What if Avatar: The Last Airbender was a spy thriller?

From the beginning, every Avatar story Avatar of The Last AirbenderTo Legend of Korra and on to the Chronicles of the Avatar novels, grapples with the fact that the Avatar — a spiritual and political leader who is reincarnated endlessly in a revered cycle — is also just a human being with human emotions and flaws. They are not perfect and make errors. Sometimes they make mistakes and leave mess for future incarnations.

F.C. Yee’s 2019 novel Avatar, The Last Airbender – The Rise of KyoshiThe teenage girl who became Avatar Kyoshi must pick up the pieces left by Kuruk’s death young, and leave the rest of the world in ruins. On the other hand, Kuruk’s predecessor, Yangchen, is still regarded as the pinnacle of Avatarhood, a gifted negotiator who enforced peace throughout the Four Nations.

After concluding Kyoshi’s story in the Rise of Kyoshi’s sequel, Shadow of Kyoshi, Yee — with the involvement of Avatar creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko — moved on to telling Yangchen’s story in Yangchen’s Dawn, available now. How do you make conflict in the story of the Avatar who is largely considered infallible, and most loved by people for centuries?

This is a spy thriller.

“I tried to look at the cyclic nature of successes and failures and triumphs and tragedies that [keeps happening] endlessly in ways that generate narrative,” Yee tells Polygon. He was able to see the flaws in Yangchen’s supposedly perfect design and began his creative journey.

“She’s not going to give up her Air Nomad values,” Yee says, referring to that culture’s pacifist creed. “I wasn’t hugely interested in showing, Oh, here’s an Air Nomad who resorts to killing very, very quickly, or anything like that.”

That’s in stark contrast to Kyoshi, who does, in fact, resort to killing, and is something of a bull in a china shop in terms of her approach to Avatarhood. Kyoshi’s character, however, is already established in the original. Avatar animated TV series, Yangchen is largely Yee’s creation. He had to respect the canon he’d already established for her, which made it harder to find a workable central conflict for Yangchen’s Dawn.

“Yangchen is maybe somebody who moves in political circles with a little bit more tact than Kyoshi. Such an environment is conducive to […] the conventions of a political thriller or an espionage thriller,” Yee says. “And with those high stakes, what could really move gears at the head-of-state level Yangchen operates at, and what could be a threat to — again, this is me part of me trying to write myself out of the corner I [painted myself into] Rise of Kyoshi, where it’s like, It’s not possible to imagine a world where she would have imposed a greater peace than that.”

A lot of conflict has been in Yangchen’s DawnThe focus of this book is information. How leaders and soldiers respond to what information they have and how they can get more. Yangchen knows Something bad is going to happen, but her challenge isn’t a fight or a negotiation; it’s sneaking around trying to find out what the threat even is.

“You also have what I hoped was a fun device, where if somebody needs to move in the shadows, who would have extreme amounts of difficulty moving in the shadows? An Air Avatar who’s very recognizable, because she’s sort of worshiped, and she’s got, you know [gestures at forehead, indicating an Air Nomad’s arrow tattoo]. She’s very physically recognizable. What would you do? Agents of her own. Now you have a supporting cast.”

Yangchen’s DawnIn the Kyoshi books, the role of the supporting cast is more prominent than that in the Kyoshi novels. Yangchen is introduced to Kavik, a Water Tribe teenage, as he attempts to steal information through letters and papers from his temporary home in her town. Instead of punishing him, she blackmails him into working for her — and readers see all this from Kavik’s perspective rather than Yangchen’s.

“There is that element where, between heist, espionage, those categories, you do have to limit the flow of information, and one of the ways to do that is through different viewpoints,” Yee explains. Due to the different perspectives, Dawn of Yangchen, no one’s true intentions are always clear.

“I’m getting very much into spy terminology, but what if it was a complete broken-arrow scenario — like that comes up in movies, because there’s a movie called Broken Arrow [laughs],” Yee says. “You’d have chaos at the highest political level, you’d have machinations, you wouldn’t know who to trust, your allies could be your enemies, you don’t know who’s turning on who, and you’ve got all this spy maneuvering over, you know, Mission: Impossible McGuffins of great import, and there you go — now you have your political and spy thriller that’ll be a challenge to a politically astute Avatar.”

Dawn of Yangchen’s spy-thriller vibe turns it into a different kind of story than Kyoshi’s — or Aang’s in the original series, even though he and Yangchen share the same native element. Unlike Aang and Kyoshi, Yangchen isn’t shown struggling to master all four elements or grapple with her spiritual duties. Yangchen struggles to decide who to trust. This makes the story feel a little more mature than either the Nickelodeon television series or the Kyoshi romance novels.

Even with this different feeling, Yangchen’s DawnYee remains a fan of Avatar, so there is still an Avatar story. “The original story is so rich that there’s elements of these types of machinations already happening,” Yee said. “And you have those perfect examples within the original shows: the hunt for Aang that takes place throughout season 1, you have that element of being undercover, then, with Zuko throughout the Earth Kingdom, and with the original Gaang within the Fire Nation.

“So, like, the source material, again, has that — it’s got everything you need. You can tell any type of story with the raw materials. AvatarAnd Korra.”

You can read the entire chapter for free. Avatar, The Last Airbender: The Dawn of Yangchen here.