Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender features the recurring character the cabbage merchant (James Sie) whose cabbage cart is constantly destroyed in the wake of Team Avatar’s adventures throughout the Earth Kingdom— but what happened to the fan favorite character after the series ended? Within the Dark Horse Avatar: The Last Airbender comic series The Rift and the sequel television series The Legend of Korra, the cabbage merchant’s story is continued, and details how he turned his cabbage cart business into an automobile company.
The cabbage merchant makes his first appearance in the season 1 episode “The King of Omashu,” in which he’s denied entry into the Earth Kingdom city by a guard for trying to bring in “rotten cabbages.” Team Avatar hears the altercation as they approach the city gates and witness the guard use Earthbending to throw the cabbage merchant’s cart off of the bridge as the merchant cries out his signature catchphrase “My cabbages!” While the cabbage merchant was originally designed to be a one-time character, it became a recurring joke throughout the series that, just as the cabbage merchant appears to have his life on track, the Avatar arrives and ruins his supply of cabbages in passing during Aang’s (Zach Tyler Eisen) myriad adventures.
The last time the cabbage merchant is seen onscreen within Avatar is when a rabaroo escapes from the Ba Sing Se Zoo and begins to snack on the merchant’s cabbages. As the cabbage man begins to exclaim his catchphrase, he chucks a cabbage head over his shoulder and says, “Oh, forget it!” While this insinuates that the cabbage merchant has given up on his business, the cabbage merchant reappears within the Avatar comic series The Rift with his own cabbage restaurant.
The Cabbage Man In The Avatar: The Last Airbender Comics
While Avatar Aang was busy helping the four nations recover after the end of the Hundred Year War, the cabbage merchant appeared to be thriving before he crossed paths with Aang in the comic The Rift: Part Two. Upgrading his cart into a cabbage restaurant, Aang and the Air Acolytes, a group of monks aiming to preserve the Air Nomad culture, eat a meal at the cabbage merchant’s restaurant to celebrate the Air Nomad holiday Yangchen’s Festival. Under the impression that his cabbages would be safer indoors, the cabbage man panics when he recognizes Aang and shields his cabbages from him. As the group orders a round of cabbage cookies, the cabbage merchant and Aang seem to finally be at peace. Not long after coming in contact with the Avatar, however, he's forced to abandon his cabbage restaurant in The Rift: Part Three when an angry spirit attacks the city to reclaim the sacred land on which it rests.
The Cabbage Man's Legacy In Legend of Korra
While the merchant is forced to abandon his cabbages at the end of The Rift, he spies a forklift invented by the engineer Satoru during the evacuation, which inspires the cabbage man to develop his own automobile company Cabbage Corp featured in The Legend of Korra. Continuing the same joke, The Legend of Korra insinuates that when the cabbage man is left in peace by the Avatar for the next 70 years, he's able to procure a successful business — that is until Aang’s reincarnation, Avatar Korra (Janet Varney), came within the vicinity of the cabbage merchant’s descendant, his son Lau Gan-Lan (James Sie). When Avatar Korra arrives in Republic City and begins investigating the Equalist terrorist organization, Cabbage Corp is accused of making weapons for the Equalists and Lan is arrested, but it is revealed later that Cabbage Corp was framed by their rival company Future Industries, and Lan eventually returns to run the business.
Quite possibly the most interesting aspect about the cabbage merchant’s running joke throughout Avatar: The Last Airbender is the fact that the Avatar’s main goal is to bring balance to the world, but for the cabbage man, the Avatar only brings chaos and the destruction of his precious cabbages. With this in mind, the cabbage man's experience is then an interesting representation of the interconnected opposing forces of yin and yang. While Aang may have ruined the cabbage merchant’s many business ventures, those failures eventually led him to discover his true purpose: technology.