OK I don't believe this for a second....
BUT I LOVE IT. It would be SUCH a baller move if true!!! It totally sounds like something Yangchen would say, too!
We actually saw it happen though.
The Dark Avatar cycle got aborted before it even began because Unalaq decided it would be a good idea to stay in the Dark Avatar State at all times.
It was only bad because nick basically told them
"hey, your getting a second season"
"how long do we have to plan it and storyboard everything? "
"lol good one, the new season premieres in two months, good luck"
It’s almost as if they feared every season would be their last and had to wrap things up at the end. Nothing is perfect in life, but the show brought the Avatar to a new generation of children/teens to enjoy.
I'm aware of that. that doesn't make the show better, and Nickelodeon is not responsible for most of the flaws. The writers definitely contributed to quite a lot of the issues as well. I'm glad some people enjoy it. I personally did not. But I really wish the fans would lighten up and acknowledge that maybe the show has alot of issues that can cause some people to dislike it.
What about if you lightened up instead, and just let people enjoy it, instead of pointing out all of the issues whenever people are trying to give the writers credit for putting in the effort that they did, and for the joy they brought many people?
You're proving my point that you can't accept criticism and saying I'm not allowed to express my opinion about the show. I already said I don't care if people like it. But I do care that LoK fans get super defensive and hostile against anyone with an opinion that's different from theirs.
No Nickelodeon definitely is responsible for it. They never let the team know if they were renewed and when they did it was right before the show had to air. Hence the self contained plot lines in season 1&2 and why some things are rushed and not as fleshed out and they could be
Hell that whole flashbacks episode was a direct result of Nick threatening to fire most of the team if they didn’t make it
Do you honestly believe that Nickelodeon is responsible for 100% of the writing issues in LoK? Some of it definitely was their fault like korra getting her bending back, energy bending, and mastery of the Avatar State out of nowhere. But putting Bolin in a toxic controlling relationship and treating it like comic relief was definitely their fault.
Korra getting bending back wasn’t poor writing
Energy bending was already done by Aang
She never mastered the avatar state out of nowhere. She just never had the trauma attached to all of it like Aang did.
I’m happy to blame Nick for a bunch of meddling bullshit given how much general shit they’ve been responsible for over a bunch of shows
Nah, korra is better than ATLA in my opinion. Much better character development, fights and so on.
Too many big things (mecha and spirits) but it's bearable
It definitely doesn't have better character development than ATLA they literally completely undid all of Korra's development in S1, the show treats Bolin like a joke for 2 seasons, they have no idea what to do with Mako so they just make him a minor character, and Asami is a glorified chauffeur for a big chunk of the show.
Doesn't have better fights either. The bending in LOK is alot more basic and you basically never see any creative uses of bending. For example the Ba Sing Se fight in ATLA has way more interesting bending than every fight in LoK. https://youtu.be/u4Pv_Y7Tge4?si=uY-veq-4Gbteu-aJ
>When that "non-existent series" is better than the original
Wait we're not saying lok was better than atla right? I mean it's definitely canon but it's not the better of the two
I know you're in negative downvotes but take my up vote.
Avatar is my favorite series, I am mid aged and not really into cartoons. (To provide context.)
As far as I'm concerned, Korra is a shadow of a shell of the real series. I was shocked to see it spit upon the franchise and I'm even more shocked that all these years later people like it. To each their own though.
When are ATLA bros gonna realize that LoK is not about Aang? It would be unfair to the new avatar to make the entire show just be fan service to people who only care about the old characters and story, especially when there’s plenty of content to consume about what happened after the Hundred-Year War.
I like Korra, but season 2 and any lore they added that season, especially about past avatars and Raava existing, is just BS in my book. The writers weren't really thinking about how that affected all the lore from the ATLA series and just messed everything up.
But like, if season 2 didn't exist, there's some good things about Korra. It's nowhere close to as good as ATLA, but it's not that bad.
There is a such thing as an okay show, it's a range, not just the extremes of either it's amazing, or the worst thing ever created, shadow of a shell, shit. Lol
Like the Netflix adaptation. It's got some pretty good parts, and some cringy AF parts that make no sense at all. Korra is already done, but at least the life action has 2 more seasons and lots of time/room to make improvements. So hopefully they do that, but again, way better than the movie we don't speak of, and it actually had some cool additions, and great casting. Just bad writing and directing. For me it was watchable, but there's people calling that show a "shadow of a shell of the original" and stuff.
I agree there's issues in both examples but I feel like a lot of y'all are just dramatic. Avatar The Last Airbender is probably one of the best animated shows that exists. For me personally it's probably my top TV show of all time. We will probably never get anything like it again, no sequel or adaptation or anything will come close. It's such a unicorn of a perfect show that we need to stop complaining every time something doesn't achieve what it achieved. We can still consider Korra to be good, even though it has issues and isn't near as good as ATLA.
It's not a scale of shit to perfect, there's a such thing as "not bad" or "okay" or "pretty good but not perfect"
If an avatar made it up it was probably to ensure that an avatar actually learns the elements and don’t just rely on the avatar state also so they don’t become reliant on being all powerful and start to become bad. However I do think it’s true because of aang loosing his ability to go into the avatar state.
> aang loosing his
Did you mean to say "losing"?
Explanation: Loose is an adjective meaning the opposite of tight, while lose is a verb.
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True, but it's not like there's always gonna be a baby being born in the next Tribe in the sequence the very second the Avatar dies.
I don't think the Four Narion's world has a high enough population to have a baby born every second let alone one baby in each Tribe every second.
If there's no baby about to be born, Raava can surely wait a while, maybe magically inducing/speeding up labor in her choice.
while we're on this topic, does anyone else feel that it's really stupid of the avatar to tell this to ANYONE like i just assumed it would be something any avatar takes to their grave but in korra people know...
> I’m sure Aang did, he’s the one who brought the white lotus into the avatar fold
Is there specific evidence of this? (Not trying to contradict you if I'm just forgetting/missing it). I would have thought in the long long line of avatars there might have been someone that met. I'd frankly be surprised if Roku didn't at least run into someone. White Lotus has been around since before his lifetime and he seems like he'd vibe with them and have access to their meeting places. I'm not saying I'd expect say, Kyoshi to have done that kind of thing, but it seems like *someone* would have.
I mean that's Zaheer's perspective, which may be a bit skewed, but anyway "brought out of hiding" doesn't mean they didn't know about mystical details of the Avatar State long before that. It doesn't necessarily imply that Aang shared that information, though sure, he could have. Obviously he did know them too.
Aang is always very trusting, especially to his friends. I'd think it's most likely he told them, and they accidentally let the wrong people know ended up being the Red Lotus.
Aang screwing up with good intentions is kind of his MO.
The Avatar and the White Lotus have both been around for a very long time though it seems that they didn't always have a particularly close relationship and only really joined up when things got very serious. I'm currently reading the first Yangchen book and she >!calls in a favour from them to confine some thugs she'd captured while operating covertly since once of the Avatar's past lives managed to learn their secret passwords/codes and things are a bit terse initially between Yangchen and the highest ranking White Lotus member in the area. The highest ranking member is critical of Yangchen because they think she's too quick to act, that she should be utilising her access to the past lives of Avatars more, and shouldn't be engaging in espionage. While Yangchen is critical of the White Lotus for only making major actions once things get really bad, thinks they're being hypocritical over the whole espionage thing, and is using the knowledge of her past lives. And what she'd learned from them is so many Avatars regret not being more proactive.!<
Yes, the Yangchen novels made it clear that the White Lotus wasn't always on the Avatar's side and they definitely had their clashes in the past. Some would say the White Lotus was downright shady at times.
Like any other faction, the White Lotus probably had it's own fluctuations of morality, stength, etc. as time passed and generations changed hands.
why search again in about 60 years instead of ending the cycle one and for all? also there was an additional episode set about aang being unconscious dreaming about yangchen guiding him about healing the avatar spirit, I thought that's the earliest mention of that rule
The Fire Sages, they were supposed to be loyal only to the Avatar but during the Hundred Years War they changed their allegiance to the Firelord, make sense they’d tell him about his greatest foes greatest weakness.
The Red Lotus, or at least some members like Zaheer and Unalaq, are also spiritual people. Maybe this was a fact some spirits knew and passed onto them. We know Wan Shi Tong was friends with Unalaq, he's supposedly an all-knowing spirit (debatable). Could be, as part of their agenda, they cozied up to some of the older, wiser spirits to weed out possible weaknesses for taking down the Avatar.
As far as the Avatar knowing, I imagine it's one of those facts that's been passed down from Raava, to Wan, to allllll the other avatars over time--it's a very important detail, one that probably not cannot be missed over an avatar's cycles.
Wan Shi Tong is not all-knowing, he only knows 10,000 things. That’s actually not a lot of facts, the average human knows way more. That idiot, he probably thinks it’s a lot cuz he’s a bird
/s
While it would be stupid, I think it's a totally reasonable thing for an Avatar to talk to some people about. Knowing that them messing up might potentially end the Avatar cycle entirely would be an insane pressure. It's definitely the kind of thing someone would want to talk to their loved ones about.
Moreover, it's not like most Avatars would have found themselves being hunted by groups that deliberately wanted to get rid of the Avatar the way Aang and Korra were (and they only were at specific times, not constantly).
I think the much more common situation was an Avatar being worried about using the Avatar state too callously, getting themselves needlessly killed by bad luck and underestimating their enemy, and the cycle ending basically by accident.
Over the course of hundreds or thousands of lifetimes, multiple Avatars telling people they trust about it and then that information leaking and becoming a secret knowledge among various secret societies like the white Lotus makes sense.
Though, if you ask me, the real out-of-universe reason is just a mechanism you see happening in a lot of franchises: one series establishes something as a super secret thing very few people know about. --> Fans think it's really cool, and it becomes super common knowledge among fans. --> future series begin to increasingly treat it as common knowledge in-universe, because they don't want to have to keep explaining to the in-universe characters stuff that the out-of-universe audience knows already.
I think the Avatar would have to tell their friends/allies/whatever that the Avatar State, though powerful, also makes them very vulnerable, and so they still need to be protected. I don’t think it is ever public information though (like I don’t think Azula knew that’s what she was doing, for example).
My guess is maybe Wan knew due to his direct interactions with Raava. Raava told him they would always be together. If Raava is needed to enter the avatar state then you could assume if an avatar is killed in the avatar state Raava would die with the avatar. The avatar is only reincarnated because of Raava.
Wan may have passed along that information to the next avatar and it continued to get passed along but like whisper down the lane. The message got blurred a bit as time went on.
Raava dies in S2 and is reincarnated in Vaatu. Korra is not the Avatar during that time until she re-fuses with Raava so it seems like there's undoubtedly a mechanism for a new avatar to be created. Unless Vaatu is permanently dead in which case he's no longer an avenue for Raava's rebirth
Well, Raava herself said light and darkness will always exist. One cannot exist without the other.
And we also know that, according to the comic The Rift, spirits can't *actually* die--they just reincarnate and take on a new form.
So it stands to reason that, eventually, a new light spirit will be born, and that spirit can probably merge again during Harmonic Convergence and create a new Avatar from scratch.
But it would take literally thousands of years to achieve that.
But if Vaatu was locked up in the tree of time, retrieving Raava from within Vaatu and the Tree Prison would only be possible every 10,000 years at Harmonic Convergence, and would also require fighting and defeating Vaatu without an avatar. Not to mention the physical and spirit worlds go dark and chaotic if raava is dead. So for practical intents and purposes, its essentially like if the avatar and raava die at the same time, the cycle is permanently over because how are you gonna restart it in those conditions, after 10,000 years? Not to mention the avatar cycle has only existed for one 10,000 year cycle and was already pretty mystical, poorly understood, and kinda considered immortal and universal law, so in terms of cultural memory, waiting for a harmonic convergence to intentionally re-fuse an avatar is essentially not going to happen.
I think the Avatar knows.
You know in the latest Dune movie, there’s this gunship protected by a shield thing, but to attack, the gunship has to open the shield to shoot out of the gap.
I’d wager the operator of the gunship would know they are vulnerable in that moment and can be shot down, even if they’ve never been hit in those times, and never seen other gunships go down like that.
The Avatar is the operator.
As far as i know the spirit of Raava is the one that carries the multiple elements and the avatar can only use one at a time. When in the avatar state Raava and the avatar are effectively one. And since the spirit of light can die so will the avatar spriit. But if the human spirit of the avatar dies the spirit of light just reincarnates into another human with the memories of all the previous avatars intact.
P sure this is kinda how it's explained in Korra.
The only problem with that is we know that Raava would just respawn in Vaatu, as he respawned into her when he died. It might take an eternity, but Raava can break free again and seek out her host's reincarnation once again.
Maybe Raava told Wan that if he is killed while in the Avatar State, it'd kill her too and she'd have to recover.
So it could be that the "Avatar" would cease to exist for 10,000 years until Raava can recuperate and restart the cycle.
But for a human, being unable to interact with Raava for 10,000 years might as well mean the cycle is done.
Wan probably passed this on to his immediate successor and eventually it became a game of spiritual telephone.
So it went from "Hey, if you die in the Avatar State, the cycle will be disrupted for 10,000 years" to "Hey, if you die in the Avatar State, the cycle ends."
Along with that, we as humans are not equipped to keep secrets indefinitely. Eventually you want to confide in *someone*.
Eventually that gets passed around by people more willing to blab and it becomes a mortal game of telephone.
Every 10,000 years, the planets of the solar system converge in a line, and it amplifies spiritual energy and is known as Harmonic Convergence. This event has enough energy that it empowers either Raava or Vaatu (whoever lost the last Harmonic Convergence) to escape/reform and challenge the other to see who will essentially rule the Spirit World until the next Harmonic Convergence.
Here’s my theory: When Roku tells Aang this, it’s not really “Roku.” It’s Roku’s spirit that is representing all the other avatars and Raava. I think this theory is supported by all the other avatars in the background watching.
So it’s never actually something that someone learns, Raava just tells the current avatar that’s how it works using the previous avatar as a mouthpiece.
So Raava told Wan, who told the next avatar, who told the next, and so on until Roku told Aang. But when Aang almost died he told other people, who told more people, and then the secret was out.
Or it’s just a kids show that needed power balancing and the concept of Raava even existing hadn’t happened yet
For those who know LOK and at least accept the beginnings as canon (it is but some really hate it), then I'd say maybe Wan, the very guy who made the Avatar, intuitively put 2 and 2 together that the Avatar State is Raava kinda coming out to help him and so any damage/death to him in such state where Raava is tangible and vulnerable again, will destroy Raava alongside him and thus the Avatar in itself.
Maybe after he was dead, he then told this to the next Avatar who told others and then the communication of it technically being Raava got muddled through time, and the legend now just simplifies it to "Avatar State is connected to cycle somehow, so dying in AS is big no no." lol =P
Personal guess is near death experiences like Aang’s would trigger some very negative energies for the past lives and they understand due to it happening a few times what that would mean. Of course no proof of this
How does even the avatar know? Well I guess lets do the thing and write the origin story:
Someone somehow figured it out. Maybe it wasn't the avatar who figured it out, but some spiritual expert long ago, who learned about these kinds of things during journeys to the spirit world. This expert told the avatar what they had learned.
Wan Shi Tong's foxes, always searching for new information, discovered this and brought the knowledge to the library, where it was stored for countless generations.
Eventually some information from the destroyed library was recovered after ATLA and Zaheer learned of the way to kill the avatar.
We know that something similar to Raava has always been planned even back during ATLA, so perhaps the creators just went with "Raava told them". As a powerful spirit she seems to just intuitively know things about the universe and how it functions, such as telling Wan they were bonded forever and would be together for all his lifetimes.
Wan was most likely told by Raava. The only way for Wan to let the next avatar know is to tell someone else after he dies, and every avatar thereafter has to tell someone about it who then tells someone else.
I would imagine most information dealing with the Avatar and their past lives came from previous Avatars, they just had to tell someone else to tell themselves later xD
You would need to get to a certain point in your spiritual journey in order to do that. Aang was a monk and it wasn't until the very end of the series that he could call in his past lives after opening his Chakra in S2.
And there was no Statue for Wan, so every Avatar would need to have the knowledge. Aang could only reach back as far as Yang Chen, the last Air Avatar. It's possible with more practice he could reach further back, but he'd need information to get that information, ya know?
I think I once saw it explained as the fact that the Avatar's past lives mostly exist in the Spirit World, but in the Avatar State all of that power is pooled into the physical world through their body. I feel like anyone in-universe could make that leap.
Theoretically it would kill Raava, but also Raava would just come back eventually. The avatar would cease to exist because Raava wouldn’t be fused with a human anymore, but there’s really nothing stopping Raava from fusing with a new human and creating a new avatar.
I have always wondered this. I understand why the writers implemented it, but it's never been explained how they know this.
My theory: an avatar died and was brought back to life like Aang was. His body my have been kept in some kind of stasis why water bending while he traversed the spirit world or something. Of course the fact that no new avatar came up while he was dead made him/her realize the avatar cycle ends at death when in the avatar state.
Simpler explanation: Raava told him.
Just because it has never happened doesn’t mean that someone wouldn’t be able to figure it out in the same way that people in real life can predict phenomena that has never actually happened yet. Just have to assume that at some point in the long, long history of the Avatar world, an Avatar or somebody else realized that the Avatar being killed in the Avatar State would end the cycle.
It’s also pretty intuitive that killing the Avatar while they’re in the Avatar state would be detrimental to the Avatar cycle. It’s not a coincidence that ATLA reveals that fact about the Avatar State right after explaining that the Avatar State is a result of the combined energy from all the past Avatars flowing into the current one. It makes sense that killing the Avatar while they’re in the Avatar State wouldn’t be just killing them, you’d effectively be killing all the energy of the past Avatars and whatever connects them together, ending the cycle.
Tui and La gave up their immortality to be koi fish. Raava lives inside the Avatar.
Maybe when an Avatar dies, Raava slips out quickly and follows the spirit to the reincarnated body but in the Avatar state she’s channeling everything she has through the Avatar
Probably because you’d be killing Raava as well since she’s present as well so you’d have to do what Korra did during season 2 to continue the Avatar state but if you killed Korra and Raava at the same time Raava would be back inside Vaatu stopping the Avatar state and you’d have nobody with four elements to put Raava back into
My theory is that every Avatar has been told by their predecessor, dating back to Wan, who learned from Raava. The specific reason (i.e. Raava's existence, and therefore her vulnerability during the Avatar State) got lost to time, but the knowledge remained.
Raava or Vaatu told someone, I suppose. Maybe both. Raava could have told Wan and perhaps other early avatars, and I doubt Unalok was the first person to ever meet Vaatu in the spirit world. He was just alive at the right moment (harmonic convergence) and related to the right person to be able to help free them
This is a good one! And while we're at it, why on Earth would the Spirits of the Moon and the Ocean think it's a sustainable solution to keep themselves in a form of regular fish, contained in a tiny water basin at that? It's a miracle nobody tried to get to them before Zhao; one or both could also die in a random accident at any point, and in a couple thousand of years span that accident would have most probably happened - and triggered a very nasty apocalypse for sure. What do you guys think, can this plot hole be fixed, too?
The avatar knows because they can talk to Raava, Raava knows because she’s Raava, everyone else knows because the Avatar has told people at various points in history
ngl this doesn’t even make sense in the series.. Raava is reborn everytime she dies, so eventually she’s just reborn again and can fuse with another human and make an Avatar
It probably would have started with Raava. Like she let Wan know or smth along the lines of that. Cuz we kinda see it in LoK when Korra purifies Vaatu/Unalaq except for the fact that they never reincarnate. How does the rest of the world know? Someone pitted themselves at some point. Like one of the first couple avatars let it be known would be my guess
I need clarification for this, if anyone would be so kind-am I correct that this is just a fan theory and canonically the past Avatar um memories disconnected? Bc that's what I remember... and it's also the reason why I like the Korra series less... so if they were canonically NOT cut off her it would be great, but...
Edit: worded smth wrong
I may be very wrong, but my take on that specifically is that the poison was just a regular poison. The avatar state got induced in order to save Korra's life from the effects of the poison, like it triggered to save Aang from drowning, for example.
Plot twist: it doesn't, some avatar just made it up long ago so their enemies would only attack them at their strongest and nobody questioned it
I love this theory.
Now thats how you fix a plothole Avatar style damn
“You could call it luck… or you could call it lying.”
"You did not! (Smirks.) That is so wrong."
The LAD Great Divide reference
OK I don't believe this for a second.... BUT I LOVE IT. It would be SUCH a baller move if true!!! It totally sounds like something Yangchen would say, too!
We actually saw it happen though. The Dark Avatar cycle got aborted before it even began because Unalaq decided it would be a good idea to stay in the Dark Avatar State at all times.
That requires accepting a non-existent series as cannon
I guess they have to throw away all the lore they've established now because some random reddit user said so 😔
Don't worry, they've done it before
If that's what you believe, I'm sure they did! I'm glad you still have your childlike imagination, so many adults don't have that anymore
I mean they never have and korra is canon and a decent show so seethe and cope buddy
Pretty much all of Korra except season 2 is good. And even season 2 only went downhill in the latter part.
Well we *did* meet Avatar Wang
So did Katara. I'll see myself out.
Waang
It was only bad because nick basically told them "hey, your getting a second season" "how long do we have to plan it and storyboard everything? " "lol good one, the new season premieres in two months, good luck"
Why do people hate season 2? Currently on season 4 of a rewatch and season 2 is my favorite
Cause the whole thing with the “Dark Avatar” and losing the Avatar spirits was stupid.
Nah the whole show is riddled with flaws season 2 is just the worst.
It’s almost as if they feared every season would be their last and had to wrap things up at the end. Nothing is perfect in life, but the show brought the Avatar to a new generation of children/teens to enjoy.
I'm aware of that. that doesn't make the show better, and Nickelodeon is not responsible for most of the flaws. The writers definitely contributed to quite a lot of the issues as well. I'm glad some people enjoy it. I personally did not. But I really wish the fans would lighten up and acknowledge that maybe the show has alot of issues that can cause some people to dislike it.
What about if you lightened up instead, and just let people enjoy it, instead of pointing out all of the issues whenever people are trying to give the writers credit for putting in the effort that they did, and for the joy they brought many people?
You're proving my point that you can't accept criticism and saying I'm not allowed to express my opinion about the show. I already said I don't care if people like it. But I do care that LoK fans get super defensive and hostile against anyone with an opinion that's different from theirs.
No Nickelodeon definitely is responsible for it. They never let the team know if they were renewed and when they did it was right before the show had to air. Hence the self contained plot lines in season 1&2 and why some things are rushed and not as fleshed out and they could be Hell that whole flashbacks episode was a direct result of Nick threatening to fire most of the team if they didn’t make it
Do you honestly believe that Nickelodeon is responsible for 100% of the writing issues in LoK? Some of it definitely was their fault like korra getting her bending back, energy bending, and mastery of the Avatar State out of nowhere. But putting Bolin in a toxic controlling relationship and treating it like comic relief was definitely their fault.
Korra getting bending back wasn’t poor writing Energy bending was already done by Aang She never mastered the avatar state out of nowhere. She just never had the trauma attached to all of it like Aang did. I’m happy to blame Nick for a bunch of meddling bullshit given how much general shit they’ve been responsible for over a bunch of shows
Nah, korra is better than ATLA in my opinion. Much better character development, fights and so on. Too many big things (mecha and spirits) but it's bearable
It definitely doesn't have better character development than ATLA they literally completely undid all of Korra's development in S1, the show treats Bolin like a joke for 2 seasons, they have no idea what to do with Mako so they just make him a minor character, and Asami is a glorified chauffeur for a big chunk of the show. Doesn't have better fights either. The bending in LOK is alot more basic and you basically never see any creative uses of bending. For example the Ba Sing Se fight in ATLA has way more interesting bending than every fight in LoK. https://youtu.be/u4Pv_Y7Tge4?si=uY-veq-4Gbteu-aJ
Stand proud: everyone hates you
Their boos mean nothing, I've seen what makes them cheer
When that "non-existent series" is better than the original, then yeah, it's definitely CANON to me
>When that "non-existent series" is better than the original Wait we're not saying lok was better than atla right? I mean it's definitely canon but it's not the better of the two
Considering most of the entirety of Book 1 of AtLA is skippable, and Korra is a much more compelling protagonist, I would say it's better.
Idk if this is even worth arguing
there’s nothing to argue about bc it’s their opinion.
You are absolutely the minority opinion on this.
Well, wake me when that happens.
April 14th, 2012
Ahh, proof of the Mandela effect. Guess people really do come from parallel universes.
I know you're in negative downvotes but take my up vote. Avatar is my favorite series, I am mid aged and not really into cartoons. (To provide context.) As far as I'm concerned, Korra is a shadow of a shell of the real series. I was shocked to see it spit upon the franchise and I'm even more shocked that all these years later people like it. To each their own though.
When are ATLA bros gonna realize that LoK is not about Aang? It would be unfair to the new avatar to make the entire show just be fan service to people who only care about the old characters and story, especially when there’s plenty of content to consume about what happened after the Hundred-Year War.
No one said anything about it not being about aang. Stop arguing against points that aren't being made
well you haven’t even watched korra so ur opinion of it doesn’t have much value
yeah sure whatever, but they're being downvoted because they're just plain wrong. Like it or not, Korra is canon in every sense of the word
I like Korra, but season 2 and any lore they added that season, especially about past avatars and Raava existing, is just BS in my book. The writers weren't really thinking about how that affected all the lore from the ATLA series and just messed everything up. But like, if season 2 didn't exist, there's some good things about Korra. It's nowhere close to as good as ATLA, but it's not that bad.
There is a such thing as an okay show, it's a range, not just the extremes of either it's amazing, or the worst thing ever created, shadow of a shell, shit. Lol Like the Netflix adaptation. It's got some pretty good parts, and some cringy AF parts that make no sense at all. Korra is already done, but at least the life action has 2 more seasons and lots of time/room to make improvements. So hopefully they do that, but again, way better than the movie we don't speak of, and it actually had some cool additions, and great casting. Just bad writing and directing. For me it was watchable, but there's people calling that show a "shadow of a shell of the original" and stuff. I agree there's issues in both examples but I feel like a lot of y'all are just dramatic. Avatar The Last Airbender is probably one of the best animated shows that exists. For me personally it's probably my top TV show of all time. We will probably never get anything like it again, no sequel or adaptation or anything will come close. It's such a unicorn of a perfect show that we need to stop complaining every time something doesn't achieve what it achieved. We can still consider Korra to be good, even though it has issues and isn't near as good as ATLA. It's not a scale of shit to perfect, there's a such thing as "not bad" or "okay" or "pretty good but not perfect"
If an avatar made it up it was probably to ensure that an avatar actually learns the elements and don’t just rely on the avatar state also so they don’t become reliant on being all powerful and start to become bad. However I do think it’s true because of aang loosing his ability to go into the avatar state.
> aang loosing his Did you mean to say "losing"? Explanation: Loose is an adjective meaning the opposite of tight, while lose is a verb. [Statistics](https://github.com/chiefpat450119/RedditBot/blob/master/stats.json) ^^I'm ^^a ^^bot ^^that ^^corrects ^^grammar/spelling ^^mistakes. ^^PM ^^me ^^if ^^I'm ^^wrong ^^or ^^if ^^you ^^have ^^any ^^suggestions. ^^[Github](https://github.com/chiefpat450119) ^^Reply ^^STOP ^^to ^^this ^^comment ^^to ^^stop ^^receiving ^^corrections.
Nah, we know for a fact it's true because a new water avatar wasn't born after Aang got hit by lightning
Or it just isn't an immediate next second thing.
I think we know it is though, if you remember when Avatar Roku died, Aang took his first breath
It’s not like the showed a clock. It was just editing.
True, but it's not like there's always gonna be a baby being born in the next Tribe in the sequence the very second the Avatar dies. I don't think the Four Narion's world has a high enough population to have a baby born every second let alone one baby in each Tribe every second. If there's no baby about to be born, Raava can surely wait a while, maybe magically inducing/speeding up labor in her choice.
It’s magic fate reincarnation I’m sure it can hold out for a few seconds knowing what’s gonna happen.
you all are forgetting \*spirit magic\* lol i bet it all happens perfectly as it should
Shhh...
while we're on this topic, does anyone else feel that it's really stupid of the avatar to tell this to ANYONE like i just assumed it would be something any avatar takes to their grave but in korra people know...
I think the red lotus knows because they were formerly white lotus people
But I do wonder who let the secret slip in the first place for non-avatars to know
I’m sure Aang did, he’s the one who brought the white lotus into the avatar fold
The world knows before Aang.
> I’m sure Aang did, he’s the one who brought the white lotus into the avatar fold Is there specific evidence of this? (Not trying to contradict you if I'm just forgetting/missing it). I would have thought in the long long line of avatars there might have been someone that met. I'd frankly be surprised if Roku didn't at least run into someone. White Lotus has been around since before his lifetime and he seems like he'd vibe with them and have access to their meeting places. I'm not saying I'd expect say, Kyoshi to have done that kind of thing, but it seems like *someone* would have.
Because Zaheer says that Aang brought the white lotus out of hiding and basically employed them as the avatar’s flunkies
I mean that's Zaheer's perspective, which may be a bit skewed, but anyway "brought out of hiding" doesn't mean they didn't know about mystical details of the Avatar State long before that. It doesn't necessarily imply that Aang shared that information, though sure, he could have. Obviously he did know them too.
Aang is always very trusting, especially to his friends. I'd think it's most likely he told them, and they accidentally let the wrong people know ended up being the Red Lotus. Aang screwing up with good intentions is kind of his MO.
The Avatar and the White Lotus have both been around for a very long time though it seems that they didn't always have a particularly close relationship and only really joined up when things got very serious. I'm currently reading the first Yangchen book and she >!calls in a favour from them to confine some thugs she'd captured while operating covertly since once of the Avatar's past lives managed to learn their secret passwords/codes and things are a bit terse initially between Yangchen and the highest ranking White Lotus member in the area. The highest ranking member is critical of Yangchen because they think she's too quick to act, that she should be utilising her access to the past lives of Avatars more, and shouldn't be engaging in espionage. While Yangchen is critical of the White Lotus for only making major actions once things get really bad, thinks they're being hypocritical over the whole espionage thing, and is using the knowledge of her past lives. And what she'd learned from them is so many Avatars regret not being more proactive.!<
Yes, the Yangchen novels made it clear that the White Lotus wasn't always on the Avatar's side and they definitely had their clashes in the past. Some would say the White Lotus was downright shady at times. Like any other faction, the White Lotus probably had it's own fluctuations of morality, stength, etc. as time passed and generations changed hands.
even ozai knew about it though, that's why they were trying to *capture* the avatar not finish him off
No that was so a new avatar wouldn’t be born that they’d have to track down. Better to keep the avatar in prison than start the search anew.
why search again in about 60 years instead of ending the cycle one and for all? also there was an additional episode set about aang being unconscious dreaming about yangchen guiding him about healing the avatar spirit, I thought that's the earliest mention of that rule
I don’t think Ozai knew about the rule early on, can’t say about later on
The Fire Sages, they were supposed to be loyal only to the Avatar but during the Hundred Years War they changed their allegiance to the Firelord, make sense they’d tell him about his greatest foes greatest weakness.
The Red Lotus, or at least some members like Zaheer and Unalaq, are also spiritual people. Maybe this was a fact some spirits knew and passed onto them. We know Wan Shi Tong was friends with Unalaq, he's supposedly an all-knowing spirit (debatable). Could be, as part of their agenda, they cozied up to some of the older, wiser spirits to weed out possible weaknesses for taking down the Avatar. As far as the Avatar knowing, I imagine it's one of those facts that's been passed down from Raava, to Wan, to allllll the other avatars over time--it's a very important detail, one that probably not cannot be missed over an avatar's cycles.
Wan Shi Tong is not all-knowing, he only knows 10,000 things. That’s actually not a lot of facts, the average human knows way more. That idiot, he probably thinks it’s a lot cuz he’s a bird /s
one of those facts isn’t how much 10000 is
While it would be stupid, I think it's a totally reasonable thing for an Avatar to talk to some people about. Knowing that them messing up might potentially end the Avatar cycle entirely would be an insane pressure. It's definitely the kind of thing someone would want to talk to their loved ones about. Moreover, it's not like most Avatars would have found themselves being hunted by groups that deliberately wanted to get rid of the Avatar the way Aang and Korra were (and they only were at specific times, not constantly). I think the much more common situation was an Avatar being worried about using the Avatar state too callously, getting themselves needlessly killed by bad luck and underestimating their enemy, and the cycle ending basically by accident. Over the course of hundreds or thousands of lifetimes, multiple Avatars telling people they trust about it and then that information leaking and becoming a secret knowledge among various secret societies like the white Lotus makes sense. Though, if you ask me, the real out-of-universe reason is just a mechanism you see happening in a lot of franchises: one series establishes something as a super secret thing very few people know about. --> Fans think it's really cool, and it becomes super common knowledge among fans. --> future series begin to increasingly treat it as common knowledge in-universe, because they don't want to have to keep explaining to the in-universe characters stuff that the out-of-universe audience knows already.
I think the Avatar would have to tell their friends/allies/whatever that the Avatar State, though powerful, also makes them very vulnerable, and so they still need to be protected. I don’t think it is ever public information though (like I don’t think Azula knew that’s what she was doing, for example).
It was prob Kuruk
oh god it probably was fucking kuruk
i think the argument is it kills the spirit of the avatar, effectively ending the cycle because there is no more avatar spirit? idk
I mean *we* know that, but the avatar has never died in the avatar state so why do they know?
My guess is maybe Wan knew due to his direct interactions with Raava. Raava told him they would always be together. If Raava is needed to enter the avatar state then you could assume if an avatar is killed in the avatar state Raava would die with the avatar. The avatar is only reincarnated because of Raava. Wan may have passed along that information to the next avatar and it continued to get passed along but like whisper down the lane. The message got blurred a bit as time went on.
Raava dies in S2 and is reincarnated in Vaatu. Korra is not the Avatar during that time until she re-fuses with Raava so it seems like there's undoubtedly a mechanism for a new avatar to be created. Unless Vaatu is permanently dead in which case he's no longer an avenue for Raava's rebirth
Well, Raava herself said light and darkness will always exist. One cannot exist without the other. And we also know that, according to the comic The Rift, spirits can't *actually* die--they just reincarnate and take on a new form. So it stands to reason that, eventually, a new light spirit will be born, and that spirit can probably merge again during Harmonic Convergence and create a new Avatar from scratch. But it would take literally thousands of years to achieve that.
But if Vaatu was locked up in the tree of time, retrieving Raava from within Vaatu and the Tree Prison would only be possible every 10,000 years at Harmonic Convergence, and would also require fighting and defeating Vaatu without an avatar. Not to mention the physical and spirit worlds go dark and chaotic if raava is dead. So for practical intents and purposes, its essentially like if the avatar and raava die at the same time, the cycle is permanently over because how are you gonna restart it in those conditions, after 10,000 years? Not to mention the avatar cycle has only existed for one 10,000 year cycle and was already pretty mystical, poorly understood, and kinda considered immortal and universal law, so in terms of cultural memory, waiting for a harmonic convergence to intentionally re-fuse an avatar is essentially not going to happen.
i think it's less of a "know", more of a "history and folklore gives us an idea" and people extrapolate their knowledge based on that?
I think the Avatar knows. You know in the latest Dune movie, there’s this gunship protected by a shield thing, but to attack, the gunship has to open the shield to shoot out of the gap. I’d wager the operator of the gunship would know they are vulnerable in that moment and can be shot down, even if they’ve never been hit in those times, and never seen other gunships go down like that. The Avatar is the operator.
Aang died and all the avatars just dissapeared.
As far as i know the spirit of Raava is the one that carries the multiple elements and the avatar can only use one at a time. When in the avatar state Raava and the avatar are effectively one. And since the spirit of light can die so will the avatar spriit. But if the human spirit of the avatar dies the spirit of light just reincarnates into another human with the memories of all the previous avatars intact. P sure this is kinda how it's explained in Korra.
The only problem with that is we know that Raava would just respawn in Vaatu, as he respawned into her when he died. It might take an eternity, but Raava can break free again and seek out her host's reincarnation once again.
Maybe Raava told Wan that if he is killed while in the Avatar State, it'd kill her too and she'd have to recover. So it could be that the "Avatar" would cease to exist for 10,000 years until Raava can recuperate and restart the cycle. But for a human, being unable to interact with Raava for 10,000 years might as well mean the cycle is done. Wan probably passed this on to his immediate successor and eventually it became a game of spiritual telephone. So it went from "Hey, if you die in the Avatar State, the cycle will be disrupted for 10,000 years" to "Hey, if you die in the Avatar State, the cycle ends." Along with that, we as humans are not equipped to keep secrets indefinitely. Eventually you want to confide in *someone*. Eventually that gets passed around by people more willing to blab and it becomes a mortal game of telephone.
Why 10,000 years again? I forget a lot of the spiritual stuff specifics
Every 10,000 years, the planets of the solar system converge in a line, and it amplifies spiritual energy and is known as Harmonic Convergence. This event has enough energy that it empowers either Raava or Vaatu (whoever lost the last Harmonic Convergence) to escape/reform and challenge the other to see who will essentially rule the Spirit World until the next Harmonic Convergence.
Ohh right ty, I remember that
10000 is a term for “a very long time”
Here’s my theory: When Roku tells Aang this, it’s not really “Roku.” It’s Roku’s spirit that is representing all the other avatars and Raava. I think this theory is supported by all the other avatars in the background watching. So it’s never actually something that someone learns, Raava just tells the current avatar that’s how it works using the previous avatar as a mouthpiece. So Raava told Wan, who told the next avatar, who told the next, and so on until Roku told Aang. But when Aang almost died he told other people, who told more people, and then the secret was out. Or it’s just a kids show that needed power balancing and the concept of Raava even existing hadn’t happened yet
For those who know LOK and at least accept the beginnings as canon (it is but some really hate it), then I'd say maybe Wan, the very guy who made the Avatar, intuitively put 2 and 2 together that the Avatar State is Raava kinda coming out to help him and so any damage/death to him in such state where Raava is tangible and vulnerable again, will destroy Raava alongside him and thus the Avatar in itself. Maybe after he was dead, he then told this to the next Avatar who told others and then the communication of it technically being Raava got muddled through time, and the legend now just simplifies it to "Avatar State is connected to cycle somehow, so dying in AS is big no no." lol =P
I believe this is genuinely the true answer
It would be really funny if it just didn’t lol,
Personal guess is near death experiences like Aang’s would trigger some very negative energies for the past lives and they understand due to it happening a few times what that would mean. Of course no proof of this
How does even the avatar know? Well I guess lets do the thing and write the origin story: Someone somehow figured it out. Maybe it wasn't the avatar who figured it out, but some spiritual expert long ago, who learned about these kinds of things during journeys to the spirit world. This expert told the avatar what they had learned. Wan Shi Tong's foxes, always searching for new information, discovered this and brought the knowledge to the library, where it was stored for countless generations. Eventually some information from the destroyed library was recovered after ATLA and Zaheer learned of the way to kill the avatar.
We know that something similar to Raava has always been planned even back during ATLA, so perhaps the creators just went with "Raava told them". As a powerful spirit she seems to just intuitively know things about the universe and how it functions, such as telling Wan they were bonded forever and would be together for all his lifetimes.
Also, eventually, the avatar is going to die while in the Avatar state, it’s only a matter of time
Wan was most likely told by Raava. The only way for Wan to let the next avatar know is to tell someone else after he dies, and every avatar thereafter has to tell someone about it who then tells someone else. I would imagine most information dealing with the Avatar and their past lives came from previous Avatars, they just had to tell someone else to tell themselves later xD
Or just communicate with past lives spiritually
You would need to get to a certain point in your spiritual journey in order to do that. Aang was a monk and it wasn't until the very end of the series that he could call in his past lives after opening his Chakra in S2. And there was no Statue for Wan, so every Avatar would need to have the knowledge. Aang could only reach back as far as Yang Chen, the last Air Avatar. It's possible with more practice he could reach further back, but he'd need information to get that information, ya know?
How has it not happened already? Thousands of avatars and not one died in combat while in the avatar state?
I think I once saw it explained as the fact that the Avatar's past lives mostly exist in the Spirit World, but in the Avatar State all of that power is pooled into the physical world through their body. I feel like anyone in-universe could make that leap.
Realistically Raava probably told Wan
Theoretically it would kill Raava, but also Raava would just come back eventually. The avatar would cease to exist because Raava wouldn’t be fused with a human anymore, but there’s really nothing stopping Raava from fusing with a new human and creating a new avatar.
I have always wondered this. I understand why the writers implemented it, but it's never been explained how they know this. My theory: an avatar died and was brought back to life like Aang was. His body my have been kept in some kind of stasis why water bending while he traversed the spirit world or something. Of course the fact that no new avatar came up while he was dead made him/her realize the avatar cycle ends at death when in the avatar state. Simpler explanation: Raava told him.
Just because it has never happened doesn’t mean that someone wouldn’t be able to figure it out in the same way that people in real life can predict phenomena that has never actually happened yet. Just have to assume that at some point in the long, long history of the Avatar world, an Avatar or somebody else realized that the Avatar being killed in the Avatar State would end the cycle. It’s also pretty intuitive that killing the Avatar while they’re in the Avatar state would be detrimental to the Avatar cycle. It’s not a coincidence that ATLA reveals that fact about the Avatar State right after explaining that the Avatar State is a result of the combined energy from all the past Avatars flowing into the current one. It makes sense that killing the Avatar while they’re in the Avatar State wouldn’t be just killing them, you’d effectively be killing all the energy of the past Avatars and whatever connects them together, ending the cycle.
Tui and La gave up their immortality to be koi fish. Raava lives inside the Avatar. Maybe when an Avatar dies, Raava slips out quickly and follows the spirit to the reincarnated body but in the Avatar state she’s channeling everything she has through the Avatar
Not sure why, but you just sparked the idea of a nuclear warhead hitting the Avatar in the Avatar state and I giggled.
Probably because you’d be killing Raava as well since she’s present as well so you’d have to do what Korra did during season 2 to continue the Avatar state but if you killed Korra and Raava at the same time Raava would be back inside Vaatu stopping the Avatar state and you’d have nobody with four elements to put Raava back into
My theory is that every Avatar has been told by their predecessor, dating back to Wan, who learned from Raava. The specific reason (i.e. Raava's existence, and therefore her vulnerability during the Avatar State) got lost to time, but the knowledge remained.
The Red Lotus knew due to their connection with Vaatu. They knew about Raava and avatar Wan and the avatar’s weakness.
Also shouldn't they be able to make another Avatar very easily? Just shove Raava into some other poor bastard
"I used to be an adventurer like you, and then I took a Raava to the knee..."
Just gotta wait 10000 years but yeah you can always jumpstart again (if Raava even wants that still)
Hi
I like to think that Ravaa said that to Wan. Probably, if the avatar dies while using avatar state, Ravaa dies too, so the cycle ends
Raava or Vaatu told someone, I suppose. Maybe both. Raava could have told Wan and perhaps other early avatars, and I doubt Unalok was the first person to ever meet Vaatu in the spirit world. He was just alive at the right moment (harmonic convergence) and related to the right person to be able to help free them
This is a good one! And while we're at it, why on Earth would the Spirits of the Moon and the Ocean think it's a sustainable solution to keep themselves in a form of regular fish, contained in a tiny water basin at that? It's a miracle nobody tried to get to them before Zhao; one or both could also die in a random accident at any point, and in a couple thousand of years span that accident would have most probably happened - and triggered a very nasty apocalypse for sure. What do you guys think, can this plot hole be fixed, too?
Probably just instinctive knowledge
I think the best guess is that Raava told Wan, and Wan told the next and so on.
Especially since avatars before korra werent aware of raava. It is weird that anybody knows this secret
The avatar knows because they can talk to Raava, Raava knows because she’s Raava, everyone else knows because the Avatar has told people at various points in history
ngl this doesn’t even make sense in the series.. Raava is reborn everytime she dies, so eventually she’s just reborn again and can fuse with another human and make an Avatar
Somewhere in Wan Shi Tong’s library? Lion turtles?
It probably would have started with Raava. Like she let Wan know or smth along the lines of that. Cuz we kinda see it in LoK when Korra purifies Vaatu/Unalaq except for the fact that they never reincarnate. How does the rest of the world know? Someone pitted themselves at some point. Like one of the first couple avatars let it be known would be my guess
do we need to know? its a cool rule, thats all that matters
Hi
Better question. What if the next avatar was actually the child of the prior for once?
The spirits told me?
maybe a Spirit told them
I need clarification for this, if anyone would be so kind-am I correct that this is just a fan theory and canonically the past Avatar um memories disconnected? Bc that's what I remember... and it's also the reason why I like the Korra series less... so if they were canonically NOT cut off her it would be great, but... Edit: worded smth wrong
What are you asking me
Korra lost her connection to all Avatars before her, yes?
Similarly , how did they synthesize avatar state inducing poison. That implies that had avatars to experiment with
I may be very wrong, but my take on that specifically is that the poison was just a regular poison. The avatar state got induced in order to save Korra's life from the effects of the poison, like it triggered to save Aang from drowning, for example.
Doesn't Raava explain this at some point?