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creampuffqueen · 18 hours ago

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Hey:)

I feel you’re one of the, if not the most qualified people to ask this question, how would you describe Yangchen? Like, personality, emotions, thoughts, everything that comes to mind. I encourage a nerd out.

I’m thinking of doing a thing at a later date when I’ve chased down all my thoughts, got my confidence and my notes in order and I want other interpretations of her than mine and what’s on the wiki 😅 you’re the next best after the wiki when it comes to details regarding her

(It’s just shedding season, I’m still panda beneath all the fur🎈🐼)

Nerd out about Yangchen???? Actually, forget veterinary medicine, this is the dream career for me.

To me, Yangchen’s character is made up of a few basic things:

Her deep compassion for other people

A constant, underlying sadness

Major imposter syndrome

Feral Little Sister Energy

I feel like when I want to give someone a basic rundown on Yangchen’s character, these are the first things that come to mind and therefore the things I mention. Obviously, just mentioning these character aspects doesn’t exactly tie them together cohesively, so that’s what I plan to do here!

You guessed, it under the cut… it’s 2415 words long…

Without further ado, Avatar Yangchen!

Compassion

To start off, it’s important to understand that Yangchen is a deeply caring and compassionate person. For better or worse, she cares so, so much about other people. It’s one of the things that makes her such a fantastic Avatar, and it’s this deep compassion that keeps her from abandoning all hope when it seems like the world just keeps on taking.

Her compassion is also what compels her to do the things she does in the novels – and arguably her appearance in the comics as well. There’s a quote she gives during Dawn that I think encapsulates her feelings on this quite well: “We fight for people we’ve never met and never will”.

Yangchen cares for humanity, and truly believes in its goodness, or at the very least its worth. She strays from this belief occasionally during the books, but at the end she always comes back to it. She will continue to fight for humanity as the Avatar – the most thankless job in the entire universe – because she believes there is good in the world. Does she have bad experiences with some of the worst of humanity? Yes. Does she have some jaded views of people? Also yes. But at the end of the day she still believes in goodness, and strives to do what she can to promote and preserve it.

This compassion shows up in many ways during the novels. She is a talented healer and largely enjoys the work. I touched on this a bit in my post discussing her relationship with waterbending, how she prefers healing as a skill because of the way it directly benefits others. When a maid in Bin-Er is injured on the job, Yangchen quietly pays for her treatment. When she first meets Kavik, believing him to be homeless, she immediately offers him money in a hopeful attempt to help him. She donates all the gifts she receives as the Avatar to the air temples to help fund the nearby towns. She heals Yingsu from an arrow wound – the woman who was trying to kill her five minutes before!

Really, this is the ultimate reason why she is the way she is during the novels! Namely, a cunning, manipulative spymaster. This all starts because she heard things were bad in the shang towns, and wanted to do whatever she could to ease the suffering. She is the way she is because of past experiences of being spied on, because when her plans are revealed before they’re ready she isn’t able to help people. She is a person who cares unfathomably deeply about others, and found the best way to help as many people as possible was to play the awful, twisted game her world was intent on continuing.

Sadness & Imposter Syndrome

While Yangchen’s deep sadness as a person and her extreme imposter syndrome are highly connected, there are a few extras about both that need to be touched on.

Namely, the fact that Yangchen doesn’t really feel like her own person, and all the ways that affects her.

It isn’t always obvious during the novels, as her POV is only half of each book and she has a few coping mechanisms to help her out, but the voices of her past lives never stop talking. Never. Like I said, she has some ways to cope, to keep herself present, to tune out the voices at least enough to focus, but they are still constant.

And that is just… yikes!!

I’ve said it before, but Yangchen and Korra have some eerily similar parallels to their stories. Both of them learned they were the Avatar at a very young age. Korra learned when she was 4 because she started bending other elements. Yangchen began experiencing voices and visions from her past lives when she was around 7, after which she quickly put together her identity as the Avatar.

Avatars are typically not revealed until they turn 16. Clearly, there is a good reason for this. All of the Avatars we have stories for that found out younger than that have had… a lot of pressure on their shoulders. Pressure that affected them deeply. Yangchen is no exception. In her case, it is honestly even more extreme, because not only did she have the pressure of being the Avatar, she was also constantly reliving trauma from her past lives.

Unlike other Avatars who have to specifically call up their past lives in order to hear their stories (or explicitly trigger them, as Aang did during Avatar Day), Yangchen is constantly and unwillingly reliving her past experiences. She is hearing voices, she is having flashbacks, and at certain points even dissociating fully from her body as another Avatar takes over and speaks.

This has created a warped sense of self for her. The idea of Yangchen The Person is pale compared to Yangchen The Avatar. She has her own personality, opinions, and beliefs, but to her, none of those are important without her also being the Avatar.

Which brings us to Jetsun. Her older sister. From what we learn in the novels, Yangchen had a happy enough childhood in the Western Air Temple, and that was largely because of Jetsun’s influence.

Jetsun treated her like a person. She argued with her, she teased her, she played with her, she comforted her. While everyone else was thinking of Yangchen The Avatar, Jetsun was always thinking of Yangchen The Person. Yangchen, her little sister. Who was stubborn, annoying, and most of all loving. While the elders worried what to do about her visions, while the world leaders conspired to take control before she came of age, all concerned about the Avatar, all Jetsun cared about was Yangchen.

This is why Yangchen is hit so very hard after her death. This is why Jetsun haunts the narrative throughout the novels. After Jetsun died, Yangchen was alone.

Not only did Jetsun die, she died in a pretty horrific, traumatizing way. A way that was not only horrific and traumatizing, but that Yangchen fully blames herself for. It’s obvious to us as the readers that Yangchen was in no way at fault for Jetsun’s death, but Yangchen is unable to see that perspective. At the start of the novels, she has been blaming herself for her sister’s death for six years.

The pain is not as sharp, but it is still there, just as constant as the voices in her head.

Without Jetsun by her side, Yangchen truly feels as though she can’t reach her full potential. She imagines how different she would be if she had Jetsun there to guide her. She imagines she would be better if she had Jetsun there to guide her.

Which brings us to how this tragedy and sadness ties into her imposter syndrome.

Like I mentioned earlier, Yangchen has known she was the Avatar from a very young age, and as such has felt the pressure of that role for a long time. She doesn’t know who she is outside of the Avatar, because that’s been her defining life event for as long as she can remember.

And because of the aforementioned compassion, she takes her job as the Avatar incredibly seriously. She is serious about trying to bring balance about and ease suffering wherever possible. She wants to be a good Avatar, and tries desperately to be one.

The issue is that because of how her past lives work, she doesn’t truly believe it’s possible for her to be a good Avatar, despite all evidence to the contrary. The visions she gets the most are visions of failure. When she speaks with her past lives one on one, the stories she hears are ones of failure. Avatars who couldn’t save their loved ones even with the most powerful bending in the world. Avatars who couldn’t prevent war no matter how hard they tried.

Yangchen does not want that to be her ending, going into the afterlife with regrets.

(Of course, for those who have read the Kyoshi novels, we unfortunately know how that ends...)

Yangchen is a woman of action. This is rather in conflict with her upbringing from the Air Nomads, who generally prefer to evade, defend, avoid, and observe. Air Nomads don’t seek out conflict. But of course, as the Avatar, Yangchen can’t avoid it. If anything, seeking out conflict is sort of her job.

Her job is to bring balance to the world, and because of how many lives full of regret she’s witnessed, it’s no surprise at all that she prefers to take action. She doesn’t want to sit and wait, she wants to solve problems now. A part of the books I think about often is when Yangchen talks about a recurring theme of her past lives and their regrets – every single one regrets waiting, regrets not taking action when they could have.

So Yangchen takes action. Most of the time it works out. Because she takes action rather than waiting, she often ends up having to do things she considers morally questionable – or even morally reprehensible. I feel it’s important to remind everyone that she was disgusted at herself for using the vacuum technique on the combustionbenders. But Yangchen couldn’t wait around for some other solution to show itself.

These are the kinds of things that breed her imposter syndrome. The things she has to do to keep balance in the world many times directly go against her views as an Air Nomad. As much as she hates it, she will sacrifice her own spiritual wellbeing for the sake of the world. That is, after all, the single thing she said in the original ATLA show, and therefore the literal start of her personality.

Just because she is willing to do it doesn’t mean it isn’t painful. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t make her question herself. There are so many moments where she wonders if she truly hates things like spying, manipulating, lying, etc. She thinks if she keeps doing them, clearly she doesn’t hate them. Clearly she isn’t doing them out of desperation or a lack of options.

When some servants are moved by her performance with the shangs, she feels physically sick. She has to look away. If only they knew. They wouldn’t revere her so much. She doesn’t deserve their love or their praise, she’s nothing but a fake.

These are thoughts that plague her almost constantly. At one point she tells Kavik that he has to let go of his failures, and not let them haunt him. Later that exact same night she spends hours flinging herself around with airbending until she exhausts herself. Clearly someone who has let go of their failures, right?

This severe imposter syndrome she experiences makes it so difficult for her to recognize her good work. She feels her failures make any good she’s done completely null and void. How can she let herself feel proud of her successes when her failures weigh so much heavier? When there’s still imbalance in the world that she needs to solve? When her own spirit is on its way to be just as spoiled as the peoples’ she’s had to defeat?

Which is why her meeting with Jetsun at the end of Legacy was so, so necessary for her. She needed to meet her sister’s spirit, see that she was alright despite everything, that Yangchen wasn’t at fault for her death. She needed to hear from Jetsun herself that she was good, that she was doing well in the world, that she wasn’t a total failure. And most of all, that even without Jetsun at her side, she was still a good Avatar.

Feral Little Sister Energy

Ending this on a happier note! Yes, Yangchen’s character is very sad and even tragic at times, but she also has so many moments of fun and light. It’s part of what really draws me to her, I think. She may be the all-powerful Avatar, but she’s also Very Seventeen.

She can just be an absolute menace at times, and it’s so great. She’s a little sister, it’s in her blood.

Probably the biggest parts of this particular personality trait are her sarcasm and her teasing. She’s also rather blunt at times, not at all afraid to tell it like it is. As well, she has no problems demanding respect from world leaders, which is honestly a good thing because she has to put up with so much shit from them all the time.

She’s basically a Disney Princess. She has (had) a sky bison that likes to preen and show off. She throws things when she gets mad. She can scream loud enough to burst eardrums, and regularly does. She likes to make little kids laugh. She tells jokes. She teases Kavik because she thinks it’s cute when he gets flustered. She gets worked up over the sound of handwriting. She loves to do crazy tricks on her glider. She’s captain of an airball team and regularly partakes in trash talk. She has a whole wardrobe of creative disguises. She hates the cold. She likes to toss people around with airbending just for fun. She’s almost frighteningly intelligent.

There are just so many fun little quirks to her character. I’m probably forgetting some, honestly.

Conclusion

These are the aspects that I feel make up the most important parts of Yangchen’s character. Certainly there are more, but I feel like these are a good starting point, as well as things that all the other parts can be tied into.

Overall, she’s such a well-written, interesting character, and I absolutely loved getting to break her down! Others can feel totally free to add other parts they think are important as well; a more comprehensive view is always better.

Thanks so much for the ask, and I hope this helps!!

#reblogging just because #yangchen

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