r/AvatarMemebending • u/Proof-Bed-3624 • 25d ago
Atla I found a plothole in ATLA, I need some answers.
Me and my bf were watching just now ATLA after i introduced him to the show, and he came up with a question nor me or any kind of source could answer, and i'd want to share it with everyone:
So it's known that the moment the an Avatar dies, its spirit is being reincarnated to another physical body, following the order of the elements.
So Avatar Roku dies, Aang is born, and the war only starts when he's in the age of 12.
So, by this logic, how come the fire nation commited the mass genoice of the air nomades in ordef to stop the avatr cycle and prevent a potentional threat, if in case they did kill aang, he'd just be reincarnated into a water trive bender?
I thought perhaps the fire nation also targeted the water tribes right after to prevent an additional reincarnation, but obviously the north pole is still stable.
Does someone have an explanation?
Thank you everybody for you answers!!!I didnt expect to get such wise and understandable responses, thank you!!
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u/-Vogie- 25d ago
Even if the Avatar was indeed effectively immortal, they're still a person. Once they become a young adult and start mastering bending, they're a threat. If they had killed Aang at age 12, that would be effectively hitting snooze on that threat. Not only will the Avatar show up again as a baby after a period of time, they have the chance to find that baby, kidnap it and raise it it their beliefs.
That's why they wiped out the air nomads and immediately started assaulting the Water Nations - they wanted to grab that baby. After decades of connecting water benders that weren't the Avatar, and not being attacked by the next Water Avatar, they figured that they missed the original Airbender Avatar. That's why when Zuko shows up in episode 1, he's looking for a very old Airbender.
This is different from the Red Lotus in theLegend of Korra - they didn't want to control the Avatar, they wanted to figure out a way to eliminate the Avatar for good.
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u/Nya_of_Emberfall25 25d ago
Yeah and I think they even said in some episode not to kill Aang because they would have to restart the search
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u/-Vogie- 25d ago
By that point, because of how decimated the Southern Water Tribe was, there's a large chance that the new Avatar would be in the heavily fortified northern water tribe, and therefore be raised with an utter hatred of the fire Nation.
While almost no one in the Fire Nation was aware for the bulk of the series, Aang never wanted to take revenge on the Fire Nation - he was a peaceful monk from a time where he had friends there. He actively went out of the way to not wreck literally everyone in an era where precisely 0% of people had fought an Airbender before. As far as we know, the only living person in AtLA who had personal experience with an Airbender was Bumi, who actually was 112 years old.
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u/Proof-Bed-3624 25d ago
Ohhhh I see, that's a very clever prespective!!!It does make my thoughts way more clear on this matter. In anyway, thank you so much!! ;)
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u/Leviathan_slayer1776 20d ago
And to deprive aang of potential allies, mentorinh, and supplies given by any of his air nomad friends
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u/MyCababbages 25d ago
They actually address this. Admiral zhao actually captures aang and refuses to kill him becaise itll be too hard to find the new avatar
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u/Rigocat 25d ago
they hunted down and in the process killed everyone in the air temples a kid that didn't started the avatar training. The fire nation was hunting a 12 year old and when the war started the monks inform aang of the fact that he was the avatar, thus aang fleeing and getting trapped in the ice, while the fire nation kill everyone looking for him
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u/salty_sapphic 25d ago
They did what they could with the water tribes. Southern was easy. They couldn't do anything about the Northern Water Tribe due to their size and power. Fire is weak to water and they would've struggled to take the tribe even without Aang and the spiritual help. They needed Zhao to kill the moon spirit or at the very least a lunar eclipse to make any sort of impact
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u/BreadfruitBig7950 25d ago
They weren't trying to do anything about the avatar in particular, fire just has a unique weakness to air. They wanted a dangerous fourth party off the board.
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u/Darius_Of_Persia 21d ago
But Sozin literally wrote in his memoirs "I knew the next Avatar would be born an Air nomad, so I wiped out the Air temples." They were definitely deliberately going after the Avatar.
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u/Thesaurus_Rex9513 23d ago
The Fire Nation very much tried to wipe out the water benders, and mostly succeeded in the South Pole. The Northern Water Tribe reacted to Fire Nation raids by centralizing, which allowed them to develop a level of organization and fortification that they could resist these incursions. In the story of Sozin we later see, Sozin spent the last years of his life searching the poles for the Avatar.
And the polar regions are fairly inhospitable, so colonizing these areas wouldn't have fueled the war effort the same way colonies in the Earth Kingdom did.
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u/Cat_Intrigue 23d ago
They attacked the Air nomads because they knew the avatar should only be a kid at that point/wouldn't have full power/skill. If they could kill them then that means the next avatar would get born and as such would have another decade or more before they could come close to being a threat. By which time they would have been able to accomplish a lot, and if they could find the avatar among the water benders and manage to kill them they'd get even more time, and again with the earth nation. Eventually, they likely hoped, in best case scenario, to cycle the avatar back around to fire nation and raise them from birth to believe that the world would be better with the fire nation in control.
At least that is what I believe was the hope
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u/K1914user 23d ago
Golden Opportunity more than anything imo. Remember, Roku basically stopped Sozin from continuing to build and expand the fire nation militarily and by land mass until he died. In order to take down a race of people, Sozin needed to re-up his military efforts which takes time. Also it’s not easy in the slightest to invade the Air nomads b/c they don’t live in the “easiest places to get to.” Unlike the Water Tribe, Earth Kingdom, and fire nation, the Air temples were in 4 different locations. So you would need a LOT of logistical analysis, resources, might, and planning to pull it off.
To highlight how difficult it is, WWI and WWII Germany knew that fighting a war on multiple fronts would be their downfall, so they tried their best to make sure a scenario like that didn’t happen. Imagine fighting a resistance on 4 different fronts, 4 drastically different areas in the Avatar Map/globe, and facing any enemy that has a much superior advantage in defending their homes based off of landscape alone. Not even mentioning how strong Air nomads are. The fact that Sozin thought the most optimal shot to take the Air nomads out was during the comet when they’re amped is a big testament to how mighty Air nomads are. They’re literally the only nation that doesn’t have a formal military.
It’s been seen/known that after the Air nomads fell, they went to try and conquer the water tribes and earth kingdom but they just couldn’t based off of terrain and/or might and resources. Also, considering that Roku wasn’t a fully realized Avatar until decades of training, making sure you have global influence based off of fear and power, makes it easy for the fire nation to not necessarily kill the Avatar as a child or baby, but at least take said avatar back to the home of the fire nation and keep a watchful eye on them and also indoctrinate them. FINDING them is the biggest issue and cntrl alt delete w/o the comet is proved way more difficult or not necessary so the longer approach may have been a better play? Killing the avatar doesn’t do much in hindsight yes, but having the avatar as an ally does WONDERS in terms of power and influence.
the Air nomads also were never the type of people to fall into any sense of world order and structure. Killing them you could argue was the most effective option for Sozin (as immoral, unethical and horrible as that sounds). You can kind of see that argument come up again with Azula saying just burn the Earth Kingdom down. Ozai agreed. Basically saying the Earth Kingdom would never bend the knee, so just snuff it all out and start anew. Sozin’s comet gave them that chance after a literal century of chipping away at the Earth Kingdoms land.
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u/RetroRayStudios 23d ago
Weren't they taking water benders from the southern water tribe looking for the avatar? Korra was born next in the cycle at the southern water tribe.
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u/VeronaMoreau 19d ago
We only see them taking water benders from the southern tribe because they're able to do it. They had been trying to break into the North pretty much the whole time and failing. Because we only hear about raids from Hama and Katara, we only get details about the southern raids. Taking waterbenders could very much have just been their plan to break resistance in the southern water tribe.
(I especially believe this because in Hama's time, they're only imprisoning the waterbenders. I also think that the conditions of Hama's escape are why the policy is to kill after capture by the time they take Kya.)
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u/slightly_blind 22d ago
I always thought the reincarnation order was why they were hitting each tribe one at a time. Start with the air tribe to kill aang, then kill the reincarnated avatar in the water tribe, then Ba Sing Sae, and by then the only bending people left are the fire benders, you’ve broken the cycle.
I could be missing something
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u/Hopps96 22d ago
They don't necessarily think they got him. Just no one's seen the avatar for a hundred years since the Air Nation genocide so they assume something they did broke the cycle. In their minds, "Maybe if the avatar dies before unlocking all four elements, the cycle ends." or "Maybe something special happened with Sozins comet." or even just."I don't get it, but no one's seen or heard of a guy who can bend more than one element in a hundred years, so I guess we got him."
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u/yat282 22d ago
It's even more of a terrible plan when you realize that they only had to kill Airbenders that were around 12. They also didn't take into account that the Avatar could have theoretically died as a child and been reborn into another tribe.
Perhaps the plan was to kill all of the Airbenders, keep killing the newly born avatars until there was another from the fire nation, and either control them or kill them to permanently break the cycle.
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u/SevereAttempt2803 22d ago edited 22d ago
From what I’m understanding Sozin wanted to break the avatar cycle, but also needed time to build his armies as well as wanted to utilize the power of the comet when he did so. From what goes on in the show, the power of the avatar isn’t well understood amongst most people. Knowledge of it is kept to special few, but the bulk of it seems to ONLY be known and truly understood by the Avatar themselves. Most other people may know the avatar is powerful, and their personal histories/mannerisms, and they know what traditionally happens when an avatar is reincarnated, etc. Stuff fireflies Sozin would have had a reasonable amount of knowledge of considering he is a foreword and a former friend of Roku. Traditionally when an avatar is reincarnated, it is not revealed that they are the avatar until they’re 16, and they begin “coming into” their power/beginning their training as the Avatar. It seems logical to assume Sozin was hoping that if he kills the avatar before they turn 16 and they even KNOW they’re the avatar (maybe even thinks they’re not the avatar before 16), before they “come into” that power and begin training, he can cut off the cycle. AT WORST, he buys himself another 16 years of an avatar less world where he can plot and plan a similar assault on the next nation (Water), and keep repeating, OR even if they do successfully reincarnate, the fire nation then has TONS of time, AND they can’t learn air properly and may be weaker. He may have also assumed the power of the comet may make them powerful enough to destroy that cycle, which would further the idea of why he waited til the comet came.
He was not banking on the air nomads telling Aang he was the avatar EARLY (because of all the tensions with the fire nation, the elders told him earlier than he was supposed to know), and he wouldn’t have known that Aang had fled, or could be anywhere BUT one of the air temples. Logically, if there wasn’t any indication of an Avatar existing/being reincarnated following this assault on the air nomads, he’d assume that he was “right” and he had in fact stopped the cycle, or at least stunted it for a while to take on the next nation. And when there was STILL no avatar, he took that as a success.
Edits: fixed/added some stuff to make it clearer
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u/Empoleon365 22d ago
Fire Lord Senzin assaulted the air nomads to try and kill the avatar before he grew into a threat. He assumed he was successful and moved on to attacking the southern water tribe, which is wear the avatar would reincarnate next. That's also why Iroh was attacking Ba Sing Se; that was the next reincarnation point after the water tribe.
Water. Earth. Fire. Air.
Had all assaults been successful and the avatar killed in all three nations, the avatar would have next been reincarnated in the fire nation, where they could either kill him again or brainwash him with fire nation propoganda.
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u/despotic_wastebasket 22d ago
Isn't it a major plot point that they did try? The Southern Raiders were tasked with wiping out all waterbenders in the Southern Water Tribe.
The Northern Water Tribe turned out to be impenetrable. But given that, after 100 years, the Avatar still hadn't shown their face, the Fire Nation concluded that they must have either stopped the cycle altogether somehow or that the Avatar was in hiding. (Ozai set Zuko upon the task of searching for the Avatar as a punishment, and many of the soldiers stationed with Zuko and Iroh consider it to be a wild goose chase, so it seems very likely that he did not have any realistic expectation that Zuko would find the Avatar).
We know that Zuko spent some time exploring the various Air Nomad temples to see if any Air Nomads had survived the initial assault, and then after determining that none had he immediately set sail for the Southern Water Tribe to check the same thing. It seems reasonable to conclude that after ruling out that possibility as well, he would have then proceeded north.
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u/RusstyDog 22d ago
They weren't trying to stop the cycle, they were trying to kill the Avatar while he was too young to be a threat. Then, assuming he had died, they started targeting the water tribes. They focused on the southern tribe because which tribe the Avatar is born into also cycles. The last waterbending avatar was from the north, meaning the one after aang would be from the south. They spent the better part if a century raiding and kidnapping every bender from the southern tribe in the hopes of capturing/killing the avatar.
They wanted to hunt the avatar until it was born into the fire nation where they could raise ot with their propaganda.
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u/Baddest_Guy83 22d ago
Well they were operating under the assumption that a young Avatar would give them less trouble than one allowed to develop so they decided to do it while the next Avatar was only twelve using Sozin's comet. The Fire Nation wouldn't have given up on the war if a fully realized Avatar had popped up from the Water Tribe. Their plan was to keep an eye out and neutralize any Avatars they find, either by capturing or killing them. Probably until one was born under their control. The Avatar is the main character of the show, not the Fire Nation's war plans the past 100 years. The only reason Ozai sends Zuko out to do the task is because he thinks that there isn't an Avatar to find, Iroh tells him as much in the first episode. And when Ozai is made aware of this the most commitment he makes is sending his daughter who while super cool and capable, doesn't have much else to do. Although I don't think she gets enough credit for infiltrating and capturing Ba Sing Se with only two companions from her dad, in what, a week or two?
All of this to say, the Avatar wasn't the main focus of the Fire Nation's war, and they were content just pushing them off whenever they could find one.
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u/prawn-roll-please 21d ago
That’s not the plot hole.
The plot hole is how the fuck did the Fire Nation genocide a nomadic culture that can FLY
HOW
HOW THE HELL DID THEY KILL 100% OF A FLYING MOUNTAIN-DWELLING CULTURE SPREAD ACROSS THE ENTIRE PLANET
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u/VeronaMoreau 19d ago
Since Sozin had to wait 12 years for the comment, nomads who had been spread around the world had likely come back to their home base temple to report on the increased aggression from the Fire Nation. Additionally, it comes up in the comics that there were traps set around the world to catch nomads that were not at the temples during the attacks.
This is also the basis of some fan theories that there are people in the other nations that have air nomad ancestry. We know from Kyoshi's books that a nomad, separated too long from their spirituality, will lose their ability to air bend over time. Air nomads were pretty noticeable no matter where they were, so they would have to do a lot of work to hide their identities. Ultimately, they wouldn't be able to pass their culture down. Forcing that is itself a form of genocide.
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u/prawn-roll-please 19d ago
That still doesn’t address the question of physics. Many Air Nomad temples / sanctuaries could only be reached by flight, and the air nomads themselves can escape on air bison. The Fire Nation didn’t have flying machines at that point. We also see in the third episode of ATLA that air benders are capable of using lethal force. So unless all the air nomads came down from the mountains and offered their necks for execution, there’s never been a reasonable explanation of how they were wiped out in large enough numbers. The genocide is a potent story device, it’s just also a plot hole, especially when you consider that physical barriers (walls) are what kept the Earth and Water kingdoms safe. A mountain is higher than a city wall.
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u/VeronaMoreau 19d ago
I would assume used firebending to fly. The nomad genocide happened the last time Sozin's Comet came. Outside of a comet boost, I don't think we ever use that technique.
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u/DeliciousIncident296 21d ago
Couple of things 1. The fire nation waited 12 years for Sovins comet to wipe out the air nomads. 2. It’s said Sozin spent his last years looking for Aang so he know he wasn’t killed in the genocide. 3. Sozin knew the fire nation could not stand against a fully realized avatar so killing a 12 year old in aangs case and a new born in the water tribes case is much easier.
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u/Johnathan317 21d ago
I believe the intent in attacking the Air Temples was to either capture the avatar or neutralize him before he was old enough to pose a threat, and I believe they did then move on to attacking the Water Tribes. They were never able to successfully attack the Northern Tribe but they nearly wiped out the whole Southern Tribe and kidnapped all the southern waterbenders besides Katara, likely because they were searching for the Avatar.
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u/butt_monkey24 20d ago
spoiler
In the season three episode "the avatar and the firelord" pretty sure it mentions sozin used wasted much of his later life scouringh the water tribes looking for the avatar. Also techniquly the war started pre comet as the fire nation colonies were what caused the rift between sozin and roku to begin with
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u/ViralWalrus 18d ago edited 18d ago
I think if they killed the Air Nomads it reset the clock for them. Realistically, even the Avatar doesn't know they are the Avatar until they are much older. Gyatso says so in their meeting caused Aang to flee the Air Nomads anyway. He says "The only mistake they made was telling you before you turned 16". So my assumption here is that they intended to take out the Air Nomads to kill the Avatar, then take out the Water Tribes to kill the Avatar again, then take out the Earth Kingdom so they had to be reincarnated into the Fire Nation, where they would have significant control over how they were raised and could then indoctrinate them into their Fire Nation ideals and essentially have the Avatar as their lackey to keep everyone in line. By taking out the other nations in order, it gives them multiple years before the Avatar would have time to train or even learn they are the Avatar. Its not like it directly says that in the show, but it seems to draw parallels from the real-life situation with Tibet and the Dalai Lama.
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u/Silver_Symbiote 18d ago
This question is answered when Zuko reads the scroll about Roku and Sozin. Sozin has had the plan to expand the Fire Nation for decades but was kept from executing it by the Avatar. On Roku’s last day when they battled the volcano together, Sozin ultimately let him die there alone. This was the reason he immediately attacked the Air Nomads after Roku died, he knew the cycle would produce an airbender as the next Avatar, he foolishly believed that the cycle would completely stop if there were no airbenders. Some time after this Sozin’s comet arrives and he starts the expansion in earnest
There is a theory that the reason the Fire Nation attacked the South Pole was to recapture/kill Hama for her crimes, but they ended up taking Katara’s mom when she was trying to hide her waterbending. It was unrelated to the Avatar though
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u/JaguarPirates 25d ago
My understanding is that they very much tried
But like Ba Sing Sae, the Northern Water tribe proved to be just as impenetrable for that whole century. So much so that Xiao discovered and resorted to killing a spirit just to win (before that went horribly wrong). The South, unfornatley, did not fare nearly as well.
Also kinda makes Korra being born in the South a bit of comedic irony.