Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Uncle Iroh deserves a prequel series

These days it seems like prequel series are a dime a dozen, and hardly any franchise hasn’t delved deeply 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 exhausting mania for inventing origin stories for things whose origins no one has ever thought about. But it’s good to remember that there are still good reasons to make prequels. There are franchises that can clearly sketch out an environment And loose and leaves pleasant space for a hearty and gripping story, even if we all know how it ends.

So for me, there will always be room for at least one more prequel series – at least until the makers of Avatar: The Last Airbender Finally got a damn Young Iroh series approved.

If you want Avatar: The Last Airbenderyou like Uncle Iroh, who begins the series as the long-suffering voice of reason for the banished Prince Zuko and gradually peels back the curtain behind his calculated, goofy facade to reveal the most interesting man in the world.

Iroh is a man of opposites: an advisor of true wisdom and a man who can tell tea from a poisonous plant just by eating it. Leader of a secret society of pacifism and a military genius. One of the greatest firebenders alive and a traitor to his nation. Iroh was once the heir apparent to the Fire Lord who attempted genocide of the southern waterbenders, and yet he spent enough time with waterbenders to incorporate 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 an excuse to save the last dragons.

It would have been easy for Iroh to be 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 touchy characters, and even his burly fifty-something, he bounces around and breathes fire like warriors decades younger than him. But it is an invulnerability tempered by the constant revelation of his past.

Iroh led a ruthless 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 could see ghosts even if 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 in any episode of Iroh Avatar. What was the relationship between the ruthless Azulon, who sentenced a child to death because of his father’s disrespect, and his heir to the throne, the cheerful Iroh? When did Iroh become disillusioned with the Fire Nation? Did it start after his son’s death or was there evidence of it earlier, like when he spared the last dragons?

Not to mention: who was his wife? Who managed to win 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 canon, Lu Ten, the tragically fallen Crown Prince of the Fire Nation, emerged straight from Iroh like a 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 wouldn’t have been able to spend two years conquering the city. Iroh spent his time in the spirit realm searching for his dead son, as shown in the accompanying “scrapbook.” Avatar: The Last Airbender: Legacy of the Fire Nation. And Iroh eventually returned to the Fire Nation to serve 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 testimony Avatar Creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko in a fan interview in 2012.

But what makes Iroh’s past different from, say, a movie that reveals that Cruella de Vil’s mother was murdered by Dalmatians isn’t that the answers to the questions of his past are fully known. We know that what we know would make an incredibly cinematic story if fleshed out – and not just disappear as a tidbit in an interview, a DVD special feature, or a note in an accompanying book.

Themes of generational legacies and conflict, as well as the idea that all the old people you know used to be cool young people, just like our heroes, are central to us Avatar: The Last Airbender And The Legend of Korra that the official RPG has just announced an entire module dedicated to aging heroes as the game moves into the next generation. And while there have been canonical Avatar graphic novels that 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 taken a step back to give us more of Iroh’s youth. (In one of them, however, he invented boba tea. We really have so much to thank him for.)

But I have at least some hope. At Paramount’s Avatar Studios, Konietzko and DiMartino apparently already have a deal on three animated Avatar films, one about Aang and his friends as young adults and two that remain unannounced. That’s two whole films with the potential to be a Young Iroh feature. Two entire films with the potential to be a franchise prequel that actually makes sense.