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** Additionally, since Sozin and Roku had the same birthday, Sozin also could have been the Avatar. Perhaps Sozin and Roku met during the Fire Nation’s way of finding The Avatar.
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** Just because they wait for the 16th birthday to inform everyone of the Avatar’s identity does not mean they wait that long to find out. The Air Nomads knew Aang was the Avatar because of the toys he picked as a young child. And the Kyoshi Novels reveal that the Earth Avatar is found by repeatedly halving a map of the Earth Kingdom until they find the new Avatar’s home. Roku was probably found as a baby/young child, and the Fire Lord would have wanted his son to be on good terms with the Avatar.
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[[/folder]]
[[folder:How did Roku and Sozin met?]]
* Isn’t it a big coincidence that Firelord Sozin and Roku know each other long before it was revealed that the latter is the Avatar?
[[folder:How did Roku and Sozin met?]]
* Isn’t it a big coincidence that Firelord Sozin and Roku know each other long before it was revealed that the latter is the Avatar?
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** I mentioned this above but I'll do it here as well. According to Wiki/TheOtherWiki, Sozin didn't originally know where the Air Temples were. That information didn't become common knowledge until after the Air nomad genocide. Sozin took 12 years to wipe out the nomads because he needed the comet AND a Benedict Arnold to tell him where to strike. Check it out http://avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Afiko
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** I mentioned this above but I'll do it here as well. According to Wiki/TheOtherWiki, Website/TheOtherWiki, Sozin didn't originally know where the Air Temples were. That information didn't become common knowledge until after the Air nomad genocide. Sozin took 12 years to wipe out the nomads because he needed the comet AND a Benedict Arnold to tell him where to strike. Check it out http://avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Afiko
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*** Something that might clear this up better is that according to Wiki/TheOtherWiki, Sozin didn't know right away where the air nomad temples were. He had to talk another air nomad into betraying them and telling him the location of the temples. It took him 12 years because he needed to find a Benedict Arnold. Here's the link. http://avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Afiko
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*** Something that might clear this up better is that according to Wiki/TheOtherWiki, Website/TheOtherWiki, Sozin didn't know right away where the air nomad temples were. He had to talk another air nomad into betraying them and telling him the location of the temples. It took him 12 years because he needed to find a Benedict Arnold. Here's the link. http://avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Afiko
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Add info on the “same birthday” question
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***It’s not explicitly stated. Roku described them as having been best friends when Sozin was still crown prince, and the birthday we are shown in the flashbacks is Roku’s 16th, since it’s the birthday on which his Avatar status was revealed. We are able to infer, however, that if they weren’t the same age, they weren’t likely to be more than 5 years apart. Anything more than that, and the age disparity wouldn’t have been conducive to the story they were trying to tell.
****While teenagers can and do form close friendship bonds with people 5 years older/younger than themselves, the point was to show the parallel between Roku & Sozin’s close friendship that unraveled & the potential friendship Aang needed to develop with Zuko in order to not only stop what Sozin started but heal the world from the effects of the war. Aang was Roku’s descendant as the Avatar, while Zuko was Sozin’s (and Roku’s) actual bloodline descendant, and they were only 3-4 years apart in age.
****Based on that narrative aim, and the fact that the companions of crown princes from IRL past tended to be boys of the noble classes that were close to the prince’s age (for both political & practical reasons), it’s logical to conclude that if there was an age difference between Sozin & Roku, it wasn’t any greater than the age difference between Aang and Zuko. Given the visual cues of their respective physicality and aging over the course of the episode, I’d even venture that it was likely no more than a year or two.
****Fanon tends to presume there wasn’t an age gap & that the “shared a birthday” line meant both of them were born on the same day in the same year because, from a narrative perspective, it allows for a double-down of the tragedy of how Roku & Sozin ended up (think one of them saying “we were born on the same day; that makes us brothers” when they were kids, like the gut-punch “we’ll always be friends forever” line from The Fox & the Hound). But even if you argue that them actually being the exact same age is too far of a leap based on what’s in the text, the likeliest gap between their ages wouldn’t be so great as to make a difference regarding the inferred ages of their respective wives.
***On top of the above points, just because they kept showing us Roku’s wife being the same woman we saw him marry doesn’t actually imply anything about Sozin’s home life. His first wife may have passed away without having had any children, or may have died in childbirth. If Sozin needed an heir, or a spare, he wouldn’t have married someone his own age; as with IRL royalty of the past, he would’ve married a younger woman in the hopes of her bearing as many healthy children as possible to ensure the succession. Especially because Sozin was planning to conquer himself an empire, having an heir to pass it on to would’ve made a woman’s youth & fertility his paramount concerns in seeking wives. It’s unlikely that the mother of the royal line would’ve been a concubine over a wife, as the show doesn’t really establish a precedent for concubines (being a kids’ show), but there’s nothing to suggest that he couldn’t have even set his wife aside if she was barren or prone to miscarriages and married someone else that might be more reliably able to have children. There’s just not enough evidence in canon to suggest anything on that front.
****The narrative *does* place Roku and Sozin on divergent paths, though: contrasting Roku’s ascending spirituality with Sozin’s descent towards world domination. The yin/yang dynamic that they evolved into **could** theoretically be used to infer that, while Roku spent his whole life with one woman that he married for love, Sozin needed to marry at least twice, each time for political reasons. It’s pure speculation, though, since it’s an extrapolation of multiple narrative cues in an attempt to rationalize what is likely just an example of the writers forgetting to do/explain the math.
****While teenagers can and do form close friendship bonds with people 5 years older/younger than themselves, the point was to show the parallel between Roku & Sozin’s close friendship that unraveled & the potential friendship Aang needed to develop with Zuko in order to not only stop what Sozin started but heal the world from the effects of the war. Aang was Roku’s descendant as the Avatar, while Zuko was Sozin’s (and Roku’s) actual bloodline descendant, and they were only 3-4 years apart in age.
****Based on that narrative aim, and the fact that the companions of crown princes from IRL past tended to be boys of the noble classes that were close to the prince’s age (for both political & practical reasons), it’s logical to conclude that if there was an age difference between Sozin & Roku, it wasn’t any greater than the age difference between Aang and Zuko. Given the visual cues of their respective physicality and aging over the course of the episode, I’d even venture that it was likely no more than a year or two.
****Fanon tends to presume there wasn’t an age gap & that the “shared a birthday” line meant both of them were born on the same day in the same year because, from a narrative perspective, it allows for a double-down of the tragedy of how Roku & Sozin ended up (think one of them saying “we were born on the same day; that makes us brothers” when they were kids, like the gut-punch “we’ll always be friends forever” line from The Fox & the Hound). But even if you argue that them actually being the exact same age is too far of a leap based on what’s in the text, the likeliest gap between their ages wouldn’t be so great as to make a difference regarding the inferred ages of their respective wives.
***On top of the above points, just because they kept showing us Roku’s wife being the same woman we saw him marry doesn’t actually imply anything about Sozin’s home life. His first wife may have passed away without having had any children, or may have died in childbirth. If Sozin needed an heir, or a spare, he wouldn’t have married someone his own age; as with IRL royalty of the past, he would’ve married a younger woman in the hopes of her bearing as many healthy children as possible to ensure the succession. Especially because Sozin was planning to conquer himself an empire, having an heir to pass it on to would’ve made a woman’s youth & fertility his paramount concerns in seeking wives. It’s unlikely that the mother of the royal line would’ve been a concubine over a wife, as the show doesn’t really establish a precedent for concubines (being a kids’ show), but there’s nothing to suggest that he couldn’t have even set his wife aside if she was barren or prone to miscarriages and married someone else that might be more reliably able to have children. There’s just not enough evidence in canon to suggest anything on that front.
****The narrative *does* place Roku and Sozin on divergent paths, though: contrasting Roku’s ascending spirituality with Sozin’s descent towards world domination. The yin/yang dynamic that they evolved into **could** theoretically be used to infer that, while Roku spent his whole life with one woman that he married for love, Sozin needed to marry at least twice, each time for political reasons. It’s pure speculation, though, since it’s an extrapolation of multiple narrative cues in an attempt to rationalize what is likely just an example of the writers forgetting to do/explain the math.
