Ashō

 

Ashō
Biographical information
Nationality	Fire Nation
Ethnicity	Fire Nation
Personal information
Pronouns	He/him
Love interest	Chief's daughter (alleged)
Weapon of choice	Fire
Fighting style	Firebending
Political information
Profession	Adventurer Author
Chronological information
First appearance	"A Way Through" (mentioned only)

Ashō was an adventurer and author who lived in the era of Szeto. His many travels are recorded in a scroll called The Long Road, though he was later revealed to have fraudulently forged some aspects of his travels.

History

Ashō wrote a travelogue about his many adventures. It told of meeting exotic people and fantastic spirits along the way, and was written in a humorous and bawdy manner.

In one case, Ashō wrote of being hired to investigate the case of an entire ship with a crew of over two hundred vanishing. He followed the clues to the Fire Islands' Sibuyan chain, where he encountered dense fog in the middle of the sea. He said that his ship sailed into a massive rock that nobody had seen, and that he washed ashore on a mountainous island.

Ashō claimed that he found a village nestled in a valley after wandering through the island for several days. He told of the locals treating him like a king, as they had never seen anyone from the outside world before. Ashō wrote that the island was home to all types of benders, and that they possessed legendary skills which were a thousand times stronger than anything he had seen before. He said the chief offered to teach him how to strengthen his own firebending, until he was caught sleeping with the chief's daughter. The account ended with Ashō barely escaping the island with his life.

Conversely, another author researched Ashō's stories and discovered that many of his claims were outright lies. This writer subsequently penned a text titled A Correction in Response to the Many Dangerous Falsehoods Perpetuated by the Dishonest 'Traveler' Supposedly Named Ashō.

Legacy

Centuries later, a young Prince Sozin discovered Ashō's account in the Dragonbone Catacombs among other ancient texts, after he and his friends, Roku and Yasu, became fascinated with tales of heroic firebending masters. Sozin's fascination with esoteric powers continued through his adolescence, and he eventually pleaded with his his father for permission to search for the island. When the Fire Lord denied this to Sozin, the prince hired a ship through his own means, and arrived at an island similar to that in Ashō's account, kickstarting the Lambak Island conflict. However, the prince later found a copy of the anti-Ashō writer in Wan Shi Tong's Library, realizing that the travel writer had made fraudulent claims.

Trivia

• The name Asho (without the diacritical mark) translates as "head of the sun" in Chinese.
• The title of the critics' text suggests that even the name "Ashō" had been forged.
• Ashō's story resembles the real-life autobiographical accounts of some pre-modern travel writers like Ctesias. The stories of these authors were often doubted by contemporaries due to strange elements of their accounts and their tendency to exalt their own importance. Indeed, modern historians often conclude that the accounts of these travel writers were broadly accurate and based in truth, but often included fantastical exaggerations and inclusions of hearsay.