Tumblr crosspost (4 December 2019)
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anghraineAn anon said:
Councilman Noatak and Tarrlok is Amon AU. How different would things be?
I replied:
It’d really depend on the circumstances that led to it, of course. There are a lot of pretty different possible scenarios there. But if we’re adhering to canon as much as possible—
Well, in canon, they have their obvious differences, but they echo each other in their approaches to their respective causes. That is, they combine ruthless power trips with very sincere belief in their own righteousness. So that would still be present in both cases—it’d be fun to envision a world where Councilman Noatak + masked vigilante Tarrlok are actually fairly benign figures, and I think in some scenarios that’s possible, but again, if we’re trying to stick as much to canon as possible, that doesn’t quite work with the thirst for power and righteousness that they share.
So the real question is what their causes would be. Noatak is so tightly associated with non-bender equality that I definitely was envisioning Councilman Noatak as still preoccupied with that— a crusading politician whose pet issue is equality and who sees all other issues as either offshoots of that or comparatively insignificant. But (like Tarrlok) he’s perfectly ready to use the crusade to fuel his own rise to power.
I do think his persona would be at least moderately different from Tarrlok’s—less (ostensibly) slippery, and more direct. More authentically confident, say, where imo canon Tarrlok covers up and maneuvers around a sense of weakness. Noatak’s more comfortable in his skin and probably less personally irritating to his opponents even when they (rightly) perceive him as dangerous.
I do think he’d be a polarizing figure politically, because he’s so fixated and unrelenting, pushing for increasingly strong measures against benders (mirroring Tarrlok with non-benders!) and using his own identity as a bender to cover up the extent of his antipathy. There’s also probably some of Tarrlok’s “I’m the guy who gets things done” shtick with him that doesn’t necessarily go over well with everyone (but makes him super popular with his supporters).
I think he’d still be at odds with Tenzin, for instance, but it would seem more ideological than personal. He fights bitterly with him in the council but makes a perfectly nice dinner guest (…as he conceals his seething hatred).
This all would complicate the scenario, though, because it would put him on fundamentally the same side as Amon!Tarrlok—instead of increasingly severe opposition to Amon, he’d increasingly legitimize him. I could even see him quietly reaching out to Amon—which Tarrlok, rejected by Noatak all those years earlier, would undoubtedly have complex feelings about!
The other complication is that I’m not at all sure that Tarrlok could use Noatak’s bloodbending removal technique, which takes extraordinary precision and power to do, and probably took a lot of practice to figure out in the first place. And even if Tarrlok could do it, I’m not sure whether he would. Like, the whole chosen by the spirits thing … it’s pretty hard for me to see Tarrlok going for that. I see him as not just more pragmatic but more prosaic than Noatak. He wants to be a saviour figure, but not at all in a divine sort of way.
So I think he’d lean into the revolutionary leader role much more than Chosen One. And so much of canon Amon’s rhetoric was underpinned by removing bending that it seems like it’d just … substantially alter the whole narrative built up around the revolution.
And in that altered role, it seems like—okay, a more prosaic revolutionary and a more visionary politician are just closer to each other on the general scale of things. If anything, they seem like natural allies. Maybe not natural public allies, but I don’t imagine them as wholly antagonistic. Particularly since Tarrlok would know that the politician who has an unexpected affinity with him is his own brother (and he’d remember how intensely young Noatak wanted everything to be fair and equal, and see the line of continuity between their childhoods and present).
It also means, imo, that neither would be so easily invalidated as in canon. Noatak’s a better long-range planner than Tarrlok and he doesn’t have Tarrlok’s reservations about bloodbending (or at least any comparable). So I don’t see him as someone who’d be backed into a self-immolating corner quite so easily. And Tarrlok isn’t going around stripping people’s bending away and quite possibly would never be in a position to be exposed by Noatak. They’d have to be dealt with on their own ground.
Of course, that is assuming that Tarrlok-as-Amon would share Noatak’s canon positions and differ primarily in tactics. Arguably, it’d match up better with canon if their positions were still opposing—either Councilman Noatak is actually leading the fight against the Equalists (hard to envision), or Amon is actually advocating for ordinary benders against some perceived threat. That’s possible but seems both messy and kind of uninteresting to me, so … eh.
Conclusion—we’d have Equalist leader Tarrlok who gets one of the biggest jolts of his life when he hears that the new council member is a world-class waterbender from the Northern Water Tribe named Noatak, and Councilman Noatak who finds himself in strong sympathy with the supposed enemy of Republic City. I imagine their courses would inevitably collide, and either a) one of them would reveal the other’s true identity per canon, or b) they would form a secret alliance of like minds (with bonus brotherhood!). Given how integral Noatak taking Tarrlok’s bending/Tarrlok revealing Noatak’s history are to their ultimate defeats in canon, that alliance would be … a lot more difficult to topple than the canon Equalists, at the least.
Councilman Noatak and Tarrlok is Amon AU. How different would things be?
I replied:
It’d really depend on the circumstances that led to it, of course. There are a lot of pretty different possible scenarios there. But if we’re adhering to canon as much as possible—
Well, in canon, they have their obvious differences, but they echo each other in their approaches to their respective causes. That is, they combine ruthless power trips with very sincere belief in their own righteousness. So that would still be present in both cases—it’d be fun to envision a world where Councilman Noatak + masked vigilante Tarrlok are actually fairly benign figures, and I think in some scenarios that’s possible, but again, if we’re trying to stick as much to canon as possible, that doesn’t quite work with the thirst for power and righteousness that they share.
So the real question is what their causes would be. Noatak is so tightly associated with non-bender equality that I definitely was envisioning Councilman Noatak as still preoccupied with that— a crusading politician whose pet issue is equality and who sees all other issues as either offshoots of that or comparatively insignificant. But (like Tarrlok) he’s perfectly ready to use the crusade to fuel his own rise to power.
I do think his persona would be at least moderately different from Tarrlok’s—less (ostensibly) slippery, and more direct. More authentically confident, say, where imo canon Tarrlok covers up and maneuvers around a sense of weakness. Noatak’s more comfortable in his skin and probably less personally irritating to his opponents even when they (rightly) perceive him as dangerous.
I do think he’d be a polarizing figure politically, because he’s so fixated and unrelenting, pushing for increasingly strong measures against benders (mirroring Tarrlok with non-benders!) and using his own identity as a bender to cover up the extent of his antipathy. There’s also probably some of Tarrlok’s “I’m the guy who gets things done” shtick with him that doesn’t necessarily go over well with everyone (but makes him super popular with his supporters).
I think he’d still be at odds with Tenzin, for instance, but it would seem more ideological than personal. He fights bitterly with him in the council but makes a perfectly nice dinner guest (…as he conceals his seething hatred).
This all would complicate the scenario, though, because it would put him on fundamentally the same side as Amon!Tarrlok—instead of increasingly severe opposition to Amon, he’d increasingly legitimize him. I could even see him quietly reaching out to Amon—which Tarrlok, rejected by Noatak all those years earlier, would undoubtedly have complex feelings about!
The other complication is that I’m not at all sure that Tarrlok could use Noatak’s bloodbending removal technique, which takes extraordinary precision and power to do, and probably took a lot of practice to figure out in the first place. And even if Tarrlok could do it, I’m not sure whether he would. Like, the whole chosen by the spirits thing … it’s pretty hard for me to see Tarrlok going for that. I see him as not just more pragmatic but more prosaic than Noatak. He wants to be a saviour figure, but not at all in a divine sort of way.
So I think he’d lean into the revolutionary leader role much more than Chosen One. And so much of canon Amon’s rhetoric was underpinned by removing bending that it seems like it’d just … substantially alter the whole narrative built up around the revolution.
And in that altered role, it seems like—okay, a more prosaic revolutionary and a more visionary politician are just closer to each other on the general scale of things. If anything, they seem like natural allies. Maybe not natural public allies, but I don’t imagine them as wholly antagonistic. Particularly since Tarrlok would know that the politician who has an unexpected affinity with him is his own brother (and he’d remember how intensely young Noatak wanted everything to be fair and equal, and see the line of continuity between their childhoods and present).
It also means, imo, that neither would be so easily invalidated as in canon. Noatak’s a better long-range planner than Tarrlok and he doesn’t have Tarrlok’s reservations about bloodbending (or at least any comparable). So I don’t see him as someone who’d be backed into a self-immolating corner quite so easily. And Tarrlok isn’t going around stripping people’s bending away and quite possibly would never be in a position to be exposed by Noatak. They’d have to be dealt with on their own ground.
Of course, that is assuming that Tarrlok-as-Amon would share Noatak’s canon positions and differ primarily in tactics. Arguably, it’d match up better with canon if their positions were still opposing—either Councilman Noatak is actually leading the fight against the Equalists (hard to envision), or Amon is actually advocating for ordinary benders against some perceived threat. That’s possible but seems both messy and kind of uninteresting to me, so … eh.
Conclusion—we’d have Equalist leader Tarrlok who gets one of the biggest jolts of his life when he hears that the new council member is a world-class waterbender from the Northern Water Tribe named Noatak, and Councilman Noatak who finds himself in strong sympathy with the supposed enemy of Republic City. I imagine their courses would inevitably collide, and either a) one of them would reveal the other’s true identity per canon, or b) they would form a secret alliance of like minds (with bonus brotherhood!). Given how integral Noatak taking Tarrlok’s bending/Tarrlok revealing Noatak’s history are to their ultimate defeats in canon, that alliance would be … a lot more difficult to topple than the canon Equalists, at the least.