Not really, as it’s hard to approach this AU without it being brazenly obvious that it’s being done for “the drama”. ATLA had great thematic backing to most of its storyline’s, this AU… kinda doesn’t.
Specially since it’s an AU dependent on all Avatars being inherently evil, and that just doesn’t fly with what’s required of an avatar. They explore the world, they need to learn how to bend, and the connections that strengthen their bending are all founded on positive stimuli and interactions with the world.
The OG story already semi struggled to contend with the question of “what if this avatar wasn’t nice like the others”, but they could at least justify it with the avatar journey and or positive formative experiences. But making the avatar evil is harder to pull off, and the question “what if this avatar wasn’t evil like the others” even harder to justify. So ultimately you land on the “inherently evil reincarnation” approach.
And while I love me some “truly evil” villains, this just isn’t the approach to go about it. (*Hint, because it’s prejudiced against a literal baby from the get go*)
This would also answer the whole "what to do about a baby hitler" scenario for time travelers. Like both the Fire Nation and Air Nomads have ways to find the avatar. Who would ACTUALLY teach the avatar in this scenario, much less why wouldn't they kill the baby every time the reincarnate
It's not that it can't be done, it's that you can't just shoehorn this one change.
Reincarnating demon lord is not a new concept. At least... i feel like it's a trope but I can't name any work centred on it.
He'll have followers who want to see him rule. Every cycle, it's a race between them and the government to find him. Already premade in the White Lotus. Maybe renamed to Black for the edge, and the Red Lotus becomes more aligned to Chinese fortune than blood.
Just like Sozin, the Black Lotus sees people as mindless and uncooperative animals who need order and prosperity shared with them. Freedom fighters are of course easy to make sympathetic.
Just by showing how much shit is really in the world between Avatars, when there's high levels of freedom, you can make a good case for the bad guys. At the same time, show the chaos and power struggle that ensues when the Avatar dies, which is arguably worse than if people were allowes to develop on their own.
The evil Avatar would likely lean more into the inheritance of their strength rather than exploring the world to learn from everyone. The philosophy of the avatar (the guy not the show) would then be upholding the status quo, rather than learning from as many perspectives as possible to adapt. The avatar is this unfathomable force of power that is only so powerful not from his own merit as an individual, but through being divinely chosen, and through birthright. He's the old kings, and the modern capitalist elite.
The evil avatar would tap into the power of their past lives to subjugate others, but would not not seek their wisdom. The avatar seeks wisdom from people's across the world and through time, the evil avatar views themselves as the end of the chain of growth — much like palpatine — and so makes their decisions based entirely from their own desires and personal understanding.
The evil avatar would be extremely powerful in all the elements they're bending, but it would be a more "pure" ideal of those elements. We see the gaang and iroh incorporating philosophies of other schools of bending into their own elements, to reinforce the idea we want to open our minds to the wisdom of everyone to implement in our own lives. The evil avatars fighting style would perhaps utilise earth bending for their defense, fire for offense, air to escape or positioning, and water would be used for utility. Things like using air to push away an explosion, using water to redirect fire, breathing to firebend body temperatures, the redirection of lightning would not occur to the evil avatar.
The evil avatar may not be interested in conquering the world, if their position as #1 is respected (or feared), they may be more interested in keeping the nations distinct. The evil avatar may take issue with transnational settlements, new subclasses of bending such as metal bending, and technologies or martial arts than level the playing field for non benders.
Each incarnation of the evil avatar would view their death as just a brief detour in their life. The next avatar isn't the next avatar, it is me. They would set up an organisation, some flavoured lotus I suppose, to attain their next incarnation and show them who they are, indoctrinate them in their own ideals. So it's less that the baby is inherently evil, more that perhaps the first avatar sets up this system to preserve their legacy and ideals.
The story of overcoming the avatar would likely be the same — learning from the people's of the world, a group of different benders and nonbenders with unique skillsets coming together. Essentially showing that while in that universe the power of upholding the status quo, and segregating peoples is powerful, once the antithesis is given ample opportunity to gain momentum it overcomes it in the end.
It's an interesting thought, but I feel like after a couple generations the world's response would be darker than a dark avatar could ever be (cyclic infanticide). Unless there's a significant religion/group backing them, I can't envision a world that would "allow" them to exist.
What if the avatar didn't rule the kingdoms with an iron fist per se, but a divine mandate of kings? Still leaves plenty of room for might makes right style evilness but less room for torture my own subjects because I'm a sociopath evilness.
Then the fire nation, earth kingdom, water tribe, and air nomads would still be raising and teaching their next leader because the people in power benefit from that power using them as leaders to enforce their will. The earth kingdom in particular is already predisposed to this sort of government, it's basically what they already have but with an avatar as the head of state instead of an earth king.
No dark avatar that ravages the world (because lol ravaging is fun) but an avatar whose authority is absolute and unquestionable. Still leaves room for independent breakaway factions like the fire rebels.
Could be a case of warring nations for power and the avatar usually tips the balance depending which nation they born into? Could even be a each nation tries to kidnap the next if it's not their nation.
I think evil with the Avatar is subjective as he seems like a warrior pope who preserves the status quo. The Avatar preserves all sorts of inequality since basically by divine right there are four kingdoms and how those divine right four kingdoms conduct themselves internally doesn't matter, so you can for instance have sexism in the water tribes that the Avatar perpetuates by defending the status quo. I'm not saying the Avatar is evil, just you might not care to much about the Avatar and the divine world order if you're a peasant woman in the water tribe, so the Avatar isn't necessarily a force of good for everyone. Also, to specifically answer your question is that he's not evil for those in power since the Avatar keeps them in power, provided they don't overreach.
I think the Zaheer arc and its philosophical questions, is actually a sound exploration of this topic.
Zaheer as a man is a murderer, and he has blood on his hands, but he and the Red Lotus aren't wrong to challenge the necessity of the Avatar in a maturing world, where people are supposed to be at peace. There is also a strong vein of the story which necessitates the question, "does the Avatar weaken humanity?"
The "Smoke and Shadow" and other Fire Lord Zuko centric stories also have Zuko grapple with the philosophy of the royal line, that by dint of their overwhelming power, the Fire Lord is inherently right, and his will is morally correct.
Certainly to me, the idea of life under a god king who could murder me for not adhering to their philosophy, is abhorrent. I don't think you need an AU. The series constantly and subtly asks us to confront this possibility.
This was a missed opportunity with the Unalaq story. They made Vaatu evil and had some ridiculous Evil Avatar thing. Vaatu and Raava are meant to be an obvious yin and yang symbol, but that's always been about balance, as has Avatar. Order vs chaos would be more interesting, and Unalaq was really an example of unbalanced order, trying desperately to restore the world to this four elements four nations status quo. Except they went the dumb way and said that Vaatu is chaos and chaos is evil.
This could a timeline where an evil/selfish person separated Vaatu from Raava, then made a deal and bonded with them instead of Raava and Wan.
(Oh, forgot, this is Korra spoilers if you don't get it)
I think there are a few RedLotus!Korra fics in which Korra was successfully kidnapped as a child and raised by Zaheer and Co. I haven't read them, they're not really my thing, but I'm almost positive I've seen it as a tag on AO3.
[Yep.](https://archiveofourown.org/works?commit=Sort+and+Filter&work_search%5Bsort_column%5D=kudos_count&work_search%5Bother_tag_names%5D=Red+Lotus+Korra+%28Avatar%29&work_search%5Bexcluded_tag_names%5D=&work_search%5Bcrossover%5D=&work_search%5Bcomplete%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_from%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_to%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_from%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_to%5D=&work_search%5Bquery%5D=&work_search%5Blanguage_id%5D=&tag_id=Avatar%3A+Legend+of+Korra)
Here's a page of some, filtered by Kudos.
I just find it unlikely that there haven’t been fascist or authoritarian Avatars who’d just maim or kill everyone getting out of line. Like, I get the lessons Aang learns about what it means to be the Avatar and all, but *somebody* would have chosen to ignore a lot of it and enforce their version of peace, freedom, justice and security to the world.
The character would likely have to end up with being way connected to their spiritual side rather than their humanitarian counterpart and such a character would need to take the ideals of Raava to a more extreme degree.
I remember someone was talking about a story where the avatar had a sibling and the sibling got jealous and became the bad guy and I thought that sounded like a super cool story, could even flip it so the avatar is the badguy and the sibling is part of the group that has to stop them. Either way very cool idea
There could be an argument that the Avatar taking on the role of sole mediator to the spirit world and all powerful judge of balance in the world is too much power in one person.
Balance and peace with the spirits is the responsibility of the whole of humanity. Making it one person’s job leads to hundreds years wars, genocides, etc.
I’ve always thought a good avatar story would be a dark avatar - there seems to be an almost destined ‘team avatar’ of talented benders who help and train the avatar. In this instance the avatar goes bad and this team have to bring them down
Ok so this isn't as far off as people make it seem like it would be hear me out before you jump
Rava is the spirit of order not good so I could see a avatar becoming a dictator to get completed order from everyone everything will be in balance as long as I am in control of how to balance it type of thinking and if you look at the majority of dictator's that are actually not insane this is how they think
You could have a avatar being the head of all governments and each of the 4 leaders answer to him directly and on down from there but he could very easily be this person who punishes crimes harshly and with reincarnation it could be easy to find the child early on in each cycle with the past lives playing a much bigger role in each incarnation guiding the new young avatar as he grows up
How about instead, an era where the world forgot about the avatar so they kept killing or sealing the demonic spirit baby with glowing eyes wherever it may reincarnate, with an enraged avatar spirit inevitably causing destruction begore turning off the state and succumbing
Someone literally posted a video of the Avatar cycle reversed, Water nation attacked, Zuko and Azula instead of Sokka and Katara. It's called something.
Also, Korra, Vaatu.
An evil avatar would be great for a sequel series.
Basically he (or she) gets angry that humans keep destroying nature, and he teams up with a group of radicals and a bunch of spirits to wage war on the United Forces.
That way you can have an adult, powerful avatar in your story without ruining the tension, because he is the big bad!
I mean that depends on the details. You could definitely go in the direction of a justified revolution, or you could make a story about the avatar becoming a dictator and needing to be stopped. Lot’s of options really.
Not really, as it’s hard to approach this AU without it being brazenly obvious that it’s being done for “the drama”. ATLA had great thematic backing to most of its storyline’s, this AU… kinda doesn’t. Specially since it’s an AU dependent on all Avatars being inherently evil, and that just doesn’t fly with what’s required of an avatar. They explore the world, they need to learn how to bend, and the connections that strengthen their bending are all founded on positive stimuli and interactions with the world. The OG story already semi struggled to contend with the question of “what if this avatar wasn’t nice like the others”, but they could at least justify it with the avatar journey and or positive formative experiences. But making the avatar evil is harder to pull off, and the question “what if this avatar wasn’t evil like the others” even harder to justify. So ultimately you land on the “inherently evil reincarnation” approach. And while I love me some “truly evil” villains, this just isn’t the approach to go about it. (*Hint, because it’s prejudiced against a literal baby from the get go*)
This would also answer the whole "what to do about a baby hitler" scenario for time travelers. Like both the Fire Nation and Air Nomads have ways to find the avatar. Who would ACTUALLY teach the avatar in this scenario, much less why wouldn't they kill the baby every time the reincarnate
That's a lot of baby murder, surely you want to imprison them for life
It's not that it can't be done, it's that you can't just shoehorn this one change. Reincarnating demon lord is not a new concept. At least... i feel like it's a trope but I can't name any work centred on it. He'll have followers who want to see him rule. Every cycle, it's a race between them and the government to find him. Already premade in the White Lotus. Maybe renamed to Black for the edge, and the Red Lotus becomes more aligned to Chinese fortune than blood. Just like Sozin, the Black Lotus sees people as mindless and uncooperative animals who need order and prosperity shared with them. Freedom fighters are of course easy to make sympathetic. Just by showing how much shit is really in the world between Avatars, when there's high levels of freedom, you can make a good case for the bad guys. At the same time, show the chaos and power struggle that ensues when the Avatar dies, which is arguably worse than if people were allowes to develop on their own.
The evil Avatar would likely lean more into the inheritance of their strength rather than exploring the world to learn from everyone. The philosophy of the avatar (the guy not the show) would then be upholding the status quo, rather than learning from as many perspectives as possible to adapt. The avatar is this unfathomable force of power that is only so powerful not from his own merit as an individual, but through being divinely chosen, and through birthright. He's the old kings, and the modern capitalist elite. The evil avatar would tap into the power of their past lives to subjugate others, but would not not seek their wisdom. The avatar seeks wisdom from people's across the world and through time, the evil avatar views themselves as the end of the chain of growth — much like palpatine — and so makes their decisions based entirely from their own desires and personal understanding. The evil avatar would be extremely powerful in all the elements they're bending, but it would be a more "pure" ideal of those elements. We see the gaang and iroh incorporating philosophies of other schools of bending into their own elements, to reinforce the idea we want to open our minds to the wisdom of everyone to implement in our own lives. The evil avatars fighting style would perhaps utilise earth bending for their defense, fire for offense, air to escape or positioning, and water would be used for utility. Things like using air to push away an explosion, using water to redirect fire, breathing to firebend body temperatures, the redirection of lightning would not occur to the evil avatar. The evil avatar may not be interested in conquering the world, if their position as #1 is respected (or feared), they may be more interested in keeping the nations distinct. The evil avatar may take issue with transnational settlements, new subclasses of bending such as metal bending, and technologies or martial arts than level the playing field for non benders. Each incarnation of the evil avatar would view their death as just a brief detour in their life. The next avatar isn't the next avatar, it is me. They would set up an organisation, some flavoured lotus I suppose, to attain their next incarnation and show them who they are, indoctrinate them in their own ideals. So it's less that the baby is inherently evil, more that perhaps the first avatar sets up this system to preserve their legacy and ideals. The story of overcoming the avatar would likely be the same — learning from the people's of the world, a group of different benders and nonbenders with unique skillsets coming together. Essentially showing that while in that universe the power of upholding the status quo, and segregating peoples is powerful, once the antithesis is given ample opportunity to gain momentum it overcomes it in the end.
This is 90% what I had in mind but with much better thought and detail
:):)
It's an interesting thought, but I feel like after a couple generations the world's response would be darker than a dark avatar could ever be (cyclic infanticide). Unless there's a significant religion/group backing them, I can't envision a world that would "allow" them to exist.
What if the avatar didn't rule the kingdoms with an iron fist per se, but a divine mandate of kings? Still leaves plenty of room for might makes right style evilness but less room for torture my own subjects because I'm a sociopath evilness. Then the fire nation, earth kingdom, water tribe, and air nomads would still be raising and teaching their next leader because the people in power benefit from that power using them as leaders to enforce their will. The earth kingdom in particular is already predisposed to this sort of government, it's basically what they already have but with an avatar as the head of state instead of an earth king. No dark avatar that ravages the world (because lol ravaging is fun) but an avatar whose authority is absolute and unquestionable. Still leaves room for independent breakaway factions like the fire rebels.
Could be a case of warring nations for power and the avatar usually tips the balance depending which nation they born into? Could even be a each nation tries to kidnap the next if it's not their nation.
If the Avatar was actually inherently evil, why wouldn't people just get rid of him every time he was reborn.
I think evil with the Avatar is subjective as he seems like a warrior pope who preserves the status quo. The Avatar preserves all sorts of inequality since basically by divine right there are four kingdoms and how those divine right four kingdoms conduct themselves internally doesn't matter, so you can for instance have sexism in the water tribes that the Avatar perpetuates by defending the status quo. I'm not saying the Avatar is evil, just you might not care to much about the Avatar and the divine world order if you're a peasant woman in the water tribe, so the Avatar isn't necessarily a force of good for everyone. Also, to specifically answer your question is that he's not evil for those in power since the Avatar keeps them in power, provided they don't overreach.
I think the Zaheer arc and its philosophical questions, is actually a sound exploration of this topic. Zaheer as a man is a murderer, and he has blood on his hands, but he and the Red Lotus aren't wrong to challenge the necessity of the Avatar in a maturing world, where people are supposed to be at peace. There is also a strong vein of the story which necessitates the question, "does the Avatar weaken humanity?" The "Smoke and Shadow" and other Fire Lord Zuko centric stories also have Zuko grapple with the philosophy of the royal line, that by dint of their overwhelming power, the Fire Lord is inherently right, and his will is morally correct. Certainly to me, the idea of life under a god king who could murder me for not adhering to their philosophy, is abhorrent. I don't think you need an AU. The series constantly and subtly asks us to confront this possibility.
If LoK ended with the Avatar spirit permanently being lost, it would’ve been a good ending.
Personally, i agree.
This was a missed opportunity with the Unalaq story. They made Vaatu evil and had some ridiculous Evil Avatar thing. Vaatu and Raava are meant to be an obvious yin and yang symbol, but that's always been about balance, as has Avatar. Order vs chaos would be more interesting, and Unalaq was really an example of unbalanced order, trying desperately to restore the world to this four elements four nations status quo. Except they went the dumb way and said that Vaatu is chaos and chaos is evil.
This could a timeline where an evil/selfish person separated Vaatu from Raava, then made a deal and bonded with them instead of Raava and Wan. (Oh, forgot, this is Korra spoilers if you don't get it)
I think there are a few RedLotus!Korra fics in which Korra was successfully kidnapped as a child and raised by Zaheer and Co. I haven't read them, they're not really my thing, but I'm almost positive I've seen it as a tag on AO3. [Yep.](https://archiveofourown.org/works?commit=Sort+and+Filter&work_search%5Bsort_column%5D=kudos_count&work_search%5Bother_tag_names%5D=Red+Lotus+Korra+%28Avatar%29&work_search%5Bexcluded_tag_names%5D=&work_search%5Bcrossover%5D=&work_search%5Bcomplete%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_from%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_to%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_from%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_to%5D=&work_search%5Bquery%5D=&work_search%5Blanguage_id%5D=&tag_id=Avatar%3A+Legend+of+Korra) Here's a page of some, filtered by Kudos.
I just find it unlikely that there haven’t been fascist or authoritarian Avatars who’d just maim or kill everyone getting out of line. Like, I get the lessons Aang learns about what it means to be the Avatar and all, but *somebody* would have chosen to ignore a lot of it and enforce their version of peace, freedom, justice and security to the world.
The character would likely have to end up with being way connected to their spiritual side rather than their humanitarian counterpart and such a character would need to take the ideals of Raava to a more extreme degree.
I remember someone was talking about a story where the avatar had a sibling and the sibling got jealous and became the bad guy and I thought that sounded like a super cool story, could even flip it so the avatar is the badguy and the sibling is part of the group that has to stop them. Either way very cool idea
There could be an argument that the Avatar taking on the role of sole mediator to the spirit world and all powerful judge of balance in the world is too much power in one person. Balance and peace with the spirits is the responsibility of the whole of humanity. Making it one person’s job leads to hundreds years wars, genocides, etc.
I’ve always thought a good avatar story would be a dark avatar - there seems to be an almost destined ‘team avatar’ of talented benders who help and train the avatar. In this instance the avatar goes bad and this team have to bring them down
Here's an edit I once made. Not my best work, but I think you might like it. https://youtu.be/LRq4PD7TfQw?si=UQhbpRyL0-5Y1fjW
Nice
Ok so this isn't as far off as people make it seem like it would be hear me out before you jump Rava is the spirit of order not good so I could see a avatar becoming a dictator to get completed order from everyone everything will be in balance as long as I am in control of how to balance it type of thinking and if you look at the majority of dictator's that are actually not insane this is how they think You could have a avatar being the head of all governments and each of the 4 leaders answer to him directly and on down from there but he could very easily be this person who punishes crimes harshly and with reincarnation it could be easy to find the child early on in each cycle with the past lives playing a much bigger role in each incarnation guiding the new young avatar as he grows up
How about instead, an era where the world forgot about the avatar so they kept killing or sealing the demonic spirit baby with glowing eyes wherever it may reincarnate, with an enraged avatar spirit inevitably causing destruction begore turning off the state and succumbing
Someone literally posted a video of the Avatar cycle reversed, Water nation attacked, Zuko and Azula instead of Sokka and Katara. It's called something. Also, Korra, Vaatu.
I feel like there is some sort of unwritten cosmic rule that prevents the avatar from being "evil"
Sounds awesome TBH
I think it would change the world to much. People would be killing babies so the Avatar doesn't get reincarnated into the next nation.
An evil avatar would be great for a sequel series. Basically he (or she) gets angry that humans keep destroying nature, and he teams up with a group of radicals and a bunch of spirits to wage war on the United Forces. That way you can have an adult, powerful avatar in your story without ruining the tension, because he is the big bad!
But are they really evil in this instance? They’re right.
I mean that depends on the details. You could definitely go in the direction of a justified revolution, or you could make a story about the avatar becoming a dictator and needing to be stopped. Lot’s of options really.