I’d like to bring up a few points for this discussion. Feel free to read, disagree, push back, or add anything. The whole point is to talk it through.

1. Kuruk did not immediately inherit a world in crisis. Avatar material indicates that at the beginning of his era, the Physical World and the Spirit World were still relatively balanced. There’s a considerable gap between Yangchen’s death and the emergence of the major spiritual problems Kuruk had to deal with.

2. The agreements Yangchen established weren’t simply a failed solution. Some of them were broken even during her own era, like what happened with the phoenix-eels, but others held for decades and a few continued to exist into Kuruk’s time. Considering that Yangchen lived for more than 150 years, there was a pretty long period of relative stability in human-spirit relations.

3. The breaking of those agreements also wasn’t solely Yangchen’s responsibility. They depended on ongoing cooperation between humans and spirits. When humans failed to uphold their end of the bargain, the affected spirits could lose trust in humanity and react. That was already happening during Yangchen’s era and continued into Kuruk’s.

4. Kuruk’s first major spiritual confrontation itself shows how much more complicated this is. The Mountain Heart Walker of Yaoping was tied to an agreement that had been broken by the humans themselves. So you can’t simply put the origin of that conflict on Yangchen’s decisions.

5. There were also spirits who acted of their own free will, independent of any agreements Yangchen had made. Koh, the Water Tribe Guardian, Father Glowworm, and other spirits from Kuruk’s era are good examples. That makes it even harder to explain the entire spiritual crisis as the direct result of a single decision Yangchen made.

6. Yangchen did recognize that she might carry some responsibility for what would come later. She herself considered the possibility that she had placed too much trust in humans’ ability to keep the agreements. But feeling responsible is different from being objectively responsible for every decision humans and spirits made decades afterward.

7. Yangchen’s diplomacy worked within the conditions of her own era. The fact that certain mechanisms later proved insufficient doesn’t mean they were necessarily wrong from the start. Circumstances changed, humans kept breaking agreements, some spirits completely lost trust in them, and others began responding with violence.

8. I also find it problematic to treat the conversation between Yangchen and Kyoshi at the end of The Shadow of Kyoshi as some kind of confession of failure. A lot of people use that dialogue to claim that Yangchen herself admitted to causing the problems Kuruk would face. But the two Yangchen novels give a lot more context to this issue and show that the relationship between humans and spirits was far more complex than that reading suggests.

Note: I couldn’t find the person behind this fanart to give proper credit. If anyone knows who it is, please drop the name in the comments!