I have been slowly making my way through the Avatar: The Last Airbender graphic novels and this is the latest one. (Check out the earlier ones like The Promise and The Search). I think I might have read this one before, a lot of it seemed familiar.
In this story, Avatar Aang wants to celebrate a traditional Air Nomad holiday, but a city has sprung up where the ceremony is supposed to take place. He finds a joint effort from the Earth and Fire Nations to extract metal from the area and refine it. Toph tagged along and loves this venture, while Aang is sad about the loss of tradition. Turns out that Toph’s father is in charge of it, and Aang learns from his past life Yangchen that the festival is to keep a dangerous spirit at bay. An earthquake traps many people underground, and Toph’s metal bending is the only thing keeping them safe. Toph’s students save them, and Aang ends up fighting the spirit, wounding it and causing the spirit to leave while bemoaning how humans destroy everything. Aang speaks to another spirit though, who praises the ingenuity of humans, and he ends up more hopeful about finding balance between their worlds.
Now Toph is one of my favorite characters and I loved seeing more of her here. I just wish that they wouldn’t have her clash with Aang so much. The refinery is clearly horrible for the environment, having her defend it so staunchly just looks bad. But it was cool to see her reunite with her father.
The note that the series ends on is pretty bleak. The spirit storms off saying that the Avatar won’t be enough for balance as the Avatar is human in the end. Balance seems far off, or antiquated at best. I don’t think Aang’s conversation with the hopeful spirit really makes up for that. But it does introduce these ideas that later show up in Korra.
I like chugging through these periodically, they aren’t very
long and are a nice way to see characters from Avatar that I love so much. I’ll
keep going, there are a few more that are left for me to check out!
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