Making a lasting peace is hard. Dealing with the aftermath of defeat is hard. As in, the Treaty of Versailles helped bring about WW2 hard, and regimes that lose major wars are really vulnerable to revolutions and civil wars. Think the fall of the Tsar, russian revolutions and russian civil war. There are loads of potential conflicts that they could have used. Making most of the cast be out of character wasn't necessary.
I am really glad they showed things being difficult after the war - in some ways I don't think they showed them being difficult enough. Food shortages, currency crises, parts of both Fire Nation colonies and Earth Kingdom declaring themselves independant, unemployed former soldiers making trouble, other countries demanding higher reparations than the Fire Nation can possibly pay, groups like Jet's freedom fighters killing fire nation colonials who don't move fast enough, debts to internal banks (I bet all the countries involved are in debt up their eyebrows if they have financial systems of any complexity, and that Ozai in particular was financially reckless) and nothing you do can bring back the dead, and there are wounds that will scar but never really heal. You can't bring back the dead, and even if you find hidden airbenders or Korra makes new ones, the new air nomads aren't going to be exactly the same culturally as the old ones.
If you show things being as hard as they probably should be, you shouldn't have to bend your characters out of shape to get conflicts going. I'm hoping to show some of this in later stories in this series, but I've got a story about a water tribe Zuko returning to the Fire Nation to finish and post first.
Comment on A Different Promise
Chisscientist Thu 03 Dec 2020 05:35PM UTC
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