It feels like prequel series are a dime a dozen these days, with hardly a franchise that hasn’t put its hand properly into the origin story. We know how Han Solo got his last name, how Poirot got his mustache, and soon we’ll probably find out how Gandalf got his hat.
It’s not just the frequency of attempts that makes them an easy target for ridicule, it’s also the sweaty mania of making up origin stories for things no one has ever wondered about. But it’s worth remembering that there are still good reasons to make prequels. There are franchises that can paint a setting vividly And light, leaving comfortable space for a tasty and poignant story, even though we all know how it ends.
So for me, there will always be room for at least one prequel series – that is, until the creators of Avatar: The last airbender finally sign off on a goddamn Young Iroh series.
If you want Avatar: The last airbenderyou love Uncle Iroh, who begins the series as a long-suffering voice of reason for the exiled Prince Zuko and gradually pulls back the curtain on his calculated, dimwitted facade to reveal the most interesting man in the world.
Iroh is a man of contrasts: an advisor with true wisdom and a man who cannot tell tea from a poisonous plant except by eating it. Leader of a secret society of pacifism and a military genius. One of the greatest living firebenders and a traitor to his country. Iroh was once the heir apparent to the Fire Lord who attempted to carry out the genocide of Southern waterbenders, and yet he spent enough time with waterbenders to integrate their style into a new firebending technique. He is still known as “the Dragon of the West” for wiping out the last dragons in the world – but that was just a smokescreen to save the last dragons.
It would have been easy for Iroh to have been more of a plot device than a character – he’s always on the right side of an argument, he has infinite patience for some of the series’ most irritable characters, and even in his With his pot-bellied fifties, he jumps around and breathes fire like warriors decades younger than him. But it is an invulnerability tempered by the continued revelation of his past.
Iroh led a brutal two-year military siege of Ba Sing Se, and his view of the Fire Nation only changed after the deaths of his son and father, and the loss of his birthright through his brother’s machinations. Iroh spent so much time in the spirit realm that he can see ghosts even as they travel invisibly through the material world. And somewhere in there, he had the time to secretly become leader of the Order of the White Lotus.
The juicy facts of Iroh’s past are only overshadowed by what we don’t know, and what we haven’t seen realized in any episode of the series. Avatar. What was the relationship between the ruthless Azulon, who sentenced a child to death for his father’s disrespect, and his heir apparent, the cheerful Iroh? When did Iroh become disillusioned with the Fire Nation? Did it start after the death of his son or were there suspicions before, such as when he spared the last dragons?
Not to mention, who was his wife? Who managed to grab the hand of the most interesting man in the Avatar world? No, seriously, who – we don’t even know her name. Despite all the information that exists in the canon, Lu Ten, the tragically fallen Crown Prince of the Fire Nation, has jumped off Iroh like coral.
It is not difficult to imagine the answers to these questions. It’s easy to say that Iroh probably broke with Fire Nation imperialism after the siege of Ba Sing Se, otherwise he couldn’t have spent two years trying to conquer the city. Iroh’s time in the spirit realm was spent searching for his deceased son, according to the accompanying ‘scrapbook’ Avatar: The Last Airbender: Legacy of the Fire Nation. And Iroh eventually returned to the Fire Nation to act as the role model and ally he knew Zuko wouldn’t get from the rest of his family, treating him like his adopted son, at least according to Avatar creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko in a 2012 fan interview.
But what sets Iroh’s past apart from, say, a movie that reveals Cruella de Vil’s mother was murdered by Dalmatians isn’t that the answers to the questions of his past are fully known. It’s that what we know would make for an incredibly cinematic story if fleshed out – and not just dropped as tidbits in an interview, DVD special, or an entry in a tie-in book.
Themes of generational legacy and conflict, and the idea that all the old people you know used to be cool young people just like our heroes, are so central to Avatar: The last airbender And The Legend of Korra that the official role-playing game just announced an entire module focused on letting heroes grow old as the game moves into the next generation. And while there have been canonical Avatar graphic novels that have solved mysteries like the disappearance of Zuko’s mother and expanded the stories of Fire Nation villains like Ozai and Azula, none of them have stepped back to give us more of Iroh’s childhood. (He did invent boba tea in one of them. We really owe him that much.)
But I’m at least a little hopeful. At Paramount’s Avatar Studios, Konietzko and DiMartino apparently already have a contract for three Avatar animated films, one about Aang and his friends as young adults, and two that remain unannounced. That’s two whole movies with the potential to become a Young Iroh feature. Two entire films with the potential to become a franchise prequel that actually makes sense.