#kyoshi parallels

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Avatar Kyoshi’s Association with Cliffsides Part 1: Avatar The Last Airbender

Kyoshi Novels’ Parallels: Kyoshi and Cliffsides (part 1)

In Avatar the Last Airbender, Avatar Kyoshi’s few appearances bears strong associations with cliffsides. Her very first appearance on the show is on an Earth Avatar mural in The Southern Air Temple, surrounded by who we later learn are the previous four Earth Avatars. Where the other four stand rock solid on mountaintops, Kyoshi is seen balancing on two separated rocks, foreshadowing what we learn of her in Avatar Day. When revisiting the show, the mural stands out as an excellent piece of worldbuilding, and a hint of the significance of Avatar Kyoshi’s most iconic feat.

In Avatar Day, we learn that Kyoshi’s namesake, Kyoshi Island, was founded at the end of Chin the Conqueror’s bloody conquest of the Earth Kingdom. Upon reaching the edge of the Yokoya peninsula, he finds Kyoshi standing tall and protecting her people, declaring the separation of her people from the Earth Kingdom. She splits the peninsula in two in one of the most impressive feats of Avatar state bending, calling on the immense powers of earth, water, air and lavabending to shift the tectonic plates. In element-of-change’s piece on the Avatar State, they note that this is one of the only times we see the Avatar State being used completely rooted, a testament to her prowess as an Earth Avatar.

At the end of this split, Chin is left standing helpless at the very edge of a newly formed cliffside that crumbles within seconds, ending his reign. 

In The Old Masters, Kyoshi’s spirit tells Aang that the death of Chin ushered in an era of great peace, and though she did not set out to kill him, she would have done anything to stop him. 

Kyoshi: In my day, Chin the Conqueror threatened to throw the world out of balance. I stopped him. And the world entered a great era of peace.  Aang: You didn't really kill Chin. Technically, he fell to his own doom because he was too stubborn to get out of the way. Kyoshi: Personally, I don't really see the difference, but I assure you, I would have done whatever it took to stop Chin. I offer you this wisdom, Aang: Only justice will bring peace. 

Kyoshi’s creation of the newly formed cliff face at the edge of the Earth Kingdom is thus marked out here as her crowning feat - a culmination of her role as the Avatar, and a legendary feat that would be associated with her in murals, festivals, and the history of the Kyoshi Island. Where Aang’s crowning moment is his defeat of Ozai at the Wulong Forest, and Korra’s is at the heart of the transformed Republic City, Kyoshi’s is at this iconic cliffside.

By nature, a cliffside is an Earth feature that lies adjacent to the powerful ocean and strong winds, a powerful space of natural confluences and collisions. Kyoshi’s association with the cliffside marks her out as an embodiment of these forces of nature, a meeting of the elements on a sturdy yet potentially unstable and mutable Earth platform. 

In the next part of this series, I will explore the ways in which F. C. Yee fleshes out Kyoshi’s development as a young Avatar-in-training with the motif of a cliffside as a touchstone, occurring at important milestones in her journey in The Rise of Kyoshi and The Shadow of Kyoshi. 

Read part 2 here.

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Kyoshi Novels’ Parallels: Kyoshi and Airbending

One of the many reasons The Rise of Kyoshi deserves a re-read is just how faithful F. C. Yee is to the original mythos of Avatar The Last Airbender, and the way he deepens and explores it. In the scene where Kyoshi learns airbending, F. C. Yee creates a slight parallel to Aang mastering the Air chakra in The Guru (2x19), beautifully capturing the moment in which Kyoshi learns to let go of her grief over her lost Air Nomad father figure: 

“Rangi made a little snort. “You know I miss him too?” she murmured. “Master Kelsang. He was so kind and funny. Sometimes when I find myself missing him, I feel guilty that I’m not thinking about my father instead. I wish they were both here. I wish everyone we’ve lost could be here with us, one last time.” Kyoshi squeezed her tight. She imagined Rangi’s energy twining together in place with her own, forming a stronger thread from two strands. There was a tickle against her brow. She and Rangi looked up to see a swirling dance of leaves, spinning around in a circle, the two of them caught in its eye. Kelsang used to make her laugh in the garden like this, by swirling the air, letting her touch the currents and feel the wind run between her fingers. Kyoshi let the breeze play against her skin before giving it a gentle push with her hand. The wind spun faster at her request. She could feel Kelsang smiling warmly at her, a final gift of love. “They’ll always be with us,” she said to Rangi. “Always.”

In this scene, we see a perfectly symmetrical parallel to the scene where Aang learns to master the air chakra. In letting go of her grief over Kelsang and embracing her newfound connection with Rangi, Kyoshi accepts Kelsang’s final gift and airbends for the first time, much in the same way that Aang letting go of the Air Nomads and embracing his love for Katara allows him to master the air chakra. In this callback, Yee creates a beautiful moment in The Rise of Kyoshi for Kyoshi to move past the pain that defined her for the third quarter of the book, a moment that both stands alone and works as wonderful commentary on the original scene in The Guru. 

Rewatching this scene, I was surprised by how the clouds of air swirl around Aang and lift him up, swirling from images of Air Nomads to Katara. I had never quite noticed how Air here is taken to represent love and community, but with The Rise of Kyoshi, this becomes obvious - the spinning currents of wind becomes a reminder of her love for Kelsang, as well as a new memory she makes with Rangi early in their romance. The two scenes complement and develop one another gorgeously, deepening the connection between Kyoshi and Aang as the same soul in different lifetimes.

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Avatar Kyoshi and Cliffsides Part 2: The Rise of Kyoshi

Kyoshi Novels’ Parallels: Kyoshi and Cliffsides (part 2)

In The Rise of Kyoshi, Avatar Kyoshi’s key bending problem is her inability to bend on a small scale - unlike Aang, who struggled with Earth, and Korra, who struggled with air, Kyoshi displays no clear struggle with the other non-Earth elements, but rather, struggles with bending on a precise scale. This seems like more than a subtle callback to the one major bending sequence we see Kyoshi enact in Avatar The Last Airbender, which is far larger than any feat we see Aang or Korra accomplish. By centring Kyoshi’s struggle with bending on her inability to bend precise amounts, the novels further reinforce Kyoshi’s association with cliffsides and large, natural structures in a way that Aang and Korra are not.

The first time we see her bend in Rise, she lifts a column of gray-stone seafloor from the surface of the ocean, a feat that is remarked to be akin to moving mountains.

“You said that you couldn’t manipulate small things. That you could only move good-sized boulders of a regular shape. Like a person whose fingers were too thick and clumsy to pick up a grain of sand.” “You didn’t tell me the reverse applied,” Jianzhu said. “That you could move mountains. And you were separated from the ocean bed by two hundred paces. Not even I can summon earth from across that distance. Or across water.”

In this section, we learn that Kyoshi’s natural bending ability far exceeds the greatest Earthbenders of her time, marking her out as a bending prodigy unlike any other we’ve seen before. In the description of the scene where she lifts the column, she almost seems to enter the Avatar State, or at least, taps on the experiences and power of her reincarnations to guide her:

“Her hands felt guided. She didn’t fully understand, nor was she completely in control. But she trusted. Kyoshi braced her stomach, filled her lungs, and slammed her feet into the Crowding Bridge stance. Echoes of power rippled from her movement, hundredfold iterations of herself stamping on the ice. She was somehow both leading and being led by an army of benders.”

When she finally does enter the Avatar State, she does so on the Xishaan Mountains on the southeastern edge of the Earth Kingdom, where Jianzhu had brought her and Yun to find out which one of them is the Avatar. This sequence is a pivotal one for the novel, and Kyoshi experiences many firsts here, primarily that of being her first Avatar State and her first time firebending.

Jianzhu describes entering the Avatar State as akin to transforming into a “human natural disaster,” referencing the “small, uninhabited atoll” that Kuruk sunk the first time he entered the Avatar State. Where Kuruk’s first time connecting to the Avatar State occurs on an island, for Kyoshi, it is fittingly a mountainside, and here is the description that follows:

““The trees were gone behind her, snapped at their trunks and torn by their roots to expose damp clumps of soil. Before her, it was as if some great hand had tried to sweep away the mountainside in a convulsion of fear and shame. Deep rips crisscrossed the stone like claws. The hilltops had been pushed over, the traces of landslides pouring down from their crests.”

If, as I said in my previous piece, Kyoshi’s crowning moment as the Avatar is the moment that she splits Kyoshi island from the coast, we learn from this moment that Kyoshi’s Avatar journey comes full circle. That is, it begins and ends with her attempt to separate a mountainside in two, as seen in the section I italicized. Kyoshi’s Avatar State is likened to a great hand that tried to sweep away the mountainside, causing deep rips that crisscross the stone. In the grief and anger over the loss of Yun and the closest thing she had to a father figure in Kelsang, Kyoshi performs a terrible act of destruction, a cliffside bearing witness to her pain and horror. The destroyed cliffside becomes a testament to her trauma.

In Avatar The Last Airbender, Kyoshi’s strength and nature as an Earth Avatar is manifested through her deep connection with the cliffside that would later become Kyoshi Island. In The Rise of Kyoshi, F. C. Yee traces back Kyoshi’s path to a foundational moment in her journey and recreates a similar moment of cliffside destruction. With this, he reframes Kyoshi’s iconic moment in Avatar as a moment of creation and declaration of peace and order in contrast to the terrible moment of destruction and trauma that her journey began with.

With the context provided by The Rise of Kyoshi, we see a trajectory charted by Kyoshi’s relationship with cliffsides: she begins her time as the Avatar in a war torn world, with the destruction of the world reflecting her own trauma and despair. By the time of her prime, she is a figure of terrible and awesome creation, rather than mindless destruction and grief. Before we get there though, there is one final piece of the puzzle: The Shadow of Kyoshi.