Rating: K, but only because I don't expect small children to understand.
Disclaimer: This is only being written because I don't own the series.
Summary: Azula explains to a visitor why the Avatar must die. Post-finale, in line with canon.
Author's Notes: This is inspired by my reaction to the Season Three Finale and Forlorn Maiden's story "Distopia."
Unbalanced
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Unbalanced, adjective
: not balanced: as a: not in equilibrium b: mentally disordered or deranged
Balance, noun
7 a: physical equilibrium b: the ability to retain one's balance
9: mental and emotional steadiness
in the balance or in balance
: with the fate or outcome about to be determined
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For the first time, I understand Great Grandfather Sozin. I doubt Grandfather Azulon understood. Certainly neither Father nor Uncle did either. If Father understands now, he cannot tell me. If Uncle understands, he will say nothing. And Fire Lord Zuzu, of course he doesn't understand. He's an idiot.
Even Sozin himself may not have understood.
But I do.
The War was not about conquering the world. The War was about saving the world.
Any good child of the Fire Nation can list at least ten reasons why the War was good and just and necessary without so much as thinking about it. The Fire Sages know why the Fire Nation has the right to make War. The War Ministers know why the Fire Nation has the need to make War.
Only I know why the Fire Nation has the duty to make War.
My Great Grandfather saw the need and invented the right. The history books my forefathers ordered to be written portray a Fire Nation which was strong and vibrant under Agni's kindling flame. The history books my brother will order to be written will tell of a Fire Nation obsessed with glory and plagued with bloodlust. The ledgers tell another story. The story I know, not because I have read it, but because I have pieced it together from scraps of tax records and royal decrees, tells of a very different Fire Nation.
Imagine if you will, a people blessed by Agni. They have the light of fire, and everything else that comes from enlightenment. Steam powers engines. Medicine saves lives. Education reaches the masses.
Utopia.
But, knowledge is good fuel for revolutionary fire and books make excellent kindling. People don't die as often, but they are still born. The countryside is small. It cannot employ everyone, but that is fine. There are cities and in those cities there are factories, and those factories will provide the employment the countryside can not. The cities grow. They are crowed, the factories spew black smoke and soot into the air, and closed quarters in the city harbor squalor and filth. The nation is small. There is no frontier. The cities demand to be fed. Forests are cut down. The wood is used to build houses or burned as fuel. The land is used to farm. Mines are built. Black fills the lungs of their workers. Then there is no more coal. No more forests. The cities cannot continue to grow. The countryside cannot continue to feed the cities. And this all in a land where everyone can read.
A man who is tasked with protecting his people knows the problem. It touches his heart. Or maybe the specter of revolution haunts him. He looks for a solution, because his task is to protect his people. And a solution he does find. Land. If only this people blessed by Agni had more land. Then there could be more coal and more food, and more space. And there is land, just not any here. So he takes it. And he discovers, serendipitously, that the army and the navy take in the young men who are overflowing in the countryside and in the cities. And in saving his nation, he finds that he has disturbed the balance.
Such a lovely little word, isn't it? Balance…
Balance is important. Balance keeps us from falling down.
Balance is what keeps society in working order. Balance is what keeps the riff-raff in the lower circles of Ba Sing Se. Balance is what keeps peasants underfoot and nobles on their palanquins. Balance is what keeps prisoners in their cells. Balance is what keeps slaves in their chains. Balance is what keeps a wife loyal to her abusive husband.
Woe onto those who try to break the balance. Woe onto he who tries to be more than he was born to be.
Woe onto the peasant who thought he could be the power behind the throne.
Woe onto the younger prince who would be king.
Woe onto the princess who would be king.
Woe onto the king who would be emperor.
Woe onto the pauper who would fashion himself a prince, or the slave who would fashion himself a master; woe onto the man who would fashion himself a god, and woe onto the woman who would fashion herself a man.
And of course, woe to the boy who would speak out of turn.
Such a lovely little word, isn't it? Balance…
Balance is important. Balance keeps us from falling down.
Sometimes, however, we need to fall down.
Trust me. I know. I spent such a long time being balanced. Shifting from stance to stance, making sure never to fall down. And then I was unbalanced and I fell down. I cannot begin to describe the pain of falling down.
I hate to be trite. But, the point isn't not to fall down. The point is to get up.
Parents can't protect us forever. Playing with fire one can get burned, but there comes a time in the life of every firebending child when he or she must learn to firebend. We must be allowed to make mistakes and those mistakes must be our own. Or else, how shall we learn from them and grow?
I have fallen down.
Once.
You should have seen me dance with fire when I was a child. I never fell down then. Not once. I was a true prodigy. Just like my grandfather for whom I'm named. And because of it my mother never coddled me. And because of it, it hurt that much more when I did fall. And still my mother didn't coddle me.
And all of that is fine. I'm stronger for all of it.
The point is to grow. We will make mistakes. But they will be our mistakes, and we must be free to make our own mistakes.
Tell me, what is the virtue in doing good if we cannot do evil? Rhetorical question dear. And what's the worth of peace if we cannot make war?
We must be allowed to change the world, and we must change the world for ourselves. We must be allowed to upset the established order, because the established order is not always good. We must unbalance the world and send it tumbling and build it up again, better than it was.
Agree with him or disagree with him, you must admit that that was Sozin's vision was. And the Avatar would not let him. And because the Avatar would not let him, Sozin killed the Air Nomads. It wasn't personal. He didn't have a vendetta against the Air Nomads. I don't think he even had a vendetta against Roku. It's just that he wanted to change the world, and he refused to be subservient to a god.
If the world needed to be changed and the Avatar stood in your way, wouldn't you try to kill him too?
You forget. Great Grandfather Sozin was the Avatar's friend too. Just like you. And he argued with him for years and he never changed his views, because the Avatar can only act to protect the balance.
And because it is his role to protect his balance, no one else will look after it. The Fire Nation waged an offensive war for a hundred years and no one stopped us because they were all busy praying for the Avatar to come and save them. All it took was one old man to break the world, and afterwards, children were set to the task of fixing it.
And why this balance? Why should the Earth Kingdom have nine tenths of the world's resources? Why shouldn't the Fire Nation seek to grow if it has the means and the need? Why four nations? Wouldn't it be better if there were no nations? If all men were brothers?
But it is not the Avatar's role to question the balance. It is only his role to protect it.
And to protect balance he will turn his back on his friends and slay his enemies and kill innocents and break the spirits of men. Or how many soldiers of the Fire Nation do you think your Avatar killed in the Siege of the North? Don't guess. I can tell you the exact number. One-thousand-six-hundred-and-twelve. And that's not counting Admiral Zhao. They were soldiers; they weren't there because they wanted to be there, they were there because their Nation sent them. They had mothers and fathers and wives. You want to know how many of them had children? No? You can probably imagine.
And then, after all that, after the orphans and widows who didn't even get a body or a uniform back, the Avatar couldn't even bring himself to properly kill my father, instead he turned him into a damned shade of the man.
For balance. For order. For the hierarchy which has remained unchanged since the dawn.
But a world which is always in balance is a world that cannot change and a world that cannot change is a world that is dead. And a world that is already dead is a world that deserves to die.
So burn the order. And if the gods will keep us from fire and strangle us with balance, slay the gods. And if they smother us, slay the spirits. Slay the Avatar.
I would think that you, of all people would understand. Country bumpkin. What place have you in the Avatar's world, you who can't bend?
You know what the real tragedy in all of this is? I almost killed him once. And had I succeeded, I never would have known why it was so vitally important that I succeed.
You see. I told you. It's important to fall. And if it takes a little unbalancing, well then so be it.
Author's Notes: Reviews are love. It's midterms week, and I really wasn't planning on writing anything, but I couldn't concentrate on my paper because Azula was just taunting me. Cookie points if you know who her visitor is.