The seeeecret history of the Avatar Cyperpunkverse
I will warn that this post contains Minor spoilers, nothing that would totally blow your mind or give away plot, but still minor spoilers ahoy.
So the secret of the cyberpunk verse? The big secret? It isn’t an AU, it’s a divergence fic. A divergence fic set way in the future, but a divergence fic none the less.
The divergence? Aang never got woken up. Maybe Katara kept her temper, maybe Sokka never mouthed off, maybe the just didn’t got fishing that day. Isn’t important, but regardless, no avatar. The Fire Nation won, took the outer wall with the drill, and got a final surrender on the day of the comet, taking the earth kingdom and forming it’s eternal empire…. Or not.
You remember Zuko’s little speech about how the earth kingdom would resist? That happens in this world, and here, the Fire Nation didn’t have the “burn the EK” plan (or zeppelins). So the comet came and went, and the earth kingdoms started resisting in earnest. There were no formal armies, and when one’s did arise, the Fire Nation always crushed them. But just a long, slow resisting.
We saw in season three that the Fire Nation itself had been economically devastated by the war, I figured they had always been willing to continue since they figured once it was over they’d finally see the profit from the occupied territories. Only here, they don’t. The active resistance means they still have to maintain a army of the same size, and have to hold the costs of governing vast regions with hostile populaces, and there never seemed to be any profit in the regions. With earthbending forbidden the mines were unproductive, and the peasants never seemed to have any crops or money, while the forced labor were never able to come close to what Fire Nation citizens could produce. For their entire existence, the majority of the earth kingdom was nothing but a drain on Fire Nation resources.
They still tried to hold on to them. It was more ideology that economic sense at that time, but them things got real bad, as one disaster after another hit.
1) The earth kingdom rebels got smarter. Much less active standing up to armies on the open battle field. Much more ambushes, tunnel making, collapsing houses where Fire Nation officials live. Use of explosive jelly. Etc. Worse, retaliations to an area not only made the resistance have more recruits, but also destroyed the economic value of the area.
2) The coal and iron mines of the Fire Nation itself, after years of use, finally dried up fully, forcing them to rely on earth-kingdom mines. The one’s run by force earth-labor proved to be ineffective, lacking advanced mining equipment, they might have been able to import the now-useless ones from the Fire Nation, except for two problems. First, rebels had a nasty habit of collapsing the mines. And secondly….
3) No one quite knows how metalbending started. The earliest possible reports of it come at the offshore coal refueling station for Gaoling, (though that may have been some other earthbending). Regardless of where it came from, it soon spread to everywhere in the earth kingdom. It wasn’t it’s open danger, it’s lack of range meant it wasn’t as deadly as it could have been, what made it an absolute nightmare was when it was combined with the guerilla tactics already employed. A metalbender could devastate equipment. A mining drill that took a factory a month to make gone in a minute. A tank in seconds, more than one platoon of troop awoke to find the in the night earthbender had dug under their encampment, gotten to the tanks, and made them into scrap metal in the night. It got even worse once one bright spartk figured out they could swim out to docked ships, bend up a bit of earth from underwater to give a steady surface, and then rip holes in them.
4) Numerous solutions were tried, the most ambitious, in Fire Lord Ozai’s final years was to create wholly Fire Nation citizen zone, where everyone else would be ‘purged’. This proved to be a disaster as well, while the undesirables could be moved or killed, these area’s also allowed the rebels to retaliate with no-hold-bars attacks, creating sinkholes that swallowed entire towns. The true difficulty of the plan came in when Omashu was switched over, as a house to house battle, with earthbender creating new wall, entrances and tunnels between houses and sliding entire area off the side of the mountain turned the area into a killing zone. Even then, the plan was never viable, the Fire Nation simply didn’t have enough citizens to settle all the areas and every citizen taken from the homeland was on less in the factories.
5) Speaking of the political situation, this didn’t help the Fire Nation. After Ozai died, Fire Lord Azula proved mentally unstable, issuing increasingly bizarre orders and killing any noble acting against her (essentially, this AU runs with the idea that Azula was always unstable, and she only needed the right trigger, but it was going to happen sooner or later). Eventually she accidently ate a spoiled dish, which poisoned her, fell down a flight of stairs and tragically landed on a misplaced spear. Her successor, Fire Lord Zuko, the only living heir to the throne, had spent nearly his entire life at that point in exile, and had little idea of how to run a nation, proving utterly unable to control the infighting between nobles, generals, and other factions of the court.
If anyone else has suggestions, I’d love em (I always love worldbuilding suggestions for stories). But the basic premise is that it wasn’t a grand battle, just a slow, steady series of things that didn’t work out, and honestly, the occupation was never profitable for the Fire Nation at all. I’m still working out what to do with the waterbenders, I know at some point the swamp got invaded (another disaster, metal armor drowns easily, and swamps don’t burn well, especially ones with a degree of sentience) forcing the waterbenders escape and hide throughout the earth kingdom, in addition a lot of the southern water tribe moved north, with the south proving inhospitable after several bad winters. Not sure about up north, maybe the Fire Nation conquered them, maybe there was a Koh disaster, maybe they just fled thanks to a vision from Yue, regardless, the only real requirement is that the moon survives, either thank to Yue replacement or fleeing or the Fire Nation capturing, but not killing it, it needs to survive somehow.
Moving on, eventually, the Fire Nation began to loosen its grip. Never overtly, and they never admitted it. But slowly, surely, it happened. It started in the northern mountains, which never had much taxes anyways and were playground for avalanches. Less patrols, more ignoring of things, slowly, surely, it happened. But soon, as things got worse, it spread to other areas. More “native administrations”, and less oversight, with the army only coming in if the overt rebellion came. The big theme here being the final lines of “The hollow men”
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
I’m still not sure what the actual overt change is when formal kingdom are declared, but by the time it happens, the Fire Nation has abandoned those area in all but name. The western areas are still Fire Nation controlled, but even those end up rebelling, with the lost profit of the other colonies, the Fire Nation had to tax it’s own citizens pretty hard, until they were fed up as well, declaring their own rebellions (Perhaps, in a bit of irony, using the next day of the comet for the time to strike?).
All this lays the stage for the modern world, it’s been a long enough time that the old grudges against the Fire Nation are mostly forgotten (still deciding on what, I originally thought 1000 years as a nice, big number, but that seems to long, shouldn’t take 100 years to go from industrial revolutions to cyberpunk, and one of the big themes of this AU is a middle finger to the idea that bender=stagnant tech). So to explain the part of the earth kingdom.
The east and north are mostly earth kingdom citizens. They still have tensions though, as a lot of groups moved in during the 100 years war to escape the Fire Nation, clashing and conflicting with the established groups. At this point, no one (outside of historians) really remembers whey they dislike each other, it’s just a list of grievances that have piled up over the years. The eastern areas, especially, havea bit of a class element to it, as the new groups tended to be forced into lower class positions. While the northern area has a more tribal element to it, as the mountainous terrain mean each village it’s it’s own area, against every other one (think Afghanistan).
The west was originally run by Fire Nation decedents, lording it over earth kingdom inhabitants. These days, there have been a series of revolutions that changed that, (see the original posting I had on that). Not much to add. The south, already described that, the waterbenders are a mix of southern tribe descendents and foggy swamp, though no one really make a lot of distinction, and they’ve tended to mix as a result of being pushed together due to social pressure.
One final note, I admit that the fact that all the people in the story itself having the same name and personality as the originals kinda stretches belief. And I really don’t have a terribly good explanations, though I will note that reincarnation is canon, so that’s what I’m going with. Plus I do actually have one for the Fire Family. Sozin’s original name was actually “Lee” but after founding his company, in a fit of supreme arrogance, he changed his name to one of the most powerful Fire Lord’s ever, and names his children after the Fire Lord’s son. The tradition has continued to this day.
So the secret of the cyberpunk verse? The big secret? It isn’t an AU, it’s a divergence fic. A divergence fic set way in the future, but a divergence fic none the less.
The divergence? Aang never got woken up. Maybe Katara kept her temper, maybe Sokka never mouthed off, maybe the just didn’t got fishing that day. Isn’t important, but regardless, no avatar. The Fire Nation won, took the outer wall with the drill, and got a final surrender on the day of the comet, taking the earth kingdom and forming it’s eternal empire…. Or not.
You remember Zuko’s little speech about how the earth kingdom would resist? That happens in this world, and here, the Fire Nation didn’t have the “burn the EK” plan (or zeppelins). So the comet came and went, and the earth kingdoms started resisting in earnest. There were no formal armies, and when one’s did arise, the Fire Nation always crushed them. But just a long, slow resisting.
We saw in season three that the Fire Nation itself had been economically devastated by the war, I figured they had always been willing to continue since they figured once it was over they’d finally see the profit from the occupied territories. Only here, they don’t. The active resistance means they still have to maintain a army of the same size, and have to hold the costs of governing vast regions with hostile populaces, and there never seemed to be any profit in the regions. With earthbending forbidden the mines were unproductive, and the peasants never seemed to have any crops or money, while the forced labor were never able to come close to what Fire Nation citizens could produce. For their entire existence, the majority of the earth kingdom was nothing but a drain on Fire Nation resources.
They still tried to hold on to them. It was more ideology that economic sense at that time, but them things got real bad, as one disaster after another hit.
1) The earth kingdom rebels got smarter. Much less active standing up to armies on the open battle field. Much more ambushes, tunnel making, collapsing houses where Fire Nation officials live. Use of explosive jelly. Etc. Worse, retaliations to an area not only made the resistance have more recruits, but also destroyed the economic value of the area.
2) The coal and iron mines of the Fire Nation itself, after years of use, finally dried up fully, forcing them to rely on earth-kingdom mines. The one’s run by force earth-labor proved to be ineffective, lacking advanced mining equipment, they might have been able to import the now-useless ones from the Fire Nation, except for two problems. First, rebels had a nasty habit of collapsing the mines. And secondly….
3) No one quite knows how metalbending started. The earliest possible reports of it come at the offshore coal refueling station for Gaoling, (though that may have been some other earthbending). Regardless of where it came from, it soon spread to everywhere in the earth kingdom. It wasn’t it’s open danger, it’s lack of range meant it wasn’t as deadly as it could have been, what made it an absolute nightmare was when it was combined with the guerilla tactics already employed. A metalbender could devastate equipment. A mining drill that took a factory a month to make gone in a minute. A tank in seconds, more than one platoon of troop awoke to find the in the night earthbender had dug under their encampment, gotten to the tanks, and made them into scrap metal in the night. It got even worse once one bright spartk figured out they could swim out to docked ships, bend up a bit of earth from underwater to give a steady surface, and then rip holes in them.
4) Numerous solutions were tried, the most ambitious, in Fire Lord Ozai’s final years was to create wholly Fire Nation citizen zone, where everyone else would be ‘purged’. This proved to be a disaster as well, while the undesirables could be moved or killed, these area’s also allowed the rebels to retaliate with no-hold-bars attacks, creating sinkholes that swallowed entire towns. The true difficulty of the plan came in when Omashu was switched over, as a house to house battle, with earthbender creating new wall, entrances and tunnels between houses and sliding entire area off the side of the mountain turned the area into a killing zone. Even then, the plan was never viable, the Fire Nation simply didn’t have enough citizens to settle all the areas and every citizen taken from the homeland was on less in the factories.
5) Speaking of the political situation, this didn’t help the Fire Nation. After Ozai died, Fire Lord Azula proved mentally unstable, issuing increasingly bizarre orders and killing any noble acting against her (essentially, this AU runs with the idea that Azula was always unstable, and she only needed the right trigger, but it was going to happen sooner or later). Eventually she accidently ate a spoiled dish, which poisoned her, fell down a flight of stairs and tragically landed on a misplaced spear. Her successor, Fire Lord Zuko, the only living heir to the throne, had spent nearly his entire life at that point in exile, and had little idea of how to run a nation, proving utterly unable to control the infighting between nobles, generals, and other factions of the court.
If anyone else has suggestions, I’d love em (I always love worldbuilding suggestions for stories). But the basic premise is that it wasn’t a grand battle, just a slow, steady series of things that didn’t work out, and honestly, the occupation was never profitable for the Fire Nation at all. I’m still working out what to do with the waterbenders, I know at some point the swamp got invaded (another disaster, metal armor drowns easily, and swamps don’t burn well, especially ones with a degree of sentience) forcing the waterbenders escape and hide throughout the earth kingdom, in addition a lot of the southern water tribe moved north, with the south proving inhospitable after several bad winters. Not sure about up north, maybe the Fire Nation conquered them, maybe there was a Koh disaster, maybe they just fled thanks to a vision from Yue, regardless, the only real requirement is that the moon survives, either thank to Yue replacement or fleeing or the Fire Nation capturing, but not killing it, it needs to survive somehow.
Moving on, eventually, the Fire Nation began to loosen its grip. Never overtly, and they never admitted it. But slowly, surely, it happened. It started in the northern mountains, which never had much taxes anyways and were playground for avalanches. Less patrols, more ignoring of things, slowly, surely, it happened. But soon, as things got worse, it spread to other areas. More “native administrations”, and less oversight, with the army only coming in if the overt rebellion came. The big theme here being the final lines of “The hollow men”
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
I’m still not sure what the actual overt change is when formal kingdom are declared, but by the time it happens, the Fire Nation has abandoned those area in all but name. The western areas are still Fire Nation controlled, but even those end up rebelling, with the lost profit of the other colonies, the Fire Nation had to tax it’s own citizens pretty hard, until they were fed up as well, declaring their own rebellions (Perhaps, in a bit of irony, using the next day of the comet for the time to strike?).
All this lays the stage for the modern world, it’s been a long enough time that the old grudges against the Fire Nation are mostly forgotten (still deciding on what, I originally thought 1000 years as a nice, big number, but that seems to long, shouldn’t take 100 years to go from industrial revolutions to cyberpunk, and one of the big themes of this AU is a middle finger to the idea that bender=stagnant tech). So to explain the part of the earth kingdom.
The east and north are mostly earth kingdom citizens. They still have tensions though, as a lot of groups moved in during the 100 years war to escape the Fire Nation, clashing and conflicting with the established groups. At this point, no one (outside of historians) really remembers whey they dislike each other, it’s just a list of grievances that have piled up over the years. The eastern areas, especially, havea bit of a class element to it, as the new groups tended to be forced into lower class positions. While the northern area has a more tribal element to it, as the mountainous terrain mean each village it’s it’s own area, against every other one (think Afghanistan).
The west was originally run by Fire Nation decedents, lording it over earth kingdom inhabitants. These days, there have been a series of revolutions that changed that, (see the original posting I had on that). Not much to add. The south, already described that, the waterbenders are a mix of southern tribe descendents and foggy swamp, though no one really make a lot of distinction, and they’ve tended to mix as a result of being pushed together due to social pressure.
One final note, I admit that the fact that all the people in the story itself having the same name and personality as the originals kinda stretches belief. And I really don’t have a terribly good explanations, though I will note that reincarnation is canon, so that’s what I’m going with. Plus I do actually have one for the Fire Family. Sozin’s original name was actually “Lee” but after founding his company, in a fit of supreme arrogance, he changed his name to one of the most powerful Fire Lord’s ever, and names his children after the Fire Lord’s son. The tradition has continued to this day.