‘Avatar: Seven Havens’ pays tribute to ‘The Last Airbender’s cabbage merchant, with a twist

Avatar: Seven Havens may have radically changed the world of Avatar, but the post-apocalyptic series still finds a way to continue one of the franchise’s best running gags: the enduring plight of the cabbage merchant.

Introduced in Avatar: The Last Airbender, the cabbage merchant (voiced by James Sie) rarely gets to actually sell any cabbages. That’s because his cart keeps getting destroyed, either by Aang’s airbending, Ba Sing Se security officers, or a rogue rabaroo. At each loss, he lets out a woeful “My cabbages!” — a line delivery that is so ingrained in my mind, I can’t think of cabbage without it.

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The cabbage merchant’s legacy continues in The Legend of Korra. Between Aang’s time and Korra’s, the cabbage merchant founds car and tech company Cabbage Corp, a competitor of Future Industries. After Future Industries’ Hiroshi Sato (voiced by Daniel Dae Kim) frames Cabbage Corp for illegal activity, Republic City’s metalbending police arrests the owner, who is also the cabbage merchant’s son (also voiced by Sie). As the police drag him away, he cries out, “My Cabbage Corp!”

On top of playing a role in both The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, the cabbage merchant also figures into some of the Avatar comics. He’s even the star of his own children’s book: Avatar: The Last Airbender: My Cabbages! by Rebecca Gyllenhaal and Jessica Yang. With all this cabbage-centric fanfare, it only makes sense that Seven Havens keeps the tradition alive. However, it does so with a very different food.

In the show’s eighth episode, titled “The Envoys: Part One,” twin Avatars Pavi (voiced by Saheli Khan) and Nisha (voiced by Aishu Devan) watch as delegates from the other Havens arrive. As they talk, Pavi airbends a paper sky bison she’s made onto the street below. It hits the face of a merchant (voiced by Eric Bauza) who’s balancing a vat of pudding on his head, alongside two smaller vats. The minor collision is enough to make the merchant slip up spectacularly, interrupting his joyful pudding song (“It’s gonna be a pudding day!”) and splattering his wares across the ground.

His reaction? A pained cry of “My pudding!” with Bauza’s line delivery mirroring Sie’s.

Credited simply as “pudding guy,” this homage to the cabbage merchant actually winds up having a larger hand in Seven Havens‘ plot than his predecessor did. After a few more pratfalls, it’s revealed that he, along with the rest of the cooks catering the summit, is a part of the outlaw group known as the Faceless. Sure, he could have joined their ranks because of dissatisfaction with Ellora’s forced conscription of benders, but I like to think he chose this life because he was tired of losing all his delicious pudding due to bending shenanigans. That would break anyone.

Either way, the moment is a sweet nod to series past, as well as proof that while some things in Avatar have changed in cataclysmic ways, others — like the Avatar’s propensity for annoying food merchants — will always stay the same.

Avatar: Seven Havens is now streaming on Paramount+, with new episodes every Friday.