Warning: SPOILERS for The Shadow of Kyoshi.
In the pages of The Shadow of Kyoshi, F. C. Yee's new book within the Avatar: The Last Airbender franchise, the title character makes a major mistake that no other Avatar has. The sequel to last year’s The Rise of Kyoshi, the book follows the story of the Earth Nation-born Avatar Kyoshi. Like every Avatar, Kyoshi is learning on the job to some extent, but her naivety and comparative lack of etiquette really shows itself at a particularly inopportune moment.
The scene in question takes place when Kyoshi and her Airbending aide Jinpa attend a Fire Nation banquet. Their attendance was by invitation, with Kyoshi also reconnecting with Rangi from the previous book. Kyoshi comes face to face with another one of the partygoers, giving the deference she knows is expected to granted to the current Fire Lord, Zoryu. The only problem is, the individual she extends this greeting to isn’t actually Fire Lord Zoryu.
Rangi attempts to get Kyoshi’s attention a few times as she walks deeper and deeper into her case of mistaken identity, succeeding only once it has grown into an irreversible faux pas on Kyoshi’s part. This mistake proves to be an error of such gargantuan proportions as to bring the entire party to a halt. The book itself even goes as far as to state that “The celestial bodies had never seen such a colossal blunder in their thousand lifetimes of watching the Avatar.”
The man that Kyoshi had mistaken for Fire Lord Zoryu is actually his older half-brother Chaejin, with the two bearing a close enough resemblance as to lead to Kyoshi’s mistake. This proves enough of a misfire as to compel the real Fire Lord Zoryu to swiftly make his way through the party towards Kyoshi, who makes dead certain that she indeed has got the right man this time. For his part, Chaejin goes out of his way to add insult to injury once Zoryu arrives, introducing Kyoshi as the Avatar to his half-brother while semi-facetiously poking fun at her mistake.
With the entire party looking on in horror at the Avatar’s gaffe, Fire Lord Zoryu himself does his best to accommodate Kyoshi in such an embarrassing moment. Furthermore, later chapters make clear that Chaejin’s apparent incredulity at being mistaken for the Fire Lord masks a deep jealously of Zoryu that factors greatly into the narrative. Nevertheless, Kyoshi steps into a moment of humiliation for the Avatar record books. No Avatar has ever been perfect, not even Aang himself, but a basic component of the job is being intimately familiar with the various leaders of the Four Nations. In The Shadow of Kyoshi, the young and naïve titular heroine walks right into a truly epic face-palm moment.