Tear Jerker / The Dawn of Yangchen

• When Mama Ayunerak inadvertently reveals to Yangchen that she's aware of her constant and oppressive connection to her past lives, Yangchen bursts into tears, because... no one outside of her inner circle, her guardians at the Western Air Temple and Master Boma, should know this. They've all tried to keep it secret, which means that someone has been spying on her and passing information to the White Lotus about her since she was a young child. And it absolutely breaks her for a moment, she instantly resolves that she never wants to know who betrayed her like that (Abbess Dagmola? Master Boma? Jetsun?) because it means that absolutely nothing about her life is real or authentic, nothing about her is real or authentic.
  "That was my home!"
• Yangchen's specific Cynicism Catalyst. Back in Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Rift, Yangchen told Aang about her first mission as a young, fully realized Avatar— just one week after she mastered her final element. When a spirit attacked a seaside city in revenge for the death of a spirit who chose to live among the humans, Yangchen fought him off, but when they stalemated, she bargained with him: If the humans left the land alone, let it go back to the way it was when he and Lady Tienhai first lived there, before the city was built, he would lay his armor aside and not bother them. In this book, we find out the aftermath of that bargain: Yangchen had to figure out how to help all of the displaced refugees from the city. When they started dying off from disease and hunger, she had to get creative and learned to lie and spin just to get them work and shelter. In the short time since, she's become a very clever strategist and spymaster, but there's almost always a moment where her opponent shows a flash of humanity, Yangchen feels soothed and optimistic... and then she realizes, suddenly, she's being played, or deceived, or manipulated, or her actions will be spun in another way by someone else, and she has to start out-thinking them again.
• After the Unanimity's defeat, Yangchen takes Kavik aside to confirm that she got his message confessing to betraying her and then regretting it, but confesses that she can no longer trust him; this, too, could be another layer of manipulation, an attempt to trick her into helping him help his brother. Her instincts tell her that he can be trusted, that his change of heart was genuine, but they also told her that when he directed her to the wrong city and endangered the balance of the world. She can no longer afford to trust him, but she will have to use him anyway as an asset. Kavik is horrified because the kind-hearted and affectionate Yangchen is entirely gone from her tone with him.
  She spoke as if he were grist for the mill. As if the kindest, fiercest, most giving part of her had broken completely.

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