[ Hei's thumb makes an absent circling on Korra's cheekbone as she speaks. There's a surreal sort of echo here. Memories of moments like these, with marks, on assignments, different beds, different bodies -- it all wants to intrude, but this isn't that. There's no element of cold-blooded calculation here. He doesn't have to hold himself differently, to gauge the quality of Korra's silences, the inflection of her words, for openings to manipulate, so he can get what his superiors need. But perhaps that's half the point, not turning away from this semblance of honesty, not shaping his own responses to as if to keep all those fake stories and identities about himself straight. ]
[ He cocks his head as he absorbs the information about Sozin. It reminds him of all the crackpot leftists and rightists he's met in his history. He'd run into them from time to time in Tokyo too -- they'd professed to abhor change, especially anything Western-influenced, held an aggressive outlook on other cultures, and were driven to prove the universality of their own ideas, and so their validity, with ruthless invasion and hegemonization. He thinks of the Dai Toa Kyoeikan -- the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Of Japanese colonial history in Korea and China, and its attempts to save Asia from the tyranny of Western market forces. Ironic, when market forces -- control, acquisition, competition -- were what drove the Japanese into their own imperial conquests. Of course, the Western nations had already taken their own concessions in China, and America had institutionalized the seeming plunder of Asia with its own so-called Open Door policy. ]
[ (He thinks, too, of Pandora's affiliation with the Syndicate -- of its thirst to erase all Contractors, the way Sozin destroyed the Air Nomads.) ]
no subject
[ He cocks his head as he absorbs the information about Sozin. It reminds him of all the crackpot leftists and rightists he's met in his history. He'd run into them from time to time in Tokyo too -- they'd professed to abhor change, especially anything Western-influenced, held an aggressive outlook on other cultures, and were driven to prove the universality of their own ideas, and so their validity, with ruthless invasion and hegemonization. He thinks of the Dai Toa Kyoeikan -- the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Of Japanese colonial history in Korea and China, and its attempts to save Asia from the tyranny of Western market forces. Ironic, when market forces -- control, acquisition, competition -- were what drove the Japanese into their own imperial conquests. Of course, the Western nations had already taken their own concessions in China, and America had institutionalized the seeming plunder of Asia with its own so-called Open Door policy. ]
[ (He thinks, too, of Pandora's affiliation with the Syndicate -- of its thirst to erase all Contractors, the way Sozin destroyed the Air Nomads.) ]
[ Eventually, quietly, ]
So who stopped the war? Aang?