Because the Puppet-master episode was brilliant and incredibly dark. The creators have obviously been reading the darker fan fictions around here. (So for God's sake don't read this until you've seen the eppy!)
I'm not sure whether the 'puppet-master's' name was Hama or Hana. I'm going to go with Hama unless the cannon spelling is revealed. But her character fascinated me…a clear example of how the terrible conditions of war can completely change someone.
It is dark. And she craves light.
Her feet stumble over themselves and her hands grab through the tendrils of air, the glimmer of the moon stretching out the faint rise of moisture that she just knows is there. Underneath this barren, ugly rock she can feel the swish of silver rays on grass and hear the trickle of water through their veins. It is calling her, all this water, all this life.
With a gasp, she bursts out onto the real ground of the Fire Nation where everything is pretty, cooling, soothing. No fire. No ice. The only thing white is the vast pearl-drop of the moon hanging low in the sky and being cradled by the stars.
A pang for seal meat, snow and her sister's face catches at her and in a rage she calls for the blood, twists muscles through her fingers from metres away and clutches at real, beating,human hearts.
She wanders out into the moonlight and does not look back at the granite forms that slump over from their posts, blood evaporating from their skin.
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The first person she catches is a young boy. He looks at her, pale and afraid, and she recalls his golden face, the face he wears at the market place when he bobs for apples. His teeth are sealed shut behind a cage of fear and she remembers not so long ago when she was clawing at a similar place, one filled with steel bars.
The coldness of her anger clashes with her face and her fingers are already ramming pain into his vessels before he has a chance to scream. She kicks him and idly wonders if she would have ever had a son with such a velvety soft scalp had she been allowed to thrive at the south pole.
No. Water-benders have skulls hard enough to rake against the bottom of a canoe. It only serves to remind her how much 'change' her element can really represent.
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Many people later and she is left hovering over a young woman, insecure in her recent maturity and one slim, fire-bending hand slipping round the catacomb of her stomach which swells out and glistens with the later months of pregnancy.
She does not know why she hesitates. Perhaps it is because the grey eyes clawing into her face are filled with the same protectiveness she felt long ago when she stood against the ships and sank soldiers with her icy breath. But then a thin whirl of smoke drains out and she is forced back in a panic, her robe almost on fire. And she remembers the battles, her sister's tears, her life with rats and tied-back drinking positions, a submission in steel-
The pregnant woman cries out, all the bones in her hands suddenly crushed with a flood of crimson liquid sloshing into the marrow. And then she lets out a ripped howl as her she feels the wetness, the smear of death between her legs…and a baby's head dipped in blood washes out into the clearing.
Hama almost smiles.
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'Your people forced me to this.'
It's always been at the back of her mind. Revenge. Forcing her hand, her head and what used to be a heart that was locked away at the South Pole.
'Look at what your proud nation has done to me!'
She wants to scream it out. But this is the first victim she cannot truthfully spit this out too in heated strips of pain.
Katara gasps, the only other Southern water-bender in the world, being forced to her knees. Her blood darts through her limbs, taking her on a merry dance and twirling her down towards the sticks of grass. Her bafflement, her horror, flood out onto the midnight air and the tip of a plead sticks in her throat, sawing away at her vocal cords as she thinks and thinks and does not understand.
Hama grins. She is a water-bender who thinks like a fire-bender.
Then Katara calls to the moon, to Yue, to her mother, to Aang, to everything she believes in, and white ember seizes her blood and slots it back into place. She looks up.
The thought is clear on her face.
'I am stronger than you.'
She gets up. She weaves the same moon magic that her ancestors have spun for generations. Those things on her cheeks are not tears. They are the life-blood of the plants she has just ripped away from the cycle of what should and pulled into what shouldn't.
'I will never be like you.'
She prefers ice, not moving, straining limbs to capture people.
'I will never let this nation change me the way it has changed you.'
But Hama has lived in this cruel world for longer than Katara. She sees how easily the girl throws away her morals, her ethic arguments for the two breathing specimens of avatar and brother that freeze before her. She feels the coil of her blood turn against her. And only wonderment seizes her.
'So this is what it feels like…'
She knows the tears running down Katara's cheeks are genuine this time. The moon tells her so.