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Suki Alone seemingly makes some major changes to previously established history and television lore in a new Avatar: The Last Airbender comic.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Avatar: The Last Airbender – Suki Alone, available now.
One of the best parts of Avatar: The Last Airbender was the exploration of its fascinating world as Aang and his friends traveled the globe in a quest to restore balance. Throughout that journey, there were many corners of the world touched on ever so briefly, and in the time since the original series, the task of expanding on those details falls to comics, novels and other media.
For the most part, the lore from these sources all weaves together in a beautiful tapestry that makes up one of the most engaging fantasy settings in fiction. But the latest addition to that tapestry, Suki Alone, by Faith Erin Hicks, Peter Wartman, Adele Matera, Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt, makes its own changes that stand out in stark contrast to everything else.
Centering itself on the Kyoshi Warrior’s leader Suki and her time imprisoned between “Appa’s Lost Days” and “The Boiling Rock, Part 1,” Suki Alone hits the ground running with an immediate inconsistency. The comic opens with Azula taunting Suki by mentioning Sokka, with whom Suki is romantically entangled in the series. Except during the timeline the scene is set in, Azula had no reason to know there was even a connection between the two. It was not until the second season finale that Azula’s team even learned of Sokka’s connection to Suki during “The Crossroads of Destiny.”
From there, the comic repeatedly conflicts with bits of lore both from the original series itself and attached media. This is particularly puzzling because the entire creative team has worked on Avatar comics previously. Hicks in particular has been a major writer of Avatar comics since the show ended, yet one of Suki Alone‘s biggest changes to continuity conflict with Hicks’ own work on Shells.
Kyoshi Island is typically portrayed as a fishing village that frequently does business with traders and merchants. The episode that first introduced the island, “The Warriors of Kyoshi,” made a prime plot point out of Zuko discovering Team Avatar’s whereabouts through the Island trading fish with the mainland. The Kyoshi novels similarly depict the territory’s expansive history dealing with fishermen and traders, and bonus content on the show’s original website claimed that elephant koi were the Island’s main export.
Shells similarly supported this robust trade dependent on the resources of the surrounding ocean, and yet in spite of all of that, Suki Alone makes the island’s isolationism and its devastation by agricultural famine major plot points. The comic’s story parallels Suki’s attempt to foster a nutritious plant within the walls of the Boiling Rock with her island’s past salvation by that same plant, yet Kyoshi Island was never depicted as relying so heavily on the growth of crops. Suki Alone similarly depicts the Island rejecting contact with the outside world, it’s political structure ruled by a governor, or indeed the presence of any village on the island besides Suki’s own.
Typically, the media that extends the world of Avatar is meticulous about avoiding conflicts with the franchise’s canon, and yet Suki Alone does so pretty flagrantly. These changes could represent a retcon shifting the conception of Kyoshi Island within the canon, but with matters of continuity, only time will tell.
Though future Avatar media is hotly anticipated, very little is known about which aspects of the world will be explored next. If Kyoshi Island is a target then these changes could be a portent of further retcons yet to come, but this story stands out as a curious and puzzling shift in the world of the Four Nations.
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