Avatar How Each Avatar Cycle Influenced Those That Came After It

Avatar: How Each Avatar Cycle Influenced Those That Came After It

Every Avatars’ achievements in their lifetime only creates new problems for the next incarnation to solve. For this reason, the Avatar will always be needed.

You Are Reading :[thien_display_title]

Avatar How Each Avatar Cycle Influenced Those That Came After It

One of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra’s centermost themes involves the cycle of change. Beyond their ability to master all four elements, the Avatar’s 10 thousand year existence serves as a balancing force against emerging threats — both human and spirit — in order to keep the four nations and human/spirit worlds harmonious. Yet while all Avatars are linked in knowledge and experience by the Avatar State, each reincarnation’s level of worldly involvement feels like a byproduct of their predecessor’s strengths and failures. Every generation produces new conflict, and with that conflict produces a reevaluation of the Avatar’s role as a peacekeeper.

This idea of change and consequence is crucial to Aang’s arc in Avatar: The Last Airbender. Awoken from his hundred year-long iceberg hibernation, Aang discovers a world thrown completely out of balance by the Fire Nation’s totalitarianism, resulting in his people’s genocide and the other nations’ near-subjugation. His mission is straightforward — master the remaining three elements and defeat the Fire Lord — but the emotional trauma guiding Aang’s journey is the recognition that his absence allowed the war to rage on for so long. This failure extends into his past life of Avatar Roku, whose friendship with Fire Lord Sozin blinded him from taking more decisive action to end the war before it could even begin.

Avatar How Each Avatar Cycle Influenced Those That Came After It

Even once Aang masters all four elements, the series finale, “Sozin’s Comet,” offers a final moral dilemma on whether he must kill Fire Lord Ozai to restore balance, a decision that upholds the Avatar’s duty but goes against his teachings as an Air Nomad. Seeking the wisdom of his past lives, Aang converses with not only Roku but older reincarnations, like Avatars’ Kyoshi, Kuruk and Yangchen, all of whom present differing philosophies that stress the necessity of his duty to the world.

Yet each philosophy is reflective not of Aang’s current predicament but, rather, their eras of conflict, all of which were imperfect and inspired by the shortcomings of their predecessors. Yangchen, who put the world’s needs ahead of her spiritual teachings, achieved long-term peace for humanity at the cost of alienating the spirits, which bled into Kuruk’s tenure. Kuruk endured the opposite situation, leaving humanity to its own devices while dealing with the proliferation of dark spirits. This led to his lover being taken by Koh the Face Stealer and dying at a young age. The militaristic conflicts formed in his absence would influence Kyoshi’s hardline perception of forceful justice, which in turn influenced Roku’s commitment to moderation and mercy in settling the world’s problems.

See also  Horizon Forbidden Wests DualSense Controls Compared To Other PS5 Games

In each conversation, Avatar stresses that every step towards change during the Avatar cycle will produce positive and negative consequences. Even the most effective strategies used in one’s lifetime could strain their ties with the other side, leaving the next incarnation to pick up the pieces. This dilemma stretches as far back as the origins of the first Avatar, Wan, who split apart the spirits Vaatu and Raava without understanding the consequences and, in atonement following his Avatar transformation, sealed off the human and spirit worlds to prevent further conflict. One must also simultaneously be active and inactive in the world’s conflicts to ensure that justice prevails, remaining involved but never to the point of enforcing your will over others as the only logical answer.

Avatar How Each Avatar Cycle Influenced Those That Came After It

Even Aang’s achievements didn’t make him a perfect Avatar, something Avatar fans might take issue with but is critical to understanding the world Korra inherits. Not only do the four nations co-exist with one another, but the United Republic of Nations offers what appears to be its apex: a supposed haven for benders and non-benders with mass industrialization and technological advancements. And yet that world still produced its own problems, many of which came from the systems Aang helped to create. Republic City’s bureaucracy is grossly inefficient, its bender inhabitants received better job opportunities than non-benders, and older forms of governance like the Earth Kingdom monarchy seemed more interested in preserving power than helping their subjects. The world got better, but at the same time, it refused to stay “balanced.”

See also  What XMen 3 Could Have Been

Over time, Korra’s initial hot-headed approach to Avatar solutions fades as she learns how this new generation’s problems aren’t so black and white. Her villains are equally dissatisfied with the world’s systemic failures and, through faux-populist or anarchic tactics, designate themselves as harbingers of a new change. Compared to the Fire Nation in Avatar — an entire nation who viewed the war as sharing their “gifts” with the rest of the world — these antagonists were often more individual-based and worked outside the realm of ruling the entire world, save for the Kuvira’s takeover of the Earth Kingdom in Book 4. Yet rather than view her adversaries as one-dimensional villains, Korra comes to understand their socio-political motives and implement solutions to combat those inequities, thus demonstrating her ability to improve the world.

In many respects, The Legend of Korra truly comes into its own once Korra’s connection to her past lives is severed at the end of Book 2. No longer able to rely on the older generations’ advice, she must instead produce a future on her own terms. It’s no wonder, then, that Books 3 and 4 are titled “Change” and “Balance.” From reuniting humanity and the spirit world to the resurgence of new airbenders to a three-year journey of self-healing, Korra dealt not only with the world’s evolution but also her own. This didn’t just make her a stronger Avatar, it also enhanced her understanding of how to better the world for humans and spirits alike.

What makes the stories of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra timeless is how they emphasize the Avatar’s importance to the world as neverending. New conflicts or problems will always arise thanks to a predecessor’s actions, leaving it to the next generation to re-restore balance through different means. So long as human nature makes these conflicts possible, the Avatar will always be needed.

Link Source : https://www.cbr.com/avatar-each-avatar-cycle-influenced-those-came-after/

Movies -