For the last few years, anime fans have been making an unaccustomed pilgramage back to American cartoons. Or rather, to one in particular – Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender. The recent finalé to season three (Book Three, as the show calls it) put an ending to the main plot of the series with the defeat of the evil Fire Lord Ozai.

The finalé had some very cool scenes (the best, in my opinion, was Zuko and Kitara’s fight against Azula) and brought some favorite characters back into the action one last time. But it was undeniably rushed, hurrying through a flurry of major plot and character developments almost too fast to keep track of. It was painfully obvious that the writers wished they had much more time to tell this story in.

Avatar was originally planned to run six seasons, not three. What would have been major plot arcs in those seventy-eight extra episodes were compressed into single scenes in the season three finalé, or else cut altogether. That’s the way the television game is played, and the reason most shows stick to episodic plots – TV writers seldom get the time they need to tell their stories right. Meanwhile, shows like Bleach and Pokémon slog through season after slow-paced, repetative season.

What would the extra seasons have been like? Is there any way to tell? Not for sure, not without kidnapping the writing team and strapping them into Mike’s Telepathic Transcriptor Device. But if we use the foreshadowing in the episodes we do have, the logic of the setting, and some educated guesswork, we can get some good ideas about what might have been.

An Old Man’s Destiny

Iroh sipped his tea, and placed a tile on the Pai Sho board. His visitor’s eyes flashed. She had expected to immediately be the center of attention — she always did. “Hello, Azula.”

“That’s Fire Lord Azula.” Iroh didn’t answer. “This pitiful trash heap of a tea house doesn’t fool me, uncle. You’re making an army.”

“On the contrary, Azula. The army was already here. Ozai made it for me, with his tyrrany.”

Azula snarled. “If you make one move toward Ba Sing Se, I will kill you. That city is mine.”

Iroh calmly placed another tile alongside the White Lotus. “The time has come,” he said, “for all of us to complete our destinies.” That made Azula smirk, as though her destiny contained anything but madness and ash. Iroh suppressed the old, dark thought, if she had been my daughter…

“If that’s the way you want it,” Azula crooned, in the sickly-sweet voice that meant she was at her most dangerous. She had not come here in person just to talk, or because she intended mercy. But before she could strike, she hesitated. The dirt floor of the teahouse had vibrated, very slightly. Azula looked around for the earthbender. She didn’t find him. The other Pai Sho player she dismissed — that toothless old man hadn’t moved a muscle except in his face. Iroh could see the calculation in her eyes. She had never been fond of fair fights. “Goodbye, uncle. I will see you again.”

The clearest and most elaborate foreshadowing in Avatar concerned Iroh and the mysterious Order of the White Lotus. Hints and references to this group appeared throughout the series. Also mentioned more than once was a dream Iroh had in his youth, that it was his destiny to conquer Ba Sing Se, a task he never managed as a Fire Nation general. But all this subtle buildup culminated in the finalé with a sudden reveal of the Order, and an equally quick victory over a city that took several episodes and treason from within to fall the last time.

It’s obvious that the original plan was for a much more involved plot. There’s no point, either from a storytelling or a military perspective, in having a secret society if it’s just going to walk in and beat everyone up. The Order of the White Lotus would have planned its war like a game of Pai Sho: from what we’ve seen, the game seems similar to Go, an almost artistic game of position and influence. There still would have been fighting, of course — Avatar is a martial arts show — but in the original storyline there would have been much less sudden, brute force and much more clever tactics.

Over several episodes, Iroh would have gathered the Order, and then probably a larger force around it (he is, after all, a general – a skill which never got much use in the show.) He would have taken out the Fire Nation army piece by surgically chosen piece, freed and organized the earthbenders, and made his final strike against Ba Sing Se only after taking away everything they could have used to resist him.

So what about Sozen’s Comet, and Ozai’s plan to raze the Earth Kingdom to the ground? That was presented as a final, catastrophic move that would have destroyed all hope for the good guys, but frankly, that doesn’t hold much water. Yes, with the power of the comet boosting their firebending, they could have roasted everything they could see, but the Earth Kingdom is huge. It covers half the world. There was no way Ozai could have moved fast enough to burn it all in one day. He was the Phoenix King, not Santa Claus.

I’d guess that Ozai would still have tried it in the original plot. Sozen’s Comet had to be used for something, storywise. But the gang would have been a little later in stopping it, and the fight between Aang and Ozai would have ended in a draw, or even with Aang running away. Meanwhile, the atrocity would have infuriated the Earth Kingdom, giving Iroh the beginnings of his army.

Thicker Than Water

The moon hung low in the sky, red and round. Zuko looked down at the canyon below the Western Air Temple, watching thin clouds drift by below. He heard a familiar footstep behind him, and turned around. “Kitara? Is Aang alright?”

Zuko’s arms twisted up behind him of their own accord. He was slammed down to his knees, contorted and helpless. “Don’t you dare say his name,” Kitara hissed. “Not after what you did.”

“It was an accident!” Even speaking was hard. “He made a mistake…”

“I saw you firebending at him, and it wasn’t for sparring. If I hadn’t been right there to heal him, he might have been crippled, or killed.”

“He lost control of his fire,” Zuko gasped. “I had to break up his firebending before…”

“Shut up. You’re a liar, Zuko. You’ve always been a liar. I warned you that if you ever hurt Aang, you’d regret it.” Kitara gestured, and Zuko was yanked to his feet. Clumsily, like a puppet, he felt himself stepping backwards. Behind him was the edge, and a long drop into the clouds. Azula had survived that fall, but Zuko didn’t think he could match her.

“Kitara, please, listen to me.” She pushed out with one hand, like she was shoving him. Zuko took one more step back. His toes felt the edge, and then slipped. “I’m sorry!”

Early in Book Three, Kitara meets the Southern Water Tribe’s only other surviving waterbender, an old woman named Hama who has mastered the sinister skill of bloodbending — using waterbending to control the fluid inside another person’s body. This power horrifies Kitara, but she nonetheless uses it to defeat Hama. This is an obvious setup for a later episode, Chekhov’s famous “pistol on the mantelpiece.” But when Kitara finally bloodbends again, it was for about five seconds, against a character who turned out not to be important, and no harm was done. This couldn’t have been the writers’ original plan.

Another sign that they were setting Kitara up to do something terrible is her warning to Zuko when he joins Aang. The audience knows Zuko is a good guy now — frankly, we’d been waiting for it for a long time. But Kitara still thinks of him as an enemy, and she’s apparently about half an inch from trying to kill him.

Possibly, these two setups would have combined, ending up with Kitara bloodbending Zuko, as I show above. On the other hand, the scene I wrote is probably a little much for Nickelodeon. (I didn’t, by the way, mean to say that Zuko actually dies. He would have made it somehow. Nickelodeon would never let them kill a main character, or even a minor one.) Perhaps Kitara would have stopped before actually hurting him, but not before horrifying her friends. Or maybe it would have been used on someone else: the man who actually killed her mother, maybe.

Just as water opposes fire, Kitara was in many ways written to be the inverse of Zuko. Zuko was a bad guy, originally, but one who struggled with feelings of honor, duty, and love. Kitara is a good guy (or rather, a good girl,) but she in turn struggles with feelings of anger, grief, and vengeance. She certainly wouldn’t have switched sides in the war the way Zuko did, but if there had been time, she certainly would have spent more time struggling with her darker side, and her temper would have had real consequences before she got it under control.

The Madness of Fire Lord Azula

The general approached Azula’s throne and dropped to his knees. “You summoned me, Fire Lord?”

“Yes. You were ordered to find the White Lotus Army and destroy them. Is that what you did, general?”

The general was a brave warrior. He barely swallowed at the poisoned-honey tone of Azula’s voice. “I took every reasonable measure…” he began.

“You failed, general. The White Lotus is operating freely. You even allowed them to make contact with the Avatar.”

“Fire Lord,” the general said, “the White Lotus Army is everywhere and nowhere. Any ordinary citizen could be one of them. They fade into the villages without a trace, and since the Day of the Comet…“

“You should have burned the villages! You should have killed the populace. Are you just incompetent, or are you a traitor?” He was arguing with her. He must be a traitor. Anyone Azula did not control, anyone who did not fear her completely, would betray her. She knew that now.

“I deeply apologize, Fire Lord. I misunderstood your commands. It will never happen again.”

Banish him, Azula thought. He is a traitor. Banish him, kill him, burn him to ash before he abandons you like the others. She took a deep breath, and pushed her thoughts aside. This man could still be useful. “See that it does not, general, because I will never be this merciful again. Go back to the Earth Kingdom and do whatever it takes to destroy my dear uncle’s army. Dismissed.”

The most rushed scene in the finalé was Azula’s descent into madness — it was actually more like a plummet. It was amply foreshadowed in earlier episodes, but once it actually began it should have taken five episodes, not five minutes.

In fact, this time all the elements of the original story arc were still present, but they went by so fast that you might have missed them. Azula was never especially stable, but her real collapse started when Mai and Tai Li betrayed her. (Those two, by the way, didn’t get to do much in the finalé. Presumably they wouldn’t have been stuck in jail forever in the original plot. They might have joined Aang and Zuko, or Iroh and the White Lotus, or even some sort of rebel movement within the Fire Nation.) Despite her attempts to control them by fear, they were Azula’s only friends. Losing them made her afraid that everyone would betray her, so she began getting rid of them all before they could.

With more time, this would have been more complex than the rapid-fire stream of banishments that made the final cut. Probably, Azula would have banished a few people, and started acting irrationally. Her apparent insanity would have made people start to think about deserting or replacing her, and when she found out about that things would only have gotten worse. By the time Zuko finally showed up to challenge her (this would have been much later, after she’d already been Fire Lord for a while) she would have pushed away anyone that might have helped her against him. He might even have gotten help in bringing her down, making her challenge to Agni Kai (by tradition a one-on-one duel) more significant than just getting Kitara out of the fight.

The Return of the Airbenders

“It’s time now, Mara. The Fire Lord isn’t letting anyone hide anymore.&rdquo

The old woman sniffed. “And whose fault was that, Your Majesty?”

King Bumi let out his crazed, wheezy chuckle. “Ozai is crazy. I would know. He’d have come anyway, whether we were fighting back or not.”

“You put much stock in Aang’s help, but I do not. I will not trust the one who abandoned us once already.”

“Then trust me, Mara.”

Eventually, she nodded. “I will send the signal.”

In a manor house in the south of the Earth Kingdom, a young man watched a strange cloud. Yellow with dust, shaped vaguely like an arrow, it slid quickly across the sky to the north. The Fire Nation officers that used this place as headquarters saw the cloud, too, but unlike their stableboy, they did not know what it meant.

The boy climbed into the dusty loft where he slept, and dug under the hay. He pulled out a sword hilt — a broken toy, really, certainly not anything he could get in trouble for. He spun it around a bit, and the hay rustled in a sudden breeze.

The Fire Nation officers were very busy lately. It took them a day and a half to realize that the youngest stableboy and the fastest ostrich horse were missing.

A middle-aged master woodworker in Omashu was in his workshop. Coated with sawdust, he carved and scraped carefully, glancing up only occasionally at the strange cloud out the window. He had to be very careful. The hinges were finicky things, and vital, and he was working from old word of mouth, because he’d never dared practice this. No one had made an airbender’s staff in a hundred years.

Chien was a beautiful girl. Wherever she walked in the streets of Ba Sing Se, eyes followed her light steps, her graceful movements, and especially her dark, knee-length hair. But today her graceful steps were quick and purposeful. She had seen the arrow-shaped clouds converging on Ba Sing Se from all directions.

On the top story of her house was a room whose windows were always open. Now she climbed up and drew the curtains across them. From a drawer she drew a pair of scissors and a razor. She reached behind her, and her long hair began to make a pile on the floor.

Mara stepped up behind her. “You can grow the back half out again, once you recieve the tattoos.”

Chien kept cutting. “I think I’ll leave it shaved, great-grandmother. This part of my life is over. It’s time for the Air Nomads to come back to the world.

As far as we’ve been told, the Fire Nation wiped out the Air Nomads a hundred years ago, and Aang is the only one left. I’m sure the Fire Nation would like to think that’s true. But genocide has been tried in the real world several times, and while terrible damage was done, no one’s ever succeeded in completely wiping out an entire people. Destroying the Air Temples would have been relatively easy, given enough military power: they were known, fixed locations, centers of the Air Nomad culture and government that they would have had to defend. But they couldn’t all have been monks. Some of them had to be actual nomads, wanderers, always moving, hard to find and hard to catch. The Fire Nation probably did track down a lot of them, the especially the ones that tried to fight back or help each other. But how exactly do you catch an airbender who just wants to get away?

It was actually a joke once among the Avatar team that they’d someday have to change the title to “Avatar: The Used-To-Be-Last Airbender.” The Air Nomads, or rather, their decendents, were going to come back.

They would have been hiding, obviously. Maybe in the wilderness; more likely, among the huge numbers of the Earth Kingdom. Many of them would probably be newbies at airbending, with no chance to practice. If they’ve had to interbreed with Earth Kingdom people, a lot of them might not have airbending at all. But a few of them would probably have had airbending tricks that even Aang can’t do.

Each other bending style, as we’ve seen, has special advanced techniques that go beyond just moving around the element: healing, bloodbending, heatbending, creating and channeling lightning, metalbending, and Toph’s seismic sense. We never see Aang or his predecessors use any of these. Apparently raw power (which Avatars have to spare) isn’t the issue: some techniques require specialization and complete dedication to a single element, which the Avatar can never do. That means that there were probably advanced techniques in airbending, too, which Aang can’t show us because he can’t do them. Soundbending could be one, the ability to mimic, alter, or mute sound waves in the air. They might be able to become invisible, by changing the density of the air to bend light around them. A skilled airbender would go beyond “escape and evade” to become, basically, a ninja.

There are lots of things the returned airbenders could have done, but I think the most likely is helping Iroh and the White Lotus. If the Dragon of the West can’t find a use for the best scouts in the world, he’s lost his touch. In fact, it might be that the reason Iroh couldn’t take Ba Sing Se the first time was because he didn’t have the help of Earth’s opposing element.

This is all cool stuff, and if I’m right and it really was planned for the lost seasons, then we’ve missed out. Is it gone forever? Not necessarily. First of all, there’s a trilogy of live-action movies planned. We know at least one of them is going to be a retelling of the cartoon series, and they’ll have to compress the story to do it, but we might still see some of the lost plot arcs there. Also, the last four episodes of book three were called the season finalé, not the series finalé. There are currently no plans to make more episodes, but where there’s life, there’s hope: they still have the rights, and they haven’t declared the series over.

And if you can’t wait until then, or if neither of those hopes work out? Well, this looks like a job for fanfiction. The creators weren’t given a chance to tell all the stories they wanted to, but fanfic writers make our own chances, and we can tell whatever stories we like. If you feel up to it, go and write stories of the lost seasons yourselves. Then drop us a link in the forums, because we’d really like to read them. You can even use the titles, events, or scenes I wrote for this rant. I just ask that if you do, you credit me and mention DO XIII in the author’s note and drop me an email when you post the fic. Someone has to keep these lost stories alive, and it might as well be us.

A rant post by Rob on September 28, 2008