Free Comic Book Day Mai Comic: The Rebound - A shallow fannish analysis

[attackfish]

Things I liked:

* Mai in an apron!  The Zuko-in-Ba-Sing-Se parallels just write themselves.  Also, it’s foreshadowing that Mai is not relying on her parents, which is critically important to the story.

* Mai attempting flower arranging/Mai’s flower arranging epic fails.

* Kei Lo, the fake date’s horrible pun and Mai’s reaction.  We all know she goes for dweebs.

* Mai defending Zuko’s treatment of her and her family.  Mai is extremely apolitical throughout the series.  She goes with Azula because she’s bored, and also, I think, coerced, and then helps Zuko escape because she loves him.  There’s no indication that she believes in the war, or that she believes the war is wrong.  This gets her a little closer to her expressing her own political views.  Also, when her father says that she has now personally experienced the pain that Zuko has brought upon the Fire Nation in contrast to Ozai is fascinating.  It’s an obvious ploy, of course, to manipulate any feelings of bitterness or rejection Mai might harbor towards her ex-boyfriend, and because of that don’t do much to make a political case to her.  This would be a good argument for Mai’s father to make to her, given that her judgements thus far have been made on personal lines instead of ideological ones.  Also, it brings to mind something else.  Mai makes sure to deface Ozai’s (extremely unflattering, really, he might not mind the defacement much) portrait as she leaves.  As Azula’s minion, and Zuko’s friend and lover, Mai has also seen up close and personal the pain that Ozai has inflicted on the Fire Nation.  Mai broke up with Zuko because he went to talk to his father without talking to her first, and leaving himself open for Ozai to hurt him.  She dislikes Ozai on a personal level because he has hurt someone she loves, and because I’m sure she’s aware that he allowed or even caused Ty Lee and herself to be basically given as toys to his sadistic daughter.  Mai, has very personal reasons to hate Ozai.

* Mai having missed Tom-Tom.  Several times in the comic, she is shown being affectionate to her little brother.  It can be a little hard for us Mai fans to square our love for her with the way she calls the trade for her brother off in “Return to Omashu”.  I have always felt that she judged that her disobeying Azula would be more dangerous for her brother than leaving him in the hands of the fairly harmless-looking teenage boy holding him and letting him mess with his face, but, like a lot of Azula’s mind games in “Return to Omashu”, this is never spelled out.  I see Azula’s forcing Mai to put Azula’s will over her brother’s safety as the equivalent to Mai threatening Ty Lee’s life and the lives of the circus patrons and performers to make Ty Lee comply earlier in the episode.  Anyway, the comic gave us some confirmation that Mai loves her brother, and that there was something deeper going on in “Return to Omashu”, and that it was Azula’s way of establishing control.

* The implication in the comic that Mai’s parents didn’t favor Tom-Tom, because he’s a boy, they’re just horrible parents.  I’ve spoken about this before.  The Fire Nation seems to be very gender egalitarian, and Mai and Tom-Tom’s parents neglected him badly enough in “Return to Omashu” that he, a toddler, was able to wander off, and it wasn’t until hours later anyone noticed he was missing.

* Mai taking Tom-Tom and running.  Not only did I like that she did it, I like the way it was executed.  There are three interesting parallels in it.  First, she listens to her father’s case, then stops, stands there for a moment, looks at a picture of Zuko, asks Tom-Tom to hold on, pulls out her weapons, and just declares that she and her brother are leaving.  This is very very Mai, and reminds me both of the time she tells the Omashu resistance that the hostage exchange is off, that split second calculation she had to make that an angry Azula was more a threat to her brother than the resistance, and also her fighting the prison guards and Azula at the Boiling Rock.  There’s the same sort of quiet about her, the same sense of not giving anything away until it’s time to strike.  Mai saving Zuko at the Boiling Rock is really a mirror image of Mai in Omashu buckling to Azula’s will.  In Omashu, Azula tells Mai that if she doesn’t knuckle under, she will hurt the people Mai loves.  At the Boiling Rock, Azula miscalculates and forgets that this is the real reason Mai obeys her.  What she tells Mai by implication when she goes to the Boiling Rock with her is that she will hurt the people Mai loves even if Mai does everything she wants her to, and that if Mai remains her creature, she will make Mai into an agent of their destruction.  What Mai said to Azula is “You haven’t broken me down so badly yet that I have forgotten why I obey you.  It’s a deeply emotional decision, made for deeply emotional reasons, made coolly and quickly, with all the emotions hidden away.  This decision to take her brother and run is a continuation of that decision, and a further mirroring of her decision to do what Azula wants in Omashu.  At the Boiling Rock, Mai told us that she wouldn’t let Azula manipulate her through the people she loves.  In the comic, Mai tells us she won’t let anybody manipulate her through the people she loves; she will just end the threat to them.  The last parallel this scene brings to mind is Zuko telling Ozai that he is going to teach the Avatar on the Day of Black Sun.  Mai tells her father she’s leaving, tells him that no, she dies not share his vision, and then threatens him with weapons, because it’s the only thing he will listen to.  Like Zuko, Mai is forced to back up her threat, and in both cases, the end is visually similar.  After Zuko has redirected Ozai’s lightning back at him, the Fire Nation banner behind Ozai comes fluttering down behind him.  Mai’s confrontation with her father and her father’s organization ends with Ozai’s portrait fluttering down behind her father.  This scene is also just plain satisfying in the way Mai is basically saying to her dad that he is so rotten as a father that not only does she not want anything to do with him, but she’s taking her brother with her so that he doesn’t have a chance to be a rotten father to him.

* The way Ma’s father asked for her to be captured but not hurt, and the way the comic makes it clear that this doesn’t change the fact that Mai’s decision to leave and take Tom-Tom with her is the right one.  The creators of Avatar: the Last Airbender have always been really good at giving us a myriad of different ways it’s possible to be a horrible parent.  Mai’s father may not hate her and want to kill her the way Ozai hates and wants to kill Zuko, but he is still a horrible father because of how he is willing to use her and wants to control her.  I like that the comic says that just because he didn’t burn half his daughter’s face off doesn’t mean he isn’t abusive, or that she should try to mend fences and play happy families just because they’re her parents.  No one should have to apologise for not having anything to do with somebody who mistreated them, family or not.

* Mai with the picture of her and Zuko at the end.  It made my little Maiko loving heart just... Ahhhh, *happy sigh*.  This comic, points, pretty strongly I think, at Mai and Zuko getting back together at some point in the future, which doesn’t actually surprise me. This was very much a Maiko comic without the two of them actually being together, and I ship it, and I enjoyed it.  unjapanologist mentioned that she wants Mai to get a job as the head of Zuko’s counterinsurgency/ant- domestic terrorism taskforce so that she can have an office inside the palace, and Zuko can “can try to ineptly woo her for years,” and all I can say is, oh yes please.  Because we all know Mai would go for his inept wooing.  Mai likes big dorks and she cannot lie.

Things I disliked:

* NOTHING!

* The length.  It’s only eight pages long (and holy mackerel do they fit a lot into those eight pages) and I want more!

* No Zuko and Mai getting back together.  Okay, actually, I’m glad they didn’t, as I don’t want them to get back together in an eight page comic.  But still, this whole thing is killing me.

Things that I neither like nor dislike but make me have thinky thoughts about what this comic makes canon:

First off, it is entirely possible that Mura is not Mai’s aunt.  We already have an example within the Avatar canon of a woman who used Aunt as an honorific, Aunt Wu.  Mura may be Auntie Mura to everybody.  Secondly, I’m not sure how I feel about her being Mai’s aunt.  On one hand, it’s adorably like Zuko and Iroh (especially the aprons, oh my God) and I like the idea that Mai might have someone within her family that maybe she hasn’t spent much time with as a child, and whom she is now learning she can trust and rely on.  On the other hand, I also like the idea of Mai getting out on her own and building her own relationships away from the royal family or her own family.  Either way, there’s something I like.

However, if Mura is Mai’s aunt, this says some extremely interesting things about social mobility in the Fire Nation, and also about Ozai.  I’ve talked a little before in comment threads that I have now lost track of about why I think Mai is nobility, and particularly high nobility at that, and none of them actually have to do with how aristocratic she seems.  Firstly, she is one of two private companions for the only young princess the Fire Nation has.  Ty Lee is explicitly stated to be of a noble family in “Return to Omashu” and Mai is implied to have gone to school with Ty Lee and Azula, and she is treated as Ty Lee’s equal.  Also, when Zuko and Mai are becoming romantic, no one bats an eye.  Although we don’t know if Zuko and Mai were betrothed, we do know from interviews with Bryke, and also from Ursa and Ozai’s betrothal that the Fire Nation royal family still routinely does arranged marriages, and therefore has an eye to the importance of any given match for those in the line of succession.  Lastly, Omashu, as a newly conquered, important Earth Kingdom city would be both difficult to pacify and a post that could potentially bring a great deal of glory to its first governor, and therefore was a highly desirable posting.  It would go either to someone supremely competent, who would have “earned it” and proven themselves already, and be a suitable candidate for dealing with such an important and difficult post, or someone important, who would get the position due to their status.  Since I detected no signs of competency in him, I assumed that Mai’s father had lucked into his status by being nobly born and the son of someone important.

In the last point of my analysis of Mai’s potential noble birth, I overlooked something that now that I have considered that Mai might not be of noble birth.  Zhao.  Zhao rises very quickly through the ranks of the Fire Nation Navy, and we have very little indication of any status he might hold apart from his military rank.  He too might be nobility, but that can only get him so far.  He also must have somehow attracted Ozai’s favorable attention.  He is startlingly incompetent, and yet manages to climb to the rank of admiral through what I can only assume must be his connection to the Firelord.  Ozai, it appears, does not share his daughter’s taste in high quality minions.  He values personal loyalty over intelligence and skill.  On the other hand, he manages to inspire personal loyalty in his minions, instead of just obedience through fear, so a point to Ozai?  I guess?

So now, I conclude that I do not know if Mai is Fire Nation nobility or not.  I still think she probably is, but I may well be wrong.  She could also be the daughter of a “mixed” marriage, between an impoverished noble and a non-noble with a fortune as well.  Hmm, I need to chew on this.

I also wonder about how Mai’s parents are going to take her kidnapping her brother.  They know where she works, and how to find her.  Are they just going to let her keep her brother, or are they going to try to get her and Tom-Tom back?  This doesn’t seem like a stable situation.  In fact, it begs for a sequel.

And now that I have written over two thousand words in response to an eight page comic, I am forced to conclude that I do not have a life.  Oh well.

And if you haven’t had a chance to read the comic, it’s up here at Avatar: the Last Airbender Online.

Comments

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

It's also possible Auntie Mura is a real auntie, but with the loss of income, has to work. I imagine landowners of occupied Earth Kingdom land lost it and with it, their incomes.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

This is true, and if so, is probably a large part of why Mai's dad is so sore about it.

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

I do love Mai saving Tom-Tom and her leaving Zuko and supporting herself.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

She is so boss!

[lavanyasix.livejournal.com]

Re: Mai's parents and their status.

(As a very long aside-as-prelude: We don't have much detail on how the war affected the Fire Nation, but I've always wondered how it could chip away at their social order. You've got sons and, to a lesser extent, daughters of nobles dying on the battlefield. Suddenly second and third children have a more realistic chance to inherit the family goods, and there's also the possibility of whole family lines being wiped out entirely. Then you're looking at families desperate either to marry their last heir(s) into an even better marriage, or to adopt successful somebodies into their family in order to keep the estate in one piece.)

There's also the issue of Mai's uncle, who runs (well, ran, most likely) their nation's most max-security prison. If he's a maternal uncle, then the Governor could have been a rising star who allied himself with the daughter of a fellow civil servant. If he's a paternal uncle, then you have two rising stars who perhaps marry into an "old name" family for mutual benefit. But then both scenarios depend on who's the noble and who's not, and if both families aren't nobles.

I suppose it could depend on how to read Mai's mother's comments in "Return to Omashu," about enjoying being treated like royalty in the city. Compare that to the other Fire Nation nobles we meet, Zuko especially, who simply presume they should live well and be treated with deference. So Mai's mother could be 1) making a bit of New Money posturing Beverly Hillbilly style, or 2) an old but impoverished noble who's finally able to live it up like someone of her status was meant to.

So many possibilities!

But I agree about Auntie Mura not being Mai's real aunt. Given Aunt Wu's position, perhaps Mura's title is more of an honorific for an unmarried older woman of good community standing.

Also:

* Zuko's tossed out Ozai's supporters from the government. So who did he bring in? I think Iroh supporters. Iroh was the longtime Crown Prince. Lots of entrenched support. It'd be logical for Ozai to move his own supporters into power once he got the crown, as Zuko apparently did. Given Zuko is both young and spent years abroad in exile, he probably doesn't have much of a base of support. Iroh could help there. He's old and a bit disgraced, but if Zuko's a way back from the wilderness for Iroh's supporters then I could see them backing him despite his pro-peace views.

* If Mura is Mai's biological aunt, is she from the same side of the family as the warden uncle?

* I'm actually writing a sequel of sorts to Mai's adventure here. It should be up in a few days.

pt 1 (this got long)

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

We see it within the Fire Nation royal family, in fact, don't we? Zuko is born a fairly unimportant prince, the son of the second son of the Firelord, behind Iroh and Lu Ten, but then Lu Ten dies in the war, and Iroh is too deep in mourning to fight his brother's power grab. So suddenly, Zuko goes from being the Firelord's second son's son, fourth in line, to being the Firelord's firstborn son, and crown prince. It wouldn't surprise me if this were happening all over the Fire Nation aristocracy.

Also, there's something between "noble" on one side and "peasant" on the other. Mai's family could be new nobility. In times of war and conquest, new noble families often spring up. Friends of the monarch are rewarded with titles, given land, etc. Mai's grandparent(s) could have built a fortune and bought their way into a title, or risen through military achievements, and Mai's father could be the incompetent son/son-in-law. Or, Ozai is after all a second son, and a schemer, and would have been building a base of loyalists at court and in the military long before he grabbed power. I suspect that this is where Zhao comes in, and might be where Mai's parents come in. They may have been made powerful nobles in the Earth Kingdom because they supported Ozai before his rise. It would make Mai's father's charge that Zuko is a usurper deliciously ironic, if so.

Also, if they were new nobility, especially if half the family were new nobility and the other half were just moneyed, that would explain Mai's mother's "treated like royalty" comment too. It often takes a lot for new nobility to be accepted by the rest of the noble classes, and it would allow for Mai to go to school with the princess and access other similar noble privileges.

Being the warden of the Boiling Rock might be a higher status position than we're thinking, too. The Boiling Rock is basically a fortress, right? It might be a post normally given to a noble in the home guard.

The other reason I think Mai is probably of aristocratic origin is that Azula seems to have some issues with uh, ideas about divine right to rule, people who rise above their station, that sort of thing (Long Feng, Long Feng, Long Feng) and I don't know if she would pick a peasant, or even recent nobility as one of her personal associates and put her equal with the confirmed noble, Ty Lee.

pt 2

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I would love if somebody wrote Mai's family as impoverished nobles who had certain privileges, like a house right next to the palace, and the right to send their daughter to school with the princess and hobnob at the palace, and a massive superiority complex because of their title, but no money to back it up, and a whole lot of resentment because of it, and the fact that it means they aren't treated as they believe they are due. Being grubbing little social climbers isn't reserved for the peasantry, is it?

Sending Zuko into exile was a stroke of genius on Ozai's part, wasn't it? Not only was he shamed, and sent abroad as an example of what he will do to anyone who displeases him, but it also keeps Zuko from forming any kind of power base of his own within the court, while leaving Azula plenty of time and space to do just that. Even if Zuko by some miracle managed to find the Avatar, he still would have very little chance to take over from Azula, or for that matter, from Zuko. Ozai himself did, after all, have his own father murdered for the throne. The funny thing is, Zuko doesn't seem to attempt to build a power base after his return either. He spends most of his time with his sister and her companions. He's not actually stupid enough to not see the need to consolidate power. I think he's almost conceding the throne to his sister. He has what he really wants, to be home, to not be despised by his father, to not be suffering the derision of everyone he meets, so what if Azula is the one who inherits? It's not like he can really stop her. Running away to join the Avatar actually gave him a base of support outside the Fire Nation, and he was able to co-opt some of his sister's support, whether he was trying to or not (*pets Mai and Ty Lee*) but he would need Iroh's supporters desperately. He would also probably pull an Ozai and start picking out young up and comers willing to support him and give them more power to offset Ozai's old supporters and the pro-war lobby. Also, Ozai must have jumped for joy when Iroh decided to follow Zuko into exile. Having him at court must have been... unsettling.

Maybe she's the warden's wife? (Okay, that fanfic needs to be written now)

Can't wait to see your fic.

Re: pt 2

[lavanyasix.livejournal.com]

so what if Azula is the one who inherits?

That's an interesting train of thought, and one I hadn't seen before. Very cool. Fic especially almost always plays it as "Zuko expects to be Fire Lord, Azula wants to kill Zuko and usurp the throne." I've played around with the latter idea before, with Azula planning to Iroh-ize her brother after marrying him off to Mai (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5628400/81/The-Fun-and-Perky-Warrior-s-Wolf-Tail), but the the former had never occurred to me. But now that you mention it, Zuko never really talks up the idea of becoming Fire Lord.


Can't wait to see your fic.

You should perhaps temper your excitement. It's a fusion with Sailor Moon.

Re: pt 2

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I remember that fic. It gave me chills when I first read it. And it shows Azula's casual assumption that Mai and Ty Lee will never defy her to be even more beautifully misguided. She knows she's threatening them through the people they love. But she forgets just what that means.

Zuko just... doesn't act like somebody who expects to be Firelord. In "Nightmares and Daydreams," he's indignant to not be invited to the war meeting, but it doesn't surprise him that Azula is and he isn't. And then he's bemused when he finds out that everybody, including his father, expect him to be there. He isn't acting as if he sees himself as the crown prince, but his actions make perfect sense if he sees Azula as the crown princess.

The whole time he was in exile, he talks about his honor and his throne. he gets home, and in "The Beach, he says about why he should be happy and isn't: "For so long, I thought that if my dad accepted me, I'd be happy. I'm back home, now my dad talks to me. Huh, he even thinks I'm a hero." Not once in that rant does he mention his title, or having his honor, it's all about his father's good opinion of him. I think he figures out what he wanted all along pretty quickly, and then from there realizes he no longer wants it. But first he goes through that phase where he knows what he had really wanted, and is trying to be content with it.

Oh dear God. *backs away slowly* I fled Sailor Moon fannish feels when I was eleven. Awwww. Though if you can make Mai into Tuxedo Mask...

[weirdlet.livejournal.com]

Here's an odd thought- the war's been going on a hundred years, and possibly in that time there has been both a lot of soldierly death of noble sons and daughters of ancient houses, with the potential of wiping out long-established lines or breaking up power bases that might have rivaled the Fire Lord's over-arching hold. Some of that could be plain old attrition of the long war, and some of it encouraged and directed by a monarchy looking to solidify its hold over its territory rather than create new, powerful potential rivals by granting new land and old privileges to long-standing houses, as well as rewarding carefully-picked new loyalists. So maybe that's part of a large turnover in nobility.

[weirdlet.livejournal.com]

Also: yay!Mai! And yay her kicking ass and refusing to be drawn into her father's political gambits anymore. She is taking her time to be her own damn person and not leaving her baby brother to that snake-nest either, now that Azula's not constantly testing her.

One of my things about the canon ships is that I'm happy with them continuing as they are and developing from the point we see them at in the end of the show- but I'm also really okay with the idea of them breaking apart or taking hiatuses and using that time for participants to develop, grow up, try new things, and then weaving back together at a later time and a stronger age, once they really *know* what they want.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Yay to Mai refusing to be manipulated and being her badass self! I like what this time apart from Zuko is doing for her. It's giving her space to be her own Mai. I ship Maiko and want them to end up together, but I do not mind them staying apart for a while and Mai getting some space to grow before they get back together. I think that their relationship would be stronger and more balanced for it.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I suddenly have this image of Zuko doing a much needed purge of Ozai supporters from the court and basically banishing them to their estates, and all of the courtiers going, "yep, meet the new boss, same as the old boss." I really want to see somebody run with this idea in fic, and also the idea that between the power plays and the wars, maybe third generation noble is the new version of old nobility.