Just finished the line art and crosshatching for this sketchbook page dedicated to Sokka, Zuko and Yue as I try to figure out how exactly I want to draw them. I'm trying to find a balance between the original art style from the show and my own art style that leans more towards realism. Yue was the first one I drew followed by Sokka then Zuko. I'm pretty happy with Sokka and ponytail!Zuko but think I lost too much of Yue's original design in her facial structure so will probably go back and redraw her a few times before settling on a design for her. I also plan to colour this page so check back in for that eventually. Any thoughts on what works or what I should do differently please feel free to share I'd love the feedback.
It may just be me, but I think Iroh's lore drop that he invented how to redirect lightning when he "studied waterbenders" is astonishingly neglected... The conflict and motivation for Katara's arc in Book One are driven by the lack of teachers who can pass on waterbending, as the Fire Nation systematically attacked the Southern Water Tribe, imprisoned waterbenders, and deprived the culture of the embodied knowledge and practitioners needed to keep waterbending alive. Hama gives us a brutal testimony of how the Fire Nation treated waterbenders. So, while Katara is severed from waterbenders and their knowledge, Iroh, the Crown Prince of the Fire Nation, somehow has access to waterbenders to extract the knowledge and insight from studying them to develop one of the most sophisticated firebending techniques in canon.
When he lectures Zuko on the elements and speaks of the waterbenders he "studied," he does so primarily to teach his nephew what they gain from appropriating knowledge of peoples that his family has been oppressing and annihilating for several generations. In other words, Iroh approached waterbenders and their knowledge as a resource for him to advance firebending. It's wild that ATLA (including when Zuko instructs Aang who cheerfully points out how this technique reminds him of waterbending) frames this piece of Iroh lore as a reason to admire him, because the moment you ask, "Okay, and how did he study waterbenders when his country has been actively at war with them and hunting the waterbenders of the South down for a whole generation...?"
Canon doesn't care (and I deem it very likely that the writers didn't think about the implications), but I do. Since I'm currently rewriting Hama's story anyway, I'll take this piece of Iroh lore as a prompt to overhaul the worldbuilding more extensively: Iroh is not uniquely enlightened for studying waterbenders, but for the raids on the Southern Water Tribe and the systematic abduction of the waterbenders aimed at studying them. That was the strategic objective of the relentless raids over years.
As far as we know, the four nations "lived in harmony" before the Fire Nation declared war. The army may genuinely not know at first how to engage waterbenders systematically in an environment that gives them a significant strategic advantage against the navy, because waterbenders can mobilize the ocean. They don't fight with ammunition; they fight with the battlefield against the Fire Nation's ammunition. That's terrifying.
Instead of sending a fleet, the initial raids and abductions aim to learn how to wage war against waterbenders who are surrounded by water, ice, and snow at any given moment. Fire is quite vulnerable to water, after all, because water extinguishes fire.
So, the Fire Nation collects data from every raid, documents and analyzes exploitable weaknesses, and tests different strategies and timing to tailor warfare and training in iterations accordingly. The abducted waterbenders become vital because they are turned into living training material for the soldiers. In the version canon gives us through Hama's testimony, waterbenders are held in cages and kept from bending under all circumstances. The question is why? Why go to such lengths? The construction, maintenance, and staffing of these prisons (which apparently hold the entire waterbender population of the South Pole) must be expensive. The Fire Nation isn't shy about eliminating an entire nation in one campaign, as they demonstrated with the Air Nomads. So, why keep waterbenders alive?
For my Hama AU, I decided to integrate the prison into the compounds of military academies. Hama and her comrades are held under conditions that prevent all waterbending, but the guards regularly transfer them in rotation to a training arena, where they have to waterbend to survive fighting soldiers in training.
In the Boiling Rock episode, we see that the Fire Nation controls firebending prisoners by literally cooling them down, strongly indicating that lower temperatures weaken firebenders. I think it's reasonable that this cooling technique is quite old because before the war, the only benders the Fire Nation would've needed to imprison were firebenders. The training arenas are equipped with the same mechanisms that allow instructors to adjust the temperature: at first, the temperatures are comfortable, even favorable for the firebenders, so they can focus on studying how waterbenders fight. The better the firebenders get, the more the instructors lower the temperatures to push their bodies to generate heat and mobilize energy under conditions that weaken them while strengthening their opponents, simulating combat conditions at the South Pole. The Fire Nation forces the abducted waterbenders to teach its soldiers how to fight them better. Analysts observe and record the sessions in detail to catalog waterbending forms, adjust training doctrines for the drills, update manuals, and design firebending techniques specifically to counter commonly observed waterbending forms, test those inventions in subsequent combat simulation sessions, and refine them through iterations. The arenas are a training ground and a highly methodical firebending military laboratory.
At first, the purpose of the abducted waterbenders from the South is limited to optimizing warfare against the Water Tribes. However, after a few years, the instructors notice that waterbenders make firebenders better firebenders. They are invaluable assets.
As Iroh explains, water is the element of change. Even after years, the analysts notice that these waterbender subjects never seem to run out of new ideas. Their capacity to improvise is genuinely admired among officers and relentlessly exploited: since the waterbenders keep adapting, they, too, can keep innovating. Their primary interests shift from optimizing waterbending specifically to advancing military firebending in general, as the war increasingly produces its own branch of firebending.
To train as many soldiers as fast and as efficiently as possible, masters started to radically standardize and simplify forms. The pro was reduced training time and higher accessibility; art and style were sacrificed in favor of aggression and speed. The con was far less flexibility and a narrower range of attacks; the more automated the muscle memory, the lower the responsiveness and capacity to improvise, because highly standardized training focused on repeating sequences rather than learning to combine isolated forms and figures.
Fighting waterbenders mitigates these downsides, and continuing to study their adaptations keeps firebending adaptive and flexible, which makes it harder for earthbenders to fight the Fire Nation soldiers because the repertoire keeps growing and becoming unpredictable.
As a young Crown Prince, Iroh studies waterbenders in the arenas and in direct combat under controlled conditions, a significant part of his training as a soldier and officer. He perfects his lightning technique in simulation battles with them. He learns to redirect lightning by observing how waterbenders defend themselves against his attacks. Iroh eventually masters a version of lightning redirection that doesn't involve waterbending by appropriating the original defenses his "test subjects" develop to survive him.
Ozai cradling his son's face before lighting his hand aflame is such a mockery of what their relationship should have been. I imagine that moment of inaction haunted Iroh for many years after. In one of the first few episodes, during Zuko's Angi Kai with Zhao, Iroh steps in very quickly when Zhao cheats. He didn't want to make the same mistake again.
