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Summary
It doesn’t take long for the rumors to start.
The Fire Nation prides itself on its civilization. It isn’t like the other, lesser, nations who throw their children away by sending them into war. Those uncultured and unfeeling savages who are destroying their own future faster than the Fire Nation can save them from themselves.
Every Fire Nation child goes to school. They learn reading and writing, the illustrious history of their country, and what will be expected of them as proper, upstanding Fire Nation citizens. They are to be protected, because children are the future glory of the nation.
The crown prince is thirteen when his father burns his face in front of an audience of hundreds.
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Bookmark Notes:
Interesting, I like the idea that the fire nation citizens also disapproved of Ozai and were also extremely discontent with him but were powerless to stop him
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Bookmark Notes:
'The Fire Lord’s eyes ought to be warm. He ought to be the light of their people, the hearth fire that wards away the darkest night. The sun that touches their lives, even from afar.
Fire Lord Ozai’s eyes are as cold as a waterbender’s ice as they glance over the crowd. He doesn’t know how everyone else can’t see it.''“How long has this been happening?” Sage Kazuo asks.
“A week, I guess—” Airi starts to say. She can remember the first time she came in from the dormitory and found the candles extinguished.
She stops, though, because a week ago the prince had sailed away in disgrace, with no fanfare or warning.
As a child, Airi had joined the throngs of people cheering General Iroh, then the crown prince himself, as he departed for his next Earth Kingdom campaign. She remembers how bright and happy everyone had been, how there were vendors selling sweet bean buns and paper dragons for children to play with.
There hadn’t been anything like that for Prince Zuko. She had heard that he had fallen gravely ill under the weight of his father’s disappointment for his actions — whatever they were; the accounts differed — and that he had to be carried onto the ship.
The Fire Lord sent him away in the middle of the night, under the moon’s gaze, and now the candles in Agni’s temple die almost as soon as they are lit. Sage Kazuo’s eyes meet hers.
A bad omen.''The harvest is poor. Villages that relied on farming reap a fraction of their past yields. Villages that used to rely on fishing aren’t catching fish.
More parents send their teenagers into the arms of the military. The military always finds a way to feed itself.''Zuojia’s play isn’t about the Fire Lord, ask anyone. It isn’t even set in the Fire Nation.
It’s about a powerful Earth Kingdom mob boss who hates his eldest son for being everything he isn’t — honorable, just, and a Fire Nation sympathizer. He stands against his father’s cruel treatment of his suffering mother (a Fire Nation bride, of course, tragically forced into marriage by the mob boss in convoluted circumstances) and is abused for it. In his rage, the Earth Kingdom mob boss uses his earthbending to gravely injure his son. The son bravely and defiantly frees his mother, who runs until she meets a Fire Nation squad. She begs them to help, and they arrive in time to stop the cruel Earth Kingdom criminal from even further injuring his eldest son.
The earthbender refuses to yield, instead reveling loudly in his right to disfigure his children if he wants to. The noble Fire Nation soldiers arrest him and offer comfort to the mother and child. The play ends on a speech extolling the virtues of the Fire Nation, where children are protected and no man would think to abuse his dependents.
See? Nothing like the Fire Lord at all.''Fire Lord Sozen had ordered all documents about the Air Nomads to be turned over to the government immediately after Avatar Roku’s death. Tu Mu’s grandfather had complied, handing over scrolls of airbending forms, philosophy, and even his spirited letters with a monk named Gyatso about morality. He had kept the copies he’d laboriously made hidden in a false floor underneath his private study. Even when soldiers had come knocking to verify his grandfather had turned all of his materials over, the cache had remained undiscovered.
He’d given it to Tu Mu shortly after his graduation.
It’s strange to walk around, respectfully deferred to professionally as the Fire Lord’s court historian, setting the history curriculum for the Nation’s children to learn, and to know that it’s all a lie. He has the documents that prove it, copied in his own grandfather’s hand.
His most precious hidden document isn’t about the Air Nomads, at least not directly. Tucked away among his grandfather’s stash of forbidden history was the journal he’d kept in the intervening years between Avatar Roku’s death and the genocide of the Air Nomads. An account of a changing nation — and his shame.
You don’t actually need people to believe your propaganda, his grandfather had written in cramped, angry characters. You just need them to go along with it. The belief will come later, once everyone who knows the truth is too afraid to speak it. Like me, coward that I am.''Airi lights a candle in secret on the exiled prince’s birthday. She’s done so every year since his banishment, and it’s affirmed her thoughts every time. Her temple lays in the heart of the Fire Nation, yet the flames flicker weakly. They fade away even in this place where they should burn the strongest.
The candle she lights for Prince Zuko burns the whole night, long after the others sputtered out.' -
Bookmark Notes:
holy shit man