Pavi, the Avatar nobody wanted

The basics

When the series opens Pavi is an orphan living rough in Ellora, hiding the fact that she can bend at all. She is timid, small and used to being overlooked, which is the opposite of Korra's entrance and closer to Aang's. Paramount+ describes her as "on the run from human and spirit enemies", and the show spends its first episodes making clear that in this world being the Avatar is something you hide.

Pavi's leg

Pavi is missing part of one leg. For five episodes the show treats it as something she was born with. In episode 6, "Night of the Afflicted", she learns that the leg was amputated, which means something happened to her as a small child that nobody has told her about, and that it is tied to the same hidden past as her separation from Nisha. In the same episode she is fitted with a prosthetic.

It is the first time the franchise has made a disabled character the Avatar, though not its first disabled bender: Toph was blind and Teo used a wheelchair in The Last Airbender. The writers have not said whether the prosthetic will change how she earthbends.

Pavi and Nisha

Nisha is the girl Pavi meets in the Harshlands at the end of episode 1 who can also bend all four elements. Episode 2 confirms they are twin sisters, separated as toddlers, and recovers some of their shared memories. Nisha was raised by Karthik and trained as an Avatar from the start, so she is confident where Pavi is not, and episode 3 is largely the two of them fighting over who should carry the title.

Two Avatars at once has never happened in the franchise. The show has not explained it. The obvious readings are that the Avatar Spirit split between the twins, or that one of them is something else that only looks like an Avatar. The entity's attack in episode 2 affected both of them, and both share the vision of their parents in episode 6, which argues for a genuine link rather than a trick.

Their parents

Episode 5 is where the parents become a plot. The twins find a vault in Karthik's office containing old-world artefacts, and Nisha recognises a bracelet that matches the brooch Pavi has always carried. Karthik then admits he received a message from their parents years ago, went to the meeting place, and found only Nisha. Who the parents were, why they were separated from their daughters and what happened to Pavi in between is still open. The lullaby Pavi uses to calm a camodillo in episode 3 was their mother's.

What Pavi can do

She is a natural earthbender and has airbent at least once, instinctively, to save Jae from a tornado in episode 1. She has not shown water or fire on screen yet, and she has had only a few episodes of formal training under Karthik and the Order of the White Lotus. Nisha, by contrast, is shown bending all four elements with practice behind them. If you are keeping score the way the fandom does, Pavi is early-Aang level: enormous potential, almost no control.

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