Kyoshi island started as a peninsula, and Avatar Kyoshi cut through a section that you could see across. What miles of farmland?
As for the imposed leader thing - put it this way, in this fic Kyoshi only made them swear loyalty to the Fire Lord, not each other. I'd be very surprised if any of the petty lords thought their new loyalty to the guy on the top was at all relevant to their feud with the next town over, which would make pirate hunting just as hard as before, and somehow I doubt Kyoshi would make that kind of mistake. I'm betting she'd have grabbed a crew and gone pirate-hunting.
(Avatar Kyoshi, Pirate Hunter, sounds like a fun fic. I'll have to remember that one.)
And we only see the places the Gaang travel through. We only see one swamp (and it's nominally Earth Kingdom), we don't see any deltas, and we only see the Fire Nation river town that's downstream from industrial runoff, which is not a representative sample. For all we know, there's a whole slew of thriving aquatic communities elsewhere in the Fire Nation.
I'll buy Water Tribe pirates, seeing as even the greatly diminished Southern Water Tribe can field a respectable navy, but first let's acknowledge that Earth Kingdom pirates are proven to exist and that pirates, like all such groups, raid weak areas and trade in strong ones. Chin may have defended his patch of land from them, but I'd bet my good shoes he also did business with them.
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As for the imposed leader thing - put it this way, in this fic Kyoshi only made them swear loyalty to the Fire Lord, not each other. I'd be very surprised if any of the petty lords thought their new loyalty to the guy on the top was at all relevant to their feud with the next town over, which would make pirate hunting just as hard as before, and somehow I doubt Kyoshi would make that kind of mistake. I'm betting she'd have grabbed a crew and gone pirate-hunting.
(Avatar Kyoshi, Pirate Hunter, sounds like a fun fic. I'll have to remember that one.)
And we only see the places the Gaang travel through. We only see one swamp (and it's nominally Earth Kingdom), we don't see any deltas, and we only see the Fire Nation river town that's downstream from industrial runoff, which is not a representative sample. For all we know, there's a whole slew of thriving aquatic communities elsewhere in the Fire Nation.
I'll buy Water Tribe pirates, seeing as even the greatly diminished Southern Water Tribe can field a respectable navy, but first let's acknowledge that Earth Kingdom pirates are proven to exist and that pirates, like all such groups, raid weak areas and trade in strong ones. Chin may have defended his patch of land from them, but I'd bet my good shoes he also did business with them.