Avatar: The Last Airbender

Elementally speaking, a waterbender does seem to be the most natural choice there, considering the versatile nature of water.

On that note, it is interesting that waterbenders find it so easy to phase shift water, while earth benders find that nearly impossible.

Kyoshi was also better at firebending compared to the other forms.

@The Moutain King I think the important thing to remember is 'Nomads'. We see Aang grow up in the temple, but we also see him hang out with Bumi as a kid and know he went to the Fire Nation to befriend Kuzon. In flashbacks it looks like most nomads at the temples are kids, elderly, or the occasional adult caretaker. The Yangchen books show the airbenders taking alms, and it's familiar enough a tradition that random lower class water tribe adults know not to offer meat to an airbender.

Korra's initial personality iircis very direct, aggressive and to the point. Personalitywise she's an Earthbender which is one of the reasons she has such trouble with air.

Tangentially, Korra (the show) presents Airbenders as all about the spirituality and the spirit world but when Aang first encounters a spirit in Book one, he has no friggen clue at all.

Retcon you think? Or the air temple speedrunning him on bending to fight the war instead of teaching him spirit stuff?

We don’t see much of the nomadic life of Air Nomads, but they didn’t spend all their time in the temples. Even as a kid, Aang traveled the world, and visited the nuns at the Eastern and Western temples. I think the adults, except for a few full-timer monks and nuns, lived in mixed-gender family groups and traveled most of the time.

I do think you’re right that they gave up their kids to raise communally, though. Otherwise Aang would know his parents and wouldn’t need Monk Gyatso for a father figure.

Partial

Edited by HeraldAlberich on Apr 18th 2024 at 8:04:07 AM

Being spiritual doesn’t necessarily mean knowing everything about Spirits.

Though Aang being a kid whose education was cut short didn’t help.

Edited by M84 on Apr 18th 2024 at 8:37:55 PM

He handled himself pretty well with Koh the Face Stealer, though.

Hm. That makes me think, if Aang got his face stolen, would he just die from that as soon as he gets back to the human world?

No. We see what happens to someone whose face is stolen in the comic The Search.

The poor guy is still alive but pretty much non-responsive. Having his face stolen by Koh also somehow allowed him to survive without needing anything that would require a face. So he doesn't need to breathe or eat.

Edited by M84 on Apr 18th 2024 at 9:08:32 PM

As for how the hell that works, A Spirit-Monster Did It.

x6 The first part is definitely true (they travel a lot, sky bison presumable make that pretty easy) but I don't think the idea that most Air Nomads didn't live in the temples and instead were mixed-gendered nomadic groups has textual support. It seems to framed more as them traveling between the temples than living as nomads full time. The fact that the Fire Nation genocide of the Air Nomads is mostly referred to as a attack on the temples indicates that at any given point, most of them were in the temples. And, at least according to Avatar Wiki (citing the ttrpg), all adult Air Nomads are "full time monks and nuns" who live in the temples.

I think a lot of the weirdness comes from that. In this society everyone is a monk, The reason men and women in monastic orders live separately is that monastic orders usually include a vow of chastity. But that's because monks are generally a tiny minority of a given culture.

Edited by TheMountainKing on Apr 18th 2024 at 1:19:33 PM

No, by Aang's time the Air Nomads were becoming more open and involved with the rest of the nations. They were more isolationist in their history, but they eventually realized they should be out there doing more good in the world in addition to contemplating spiritual matters.

The reason most of them were gathered at the Temples before the genocide was because they found out the Fire Nation was planning to attack them. They retreated to the Temples because they were the most secure locales they had.

Unfortunately, the Temples weren't secure enough to stop an army supercharged by Sozin's Comet.

The question of whether they were isolationist or interacted with the other nations is not what I'm talking about. They can interact with the other nations and still primarily live in the temples. I've heard that claim that they recalled the Air Nomads to the temples, but never seen where that's from. Besides, that could just explain why all of them were in the temples, as opposed to just most of them. Still never seen a canon source that most of them lived full-time outside the temples.

I've already said before that not all of the Nomads were at the Temples.

The "Relics" comic revealed that the Fire Nation had to set traps using Air Nomad artifacts to catch and kill the remaining Air Nomads.

As for the increased nomadic ways, that's from the Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game (which is indeed canon). That's also the source confirming the Air Nomads' leaders knew the Fire Nation was planning something and tried to prepare for it.

Edited by M84 on Apr 19th 2024 at 2:58:13 AM

The best you can hope for any Air Nomads surviving aside from Aang is that they had forsaken everything that made them Air Nomads, from tattoos to practicing air bending at all. Which in many ways is a Fate Worse than Death.

Kyoshi's mother proves it can be done... at the cost of her Airbending becoming much weaker.

Granted the tattoos are the sign of a master aren't they? I imagine there might have been some elderly Airbenders that never quite cut it.

No-one that I can see is arguing that Avatars can repopulate airbenders as a whole, am I missing something? I'm not sure why you keep revisiting the point.

Okay, to be clear, I was absolutely saying that. As the person who started this conversation, I was 100% saying that if Aang and all the other Airbenders died, when the Avatar Cycle looped back around to Airbending, Raava would reincarnate into some random kid somewhere in the world who would have otherwise been destined to be a non-bender, and that kid would be born with a natural affinity for Airbending and would later be able to pass down their "Airbending genes" to the next generation.

Because, as we've seen in Korra, the universe likes balance. And I think Raava is strong enough to do for one person what Harmonic Convergence did for a ton of people.

Edited by PushoverMediaCritic on Apr 19th 2024 at 1:04:06 AM

Oh hey, I owe you and M84 an apology then I misunderstood. I'm sorry.

I'm down with Raava creating a new airbender at the appropriate point of the cycle. I don't think you can really repopulate airbending with one person every four generations. Unless they get up to ghengis khan level of profligacy.

Yeah, I think so too. Without any further intervention, airbending would basically become an Avatar-exclusive ability, or very, very rare.

Which is basically what the series was moving towards before the writers came up with Harmonic Convergence to solve that issue.

It would be kind of a silly solution but maybe every Avatar has the potential to have kids of each four elements.

The one Avatar with confirmed descendants would disprove that. Zuko and Azula were both firebenders only. Heck, Ursa wasn't even a bender.

And as we saw with Aang himself, only one of his kids was even an airbender. His daughter was a waterbender like their mother, and his other son wasn't a bender.

Edited by M84 on Apr 19th 2024 at 5:16:55 PM

Yeah I am aware of that. Just throwing out a what if that's not actually a thing. Aang had only Airbenders and Waterbenders too.

Besides, as interracial relations become increasingly common, more and more people will have the potential to sire different kinds of benders. We saw this with Mako and Bolin too, the firebender and earthbender siblings. No need for an Avatar to be special in this regard.

Edited by M84 on Apr 19th 2024 at 5:21:02 PM

That also opens up the possibility of natural born children to have multiple bending powers. That would certainly change up the world dynamic quite a bit.

I think if "pseudo" Avatars like that were possible just from mixed families they'd be mentioned earlier. Fire Nation would be very interested at the very least. Maybe in a harder sci-fi verse with crazy implants and such.