Here's Why Avatar's Aang Actually Failed in His Quest to Stop Fire Nation
"But didn't Aang defeat the Fire Nation at the end of his story?" No, he didn't. Let's take a look at what's really going on in the world after Aang's assumed "victory."
Avatar: The Last Airbender shows us a world where a large militarist empire builds itself to dominate over every other nation.
Fire Nation's quest to establish complete control over the world is going on great, and the fire benders keep submitting more and more territories to their will without anyone able to put an end to their expansion.
Sure enough, when the threat becomes imminent, the Avatar reincarnates to change the current balance of power, but due to an unfortunate series of events, he gets stuck in an iceberg for a hundred years.
This gives the Fire Nation a plethora of time to continue its colonialistic warmongering and overtake more lands.
By the time Aang, the new Avatar, gets out of the iceberg, the Fire Nation is comfortably dominating most of the civilized world with only a few unconquered territories yet to cover.
For Aang, bringing down this crooked empire becomes the ultimate goal — and in most people's books, at the end of the story, he succeeds.
As we see in The Legend of Korra (which begins 70 years after The Hundred Year War ended by Aang), fire benders are still very much in control of the populace.
Despite the action taking place in the Earth Kingdom, the absolute majority of the wealthy people are the descendants of the Fire Nation.
A large chunk of the Kingdom's population, too, is represented by fire benders. The descendants of the Fire Nation make many important decisions despite being on the Earth Nation's land.
Furthermore, as the saying goes, if we had a dollar for every time someone's relative is killed in The Legend of Korra and the murderer was a fire bender, we'd only have two or three dollars.
Still, it's weird that it's 100% of the cases that were brought to our attention in the series, isn't it?
Admittedly, Avatar Aang started celebrating his victory too soon; even 70 years later, the fire benders still remain in control, even in foreign lands.
They over-emphasized their defeat to make everyone feel like things have changed while in reality, they haven't. A large statue of Aang is a symbol of deceit, not defeat, it seems.
After all, it makes quite a lot of sense. Imprisoning a single person can't possibly change the nature of a massive colonial regime that has been focused on expansion and military conquests for over a century.
Even with an idealist like Zuko in charge, many decision-makers of the past kept their power — and they didn't let go of them.