there, not by quite a bit. These two seem to represent order and chaos as they apply to sentient things (humans and spirits) not entropy and whatever the opposite of entropy might be in physics. So they’re big, but not that big. The actual spirit of entropy would be... something entirely different.