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attackfishThings 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.
* 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.
