“Well, that’s too bad,” she said. “Everyone you meet in Bin-Er is in someone else’s pocket. From the moment you appeared, I was trying to figure out whose pocket you were in. Now I finally have the answer.”
A fresh slash of a grin spread across her face. “Mine,” Avatar Yangchen declared. “Now you’re in mine.”
Been a long week, so once again I’m skipping over the more weighty books in my rotation in order to indulge in the Avatar-verse. The Kyoshi books were a great way to take my mind off things, and I was hoping for more of the same with the two novels focusing on her predecessor, Yangchen.
Well, more of the same to a degree. F.C. Lee continues to do what he does best here and has managed to once again get the tone and the feel spot on. These novels, like the one’s preceding them, slot in seamlessly with what has been established with the TV show. What does differ though in The Dawn of Yangchen and The Legacy of Yangchen is the kind of protagonist and the style of story. Yangchen is a very different woman to her eventual successor, Kyoshi. And this is not a story of self discovery; this is a story of espionage.
Unlike Kyoshi, there was never any doubt that Yangchen is the Avatar; she’s known since the age of eight. And the reason her status was so obvious is that Yangchen has an issue I don’t think any other other Avatar has shown before—she has too close a connection to her past lives. To the point that in her sleep, she’s almost possessed by them. As a child, this was very distressing, but as a young adult, this issues makes it hard for Yangchen to remain or act as she was in the present. It’s an interesting issue to have, and it really does shape her thinking.
The Yangchen we meet in these novels, while still rather young, is very much an established Avatar, with mentions of a previous battle with the sprint of Old Iron. She also distinguishes herself from Aang—our other air bending Avatar—by actually having the rest of the Air Nomad society present for her to work with. Or in some cases, come in conflict with. The fact that she’s an Air Nomad is important in that it gives her a lot more freedom to move than members of the other nations during this time period. This means that she’s been able to cultivate a large network of people that can keep her informed about various political goings on without too much difficulty.
Most of the story is set in or around the city of Bin-Er, and the political unrest breaking out there. Bin-Er has been shaped by the Platinum Affair, a colossal political clusterfuck where the Fire Kingdom and the Water Tribe tried to leverage a civil conflict in the Earth Kingdom for their own ends—and had it backfire. In the aftermath, the three nations packed the shits and closed their boarders to each other, adopting more isolationist stances. Only the Air Nomads seem free to roam.
But a complete loss of trade serves no one well, so a few chosen cities were permitted to keep their ports open under the supervision of a set of merchant-nobles known as the Shangs. But of course the Shangs—and their financiers, the Zongdus— have gotten greedy, and have started competing with each other. All while the working class becomes more and more unsettled.
As Yangchen slowly works out though, at least two of these Zongdus, in the midst of their competition, have managed to come together long enough to cooperate and develop Unanimity, a secret project that would give them a wild advantage over the competitors and allow the pair of them to tighten their grip on trade. While I’m sure they would be delighted by the immediate aftermath, it’s highly doubtful they would be able to remain working partners for long, and if they were to succeed, long term stability in the region would likely go haywire.
Again, unlike many of the other Avatars that we’ve been introduced to, while Yangchen has her networks, she does not have a handful of super close companions around her age from other nations to rely on. Her main non-air bending asset—and yes, I am going to refer to him as an asset—is Kavik of the Northern Water tribe. Yangchen first meets him when he tries to rob her. And he must have left a strong impression, because she decides to hunt him down. She then delights in stealthily blackmailing the young man—in front of his parents, inside their own house—into helping her with her work on the ground in Bin-Er. Not how Kavik expected his day to go.
Kavik, in a move that differentiates this pair of books form the Kyoshi novels, becomes almost like a second protagonist. It’s just such a shame I didn’t find him as charismatic as Yangcheng herself, who, to be fair, is pretty hard to beat. Yangchen is pretty damned sneaky and conniving for a nun, with a set of morals that do not neatly fit with that of other Air Benders. It’s as if sh’s realized that the world is full of bastards, and she has to develop a bastard-habit of her own if she’s to keep a handle on everything. She’s also very playful in nature, in a way that reminds me of Aang. Kavik though, while he has an interesting background and some interesting motivations, is no where near as well fleshed out as our Avatar. But his strained relationship with Yangchen certainly makes him a unique companion.
The Yangchen novels can be thought as one story broken into two parts. The Dawn of Yangchen mostly deals with revealing the truth about of Unanimity, while The Legacy of Yangchen picks up not long after when Yangchen has to deal with the fallout. Even more than the first novel, Legacy deals with the bonds you forge with people and what to do when trust has been broken. Which, considering this is a pair of novels based around secret politics and espionage, is something that is bound to happen. It also, sadly is not as tightly pulled-together as the first novel. Without giving too much away, while I did appreciate learning more about what the organization was like in this era, the subplot with the White Lotus was not always well incorporated.
But, as a whole, the story is still very engaging and, as I said above, a great distraction. Also, because I’ve read the Kyoshi novels, I was able to realize—Yangchen must have somehow come out smelling like roses after all. We know from her own story she can play as dirty as everyone else. But by Kyoshi’s time, Yangchen was seen as a blessed saint. Maybe our little nun was also a skilled propagandist?
For cbr17bingo, this is Border. ‘Political borders are often sources of tension and conflict” That is the Platinum Affair all over.