The Secret Earthbending Ability Nobody Talks About

Kyoshi might have learned the secret to immortality Avatar yangqin lived 60 years kuruk only 33 Roku 70 but Koshi somehow managed to live over two centuries dying at 230 years old far longer than the average well mortal person in Avatar and the novels my friends might hold the answer and today's video is sponsored by my patreon if you like my content then please consider going over and subscribing there uh for any amount you feel you can I have been fortunate enough to be doing this for 7 years now and it is purely because of the amazing support that those people do over on patreon truly genuinely it's mind-boggling we have a Discord and a monthly writing Workshop if that interests you but if you can't that's totally okay I would love for you to go uh check out my uh short stories published in magazines uh there's a ton of them linked down below most of which I think are free to read now like two robots at the end of the world which has just been selected for the uh 5-year best of utopian Anthology links all down below writing is my life and I want to share that with you all right so in this book Kyoshi is trained by a mysterious old dude named Lao G he appears as a drunk foolish Bandit but this is a facade in reality he's an immortal assassin who has pulled strings throughout the Earth Kingdom for centuries even murdering the earth king once before and he's otherwise known as tigu and I'm sorry I don't know how to pron anounce it I already read it on the page so feel free to correct me La G is already old but he hints at his true age a lot measured not in decades but centuries or even Millennia implying that he even personally knew Guru shoken an ancient philosopher which would put him at over 4,000 years old before the four nations had even formed now we don't know that he's telling the truth but one nobody remembers him as anything but already old and two he has the skills to back up this backstory and as I know this is just one of the things that the books do really well in fleshing out the story of Avatar in a really natural way but when Kyoshi finally bites and asks how Lai achieved immortality he tells her the following and pay attention to the wording you see it all comes down to order keeping things neat clean and tidy aging is really just your body falling apart on the smallest most invisible levels and neglecting to put itself back together with the right mental focus you could take an inventory of your own body and place each little piece that's not where it should be back into the correct order basically stopping his body from decaying with what he calls the right mental focus so one way to look at this is that the right mental focus is just sheer willpower and Kyoshi just refused to die which I would totally believe I don't think we would put that past to but this idea of spiritual and physical Mastery over your body extending your lifespan has appeared in Avatar before gup patik is one of the oldest characters in the series at over 120 years old and having personally known Monk gatso and in a way we see how patik achieved this he has acquired what could be called perfect mental focus he's opened all of his chakras he meditates in tandem with the universe he's kept his body strong flexible Lim fit he's able to ignore his hunger and feel satisfied on little more than banana juice despite being over a century old we see how the chakra is at tied to physical points on the body and opening them is about exercising full control over your body and mind that spiritual Mastery becomes Mastery over the body and perhaps lets him see those invisible ways the body neglects itself even passively even if he doesn't quite notice it it and perhaps like lgee he was able to use that control to put each piece back in the correct order that gudu patik was stopping himself from decaying even if he didn't necessarily realize it and the creators actually acknowledged a similar thing with a different character King Boomie the second oldest character at around 112 years old you know Boomie lived over a hundred years we had kind of set it up pretty early on Mike and I were of the idea that these people with such enhanced Chi Fields might live A longer time we shown that Koshi was a pretty robust person so there's the second term the right mental focus and enhanced Chi Fields this is the first law reason we were ever given that Kyoshi lived for such a long time and as far as I can tell it hasn't been used really anywhere else but we were given over a decade ago and it fits with what Lao G was saying in Avatar Chi is the life force you have that connects you to the the world around you and perhaps the right mental focus isn't all that different from manipulating your Chi you know we see that with gudo patik too his whole thing was helping Ang's chi flow naturally allowing him to control the flow of his Chi completely unchecked so that you could access the Avatar State being a powerful Bender isn't just about raw talent it's about your ability to manipulate your Chi if this kind of skills spirituality and practice gives you enhanced Chi fields then maybe Koshi used hers like petique like laoe to prevent her body from decaying and the idea of spiritual or martial Mastery leading to a kind of immortality isn't entirely without basis in our world the legendary Chinese DST figures Jang sang finin supposedly achieved immortality by mastering what they called internal cultivation controlling perhaps how the chi flowed throughout his body his breathing his muscles turning his martial Arts into something that gave him perfect control over his body prolonging his life with what sounds pretty damn similar to everything we've been describing with king bumi or gurua Lai and Kyoshi and not only this but Mike and Brian referenced these sort of legendary characters in discussing Koshi over a decade ago but there is a dark side to immortality because of course there is there always is because Koshi goes on to say this the way you describe it you'd have to decide what version of yourself you'd be stuck as forever exactly those who grow live and die the stagnant pool is Immortal while the clear flowing river dies an uncountable number of deaths I'm trying to teach you about the Mind an infinite world that's been neglected by far too many explorers becoming Immortal is becoming a stagnant pool sickly putrid unable to be clean of itself but Eternal in one way Koshi is just talking about physical appearance you just have to choose what you look like but it's probably psychological as well Lai talks about growing and changing with a gravitas that applies more to who you are as a person than it does to your physical appearance even explicitly saying he's talking about the mind your beliefs your personality who you are you stagnate as a person to be immortal is to crystallize yourself but it stops you evolving as a person too stuck in your ways stubborn even self-righteous and La G in the books is exactly that he lives by an unbreakable moral code he is undeterrable can't change his mind the term stagnation applies much more to the way a person lives and thinks than to how they look we don't consider old people to be stagnating and if all of this sounds familiar it's because yeah it is Koshi too has that undet moral streak to her her inflexible sense of justice that she cannot be persuaded one way or the other when she speaks to Ang or the like perhaps she exended her own lifespan to 230 years and that came with a little stagnation we don't know we never given any confirmation not in these books but what do you think that would have looked like with her interestingly we only ever see Kyoshi when she's middle-aged meaning she might have started using this technique when she was younger and when she died she still looked in her 30s or 40s like Loi just looked like an older man however there was one curious line in this book that actually suggests that this technique is an earthbending specific ability and it's curious because well who guessed it all the people we've been discussing today boomi Kyoshi laoi possibly even petique they're all Earth Kingdom but more than that Lai stagnation could be connected with what boomi himself described as neutral Jin the ability to wait to decide when to attack to not move to not shift or change and stay as you are Bo is a master of neutral Jing himself it's a very earthbending focused thing and perhaps it's not just to do with bending and combat but it's more spiritual physical it has broader implications than that truly mastering it might lead to immortality of course the weird thing is lai's description of how the body decays and dies isn't actually that far off from reality you know we age because our body loses its ability to heal and replicate and adapt and all the things slowly and visibly start to fall out of place and and don't go where they meant to be now look you know I've always hated the idea of like is flesh bending possible because everything's made of carbon and Earth Benders should be able to bend flesh like they been soil I hate it I don't I hate it or there's iron in the blood so me beers blah blah blah no no not doing it but still worth mentioning it's not like there's no connection between bending and reality however there is another reason the true reason that k she lived so long the creators made a mistake see in the fourth episode of the first season they offhandedly had the M of Kyoshi Island to give us this line Avatar Koshi was born here 400 years ago but because Ang had to be in the ice for 100 years and Roku needed to be born around the same time as fire lord soen for them to be friends there's a whole episode dedicated to that this meant that Koshi somehow lived for over 200 years and they didn't really have a way out of that so they made up a cool answer and I like that I love when this sort of stuff happens you know we like to imagine that World building and writing is is it's all perfectly interconnected and and and people don't just make up things on the fly to retroactively make things make sense but sometimes that is the way it is and it can give us really great answers and it can give us really crappy answers too but I happen to like this one it just really fits with her character now the last question of course if Koshi was Immortal how did she die well we don't know but being Immortal does not make you immune to an ad6 viable to the face so something might have killed her but I would put money on the idea that Kyoshi wasn't killed by anyone not someone this powerful this awesome but instead she chose to die she gets to a point where she's realized that she has stagnated she has seen enough of the world and it is time to move move on to let someone else take over the role of Avatar her time has come and she will meet death on her terms I think that would be a great end to her story but that's all from me uh just a fun little video I know I haven't done a little Avatar thing in a while but it's it's it's a lot of fun to come back to you know and and just do this stuff especially with the new Netflix series coming out I'm going to be talking about that don't worry I might be doing I'll be doing like Episode by episode reviews over on the second Channel probably uh in the meantime patreon of course thank you so much if you do means a hell of a lot and uh you know especially want to support my writing we building content uh that sort of thing uh and go check out my short stories they mean a lot to me and I want to share them with you uh and I I'm going to have some pretty exciting news in a little while I think but stay nerdy and I'll see you in the future I for

Channel: Hello Future Me

Views: 261,875

Keywords: explained, theory, lore, analysis, how to, avatar, last airbender, booktok, rise of kysohi, shadow of kyoshi, rangi, korra, airbender, firebender, earthbender, earthbending, firebending, airbendering, waterbending, waterbender, sokka, katara, zuko, kyoshi

Id: XOdoRdGtKqw

Length: 14min 23sec (863 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 30 2023