The Fire Nation needs to return all land and make reparations. Fire Nation citizens in the Earth Kingdom could theoretically be allowed to stay, but that would have to be up to the people of the Earth Kingdom, particularly the people of those specific colonized parts of it.
No matter how connected they feel to the land, no matter that some of them were born there, the presence of the Fire Nation colonizers was not some accident- it was a deliberate act of war and cultural genocide.
At the very least, that chickenshit "well why don't you just share the land and be part of neither nation?" solution was some both sides nonsense, as if this was some border dispute and not a conflict where one side was the clear- and self-admitted!- aggressor and colonizer
So I understand that in the context of writing, a both sides story like this is bad. But in the plot, don't basically all the people in what becomes republic city demand independence? To me they seem more like the metis than two separate groups.
If that happened in the real world, that would be one thing.
But these people were written with the end goal of creating the United Republic so that Korra could happen, not with the goal of being an exploration of the actual dynamics of colonization. Saying "well the people wanted that" doesn't carry any water when those people are fictional and it serves the creators' needs to have the characters want that. It's an easy out for the writers, nothing more.
The Fire Nation needs to return all land and make reparations. Fire Nation citizens in the Earth Kingdom could theoretically be allowed to stay, but that would have to be up to the people of the Earth Kingdom, particularly the people of those specific colonized parts of it.
No matter how connected they feel to the land, no matter that some of them were born there, the presence of the Fire Nation colonizers was not some accident- it was a deliberate act of war and cultural genocide.
At the very least, that chickenshit "well why don't you just share the land and be part of neither nation?" solution was some both sides nonsense, as if this was some border dispute and not a conflict where one side was the clear- and self-admitted!- aggressor and colonizer
So I understand that in the context of writing, a both sides story like this is bad. But in the plot, don't basically all the people in what becomes republic city demand independence? To me they seem more like the metis than two separate groups.
If that happened in the real world, that would be one thing.
But these people were written with the end goal of creating the United Republic so that Korra could happen, not with the goal of being an exploration of the actual dynamics of colonization. Saying "well the people wanted that" doesn't carry any water when those people are fictional and it serves the creators' needs to have the characters want that. It's an easy out for the writers, nothing more.
Ok, that's more or less what I thought, basically fine in story, but not fine to write