The Avatar: The Last Airbender fans know just how hard it is for all the Avatars who have been bestowed with the responsibility of protecting human beings from the threats of the spirit world. While all of them exercise great strength and power to overpower evil, they also have to leave behind their own desires to fulfill their duty of serving the world.
Yet even through that, each successor of this league of heroes is connected to their predecessors throughout their lives, gaining access to their consciousness to continue to fight for what’s right. All except for Korra, who loses this ability at one point in time. And in doing so, revealed a major and extremely dark storyline about the saga that we never quite realized existed.
Avatar: The Last Airbender Follows an Incredibly Dark Storyline
While it may not seem like it with all the merry tones in the saga, there is an incredibly dark storyline hidden in The Last Airbender lore that many must have failed to realize before. And it all connects down to Korra losing her connection to the past Avatar predecessors in her The Legend of Korra storyline for a while.
Everyone knows how Wan’s total fusion during the Harmonic Convergence with the spirit of light and peace, Raava, led to the creation of the Avatar Spirit and Cycle. This cycle continued for a long time, with each new incarnation of an Avatar resulting in Raava birthing in them and connecting them to their ancestors, and Wan.
However, while the other Avatars did not face problems with this, Korra did. In her storyline, there came a point where Vaatu (i.e. the spirit of darkness and chaos), after merging with Unalaq, pulls out Raava from Korra’s body and destroys her. This led to any connection that Korra had with her ancestors getting severed.
While Korra eventually ended up getting this connection back as the story further progressed, this also pointed out one fact: Until the time when Raava and Korra separated, Wan and all the other Avatars had to constantly show up every time they were summoned, even after dying, because of this constant cycle.
This meant that the Avatars had no personal life of their own and were made just for the purpose of protecting humanity and tirelessly maintaining harmony, without being allowed to fulfill their personal desires or pursuits. As @lycheehive pointed out on X, this simply meant that “their existence is fundamentally for the benefit of others.”
being the avatar is such a tragic concept tho, by nature, they r excluded from indulging in selfish desires or pursuits. Instead, they are bound by their duty to serve the world, tirelessly maintaining harmony. Their existence is fundamentally for the benefit of others
— sam🍉 (@lycheehive) April 6, 2024
And as unbelievable as it may seem, this is only true and the story further progresses into something even more tragic. Not only do Avatars have to devote their entire respective lives just to protect the rest of humanity, but they are also not allowed to leave the job even after their death, considering the connection that all the succeeding Avatars exercise with their predecessors.
Moreover, all of this even hints at the fact that this constantly raging cycle might not have been a blessing full of incredible powers but rather a curse in disguise for Avatar Wan and all the other Avatars because of something that he started.
The Avatar Reincarnation Cycle Could be an Eternal Punishment for the Avatars
As fans already know, the first Avatar was born only after Wan managed to separate Vaatu and Raava, the two of whom had spent the majority of their existing time combating and trying to defeat each other. But even in this fight, it was Raava who was keeping Vaatu’s darkness under control and maintaining the balance in the world.
So when Wan separated the two after getting tricked by Vaatu, Raava was the one who started shrinking now that the dark spirit was on the loose and the light for which she stood began to fade away. Thus, as she started to grow weaker, she had to merge with Wan to find and defeat Vaatu, which eventually led to the birth of the first Avatar.
This concept had @aangdaily on X pointing out that since one mistake at the hands of Wan caused all of this to happen, it could be that this was handed down as an “eternal punishment” to all the Avatars to not follow their own desires but only live to protect humanity from evil, as the X handle wrote:
“They’re literally cursed to never die and constantly suffer for the world.”
The concept of the Avatar is actually very dark because it’s basically eternal punishment for Wan after he separated Vaatu & Raava. They’re literally cursed to never die and constantly suffer for the world https://t.co/0kOciqTqFY
— daily aang (@aangdaily) April 7, 2024
Come to think of it, this theory seems more than likely after carefully putting all the facts into measure. Thus, as it turns out, the Avatar: The Last Airbending universe actually has a pretty dark storyline at its very center — one that we failed to notice despite acknowledging all of these facts.
You can stream Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra on Netflix.
