Air Nation - Blog Posts
Why Aang Not Being The Best Father Works?
A lot of people did not like Aang’s interpretation in LOK. I actually really liked it since it makes sense. Aang is one of the sweetest characters, but he didn’t have a parental example to follow and that plays a big role when you become a parent. Sure he had Monk Gyatso but only until he was twelve. Aang had to grow up without parents. Plus, he added this pressure to restore the Air Nation on himself and it clouded him for a lot of his life.
He just focused on Tenzin more because of his own pressure and wish to bring the Air Nation back. He also wanted to teach his youngest child how to hone his skills.
Aang definitely loved his children and never intentionally wanted his two eldest children to feel they way they did. He wholeheartedly accepted Kya when she came out, and I bet Aang is proud of all the achievements Bumi accomplished as a non bender.
I think some people expect protagonists to be perfect, but them making mistakes is what means to be human. Learning from them especially. Viewers need to know that making mistakes is okay, and how to grow from it.
Thoughts? 😊❤️
My own theory is that a majority of the new Air Nation is made up of former Earth Kingdom subjects for two main reasons. First of all, the simple fact that the Earth Kingdom is the most populous nation in the world means that, if the number of people developing airbending was equally distributed, the lion’s share of new airbenders would appear in the Earth Kingdom. Secondly, it seems like Tenzin got the majority of his “recruits” from Ba Sing Se, where they were refugees fleeing conscription and had no choice but to leave the EK, while others presumably came to Republic City as civil war broke out falling the Earth Queen’s assassination. By contrast, the Korra-era Fire Nation and the two Water Tribes were relatively stable and humane places, so the new airbenders probably had less of an impetus to emigrate. I imagine some did, but it wasn’t a matter of life or death for them. As for the airbenders who stayed behind in the Earth Kingdom, I had a dark idea about that. A few years ago, I was playing with story ideas for a potential Kuvira fic, and I hit upon this idea of a bunch of pro-Kuvira EK airbenders joining her army and being put into a special unit. With a training regiment crudely based off of whatever old books about airbending were floating around the EK, these airbenders would learn to control and manipulate poison gas as an offensive weapon against opposing armies and in fortification-clearing operations. While they would seem rather graceless and clumsy compared to someone like Tenzin, the fact that these “gasbenders” would be wielding clouds of the Avatarverse’s equivalents of mustard gas, phosgene, and chlorine would make them terrifying in their own right, and they would be one of the many things that turned the world against Kuvira. Sadly I never came up with an actual story to put this idea in, but I still have the gasbenders in my back pocket for a rainy day.
Were there no new Air benders in the Fire Nation of Water Tribes? We saw the Air benders pop up in Republic City (EK colony) and Lin had reports of Air benders in the Earth Kingdom.
Does this mean Air benders come from “the people of the earth element” or that the other two nations just kept quiet about it? It certainly would have been interesting to see how the modern Fire Nation deals Air benders in their midst.
Where did the Air benders come from in the pre- fire- conquest days? Where they all born within the nomadic- monk society? That seems very unlikely. Where they born elsewhere and joined the order as a “higher calling”? Where they Air benders from all nations or just the Earth kingdom? and if so, why?
While Tenzin & Krew pressured the new Air benders to join it was a voluntary choice in the end. Was it always that way? what I’m getting at is … there may be people with Air bending abilities that are not part of the Air bending culture/ society. Are they self taught? are they lying dormant? What are the stories of the non joiners?
