i will NEVER understand why bryke thought that quasi-face stealer amnesia plotline in the search comic was a good idea. never till the day i die.
because hereās the thing. iāve harped before on how fucking dumb it is to take the character whose central line in the og show was āno matter how things may seem to change, never forget who you areā and have them immediately afterwards 1. actually somehow just not leave the country they were banished from, and 2. deliberately and knowingly choose to have their own memories wiped. like ???????!!?
and yeah, that then leaves the question, when itās revealed in late s3 that she was banished and is possibly still alive: why didnāt she ever come back for her kids? why didnāt she at least seek out zuko, who was also banished and therefore at least theoretically accessible to her? why didnāt she try to intervene when she presumably learned about the agni kai and her sonās disfigurement? and if she never learned of it, how could that be without her either deliberately forgetting she had kids or choosing to actively ignore any opportunity to get information about them?
and my friends, this is where the silliest part of the whole kerfuffle is. because there was ALREADY a built-in, solid, well-explored piece of worldbuilding that could very easily have answered all of those questions in a way that wouldnāt fundamentally violate the basic foundations of her characterās nature. that piece of worldbuilding? the city of ba sing se.
As a writer, this solves so many of your problems. If Ursa ends up in ba sing se (which thereās decent reason for her to do, given that itās entirely reasonable that sheād be worried about ozai changing his mind and deciding he needs to tie up loose ends, and that the city just repelled iroh, making it about the most secure location she could get) then once she makes it inside the walls she discovers there is no war in ba sing se. suddenly, trying to get information about anything to do with the fire nation, let alone the royal family, becomes extremely difficult and dangerous. she has a plausible reason not to know, or have very little and extremely delayed awareness of whatās happening to her children.
also, the city is fucking massive and packed to the brim with refugees. even with zuko and iroh getting all about the lower and upper ring, itās completely plausible for her to have even still been there without amnesia and just. never happened to cross paths. big cities are like that. you could see a million people in a day that youāll never see again and theyāll only be a tiny fraction of all the people there that youāll never catch a glimpse of. plus, once youāre lucky enough to get in as a refugee, itās probably not so easy to leave again, especially if you want to have a chance of being able to come back.
if you really want the amnesia plot, the dai li/joo dee worldbuilding is already set up there too! all you have to do is have ursa keep trying to find out about her kids, maybe even discover zukoās banishment and try to either reach out or leave the city in response, and have the dai li catch her in a sting to crack down on citizens promoting awareness of the war.
badabing, badaboom, ursa gets joo deeād and now you have an amnesia plotline without ursa deliberately abandoning even the memory of her kids.
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