Vathara may have perfectly explained a canonical key plot twist in two ways without realizing it; she says the Dai Li joined Azula because "Fire Is Loyalty" so she was able to "Bend Their Minds" with her "Inner Fire", but she also showed another explanation; "Earth is Enterprise." The Dai Li suffer greatly to defend their city from evil spirits, and prior to Long Feng's thought police scam they were honored as protectors. People feared them for their supernatural scars, but they also respected them. Once Long Feng made them into Mind Raping bogeymen, they never got respect, only increasing amounts of fear - people only saw them as the monsters who kidnapped and brutalized their friends, turning the women into those freaky Joo Dees because their efforts to fight evil spirits were suppressed because their prevalence is related to the War, which is illegal to speak of. In effect, Long Feng kept them from getting paid. They were permitted, perhaps even compelled by Earth Kingdom ethics to blow him off for a better deal.
Agent Bon: We give up everything for our city. Can't it give us something back?
Katara, Sokka and Aang were pretty ignorant of the cultural differences. Given that their contact with other people is mostly "fly on Appa, land for sleep and food, take care of any problems we find then leave", it makes sense. They weren't purposely ignoring the differences until it was pointed out. They just didn't stay in a place long enough to learn.
The whole "flying on Appa" makes a difference, definitely. In chapter 72, Katara gets angry when faced with Zuko and says how he's safe up where he is while his people are not down the mountain - the gAang have a tendency to see things from the high ground rather from where the real trouble is.
It comes out in-story that the name of Sozin's wife was Fire Lady Tejina, which was in fact a false name for the dragon Makoto. Made absolutely perfect when you realize that 'tejina' is Japanese for "sleight of hand", while 'makoto' is "truth".
Chapter 79 all but states the problem everyone in the world has with the Fire Nation, but lack the cultural attitudes to understand. Due to their natural state of intrigue and warfare(as well as Hot-Blooded instinct), Fire Nationals become extremely vague and formal whenever they feel pressured, as the slightest ill-conceived word could ruin formal agreements or even get them killed. In other words, they lawyer up. And Only Bad Guys Call Their Lawyers.
"(Zuko) grew up in court," Karasu stated. "Nephew. You're among kin."
Dragon morality is similar to human morality with a crucial difference: both human and dragon morality have innocence and trustworthiness as shared key virtues, but are opposed as to which takes precedence - to a human, a nonviolent traitor(a draft dodger) is less of a concern than a dutiful sociopath (a war criminal). For dragons, it's the other way around - a Blood Knight is of use to the clan, but a Dirty Coward is a weak link to be eliminated at all costs.
This explains why Raava is so violent whenever she has sole control over the Avatar State. As another troper pointed out in the Legend of Korra pages, some of this is saving/freezing Aang helped screw up the world's balance and her attempts to fix it reflect that (especially against Ozai). However, how is Aang is more peaceful than the spirit of light/peace/good? In Embersverse it does make sense. Raava follows the dragon's code. Make that, the dragons (subconsciously) follow Raava's since they're from her world. Humans aren't, so it makes sense that the 12 year old airbender kid is more of a pacifist than the Spirit of Peace and Goodness.
Other Beginnings and Embersverse explanations: Humans arrived on the lion turtles. Spirit bending becomes Fire/Earth/Air/Water with appropriate teachers. Vaatu breaks the barrier between worlds. Why do the turtles have the bending? Maybe because the humans fear giving the great spirits power over them (spirits almost wiped out humans, it took Wan two years to find that Air Turtle, yet he found Water and Earth within a year) or they're disturbed by the way the elements force the benders into line with their element's values and the possibly fatal consequences of breaking of those bonds.
Wan has gold dragon child eyes. The soldier we saw possessed by the aye-aye spirit was transformed fairly quickly. Yes, Wan might have just lasted so long possessed but not fused with Raava while fighting Vaatu because she'd entered him so many times to switch elements, but maybe his dragon blood helped him somehow, since dragons are of Raava's world. Also, Raava needed to hold the other three elements for Wan because she's the Spirit of Good, not Agni/Tengri/etc, she couldn't make him a yaoren because that's not what she's Great Spirit of.
Sokka being the one to beat Ozai. Given the Ozai looks down on those who aren't firebenders and those who are Fire Nation, and is willing to throw away his family if he has no use to them and cares only for his goals and ambitions, Sokka, in a sense, is a physical representation of what Ozai disdains, a non-bender from outside the Fire Nation who is devoted to his family and honestly cares about people. Given how Ozai dislikes non-Fire Nation people, Sokka's adoption by Temul probably makes him one hell of an insult in Ozai's eyes (or would if he knew). Add in the fact that earlier in the story, Sokka was the one that pointed out it doesn't have be Aang who kills Ozai, Katara made a comment a boomerang. Sokka beating Ozai was foreshadowed!
This fic originally had Tombcannon quite annoyed. It's loaded Fire Nation apologetics, used to paint literally the whole Fire Nation - every single one of them, even Sozin, as innocent victims of a ruthless Avatar Kyoshi off on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. At the same time, Katara and Aang were mysteriously transmogrified into Idiot Ball carriers with one-dimensional, mind-numbingly ridiculous takes on life that were completely contrary to the personalities established over Season One's canon (which the fanfic claimed to be adhering to). Throw in Dragon!Zuko the fire-water dual-wielding reincarnation of Kuzon, erase every single bad decision he made in canon and make him a self-flagellating noble hero who can do no wrong, add awesome into everything Zuko does and have the multitudes of Original Characters taking his side, reminding the reader in stylized "monologues" of exactly how fantastic Zuko is, hide behind a variety of excuses ranging from everyone being an Unreliable Narrator to "There are no excuses, only reasons" (suspending this rule if your name is Zuko or Iroh or you're Fire Nation)... this is officially the most brilliant satire/trollfic of all the hundreds of less well-presented fanfics with similar plotlines. Realizing all that, then going back and reading Embers from the start... Vathara is a genius. A genius..
Apologetics for the Fire Nation, you say? You're forgetting about the Air Nomads. The latest chapter shows what the Air Nomads were like, and how Xiangchen put together his grand scheme for "world peace" which included kidnapping the new Avatar, Yangchen, shutting her away from the world, targeting Air Nomads, especially the healers, and folding them into the Temples, thus helping Skylord Subodei conquer, rape and pillage everywhere. Aang will have to invent a new religion to justify what his great hero did. Killing may be wrong, but erasing one's individuality should be a violation of human rights. What reason is there for that?
"The latest chapter shows what the Air Nomads were like" - in her fanfic. There's nothing in canon that hints at this, so the OP has a good point about the Fire Nation apologism and Embers being potential trollfic/satire.
Except that a recurring theme is that there ARE no excuses for what's been done, and the Fire Nation was wrong to do what they did, regardless of what may or may not have been done to them. In fact, the basic premise of the fic is more along the lines of "everyone has fucked up royally at some point in the past, and the more powerful you are, the greater your potential for fucking up everyone else's lives along with your own". And that most of the people on both sides are "fucked-up people fucking up in a fucked-up world." (quote from 1632) It's still possible that it's a trollfic or satire (I for one am leaning towards satire of the two), but the claims of rampant apologism are patently spurious.
On Fire Nation "honor"; though "Corvo Is Not An Honorable Man" is an examination of a Western honor culture instead of an Eastern one, it's got a lot of eerily and downright sickening similarities to what Zuko is lauded for in Embers. It also demonstrates why so many - in-story and out - find Zuko and the Fire Nation despicable; in an "Honor culture", honor is not about being "ethically virtuous", so much as being "worthy". A man from such a culture can be extremely amoral and completely honorable at the same time. Duels are not honorable because you are attacking an offender, but because you are exposing yourself to danger to prove your integrity. Refusing to attack your opponent would be a terrible insult to them - which is why Ozai was permitted to horribly scar Zuko even in canon. It also explains how Zuko can adore his sister despite her regularly trying to kill his allies and him - and even how he loves his father even as he leads an army to slaughter his people; they are cruel and merciless and murderous, but they aren't duplicitous - they state their enmity to him, and challenge his power with their own, exposing themselves to his power to do so. It also makes one wonder if peace in the Embers!verse is even possible, given that the most powerful people in the world see appearance as honor and compassion as secondary to it.
While Xiangchen kept Yangchen shut away from the world, this allowed Skylord Subodei, his son Yisugei, and his son Subodei (and let's not mention the rest of the White Wind clan) to conquer, rape and pillage all around the world. The White Wind being the equivalent to the Mongols, think about what Genghis Khan had done. This is most likely why there are still traces of airbender blood in people who are NOT Air Nomads.
It gets even worse when you realize that following a Way is the air equivalent of giving loyalty to a lord, making a deal, or being part of a tribe except WORSE because lack of air will kill you within minutes instead of hours so if you don't have someone immediately on hand to breathe for you there's no chance of survival. Meaning that anyone who follows Xiangchen's Way, willingly or not, is in the same position the Fire Nation is in because of Kyoshi's decree. No airhealers to help them survive and considering Gyate didn't know until it was too late that it could kill her there's a very good chance that nobody would know what to do if it happened. All those kids growing up in the Air Temples would have no idea that going against the Way they've been taught would kill them. If the Avatar wasn't except from this Aang would be dead by now.
In a way Embers runs on this trope. Not the reader's horror, but Vathara's. For instance: remember when we see Iroh and Zuko sailing away from the North Pole on their raft, and Zuko finally getting rest? An almost happy moment, they are reunited, Iroh finally gets Zuko away from bad influences, and he gets to rest. But wait, there's more. Clean water to drink—for now there's the ice bergs but they will run out before they hit land. Food, there's none on the raft, in Embers they ate the equivalent of seagulls that landed on the raft. Plus they had just seen an entire fleet get smashed in the space of seconds. Oh, and dead bodies? They tend to float. Yuck.
There's even a few cases of this in-series. Two of the more common ones are when people discover just what it was that Kyoshi did to the Fire Nation and when they discover just what Aang did at the Siege of the North Pole. Death at the hands of a spirit? Death without any possible attempt to fight back or while full of strong negative emotions? Improper burial (those who drowned at the North Pole would have been irretrievable, and even if they could be retrieved, Northern Water Tribesmen either wouldn't know or wouldn't believe that Fire Nation dead need to be cremated or given a funeral light)? Any of these can cause a soul to be restless. The Siege of the North caused a whole army to experience all three fates. That means there's an army of demons and restless souls wandering southward along the bottom of the sea... not to mention that the angry Ocean spirit is going to keep spitting up monsters of its own to express its rage at their presence.
Aang's ultimate fate. In canon, Aang is actually the nth-degree removed reincarnation of Avatar Wan - a single human soul symbiotically bound to a single spirit, who are born, live, die, and reborn together, memories preserved in the Spirit World like old logbooks. But in Vathara's Avatarverse, he's just the latest in a sting of chumps the World Spirit has attached itself to - and Vathara has repeatedly demonstrated that the World Spirit doesn't care one whit for the fate of humans. Not even its bearer. Aang is going to suffer in Vathara's Avatarverse even worse that every other free-will-deficient pseudohuman - he's built his entire cultural identity around re-incarnation, but he is not going to re-incarnate! When he dies, he's going into a pouch on the World Spirit's hip to be taken out only when - no make that IF! - any of the next few Avatars have use of him, and unless he does something unforgettably amazing or unforgivably destructive he will be completely forgotten in a few hundred years. And spend the rest of eternity in a dreamless sleep, never to see the people he loves ever again. There's no better proof than this that Vathara hates Aang just for confusing her. Just... Damn it, Vathara.
World Spirit, Raava... Did you even watch Legend of Korra?
There is also the part when Yang Chen first appears. She is described as standing on a mountain top and she talks to Lu Ten/Kaze. It seems as though Avatars don't reincarnate but hang around in the Spirit World and show up if their successor needs them.
Vathara introduced a wrinkle canon avoided; while canon had cross-cultural marriages like Yu Dao's Firebender mayor and his Earthbender wife with an Earthbender daughter, Vathara has introduced countless cases of overt and covert forced cultural assimilation — Earth/Air/Waterbenders who were unknowingly kidnapped by the conquerors who murdered their parents to be raised as Fire Nation, if not outright children of rape. This is a world where bloodlines carry immense supernatural power, and now that the War is over, many of the Fire Nation's non-Fire benders are going to be caught up in a cultural nightmare; imagine waking up one day and discovering you wield a power your ancestors very likely stole by kidnapping and/or rape — and the likelihood that your living family will be unable or outright unwilling to tell you the truth of your origins. Do you stand with your country or its enemies? The conquerors or the conquered? Especially since the Fire Nations are being guided by Azula — an outright and self-acknowledged sociopath — to do anything possible to see rival nations suffer for daring to challenge them. Won the War, Lost the Peace doesn't have to happen quickly; now that Ozai's attempt to commit global genocide is public knowledge, how long will it be before Fire-born Water and Earthbenders accuse their parents of being kidnappers and/or rapists? Especially since in the Fire Nation, "Disloyalty Is Death" and such accusations can and will be punished by brutal abuse and/or filicide. Especially the royal family itself; Sozin murdered Roku in secret and arranged a marriage between their children specifically to claim the power of the Avatar's bloodline. Every living member of the Fire Nation royal family is the result of rape by deception. Zuko and Azula have both decided that Roku's demise and desires mean absolutely nothing, but we never learn how the world at large will see the rulers of the nation that tried to murder the world ruling their domains with the power of an Avatar's bloodline. Iroh himself states waaay back in Chapter 6 that, "The Fire Nation has taken so much from the world. The balance may require that we give it back. Even if it breaks our hearts." At the very least, this concept makes it far less likely for Vathara's Fire Nation to retain the Karma Houdini status she granted it; everyone will be wondering, "Is there stolen blood in my veins?"
Zuko claims the murder of Katara's mother was a crime even by Fire Nation law, and Katara is justified in seeking vengeance. But that fire bender wasn't there to kill Katara's mother, he was there to kill "the last southern waterbender" - Katara - as per the Fire Nation waterbender extermination policy. Becomes Fridge Brilliance because Katara's mother wasn't a water bender; intent means nothing for the Fire Nation, thus the killing was unjust. If that's the case, then the realization that killing Katara would have been A-OK in the Fire Nation's eyes - that Kya's sacrifice saved her twice over - would most likely drive her Survivor Guilt up to eleven.
Nuanced in Chapter 60, where the Fridge Logic disconnect between Puppetmaster (where waterbenders were captured, not killed) and The Southern Raiders (and the death of Katara's mother) is Lampshaded: The "sympathetic" Fire National present insists that as far as he knew, Fire Nation policy was to capture waterbenders. However, unless Vathara Retconned things to make the Fire Nation look better again, Yon Rha's specific words were; "I'm afraid I'm not taking prisoners today."
Actually, that explains why it was a crime on Fire Nation terms even BETTER. If Yon Rha said that, it can imply that his orders are to take prisoners, and he is disobeying those orders when he kills Kya. Which neatly explains why he's no longer in the military when Katara finds him—he was dishonorably discharged for disobeying orders.
Except that disobeying orders makes firebenders die. PERIOD. Why would Yon Rha be willing to commit suicide to kill Katara's mother?
Zuko didn't blame Katara for attacking him at the Western Air Temple. Of course he wouldn't. He was there when Amaya had been grabbed by the Haima-jiao. So he probably compared the two incidents and concluded Katara was just as much a victim when the sea serpent showed itself
Also Fridge Brilliance: There is (potentially) another reason Makoto helped instigate the current war - Asagitatsu's guardians were her clan. The Northern Air Temple was built right next door. Dragons are known to prey on sky bison. Did the Air Nomads at some point slaughter the Asagitatsu dragons in order to protect the bison? Did Makoto in turn encourage the genocide of the Air Nomads in part because of the loss of her clan? Was this the event that led to the schism and blood feud between the remnants of Clan Asagitatsu and the other dragons, and had Makoto urging Sozin to hunt all the rest down as revenge for her lost kin?
Alternately, that last one could also have occurred to prevent any other dragons from setting up shop on Mount Asagitatsu and pacifying it, taking the volcano's destructive power out of the equation - and given just what Asagitatsu is capable of unleashing, it's easy to see why Makoto and Koh fully intend to keep this ace up their sleeve.
Alternately again, it's possible that she killed her clan herself to ensure there was nobody around to hold the volcano back, or that her clan died off due to throwing a high number of dark dragons, which would oblige the other clans to attack them.
In Chapter 47, Avatar Yangchen's death brought ruin upon her clan. She actually traded her clan's domain to Wan Shi Tong in exchange for human knowledge.
mysteriously transmogrified into Idiot Ball carriers with one-dimensional, mind-numbingly ridiculous takes on life that were completely contrary to the personalities established over Season One's canon (which the fanfic claimed to be adhering to). Throw in Dragon!Zuko the fire-water dual-wielding reincarnation of Kuzon, erase every single bad decision he made in canon and make him a self-flagellating noble hero who can do no wrong, add awesome into everything Zuko does and have the multitudes of Original Characters taking his side, reminding the reader in stylized "monologues" of exactly how fantastic Zuko is, hide behind a variety of excuses ranging from everyone being an Unreliable Narrator to "There are no excuses, only reasons" (suspending this rule if your name is Zuko or Iroh or you're Fire Nation)... this is officially the most brilliant satire/trollfic of all the hundreds of less well-presented fanfics with similar plotlines. Realizing all that, then going back and reading Embers from the start... Vathara is a genius. A genius..
is an examination of a Western honor culture instead of an Eastern one, it's got a lot of eerily and downright sickening similarities to what Zuko is lauded for in Embers. It also demonstrates why so many - in-story and out - find Zuko and the Fire Nation despicable; in an "Honor culture", honor is not about being "ethically virtuous", so much as being "worthy". A man from such a culture can be extremely amoral and completely honorable at the same time. Duels are not honorable because you are attacking an offender, but because you are exposing yourself to danger to prove your integrity. Refusing to attack your opponent would be a terrible insult to them - which is why Ozai was permitted to horribly scar Zuko even in canon. It also explains how Zuko can adore his sister despite her regularly trying to kill his allies and him - and even how he loves his father even as he leads an army to slaughter his people; they are cruel and merciless and murderous, but they aren't duplicitous - they state their enmity to him, and challenge his power with their own, exposing themselves to his power to do so. It also makes one wonder if peace in the Embers!verse is even possible, given that the most powerful people in the world see appearance as honor and compassion as secondary to it.