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OOC Information

This application is for any character who IS a part of the ATLA/LoK series.

Player: Masa
Age: 30
Characters: None
Contact: dammitmasa @ plurk

IC Information

Name: Kuruk
Age: About 28 (He’s finished mastering all elements in the traditional Avatar cycle. Unlike Aang and Korra, he would have started at sixteen and spent about four years mastering each element. This reflects the same twelve year process that Roku undertakes.)

Canon: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Canon Point: After mastering Airbending and the New Moon celebration where he meets Ummi, but before he marries her or runs into Koh.

Physical Description: A Link!
Possessions: The clothes on his back, including the Polar Bear Dog skin he is often seen wearing in his spirit form.
Companion: Avatar Kuruk killed his Polar Bear Dog companion for a pelt. N/A

Personality:

Much of what defines Kuruk’s personality is told only from his own perspective after the fact. But there is a patchwork of information that surrounds him from the original Avatar series and some from The Legend of Korra. Much of his story is revealed through the “Escape from the Spirit World” web series.

Unlike most Avatars, Kuruk grew up in a world that lacked any real conflicts. This was not entirely uncommon, as we see that Roku himself does not encounter true conflict in the world until he’s middle aged. But for Kuruk, the world seemed to exist in a state of harmony and that most problems seemed to work themselves without his interference. He embraced this philosophy as simply ‘going with the flow’. He took no active part in the world’s affairs and for the most part, things went along fine because of it. It was a strange way for the Avatar to interact with the world, but the world never suffered from his inactivity. The world seemed just fine without him.

Instead of focusing on his Avatar duties, Kuruk focused on his bending. Like any Avatar, he possessed a natural talent for it. His natural talent turned into arrogance and he became known for his brash attitude as he went around challenging other benders to duels. Despite his youth, he gained a reputation for being undefeated. With each duel, he’d only become more arrogant and eager for a new challenge. He was even seen challenging normal Fire Nation citizens to Agni Kais, regardless of whether they might even be a bender or not. It was this pride and arrogance that ultimately led Koh deciding to punish him and would redefine him in the last years of his life.

Beyond his boastfulness, Kuruk loved attention. The attention he loved most was from women. It’s not explained how, but Kuruk even managed to get his airbending training from either the Western or Eastern Air Temple (probably the latter) and so be taught exclusively around female airbenders with whom he was only too delighted to demonstrate from. But in spite of all that, he never settled down. We’re never told how deep his relationships were with other women, but we do know that it was only when he first saw and met Ummi that he began to think of settling down and so transition into becoming a more responsible Avatar.

Although past his canon point, this is where we see the tragedy in Kuruk’s life. Despite having begun to mend his ways and become a more responsible Avatar, the love of his life was stolen away during his wedding ceremony. No longer willing to ‘go with the flow’, Kuruk began to hunt down Koh to save his wife. Each year on the anniversary of their wedding, he delved into the Spirit Realm to try and find her. Eventually he would one day discover her, long after his life had ended, and discover that he could not kill Koh because it would mean destroying the last trace of his wife instead. And so he was doomed to spend an eternity unable to reunite with his love or enact vengeance on the one who took her from him.

Not much else is said about Kuruk, but there’s much that can be inferred just be Kuruk’s life as an Avatar. Although arrogant and boastful, Kuruk was not a bad man. He did not interfere with the world’s affairs, but he also did not abuse his powers beyond feeding his own ego. Where an Avatar could easily establish and take power over others, Kuruk’s mantra of ‘go with the flow’ was something of a mixture of Water Tribe and Air Nomad’s philosophies, which seems fitting in how he began and ended with those elements. The Water Tribe believe in change and the Air Nomads in detachment. Kuruk was content to let the world follow its own course and to not interfere with events. Where other Avatars left significant impacts on the world through action or inaction, like Roku and Kyoshi, Kuruk did not leave the world any better or worse than how he arrived in it. Kuruk’s sin was not inaction, but his own pride.

Furthermore, Kuruk shows a strong cultural link to his Water Tribe origins. In the Spirit World he took to using a spear as his weapon, proving that he was not just a bender but a warrior as well. He was also a hunter, demonstrated by the Polar Bear Dog skin that he is shown to wear proudly even after his death. His martial prowess was important to him, because his competitions were not only about his bending skill, but also his strength as well. Because of his Northern Water Tribe heritage, it is likely he shared some of their more traditional beliefs that managed to persist even into Avatar Aang’s era. For instance, Kuruk would have grown up believing that most forms of waterbending are restricted to men. Though he would have the capacity to learn waterbending healing, he would have neglected to do so because of that skill being the province of women. His time in the world would have relieved him of much of that attitude, but it would still be there as part of his initial foundation as a person.

All in all, Kuruk was a man that often polarized those who knew him. There were many who liked him in spite of his flaws and he demonstrated himself to certainly be exciting and energetic. Even in death, he was shown to maintain a friendly attitude with Aang. But his personality made him equally unlikeable to others. He was passionate in the things he did and ruled more by emotion than by reason. In the end, it proved to be his undoing because finding love was what made him weak. We are not told how he died, but Kuruk appears to have died in his thirties and thus lived the shortest life of any of the known Avatars. It’s likely that without the love of his life, there was little left to keep him tied to the physical world.

History: Avatar Wiki

Sample: Test Drive Meme

Nationality: Water Tribe
Bending: Yes (Avatar, all four elements)
Subset: None of these newfangled subsets exist in his era.