boring and borderline inactive

Pre-Unifications - A Global Warring States Era?

A warring states era on a wouldn't be nearly as compelling if there were only four Lion Turtles. If this were the case, everything would be perfectly balanced; why would there be disarray, violence, cultural disparity and struggles for power within each elemental group if the world was already perfectly divided into four solid groups? Why would a national identity be in question at all?

But the fact that there are more than one Lion Turtle per element... that means different groups of people being isolated from one another for long periods of time. This means different bodies of identity, regardless of element. Different city states, regional Kings, Queens, fiefdoms, dynastic power struggle, etc etc, before any sort of inherent loyalty the ones element as a national and cultural identity was established.

We know the Avatar world was not always divided into Four Nations. In Chapter 21 of The Rise Of Kyoshi we learn that Guru Laghima - a name you'll recognize from TLOK S3 - was from an era when the Four Nations had not yet been formed. We also know from Zaheer that he lived about 4,000 years before the events of TLOK (for context, thats about 6,000 years after Wan became the first Avatar).

There's further confirmation of this in Smoke And Shadow, where we learn about the first Firelord and the Fire Nation's unification wars.

However there's implications of this even in the original series; it's not some sloppy ret-con from the books and comics, it fits. Think Omashu:

In S2E2 of ATLA we get the story of Oma and Shu - and we learn that they come from "warring villages." Now why exactly would their villages be warring if The Earth Kingdom already existed? Why the need for a power struggle? Why is it not presented as a civil insurrection or civil war, but as a conflict between two distinct groups of people? The answer is that the "Earth Kingdom" as we conceptualize it did not exist. I'd go further and say that we can assume that after Omashu was established it became a powerful regional kingdom, and created strong sphere of cultural influence. Think about it - Bumi is King Of Omashu. King. NOT the Earth King, King Of The Earth Kingdom, but still King Of Omashu.

[Now there's some debate about where Omashu's founding sits on the timeline but to me it HAS to be post-Wan, probably very nearly immediately post-Wan. The line that calls them the "first earthbenders" and that they "learned earthbending from the badger moles" has caused some to question if they fit in with the "Lion Turtles bestowed bending" lore, but to me it fits pretty easily. The Lion Turtles may have bestowed the power but the actual technique was learned from the badger moles and dragons and blah blah blah.]

I also find this line from Jianzhu in The Rise Of Kyoshi very illuminating:

VINDICATION !! And Jianzhu's moaning over the cultural diversity within his country brings me to the second part of this post...

FC Yee And Gene Luen Yang Accidentally (?) Make Avatar's Cultural Mish Mash Make More Sense

Avatar's cultural gumbo of visuals has always been a little hard to parse. If you follow @atlaculture then you know it'd be kind of fruitless to try and apply any one single ethnicity/culture to one nation. A common, and very valid, criticism of Avatar is the pan-asian approach it takes to worldbuilding. I'm not here to defend that lol. I think people who dislike Avatar on that basis are well within their rights to do so, and I also think it's important to enjoy things critically.

HOWEVER, from a worldbuilding perspective, the mish mash becomes easier to swallow when you think of it in terms of multiple groups of people being unified into different nation states over a very long period of time and slowly intertwining their cultures into a single(ish) identity.

Take the Fire Nation for example: in FC Yee's The Shadow Of Kyoshi we learn that the government was much more decentralized and the country was controlled by different clans, like the Saowon and Keosho, who had individual spheres of influence and strong senses of identity. It makes me think about Mai and Ty Lee

They're both Fire Nation nobles and they both live in the Fire Nation capital - but their styles/clothes are completely different. Now, obviously that can be boiled down to personality-based character design but. There's a wide discrepancy between Mai's Edo Japan inspired hair and Ty Lee's Thai inspired performance outfit, and a little retroactive canon about them being part of different but powerful clans .. ? Yeah. That'd be fun, at the very least.