buck and eddie's conversation on the fountain in merry ex-mas gets infinitely funnier to me every time it's like: your estranged wife who you're sleeping with on the DL comes to your place of work and announces to your nosiest co-worker and best friend that you can't talk without fucking, your platonic male bestie ✨ is absurdly quiet about the whole situation which is very uncharacteristic of him so you invite him to bring your son to a mall santa whilst wondering if you can ever trust your wife with your son again, once said child is out of hearing distance you bring up your bestie's silence, bestie replies that it's none of his business and you agree in a way that sounds like you're begging him to question every life decision you've ever made before immediately launching into a full explanation of the situation despite no homo bro sitting there awkwardly listening after doing the absolute Most to avoid this conversation because he's been talking about the situation with his future brother-in-law whilst christmas tree shopping, then he commiserates with you about the never-ending complications of sex with women, both of you are exactly three seconds away from wondering aloud whether sex with men is simpler, but then your son returns from santa's village with an elf who will tell your work husband that the two of you have an adorable son and he will skip away without denying this. just normal best friend things <3
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i don’t normally do this here, but i’m answering this ask anonymously to respect op’s wishes. it’s a very interesting question!
i think the tragedy of yun is fascinating because in many ways it explores the central tension of korra’s arc, but then also magnifies it by revealing that this aspect of his identity which he assumed ontologically elevated him is actually a lie. he’s literally just some guy.
korra grapples with what it means to define her humanity and her agency beyond the box into which she is forced due to her status, but at least she has the luxury of actually being as powerful as everyone assumes her to be. and obviously, this can only really be considered a luxury when compared to yun, because he is cruelly and ruthlessly dismissed and dehumanized once no longer deemed “special.”
he serves no value to the world, to jianzhu’s ends, if he is not the avatar, and so his tragedy lies in the fact that if he cannot live as a fraud, he must be disposed of. he was never simply treated as a human being, because his father figure only actually cared about him as a means to an end, and his friend kyoshi is also the reason he has been so suddenly and violently stripped of value.
there’s this idea that yun seeks revenge because he feels entitled to power and deserving of his status, that he feels that kyoshi was better as his demure servant, and that for kyoshi to be the avatar he always believed himself to be is a perversion of the order he feels owed.
but of course he feels entitled to that power. he was groomed since childhood to be the avatar, and his alternative to that power is living on the street an orphaned child making money off of performing pai sho tricks. and it’s not that he simply basked in this power; no, he took this responsibility very seriously. he was jianzhu’s perfect protege, and so he tied his identity to being the avatar to the point that he had nothing left to give beyond that role.
just because he’s in the wrong doesn’t mean that his pain isn’t understandable, imo. like, just put yourself in his shoes. everything he ever thought he knew was revealed to be a lie, and he was left for dead in a matter of seconds. no one gave him a reason to pause, to consider an alternative. even kyoshi simply told him to let go of his pain, which of course would be an infuriating piece of advice to hear from the person who “won.” even if it’s not her intention, by telling him, essentially, to “get over it,” to simply move on from this existentially significant, defining injustice, she does sound like she’s gloating.
no one ever bothered to put themselves in his shoes, no one ever offered him true empathy. i don’t believe that yun was an entitled brat. i think that, like korra, he was someone who was depersonalized in his role, his image so heavily controlled by outside forces that he lost any sense of identity beyond that role, and was discarded once he could no longer perform it.
to swallow an eye — to reclaim the violence of that dehumanizing gaze, but also to consume it, to internalize it, to project it outwards — was always his fate. so no, i don’t think that there was any way to save him. he was marked for death the moment he was first misidentified as the avatar. his demise was inevitable, because it was born of human error; no one learns anything from their predecessors’ mistakes, they simply repeat the cycle. like all true tragedies, his destiny was fixed for him from the very beginning.
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