Avatar Yumi and her Yunit!
Art by the wonderful @ube-kun!
Avatar Yumi is the Avatar OC that I've been spinning around in my head for the last 9 years. My original concept for the Earthbending Avatar after Korra.
I call her story Avatar: The Broken Earth
The story goes like this:
75 years after Kuvira's defeat, the Earth Continent is divided between a number of states, most of which are ruled by authoritarian governments. And the most despotic of them all is Shield Island, an isolationist military dictatorship off the eastern coast of the continent.
15 years old Yumi has been a patriotic citizen of Shield Island ever since she joined the training academy to become a bodyguard to the island's Supreme Commander. But the course of her life changes when she finds out she is the Avatar, the sworn enemy of the state, the person she was indoctrinated since birth to hate.
Now she must flee the only home she's ever known and drift from place to place as a refugee, looking for safety. Along the way she meets new friends who will help her on her journey.
Andon is a carefree guy. A firebender from the lower ring of Ba Sing Se who's practiced in the ways of the road. He offers to become Yumi's guide and the two travel together.
Yonten is the great-great-granddaughter of Aang and proud of it. A rather arrogant airbender who cares deeply about a lot of things, which goes against her people's philosophy of detachment.
Reza is an industrious and polite young boy. Very smart but also very ignorant about a lot of things since he came from a sheltered home. That sheltered home being the mobile imperial palace of the Second Earth Empire, where he was the emperor.
Wy is a waterbender from the Foggy Swamp Tribe. A weirdo even by her own people's standards, she likes to dabble in the dangerous and off-putting. She rejected the path decided for her and chose to be an apprentice to an apothecary that many (including Wy) call a witch.
Likai is Yumi's animal guide. A spider-cat stray who lived around the bodyguard academy's grounds. He would always come back even when told to go away. He is the last connection Yumi has to her home. His name literally means "go away".
Reza is actually a non-bender.
The Second Earth Empire isn't a top-down fascist dictatorship like Kuvira's empire, but more of a loose collection of semi-independent states and warlords that all on-paper swear fealty to the emperor.
It's loosely inspired by the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact.
The setting as a whole is inspired by the Cold War era. The world is divided into two broad alliances, referred to colloquially as the Green Bloc and Grey Bloc.
I already started writing their story!
It'll be published on my AO3 (with maybe more art by @ube-kun)
btw, I intentionally made Yumi resemble Asami to reinforce the "face you loved in a past life" theory, that every Avatar resembles the love interest of the previous Avatar (at least when they're young)
