The average person, before modern medicine, could be expected to live into their thirties and die young, which means after about 90 years, most of the people who'd have been alive and able to take offense to what Sozin did would be dead. The Fire Nation has been at war with the rest of the world for 131 years and has run such an effective campaign of propaganda that the rest of the world forgot the generation of violence preceding the genocide of the Air Nomads. His son, Azulon, who lived to 95, was born at the same time as the genocide and died five years before canon's start, just for reference. He lived in fear of that until he died at the ripe old age of 102. Sozin would have known if the Avatar was captured or killed because the Avatar would surely have appeared to punish him for his crimes. Because as a Fire Nation citizen, his propaganda would have been so absolute that they'd have self-reported being the Avatar. I think, towards the end of his life, he was certain the Avatar was still out there because surely by the end of his reign he'd have caught that one special Earthbender, Waterbender, or even Airbender he must have believed if the Avatar were a Fire Nation citizen that, by then, he'd have won. The Fire Nation declared war on the world, but Sozin declared war on the Avatar. And of course Sozin used these advantages to kill the Air Nomads first - for one of their own would surely have been a witness to his betrayal. Permanent rails could be built later either on land vored by the empire or on the ashes of non-acquired territory. Of course the Fire Nation developed steam tanks and land trains. ![]() The Earth Kingdom failed to respond, the Water Tribes weren't united, and the Air Nomads had no military. Roku's lifestyle must have been sufficiently reclusive that nobody knew he was dead - nobody except the most observant and spiritual, the people the Avatar would most likely reincarnate from. The Fire Nation's head of state knows they can take any action because the rest of the world would rather wait for the Avatar to respond. That's a full thirty-six years of military build-up and time to benefit the central empire from colonization and industrialization. Mind, none of this counts the extra eleven years after Roku's demise when the Fire Nation began ramping everything up. Twenty-five years of propaganda, research and development, exploitation of resources, refinement of pre-existing strategies and tactics, and the development of a strong, robust economy backed with military might possible only from colonization and nationalism, they were the makings of a rapidly expanding empire and Sozin knew it. The reason the Fire Nation boasts technology twenty or thirty years ahead of all their military peers is that they had that much time to refuse sitting idly and had already demonstrated their clever ability to use fire to imitate or exceed every element entirely, all through the raw power of FIRE. The nation of fire marched across land, sand, trees, mud, mountain, and ice with the most powerful navy and army, and by the end of the series had established the first effective fighting air force since the Air Nomads a century ago. But the Fire Nation, with its advantages of industrialization and raw materials, skill, and manpower afforded to them via their colonies, it was unquestionable that they represented a near monopoly of force on battlefields. Whatever peace the world knew in those twenty-five years was a cold war waiting to go hot, with all four nations preparing for a conflict. ![]() For twenty-five years after that, Sozin kept an iron grip on the territory he stole. Roku allowed Sozin to live out of respect for their friendship and his position as Fire Lord. They most likely attempted appeasement, waiting for the Avatar to intervene so they wouldn't have to.įor years, Sozin colonized territories and lands that did not belong to the Fire Nation, and repeatedly he violated the sovereignty of foreign states until, finally, Roku's intervention occurred. Annexing that territory was a brazen act of war the other nations failed to recognize and respond to in time. It's glossed over in the original show, but Sozin began the war when he colonized islands owned or shared between the Earth Kingdom and Water Tribes. ![]() ![]() Click to shrink.The death of Avatar Roku was the greatest political assassination in history, perpetrated by a head of state taking advantage of an inevitable natural disaster to kill two birds with one stone.
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