Avatar The Last Air Bender

[Yanagi]

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I was really looking forward to seeing the return of Agni-Kai and the Earthbending wrestling as mainstream sports equivalent to boxing and wrestling. Mainly because the two Agni-Kai duels in TLA were my favourite scenes, fast paced but ready to file combats with a clear win condition. Not the the Pro Bending thing was bad, but it was just not as fun to watch as Agni-Kai had been.

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Eh, it makes sense that Agni Kai went away, though: it wasn't really a sport, it was dueling.

The Agni Kai represented everything that had gone wrong with Fire Nation culture and leadership: power justifies itself, so violence is just the ultimate form of rhetoric.

When the audience is introduced to the idea, it's exciting but also a shorthand demonstration of who the Fire Nation are: issues of personal etiquette amongst the elite are conflated with issues of policy that are then escalated to a physical struggle. It's exciting to watch Zuko and Zhao fight, but...what you're being shown is that the people in the Fire Nation with power have created a system where advancement of personal gain trumps putative ideals that define their nationalism and imperialism.

The running theme of the Agni Kai is the bad faith engagement of Fire Nation elite. Zhao keeps fighting after he formally loses; Sozin doesn't just defeat his child, but maims Zuko as assertion of his absolute power ; Azula firsts calls for a fair match then cheats. It also demonstrates in that first Agni Kai why Zuko is an exile--he practices honor in good faith and sees power as a duty--while Zhao turns out to be a synedoche for the whole Fire Nation--the rules and ideals exist until they're inconvenient.

We don't see the new Fire Nation much, but it would makes sense that Agni Kai would be downplayed, or outright banned, as part of a reformist regime. A political systems in which advancement and policy are tied to direct power contests is inherently unstable and rewards people with the most antisocial instincts. With time it might take on the kind of formal rules that differentiate sport fencing from swordfighting,

Earth bending wrestling on the other hand is pure winning and probably still exists in the LoK timeline...but the region where it's practiced is politically unstable and desperately poor, so it doesn't have the profile of a sports practiced in a giant metropolis.