Hey, what do you guys think happened to the Avatar’s mansion on Kyoshi Island? Like, is it still there, and it’s just never been shown on screen? What do they do with it? Or was it destroyed? How?
*points up* I made myself a sign! I like it. I think I’ll use it whenever I decide to share my fiddlings here.
Just some thinky thoughts regarding Avatar Kyoshi and Kyoshi Island. Be prepared for rambling, amateur research, and my usual disregard for canon in favor of whatever I find more interesting, lol.
So one thing that bugged me about the Kyoshi duology is that it didn’t use any of the information we already had about Kyoshi Island to further develop the peninsula now known as Yokoya. FC Yee seems to have just taken the region as a blank slate. And yeah, the information on Kyoshi Island culture is pretty minimal, but there’s actually more to it than you might think at first glance! But FC Yee doesn’t seem too keen on reading that signpost and instead went and forged his own path in an entirely different direction. I find this pretty sad, so here’s my ideas about Kyoshi Island/Yokoya culture built off of the original information we had in from the show, as well as my thoughts on how to integrate FC Yee’s ideas into them.
So first off, as a lot of people seem to have figured out by now, Kyoshi Island is based on Japan. It is, in fact, the most Japanese place in all the Four Nations - Kyoshi, Suki, and Oyaji are all Japanese names, and the Kyoshi Warriors’ uniforms are reminiscent of samurai outfits.
But the architecture and the fashion of the regular villagers don’t look very Japanese at all. Why is that? It’s because they’re inspired not by the Japanese, but by the Ainu, the indigenous people of northern Japan.
Traditionally, the Ainu were a hunter-gatherer society who emphasized the importance of sustainable foraging, fishing, and hunting. They have a lot more in common with circumpolar cultures like the Inuit than they do with the Japanese. Unfortunately, they’ve also been the victims of a massive assimilation campaign by the Japanese over the last few centuries, so a lot of their cultural knowledge has been lost. But they’re still around, and over this past century they’ve put a lot of effort into preserving their culture. Information on Ainu culture is out there - more of it in Japanese than in English, but there are still quite a few books and articles written in English for anyone who cares to look.
It doesn’t seem that FC Yee looked at all, nor did he use the vaguely Ainu foundation that Kyoshi Island had and build upon it. He went down a completely different path. The people of Yokoya in the Kyoshi novels are described as farmers, not hunter-gatherers. Ainu were definitely not farmers - in fact, many of them starved to death in the 1800s when the Japanese forced them to become farmers.
So in my headcanon, I’m thinking that these farmers were actually newcomers to Yokoya. Relative newcomers, perhaps - maybe they’ve been there a few decades or a century or so. I think the people we see in The Warriors of Kyoshi are the true native inhabitants of the Yokoya peninsula, and that their society is much more like that of the Ainu. And like the Ainu, perhaps they were pushed out of their land to make way for farms and livestock. Or they still live nearby, but are now beholden to new laws about hunting and fishing that interfere with their traditional way of life. In his memoir Our Land Was A Forest, Kayano Shigeru talks about how his father was arrested by the Japanese for salmon poaching - but the only reason there were laws against catching salmon was because the Japanese had overfished and decimated the population in the first place!
There are other details that could be hammered out here, but the gist of it is that I don’t think the Yokoyans we see in the novels are the same people we see living on Kyoshi Island. I think the Yokoyan farmers are newcomers, Yokoya’s native inhabitants are still around, and after Kyoshi Island is formed those farmers are the ones who either leave or get assimilated into the indigenous population. “I created Kyoshi Island so my people could be safe from invaders” heck yes you did.
Which brings us to my next topic - Kyoshi herself, and her heritage. In ATLA, Oyaji says that Kyoshi was born on Kyoshi Island/Yokoya, and we have no reason to suspect she might not be a native to the area. FC Yee pretty much blew that out of the water - her dad’s from a family that originated in Ba Sing Se, and her mom’s a renegade Air Nomad. This actually seriously annoys me, because Kyoshi looks like the Kyoshi Islanders - you might say it’s because her genetics have filtered down over the centuries, but no, she looks like the people in that painting of Kyoshi Island’s creation too. Kyoshi looks like the Kyoshi Islanders, and the Kyoshi Islanders look like Ainu. How do I justify this?
I’m thinking there has to be a native Yokoyan person somewhere in her family tree. Jesa would be easiest - maybe Jesa’s only half Air Nomad herself? If her mother met a guy in Yokoya and they hit it off but didn’t sink into a fully committed relationship, and then Jesa was brought up amongst the Air Nomads, that could explain her looks, which she would then pass down to Kyoshi. It could also explain why she dumped Kyoshi on Yokoya - Jesa was likely familiar with the place from visits, maybe even thought her father’s family would take Kyoshi in. Makes more sense than Kyoshi just happening to get dumped in a place where by complete chance she looks like the people who live there but shares no genetics with them. Heck, it’d explain why those farmers happily threw her out too - maybe Jesa was unable to leave Kyoshi with family for whatever reason, so she left her with the farmers instead, and if there’s tension between the farmers and the native Yokoyans and this kid looks just like them....
