Can you share more about fake avatar guy in your AU if you’re up for it?
This one’s been sitting in my inbox until I got a chance to think about it!
Fake Avatar Guy (TM), the Firelord’s son.
The awful thing is--when you have connections, it’s so easy to fake.
This is before the White Lotus, before there was any formal system in place to identify the Avatar. Oh, the Sages, of course--but as evidenced by ATLA, even Sages can be corrupted. And this was at least a hundred years pre-Kyoshi; systems of communication and formal methods of identifying Avatar candidates, especially if the spirit reincarnates in a distant rural village, aren’t up to the level we see by Aang’s time.
Especially because of the simple fact that the Avatar is not traditionally told their identity until they’re sixteen.
So...it takes some doing. I genuinely don’t think the Firelord knows about the deception, because I don’t want to make the Fire Nation the “big bad” again and because I’m so in love with the image of leaving an episode on a cliffhanger of the Firelord standing with all his guards outside Girlfriend’s house...and then they show up safe and sound, because he was never the enemy.
But also, a twelve-year-old raised by that person would not come up with a plan, on his own, to pretend to be the Avatar.
By the time we hit the series proper, the kid’s deeply invested in the scam because of the influence and false respect it earns him, but it was clearly thought up by some adult ringleader. He was clearly, at first, manipulated.
And it’s....so easy. Get extremely skilled benders from all four nations, benders who can, like Bumi, bend the elements with very small or nontraditional movements. Present them as non-bending specialists. Get your “in” at the palace--some advisor or other, a power-hungry noble, someone close to the prince--to place them as the young prince’s bodyguards.
Wait. Wait for at least six months. So that when the kid makes a movement and an element suddenly bends that isn’t fire, the change won’t be directly tied to these new guards.
And well, no need to find some SAGES to confirm his identity, not anymore. It’s pretty obvious. Look! The kid’s waterbending!
There will be sages who know the truth, of course. Who can tell that the Avatar spirit is absent here...but there are these extremely dangerous specialist guards, and these are only the handful directly assigned to the false Avatar. And it’s immediately obvious that there’s a deadly powerful spirit magician on hand, as well.
oh, you could decry the false Avatar. You could search for and seek to protect the real one.
And you would lead this extremely dangerous, well-organized small band of benders directly to the real one. Untrained, and undefended.
They choose not to. They pray, fervently, that the true Avatar knows to hide.
I think....that the final confrontation is not a boss fight. Not even full Last Agni Kai style where it’s just sad. I think that ultimately a major theme here is going to be not like, a Big Bad represented by one nation, but...the final confrontation, the final battle so to speak, the finale--it’s going to be about unity. About the community protecting itself and one another against forces trying to divide it.
I think the true Avatar is capable of understanding that the false one, while responsible for his actions...was also manipulated. And has been led to believe that he has no other value.
I don’t know whether she has to kill him. It’s possible he’s not even a bender at all and never was, and when his “guards” are taken out he can be apprehended by the airbenders without causing further harm. It’s possible she talks him down. I’ll admit, I don’t know the “plot” of this story past about mid-”season two”.
It’s possible, if so, that he’s the one who gets casually taken out during that attack on the Air Temple, a blow from his own side to silence him. It’s possible he is the one our hero is healing when she finally unlocks the Avatar State.
I’m not sure. I think his intentions have been malicious, I think he’s been an active collaborator. But in order for the deception to work, he HAS to have been indoctrinated into this from a young age. Our hero is, maybe, nineteen when the story opens. He’s by definition her age. And he has to have been firmly established as the Avatar by age sixteen in order to pull off the deception, and the fact is that a fourteen-year-old boy uncoached could not pull this off. He’s responsible for his own actions, but he--like Azula, frankly--is also a victim.
I don’t want to portray him as evil. I want to portray him as a kid who was an entitled bully, and is mad that his power has been taken away, and for most of this has absolutely been out for revenge because he just lost everything. But I want to tell a story about how there is no such thing as having gone so far in that you can’t stop and choose to do better from now on. And...frankly? I think there’s a difference between being an entitled bully, and being willing to set children on fire.
I think there’s a lot of space between being a good person and being irredeemable. And that there’s a lot of space between being irredeemable, and being forgiven.
Listen...he’ll never be Firelord after this. I think it’s very possible that, when the dust clears, especially if the true Avatar saved his life, he’s only too willing to let his younger sibling take his place and quietly disappear. Become a person.
He’s had enough of chasing a destiny. It brought no one anything but pain.
His family doesn’t...wash their hands of him. But he did some shit, y’all. At the very least, they’re gonna need some time before they welcome him back. He doesn’t like, become an Atoner. Zuko this dude is not. But there’s a place for him in the world as a human being.
You become the person you choose to be, and that person is shaped by the community you choose to be a part of.
It’s also possible that she offers him this choice, and he rejects it. That--honestly, more than anything that would put her in the mindset of “I can’t do it, I’m not a real Avatar”. That she saves the Air Temple but doesn’t feel like it was a victory, and then is narratively given a chance to realize that the Avatar is more than a weapon, that her power can be used in a way that brings her and others peace.
You become the person you choose to be. She’s going to try to talk him down. And he’s going to make a choice.
