Which of course makes running a war a lot harder, especially against an enemy with a unified command.Īs for the OP, remember that we see the Avatar world from the back of Appa, who the writers have said flies 'at the speed of plot'. Is Bumi subordinate to the Earth King or is Omashu an independent power? Or maybe Ba Singe Se is the Athens to the Earth Kingdom's Delian League, which is to say that the whole thing is some kind of loose confederation of city-states. Obviously the Fire Nation had siege engines of some sort because no amount of fireballs could bring down a wall of Ba Sing Se's size.Īlso remember that it's not clear what the exact political system is in the Earth Kingdom.
I think we can make a comparison to the First Sino-Japanese War, when Japan's superior organization and greater political cohesion defeated China's badly run military, which technically had slightly better weapons.Īnyway, I think we can safely assume that the war is being badly run by Ba Sing Se's generals, and I believe we can also infer that the general strategy was to hide behind the walls and let the Fire Nation exhaust itself. Well, Ba Sing Se is clearly meant to be Manchu Dynasty China, when the country was isolationist and called the 'sick man of Asia' for its general weakness on the international stage (setting aside the fact that it was the Opium Wars instigated by the British that weakened China in the first place).