The Secret Histories of Avatars Past
The new novels The Rise of Kyoshi and The Shadow of Kyoshi, follow Kyoshi’s life from her early childhood until the first few years of her Avatardom. These years cement her beliefs, hint at the life long lessons all Avatars must learn, and highlights the difficulties she has solving all the world’s problems. Kyoshi had a late start, considering the whole world thought her friend Yun was the next Avatar until they were in their late teens. Because of this, Avatar Kyoshi has to prove she is a better fit for the role than her best friend.
By the end of these novels we not only know more about the beloved Avatar Kyoshi, but also Avatar Yangchen and Avatar Kuruk. We know next to nothing about these two Avatars before the Kyoshi novels, and it turns out it was intentional. These novels reveal the secret history these Avatars have been trying to conceal. Their actions will affect five Avatar reincarnations and will create one question that shapes their lives as the Avatar—how do you stop someone who has enacted irredeemable violence without resorting to murder?
Major Spoilers Ahead!
At the end of Kyoshi’s second novel, The Shadow of Kyoshi, Kyoshi works out her hang-ups about the previous Avatar with the previous Avatar, Avatar Kuruk, to find out the true meaning of his past and uncover the real reason she resents him so much. Kyoshi eventually sees the truth, learns how to forgive her past life, and experiences spiritual healing. Now that she knows the truth about his life, she is finally able to commune with further past lives and speaks with Avatar Yangchen, who has even more information on the Avatars that the public is not aware of. For reference, Yangchen is the most respected Avatar of the era, meaning that Kuruk and Kyoshi have not lived up to Yangchen’s legacy in the eyes of the people.
Avatar Yangchen
As soon as Kyoshi praises her past life, Yangchen stops Kyoshi and rejects her own reputation. She actually apologized to Kyoshi, confessing that she is only seen as a great Avatar because she was great to humans. Yangchen explains that she was biased in her Avatardom, favoring humans over spirits in interspecies arguments. Many spirits came to her saying that humans were disrespecting their territories. In response to their pleas, Yangchen told the spirits to leave their territories in the physical world and live only in the spirit world, that the humans would honor and respect their territories while the spirits were gone. But not every human kept their promise.
Because too many humans went back on their treaties and angered the spirits they’d appeased, the spirits eventually changed from their true forms into beings consumed by rage and violence. They wreaked havoc on the human world again, targeting the people and villages that broke their treaties in the first place. These spirits sought their revenge during Kuruk’s lifetime.
Yangchen did everything she could to give everyone, every human, what they wanted. That eventually led to the entitlement many humans carried with them during Kuruk and Kyoshi’s eras. Yangchen would solve problems between the two worlds by forging treaties between humans and spirits, but because these treaties favored humans more than they did the spirits, there was peace in her era but there was no justice carried out by Yangchen, because there was no balance.
Avatar Kuruk
Kuruk was seen as a lazy Avatar because most of his work was done in secret. He was tasked with the heartbreaking job of venturing into the spirit world and the killing angry spirits that were offended during Yangchen’s lifetime. For a long time, he did not know about the broken treaties. The spirits he was forced to kill were too angry to think of peace and make any more agreements. Kuruk’s spirit suffered. His body and mind deteriorated in front of everyone’s eyes. And on top of everything, Kuruk felt as though he couldn’t tell anyone about his quests to hunt down spirits because the act of destroying spirits was too dishonorable, in this world, and the next.
Kuruk’s past is a reference to Book 1 Episode 20 “The Siege of the Water Tribe Part 2” of the Avatar the Last Airbender TV series. Koh The Face Stealer told Aang that he stole the face of someone Kuruk loved. Viewers were led to believe that Koh stole this face out of pure malice, but in actuality he could have done it to level out the playing field, giving his people, the spirits, a win against a human monster. A monster that eventually joined them in the spirit world when he died. He was so feared in the spirit world, that most spirits kept their distance from him, making him even lonelier than before.
Avatar Kyoshi
The actions and mistakes of the past Avatars have always affected future Avatars’ lives. The consequences of one lifetime will always affect the next. But to see Kyoshi being so heavily burdened by two of her previous past lives’ experiences, and seeing her wrestle with such intensely personal issues, both as the Avatar and as a young woman, broke down every previous image of Kyoshi I had in my head and replaced it with someone new. Kyoshi was someone I saw as a force of nature, an immovable rock. Her image demanded confidence and she always seemed so sure of herself. Her fans assumed that she was like this because that was just her personality and she could lead because of how confident she is. But she’s really not. She’s constantly second-guessing herself, obsessing over future plans, ignoring her health, and learning painful lessons without having much time to reflect or heal from everything she’s learned.
It’s because Kyoshi has learned all her lessons the hard way that she’s so confident in the future. Her confidence is a result of the lessons she’s had to learn from her past selves and her early life as the Avatar. She’s confident because she’s had to learn about balance. Whenever Kyoshi is in a conflict, she’s assessing all options from all sides and parties before making a decision.
We know Kyoshi as one of the greatest Avatars of all time. And we know now that it’s because she has had to shoulder immense tragedy and hardship and learn from it. In learning from her past, she is able to make room for her future. She’s finding solutions for generations long problems, made life long friends on all her travels, and got a girlfriend who is also her best friend. Kyoshi is one of the best Avatars of all time because she built herself up from nothing and became the Avatar she wanted to be. Period.
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If you love the Avatar the Last Airbender series as much as I do I definitely recommend reading the Kyoshi books. Her origin story is amazing and I can’t recommend it enough. You can find it where ever you buy books but I recommend buying from Bookshop.org. They donate a portion of their profits to local bookstores and even support local bookstores’ online orders. Check them out!
Who’s your favorite avatar? Let me know in the comments down below. I can’t pick between any of them, they’re all my favorite and I’ll defend each and every one of them!
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